Forever? | The Deep End | Episode 6 Part 1

What do Dante’s Inferno, the King James Bible, Greek mythology, Augustine, fart jokes, and Tommy Boy have in common?

Unfortunately, they all ended up in our conversation about hell.

In Episode 6, Part 1 of The Deep End, we ask a question most Christians assume has a pretty obvious answer: What actually happens to people who reject God?

Then things get complicated.

Because the Bible uses words like Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus—and they don’t all mean the same thing. So what did Jesus actually mean when He warned about hell? What is Revelation’s Lake of Fire? Does the Bible teach eternal conscious punishment? Does “the wages of sin is death” mean… actual death? And have Christians always agreed about any of this?

We put three historic Christian views of final judgment on the table—eternal conscious torment, conditional immortality, and universal reconciliation—and ask each of them to explain the passages that don’t fit neatly into their system.

Fair warning: there’s a decent chance you’ll have a Tommy Boy moment somewhere along the way:

“Did I eat paint chips as a kid?”

But underneath all the Greek words, Church Fathers, fire, death, judgment, and theological arguments is a question that becomes a lot less academic when the unbeliever has a name:

Can I trust God with the eternal destiny of someone I love?

And that’s where Part 1 takes us into the deep end.