Is hell a real place?

Hell Is Overrated: What God Really Thinks of You — A Mystical Christian Perspective

By Mark L Lockwood BA(hons)(psy) | Founder, Center for Healing | Author of Contemplative Intelligence & The Paradigm Process

What if everything you were taught about hell was wrong?

Not slightly wrong. Not a little exaggerated. What if the entire framework — the fire, the torment, the transactional God keeping score — was largely a mistranslation, a misreading, and a trauma response that got baked into Western religion for over a thousand years?

And what if the real story — the one alive in the original Hebrew and Greek, the one the mystics have been whispering across centuries, the one Jesus himself was telling — was not a story of fear and punishment at all, but a story of love so wild, so vast, and so uncontainable that it will not stop until every single lost thing is found?

That is what we are exploring in this post about Is hell a real place? — and in the accompanying YouTube video. Buckle in. This one may change everything.

Part One: The Problem With Hell As We Know It

“We built a God too small.” — Richard Rohr

Let us begin with an uncomfortable truth: the word “hell” does not appear in the original Bible much at all. Not once in the first 5 chapters. Not in Hebrew. Not in Greek. What you find instead are four very different words that were collapsed — flattened — into one terrifying English noun by translators working centuries after Jesus walked the earth.

Sheol — in Hebrew, simply the realm of the dead. A shadowy underworld of shadows. No fire. No punishment. The Psalms speak of God even being present in Sheol. Psalm 139:8 declares: “If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there.” Not “there to punish.” Just — there.

Hades — the Greek equivalent. Not a place of torment, but something closer to unconsciousness, the grave. The NIV, NASB, and most modern translations do not render Hades as “hell.”

Tartarus — a concept borrowed from Greek mythology. It appears once in the entire New Testament. Once.

And then there is Gehenna — and this is where the story gets truly fascinating when we ask ourselves Is hell a real place?

Gehenna was a real place. A valley just outside the walls of Jerusalem called the Valley of Hinnom — Gei Ben Hinnom in Hebrew. In the Old Testament, it was a site of pagan child sacrifice. Later it became the city’s rubbish dump — burning refuse, dead animals, sometimes the bodies of criminals. It was a symbol of disgrace and social rejection, not a metaphysical destination for sinners after death.

As Wikipedia’s entry on Gehenna notes: “The King James Version is the only English translation in modern use to translate Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna by calling them all ‘Hell.’” One translation. One editorial decision. And from it, a doctrine of terror that has haunted Western Christianity for centuries.

When Jesus used the word Gehenna, he was speaking to first-century Jewish audiences who knew exactly what he meant: Don’t live so destructively that your body ends up discarded like rubbish outside the city walls. This was a social, ethical, and urgent point about this life — not a detailed blueprint for an afterlife of eternal torment.

“Religion is lived by people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell.”
— Richard Rohr

The concept of eternal conscious torment was in fact a minority view in the early church. Many of the early Church Fathers — Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Clement of Alexandria — taught what is now called apokatastasis: the universal restoration of all things. It wasn’t until Augustine of Hippo in the 4th and 5th centuries, heavily influenced by his reading of Platonic philosophy, that eternal damnation became mainstream. For the first 500 years of Christianity, the dominant strain of thought was restoration, not eternal separation.

This matters enormously — not just theologically, but psychologically and spiritually. As I explore in my work on Contemplative Intelligence, the story we tell about God becomes the story we tell about ourselves. A punishing God produces punishing people — people who live in shame, fear, and chronic self-rejection. A loving God produces people capable of genuine transformation.

“Our desperate need for certainty is fear wearing a mask of ‘knowledge’. It slams shut the very doors that grace moves through. But the one who learns to sit in holy unknowing — who trades the false safety of a closed mind for the trembling aliveness of an open heart — discovers something the frightened self could never find: that Love was never a belief to be defended. It was always a truth to be lived.” — Mark L Lockwood

Part Two: Dante’s Inferno — The Allegory We Forgot to Read as an Allegory

Here is one of history’s great ironies. Is hell a real place? Dante made it so, at least a little bit.

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno — the 14th-century masterpiece that more than any other cultural work has shaped our visual imagination of hell — was never intended to be taken literally.

Dante opens the Divine Comedy with perhaps the most famous lines in Italian literature:

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”

He is not describing a literal descent into a physical underworld. He is describing what we would today call a spiritual crisis — midlife disorientation, moral confusion, loss of meaning. As SparkNotes’ literary analysis notes, the dark wood sets up “a clear dichotomy between the unenlightened ignorance involved in a lack of faith in God and the clear radiance provided by God’s love.” The journey, from the very first line, is an allegory of every human soul — not a theology textbook on the afterlife.

The nine circles of hell in Dante are not a geography lesson. They are a map of what happens to the human soul when it chooses ego, violence, deceit, and self-enclosure over love. The suffering is not external punishment imposed by an angry deity — it is the natural consequence of choosing radical separation from love.

Crucially, Dante does not stay in hell. He passes through it. Guided by Virgil — representing human wisdom and reason — he descends all the way to the frozen figure of Lucifer at the very bottom, and then climbs out the other side. The final line of the Inferno shimmers with meaning:

“Thence issuing, we again beheld the stars.” — Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXIV

Hell, for Dante, is not the destination. It is the passage. It is “necessary suffering” — the descent that always precedes the ascent. Even the inscription over Dante’s gates of hell contains a stunning surprise:

“Through me you pass into the city of woe… Justice moved my high maker; Power Divine, The Highest Wisdom, and the Primal Love.”

Primal Love. Even Dante’s hell is built on love. Hell, in its deepest allegorical reading, is not the absence of God — it is what we experience when we refuse to be transformed by love. The door, as C.S. Lewis observed in The Great Divorce, is always unlocked from the inside.

This aligns precisely with the Paradigm Process understanding of the “dark night of the soul” — the necessary descent through our shadow, our false self, our fear — as the very ground from which authentic healing and transformation springs.

Part Three: The God We Were Never Told About

Fr. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico, has spent decades dismantling the small, frightened, punitive God that Western Christianity inherited — and restoring the expansive, loving, universal Christ that the mystics always knew.

In his landmark book The Universal Christ, Rohr writes with disarming directness:

“The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.”

Think about that for a moment and the question of Is hell a real place? How many people have walked away from God — not because God was too much, but because the version of God they were offered was too small? A cosmic accountant. A hanging judge. An easily offended monarch. Rohr argues — and I believe he is right — that this distortion has done incalculable spiritual damage.

On salvation itself, Rohr shifts the entire frame:

“The salvation Jesus is talking about is present tense. He’s not saving someone from the hellfires later… He’s talking about transformation now.”

And on the resurrection — one of Rohr’s most profound teachings, and one directly relevant to the mystical Christian tradition:

“The Eastern understanding of the resurrection is the liberation, the undoing, of hell — it doesn’t exist anymore.”

The resurrection is not merely a miracle that happened to one man 2,000 years ago. It is a cosmic declaration that Love is the final word. Death, separation, and hell — in whatever form they take — do not get the last say. Love does.

Perhaps Rohr’s most transformative insight — and one that sits at the very heart of my own therapeutic approach — concerns the relationship between love and change:

“Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change, is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.”

This single idea overturns the entire architecture of fear-based religion. The old model was: Behave → Belong → Believe. The mystical tradition — and the most effective therapeutic approaches — reverse this entirely: You already belong. Now transformation becomes not a duty but a delight.

This is why Loving Inquiry — as a practice and a philosophy — is so central to real healing. You cannot shame a person into wholeness. You can only love them into it.

Part Four: 21 Ways God Loves, Redeems, and Resurrects With Endless Love

The love of God is not an abstraction. It shows up, over and over, in scripture, in history, in the lives of real people. Here are 21 examples — each one a different face of the same relentless Love.

1. The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32)

The father sees his returning son “while he was still a long way off” — and runs. He doesn’t wait for the apology to finish before throwing a party. God’s first move toward the broken is not judgment — it is a sprint.

2. The Woman Caught in Adultery (John 8:1–11)

The religious authorities have the law on their side. Jesus has mercy on his. “Neither do I condemn you.” God’s first word to the shamed is not condemnation — it is liberation.

3. The Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3–7)

A shepherd leaves the 99 to find the one. Not because the one deserved it — but because that is what love does. It goes after what is lost. Every soul. No exceptions.

4. Zacchaeus the Tax Collector (Luke 19:1–10)

The most despised man in Jericho — a collaborator and a cheat. Jesus doesn’t pass him by. He looks up into the tree and says: “I must stay at your house today.” Not “clean yourself up first.” Today. As you are. People can’t take such kindness. They almost really want the answer to Is hell a real place?, to be a resounding yes, “and you’re going there of course, not me!”

5. Thomas Merton’s Epiphany on the Street Corner

The great Catholic monk was walking through Louisville, Kentucky, when he was overwhelmed with love for the strangers around him. He wrote: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” God’s love doesn’t need a church building to operate. It erupts on street corners.

“We do not lie because we are wicked. We lie because we are afraid. And the greatest lie the frightened mind tells is that certainty is the same as truth. Contemplation is the courageous act of releasing that lie — of sitting with God in the darkness long enough to discover that mystery is not the absence of truth, but its deepest and most luminous form.” — Mark L Lockwood

6. The Resurrection of Lazarus (John 11)

“Jesus wept.” The shortest verse in the Bible. The Son of God, moved to tears at a grave. Not performing. Not detached. And then — calling the dead man back. God weeps with us, and then calls us forward into life.

7. Nelson Mandela — Resurrection from Prison

Twenty-seven years on Robben Island. Enough to fill a soul with bitterness for a lifetime. But Mandela walked out choosing love over resentment — saying that carrying hatred was another form of imprisonment. He chose to be resurrected. This is what love looks like in real time.

8. The Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35)

Two devastated disciples walking away from Jerusalem. A stranger joins them, walks with them, listens to them, breaks bread with them — and only then do their eyes open. God often meets us when we’re walking away from the place we thought we’d find him. He joins us on the road.

9. C.S. Lewis — From Atheist to Mystic

Lewis described his conversion as God’s “steady, unrelenting approach” — a love that would not stop coming for him no matter how hard he resisted. Not threats of hell. Just love that would not let him go.

10. Paul on the Road to Damascus (Acts 9)

A murderer of Christians. And the risen Christ doesn’t strike him dead. He strikes him blind — and then heals him. The most violent persecutor of the early church becomes its most passionate apostle. God’s redemption has no limit.

11. Jordan Peterson’s Encounter with Meaning

Peterson — who has wrestled publicly and profoundly with the Biblical narrative — says this: “To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.” But he equally points toward the antidote: the purpose-filled life, the meaning that makes suffering bearable. He quotes Jung: “No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell.” The descent and the ascent are not enemies — they are partners in transformation.

12. The Feeding of the 5,000 (Matthew 14:13–21)

Jesus is grieving. He has just learned of John the Baptist’s execution. He tries to withdraw. The crowds follow. And instead of turning them away, he has compassion on them — and five loaves become enough for thousands. Love multiplies when given away, even in grief.

13. Viktor Frankl — Love as the Highest Reality

Frankl survived the Nazi death camps. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he arrived at this conclusion: “The salvation of man is through love and in love.” Even in Auschwitz, love was the force that sustained the human soul. He concluded love was not merely an emotion — it is a metaphysical reality. The most real thing in the universe.

14. The Healing of the Ten Lepers (Luke 17:11–19)

Jesus heals all ten — even though only one comes back to say thank you. And that one is a Samaritan, an outsider the religious establishment would have excluded. Grace is not contingent on gratitude.

15. Desmond Tutu and Restorative Justice

After apartheid, Archbishop Tutu chaired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission — a process built not on punishment but on confession, witness, and restoration. He said: “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” The gospel of love does not write people off. We are made whole together, or not at all.

16. The Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38)

An unmarried teenage girl in a backwater province. This is who God chooses to carry the Light into the world. Not a priest, not a king, not a scholar. God’s love has a persistent, consistent bias toward the marginalised, the overlooked, and the ones the world has passed by.

17. Brené Brown and the Gospel of Worthiness

Brown’s research found that the one variable separating people who feel loved from those who don’t is the simple, radical belief that they are worthy of love and belonging. The gospel says the same thing — not as a self-help affirmation, but as a cosmic fact. You are the Beloved. You do not earn it. You simply are it.

18. The Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1–16)

Those who worked one hour get paid the same as those who worked all day. The owner says: “Do you begrudge my generosity?” God’s love is offensive in its extravagance. It does not follow market logic. It does not ration itself. It simply pours.

19. Grace at the Bottom

Rohr writes: “It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up.” We think grace is found on the mountaintop — in our best moments, our spiritual achievements. The mystical tradition keeps saying the opposite: grace flows down. It finds you in the mess. It finds you in the failure. It finds you at rock bottom.

20. The Woman with the Lost Coin (Luke 15:8–10)

She sweeps the whole house. She lights a lamp. She searches until she finds it. Then she throws a party with her neighbours. For one coin. If that doesn’t tell you how God feels about each individual human soul — the extravagant, unreasonable, relentless searching — nothing will.

21. The Cross Itself — Love’s Final Word

At the moment of maximum violence — the state-sanctioned murder of an innocent man — what does Jesus say? Not: “Father, damn them.” Not: “You’ll all pay for this.”

He says: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

Forgiveness — not condemnation — is the final word spoken from the place of deepest suffering. The cross is not God venting wrath. The cross is God absorbing our violence and returning it as Love. And the resurrection is proof that Love survives everything we can throw at it.

Part Five of Is hell a real place?: The Frightened Personality vs. The Soul

Here is where it all comes together — and where theology becomes psychology, and psychology becomes healing.

There is a part of us — we all have it — the shadow, small self, persona, false self. Jordan Peterson calls it the shadow. Carl Jung called it the persona. The mystics called it the mask. In my own clinical framework, it is what I address through the Paradigm Process and the Energetics Scale of Consciousness.

This frightened personality needs hell to be real — because it needs someone else to be punished. It needs God to be keeping score, because at least then it can keep score too. It wants religion as reward-and-punishment because that gives it control. It wants a small God, because a small God is manageable.

And Peterson adds, with characteristic psychological precision: “No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell.” In other words, the descent — the dark night, the “hell” we go through — is not the enemy of our growth. It is the ground of it. The soul does not grow by avoiding suffering. It grows by going through it — with Love as companion, not Fear as driver.

The frightened personality needs hell. The soul already knows it is home. It is finished and the game was Love and love wins every darn time. Fear isn’t real, it doesn’t exist. It is false evidence appearing real, F.e.a.r. So, is hell a real place? Well if it is, we’ve totally contorted and manipulated the idea of it 180 degrees.

And Scripture about Is hell a real place? — not the watered-down, institutional, control-based version, but the raw, wild, mystical river of Scripture — keeps saying the same thing, over and over:

“Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18)
“There is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)
“Neither death nor life… nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.” (Romans 8:38–39)
“Behold, I make all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)
“His mercy endures forever.” (Psalm 136 — repeated 26 times in a single Psalm)

And perhaps the most foundational declaration in all of Scripture:

“God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

Not: God has love. Not: God gives love to the deserving. Not: God offers love conditionally.

God is love. Love is the substance. Love is the operating system. Love is what reality is made of at its deepest level.

As Rohr writes — in one of his most beautiful formulations, available in the full collection of his quotes:

“Love is not something you do; love is someone you are. It is your True Self. Love is where you came from and love is where you’re going.”

Conclusion: What Matters Is Love, Not Fear — The Soul, Not the Frightened Personality

So let us bring this home. Mark challenges traditional views of hell, suggesting it is a misinterpretation of biblical texts, primarily fuelled by fear-based religious teachings. Instead, it emphasizes a loving God who seeks to transform individuals through love, not punishment. The journey through suffering leads to healing and spiritual growth, highlighting the centrality of love in the divine narrative.

The doctrine of hell — in its fire-and-brimstone, eternal-torment, fear-based form — is largely a mistranslation, a historical aberration, a tool of control, and most critically, a profound misrepresentation of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Dante’s Inferno is not a travel brochure for the afterlife. It is an allegory of the soul’s journey through its own darkness — and the path always leads upward, toward the stars, toward the Love that Dante placed at the very close of the entire Divine Comedy:

“L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.”
“The Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”

Rhor says, The God we have been given is too small — and that the real God, the Universal Christ, is a Love so vast and so patient that salvation is “not a question of if but when.”

Jordan Peterson intuits that hell is a psychological reality we create through self-deception and moral cowardice — and that the antidote is not the absence of pain, but the presence of Love and meaning.

Viktor Frankl, from the depths of a Nazi concentration camp, concluded that love is the highest and most real thing in the universe — and that no system of cruelty, not even the most horrific humanity has devised, could ultimately extinguish it.

And the 21 stories we have told — from Zacchaeus up a tree to Thomas Merton on a street corner in Louisville — all say the same thing:

Love finds us. Love will not stop finding us. Love is what we are made of, and Love is where we are going.

The frightened personality in you may need to hold onto hell — because it gives the illusion of control and the grim satisfaction of knowing the bad people will eventually get what they deserve.

But your soul — the deepest, truest, most real part of you, the part breathed into existence by the very breath of Love itself — your soul already knows the truth.

Love is the first word. Love is the last word. Everything in between is just the journey home.

Ready to Move From Fear to Love in Your Own Life?

If this exploration about Is hell a real place? has touched something deep in you — if you’re ready to stop living from your frightened personality and start living from your soul — that journey is exactly what I do at the Center for Healing.

Through Contemplative Intelligence, the Paradigm Process, and Loving Inquiry, we help people move — at the deepest neurological, psychological, and spiritual levels — from fear to love, from ego to soul, from survival to genuine transformation.

Book a free discovery call today →

And if you haven’t yet watched the full video version of this teaching, I’d love for you to join me on YouTube where I go deeper into every dimension of this conversation.

About the Author of Is hell a real place?

Mark L Lockwood BA(hons)(psy) is an award-winning Life Strategist, author, and founder of the Center for Healing in South Africa. Since 2012 he has helped thousands of people transform depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, and existential crises through his unique integration of neuroscience, psychology, and Contemplative Intelligence. He is the author of Contemplative Intelligence and The Paradigm Process and hosts a growing YouTube channel exploring mystical Christianity, healing, and consciousness transformation. Therapist, author, and contemplative teacher, based in Knysna, South Africa.