What exactly IS Hell?

The ancients believed in Elysium for the good, the Asphodel Meadows for those neither good nor evil, and Tartarus for the wicked.

Throughout history it's been fairly common for Christian proselytizers to subvert ideas already in place and bend them over to a Christian interpretation, a good example being the winter solstice's rebranding to Christmas.

So the early Church came up with Heaven, Purgatory/Limbo and Hell to make conversion more palatable for the pagans. These became ingrained within our culture, but are really pagan ideas and have no basis in Christianity. Artistic depictions of Hell in the middle ages really strengthened this mistaken view of Hell as a physical, burning place of torment underground.

The New Testament speaks only of the resurrection, and when it refers to Heaven and Hell is in fact talking about inward states of mind. Hell is sometimes connected with fire in the New Testament because fire is used there as a symbol of bodily desire (e.g. greed - the more you feed your greed, the greedier you become, and the more you feed a fire, the stronger it burns).

So Hell is the state of mind where you are a slave to your bodily passions of lust, power, greed, revenge, and hatred, and so are separated from God and from peace.

I'm not disputing that Hell exists, what I want to know is WHAT IS HELL? Hell is an Old English term translated from the Hebrew word for the grave "Sheol" and the Greek translation of Sheol "Hades". Hell means the "Grave" or a "Crematory".

In my opinion there are only two possible answers, but you might inform me of something else. Many people have argued that evil is the absence of God, hell must be evil, thus hell is the separation of us from God. As poetic as this sounds, I've never found the scripture to back this up. Maybe you have some that I haven't read yet. God is Life (John 14:6), the absence of Life is Death (Genesis 2:17). Evil separates life from the body (Isaiah 59:2).

The second option in my understanding is that hell is the wrath of God against the disobedient Yes, the wages of Sin is Death (Romans 6:23).

I have found one piece of scripture that debatable states that God is in Hell, Yes, Jesus was placed in a grave (John 19:42). (aka: went to Hell)

But not what He is doing down there. He was fulfilling his prophecy (Matt 12:38-40).

Can you set me straight with the scripture that I need to understand the lake of fire? First let us replace Hell with the correct usage as grave. "Then death and the grave were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death."(Revelation 20:14). Think of the usage of the phrase "Sea of forgetfulness."

By understanding the First Death, we can understand the Second Death. If the First Death is Separation from God, we can assume that the Second Death also is a separation from God. Now if Death (a separation from God) is separated from God. That is a fancy way of saying that nothing else gets separated from God by use as a double negative.

Therefore using replacement ideology for Revelation 20:15 "Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was never thought of by God again."

The conventional definition of Hell is that it is 'separation from God'. Both Pope John Paul II and Billy Graham have defined Hell in this way, so its is safe to say that this represents the mainstream view of Hell in Christianity.

However this definition does not give any details of what Hell is like. Few Christians would consider the ancient view, of a place with devils and pitchforks, to be anywhere near accurate. While some might agree that there is explicit punishment, for the most part it is considered that eternal separation from God is punishment enough. (An atheist would of course disagree).

Most Christians again agree that the Biblical descriptions of Hell are largely picture-language - that (for example) the fire, brimstone and darkness indicate the quantity and quality of suffering caused by separation from God, rather than actual physical pain; Biblical literalists would be the main dissenters from that view.

There are plenty of online references giving treatises about Hell. My own recommendation for a starter is C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce - though again I would caution that it is intended as allegory and not theology.