Why do good non believers go to hell? If your a good person why should you be subjected to torment when you never really did anything wrong. What If you were the nicest most helpful person in the world would you still go to hell? Idk I don't think it's fair to be honest. Sure they messed up but maybe they were brought up differently or something you know.
Hell isn't punishment for doing the wrong things. Neither is Hell punishment for believing the wrong things.
Hell is what happens when there is, ultimately, a fundamental rejection of God and the life of God.
I would actually posit that the Scriptures themselves don't have much to say on the topic of Hell; instead Jesus in the Gospels talks about the two sides of the underworld, called She'ol in Hebrew and translated as Hades in Greek. These two sides are called Paradise and Gehenna. Paradise or rather Paradeisos is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Gan-Eden or Garden of Eden; Gehenna is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom or Valley of Hinnom. According to the standard Jewish understanding in the first century everyone went to the common place of the dead, called She'ol/Hades; the righteous dead went to Paradise also sometimes known as Abraham's Bosom or Side because it was the place of the righteous patriarchs of old; the wicked dead went to Gehenna. The purpose here was that the dead were in this place of waiting until Judgment, until resurrection. So, for example, there is a somewhat cryptic passage in 1 Peter ch. 3 that talks about Christ preaching to the captive spirits. This has been understood, historically, as part of Christ's descent into Hades--that is Christ's descent into the place of the dead, and thus part of what is known as the
Harrowing of Hell.
Further, in the Western Churches we recite, regularly, the Apostles' Creed in which we confess, "He [Jesus] descended into Hell", the original Latin however reads "descendit ad inferos" or "descended into the depths"; that is, He descended into the place of the dead. Not "hell" in the popular imagination.
This also gets us to understanding how the word "hell" can be pretty confusing for modern English-speakers, as this word is used all over the place to translate and refer to all sorts of different things. For example in the archaic language of the King James Version of the Bible the word "hell" is used to translated the Greek words Gehenna and Hades, as well as the Hebrew word She'ol. And in a number of translations is used to translate the Greek word tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4. Note also that it is the traditional translation of the Latin
inferos found in the Apostles' Creed. The idea of "hell" is also brought into biblical passages about judgment and, in the Apocalypse of St. John (the Book of Revelation) understood also to correspond to the lake of fire and brimstone.
That means "hell" gets used as a catch-all for all sorts of words and ideas.
Any meaningful discussion about "hell" first requires that we have some sort of working definition or concept of what we're talking about. Are we talking about the prison of the wicked? The underworld more generally? The state of penultimate or ultimate judgment generally? Etc.
Unsurprisingly the Christian Church, historically, really has never had a dogmatic position when it comes to Hell. For example you won't find it mentioned in any of the ancient Creeds, it was never part of the discussions of any of the original Seven Ecumenical Councils. And the views and opinions of the fathers of the Church and theologians throughout the last two thousand years are hardly unanimous or monolithic.
As such it is possible to find theologians whose view of hell is more-or-less the modern populist view, as a literal place of fire, wailing, and gnashing of teeth where the damned spend eternity in perpetual unending torment, with all the graphic imagery dreamed up by Dante in the Divine Comedy.
Then one will find other theologians who, certainly have more subtle and nuanced opinions and positions. For example St. Gregory of Nyssa regarded the fires of hell to be "purgatorial", describing them as doing to the soul what the refiner's fire does to gold, removing the impurities. In the writings of St. Isaac the Syrian he describes Hell as not a place at all, but instead the disposition of the wicked when confronting the love and presence of God; Isaac describes the flames of hell as the fires of God's love, which for the righteous are unimaginable joy and therefore Heaven but for the wicked are unbearable agony. In more modern times a rather fascinating take on the subject can be found in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, a book I would highly recommend.
So when I, near the beginning said that Hell wasn't about punishment for having done or believed the wrong things, but is about an ultimate rejection of God and the life of God, what do I mean?
I mean that the work of God is restore and renew all things, in Christ God is setting the world right, all creation is being set right. That involves our restoration and justification as sinners by the forgiveness of our sins and the imparting of new life by grace through faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit to the hope of resurrection in the future age; but it means the complete and total restitution and restoration of all things. All creation,
the entire universe. So since God is restoring His creation and making us part of that new creation, both now by grace through faith and in the future by resurrection, what would it mean for there to be people who refuse to be part of God's new creation? What would it be for a people to, fundamentally, deny their humanity, to reject grace, and to cling to their own selfish and destructive way? I believe this is, fundamentally, what hell is. It is that ultimate rejection of God, and the life of God. It is, ultimately, to reject life and to choose death, a death that is in some sense more terrible than death (St. John in the Apocalypse calls it a second death, and describes it in the most graphic and horrible way he could imagine, as a lake of fire and brimstone). What would it mean to be, in some sense, dead forever? Not in the annihilationist sense of ceasing to exist, but something far worse, to be dead beyond death.
In
The Great Divorce Lewis writes of there being a grumble, we grumble in ourselves, but what if that grumble is never nipped in the bud, but is allowed to grow and flourish. What happens, ultimately, when there's nothing left of us but the grumble?
That's hell. Hell isn't where we go, hell begins in ourselves and if not healed becomes a terrifying and consuming inferno that burns us to ashes.
Further, here are some thoughts from the now retired Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright,
-CryptoLutheran