The short answer is no, not according to the Bible. I will post a longer explanation below because this deserves a fuller answer.

First though I’m going to answer the question of “How is it that so much of Christian history and tradition hold that God will torture people forever in hell, if that is not what the Bible says?”

This is partly due to people losing sight of How to Read the Bible Like a Christian, but this is also due to a very related additional cause – Christianity’s movement away from viewing scripture through the lens of a first-century Jewish worldview to a predominantly Greek and Roman worldview as Christianity spread more and more throughout the pagan culture.

Our scriptures are, after all, inherently Jewish, and Christians are following a Jesus who was every bit Jewish, so it is understandable how Christians would begin to get things wrong as they began to understand both scripture and the Jesus of scripture through a set of assumptions and perspectives that are foreign and out of place with both the text and the central figure of the text (Jesus).

One of the key misunderstandings here is the difference between the understanding of the concept of the soul in ancient Judaism and pagan Rome. In the Roman world it was largely believed that everyone had an immortal soul which in life existed in one’s mortal body, when the body dies the soul goes on living somewhere.  In the Jewish understanding, the combination of body plus breath (or spirit) creates a living soul. When the soul (body + breath) dies, it is dead, lost to the grave.

The hope of the Jewish people (most of them anyway – some believed that this life is all there is) was in a bodily resurrection to eternal life. They weren’t concerned about where their immortal soul would spend eternity because they didn’t believe they had an immortal soul. Their concern was missing out on the resurrection life in the new creation of heaven and earth – the coming Kingdom of God. This is not about eternal torture, but ceasing to exist, being utterly consumed by death and missing out on God’s Good Kingdom.

This is why in Mark 10 and Luke 18 the “Rich Young Ruler” asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” As a typical Jewish person of his day, he assumed that not everyone was going to go on living after they died (eternal life) because he didn’t believe people have immortal souls, but actually are souls (body + breath). If he had been a non-Jew with a pagan worldview, he might have asked Jesus something more like, “How do I get to heaven when I die?” or “How do I avoid going to hell when I die?” with the assumption that he had an immortal soul that would go on living somewhere and he would want it to be a good somewhere.

Another example of this is found in what is one of the most well know verse of scripture, John 3:16, where Jesus says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.” A pagan-influenced worldview would misread this verse as saying, “…will not spend eternity in hell, but live forever in heaven” because of the assumption that we have an immortal soul. This however is not an assumption of Jesus or the Christian Bible.

Christians have misunderstood their own scripture and the Jesus of scripture so badly in some important ways for so long because long ago we severed our ties with the Jewish community and lost touch with the fact that Jesus and the writers of the New Testament did not see the world the way that we do – they saw it through the lens of first century Jews.

Thanks to modern scholarship, we are beginning to understand Jesus and the Bible better.

Now, for a fuller answer to the question, “Does God torture people forever?” there is no need for me to reinvent the wheel, especially one as involved as this one.

Jeremy Moritz does a great job of answering this question from a scriptural, theological, and ethical perspective. You can read his article by clicking HERE. You can listen to him read it via MP3 by clicking HERE.

I hope you check it out. This is an important topic for understanding scripture and for understanding God. Since we humans tend to become like the gods we follow, following a God who we believe subjects people to unending torment and torture would at the least cause theological angst and at the worst encourage people to emulate the God of their understanding – a frightening thought that has happened before.