A reader writes:
What is the church teaching on location of hell and the duality of it Abraham’s bosom vs. hell fire.
I am curious because I recently came across some audio claiming to be the sounds of hell emanating from a 9 mile dig in Siberia". I am also wondering what you could tell me about this story and any of the others I mentioned.
I have surfed and read numerous sites opinions and even heard that we, the Americans have a similar story form the 60’s. Then I read about Jacques Cousteau hearing screaming voices coming from beneath the seabed of Cuba.
I also recently learned of the deep sea worms that were discovered living in 180 plus degree tempereatures and read about what Jesus said "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched" (Mark 9:43-48).
Finally I read about the "paradise" side of hell, Abraham’s bosom and then fire and brimstone Hell.
The Church allows a great deal of liberty in the interpretation of Scripture. For the vast majority of passages–including the parable of Lazarus and rich man (the one mentioning Abraham’s bosom)–the Church basically allows one to interpret the text in the way one feels that the evidence best supports, as long as one does not contradict a doctrine of the faith.
While stories about hearing what sounds like sounds of hell are scary and interesting to think about, I find it very unlikely that there is any truth to them, for several reasons:
First, departed souls don’t have physical form and thus would not naturally be able to make noise. No body, no throat, no lungs.
Second, the depiction of hell as "down" in Scripture is a metaphor. Hell isn’t really "down" any more than heaven is "up." The two are not physical places in this universe. You couldn’t go to heaven with a space ship or to hell with a backhoe. Heaven and hell are depicted as inaccessably high and inaccessibly low because they are places that are inaccessible to humans–we can’t physically go there in this life–and so Scripture metaphorically uses inaccessible places (up in the sky, under the earth) to depict where they are.
(Incidentally, note that though the two places are not in this universe, they can receive physical bodies–for the saved and the damned will have their bodies after the resurrection, just as Jesus and Mary do in heaven now.)
Third, if you think about the physics of sound (i.e., acoustics) then it would quickly be clear that voices don’t penetrate rock and earth very far. Even if you had a lot of voices, they wouldn’t be able to penetrate rock and earth very far at all as recognizable screams. That’s one reason we can’t find trapped miners that easily and can’t hear them until the material trapping them is very thin. Consequently, it is unlikely that Jacques Cousteau could detect the sounds of screaming under the ocean floor unless hell was very, very close to the surface.
Same thing goes with voices from holes in the ground. Voices–particularly recognizable screams–just don’t travel that far. Hell would have to be very, very close to the Earth’s surface.
We’ve done so much exploring that, if hell really were a physical place close to the Earth’s surface then we would have found it by now. Consequently, if you hear voices shouting from a hole someone has dug in the ground you should think "trapped miners" or something like that, not "damned souls."
About the imagery of fire and worms connected with hell, this is an extension of picturing it as "down" and a place of suffering. People in ancient Israel buried their dead, and they knew that worms get involved after burials (given the fact they didn’t have hermetically sealed coffins back then, or even coffins at all), and so it was natural to picture worms as one of the torments of the damned.
Similarly, being burned by fire is about the most intense torment that a human of the ancient world could imagine (since they didn’t know about sinking electrodes into the brain’s pain reception center), making it a fitting symbol of the natural of the ultimate torment of damnation.
I couldn’t rule out the idea that there is some role for the fact that if you go down deep in caves that it starts to get hot (due to the magma inside the Earth) in the development of this imagery, but I think by far the larger role is just the fact that being burned by fire is the most intense form of torment the ancients knew.
As to the relationship of paradise/Abraham’s bosom to hell, you should be aware that the terms for hell in Scripture do not (most of the time) pick out the unique place of the damned. In the Old Testament the word is sh’ol (not SHEE-ol!) and it just describes the place of the dead, both good and bad. Same thing with the Greek word hades. Even the English word hell originally just meant the place of the dead, not the place of the damned.
Because these words were used as a catchall for the place the dead went, it was presumed that the righteous dead were comforted in sh’ol/hades, while the unrighteous were being tormented there. That’s the background to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, where both Lazarus and the rich man are in the land of the dead but are experiencing different fates: Lazarus is apparently at a banquet with Abraham and is leaning against his bosom (the was John leaned against Jesus’ bosom at the Last Supper; the ancient Israelites ate dinner reclining at a low table) while the rich man is being tormented across a gap of some kind.
Since Christ has now opened the gates of heaven to the dead, the righteous dead are in a glorified state now that goes beyond the comfort they had previously, though what this means in terms in terms of how they are spatially related to the damned is something we can’t say–or possibly even imagine–at this point.
