Tartarus and General Revelation

What the Tartarus?

The first time I heard the word “Tartarus,” I thought, No thanks. I okay without tartar sauce. In Greek mythology Tartarus, like Hades, is both a deity and a place in the underworld. Whereas Hades is the abode of the dead, Tartarus is far lower and functions as a prison for unfortunate captives and punishment for those who committed crimes. The Greeks’ Tartarus is a lot closer to our modern concept of Hell than the Greeks’ Hades. Jewish traditions borrowed this concept of Tartarus, a place where mythical figures were punished for their sins, and applied it to angels who sinned. The first instance is in the pseudoepigraphal book of 1 Enoch 20:2.

Early Christians inherited this term, and the New Testament employs the word and concept of Tartarus for a very specific case—the state of fallen angels, or demons. The only biblical occurrence of the term Tartarus is 2 Peter 2:4, where it is forever mistranslated “Hell.” This adds more confusion to the word. Here is the verse as it should read: “God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to Tartarus, putting them into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment.” Is this a place? Or is it a condition? After all we’re talking about spirits, and spirits aren’t physical.

Without using the actual term, Jude 6 makes the only other reference to this place or condition in which fallen angels are kept in a kind of bondage: “The angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.”

If demons actively afflict people in the Bible, and demonic manifestations still occur today, what do we make of this? Are they in a prison and can’t get out? Or are they in a state of bondage, like vicious dogs on short leashes? Charles Dickens was not known as a theologian, but his image of Jacob Marley, who visits Scrooge, may help us imagine at least one possibility. Marley roams the physical world, but he is in bondage, shackled to chains and locked boxes—and more significantly, he is imprisoned in a state of spiritual judgment. The difference here is that Marley was not a demon but a dead person in a novel. The demons that afflict humans may similarly be in a state of bondage—in Tartarus. Imagine if they weren’t.

Because Tartarus is for angels and not humans, and because demonic activity is evident in daily life all over the earth, I suggest that Tartarus is not a lower level of Hades. Nor is it a part of Gehenna, where “the devil and his angels” will be thrown at the end of time (Matthew 25:41; Revelation 20:10). Rather it seems to be some sort of bondage for demons in this world—contrasting the free condition of the angels of God who also operate in this world. This bondage may be some kind curse or judgment along with a confinement or limitation that yet allows them to roam the earth.

 

Everyone Should Know

Let’s make the whole equation more complicated. Contrasting the specific revelation of Jesus as Lord, known as “special revelation,” we also have “general revelation.” As the term implies, this is the aspect in which God reveals himself in general ways through nature and through the human conscience. Psalm 19:1 says, “The Heavens declare the glory of God.” Acts 14:17 echoes, “He has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from Heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” And Romans 1:20 expresses God’s resulting expectation: “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Though people in many countries can be excused for not having heard the gospel, they cannot be excused from seeing and responding to evidence of God in creation.

Romans 2:14–16 speaks of God working in the human conscience in a kind of natural law: “(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves . . . since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) This will take place on the day when God will judge men’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.” That day may be at their death or at the end of time.

What do we do with this? There’s not much we can do; it’s something that God does. But this does demonstrate God’s sovereign work in people’s hearts beyond even gospel ministry, presumably among those who don’t receive an adequate hearing of the gospel message. These verses also show God’s expectation of a response to what they understand of God, even among those who have not adequately heard. The inclination of their heart’s response to their God-given consciences seems to indicate the direction they would take in the afterlife.

For those who hear the gospel in this life, it means responding positively. For those who do not hear the gospel in this life, could it mean responding in the afterlife? Or could it mean God will judge their response to the law “written on their hearts”? Either way, God will handle it.

Her grandparents had certainly heard about Christianity but had never adequately heard the gospel message. She wasn’t sure she wanted to follow a God who would summarily condemn them to eternal hell. And with so few Christians in Japan, a hundred and twenty million more people were like her grandparents.

As I thought about it, I went one step further: On one hand, Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), and Peter says of Jesus that “there is no other name under Heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). So Jesus is the only way to Heaven, and without him I go to the hot and fiery place. On the other hand, the First Letter of John says twice in chapter four, “God is love.” He doesn’t just love believers; he is love.

Isn’t there a contradiction here—like the one repeated ad infinitum of “how could a loving God send people to hell?” In responding to the question, I risk being vilified as a narrow-minded, judgmental Christian. And I risk being vilified as a doctrine-denying liberal.

When I hear people leaning Universalist and letting everyone into Heaven because “mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13), I gasp and say, “What about all the times Jesus warned us about hell?” He wasn’t just having a bunch of bad days.

When I hear people proclaim that anyone who does not confess Christ goes straight to eternal damnation, I sigh and say, “What about all the places where the Bible talks about God’s mercy?”

To say it’s a mystery is partly right, because there’s much we don’t know. Deuteronomy 29:29 sets the standard: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” Some things we’re meant to know; some we’re not. But a lot of us ignore what’s actually been revealed to us.

The Problem with Hell

I wish we could take the word hell out of our English vocabulary—not because it’s unpleasant, but because it creates so much confusion.

Hell is originally an English word derived from Old English, referring to the place of the dead. It is not a biblical word. Whenever we take a single word outside of the Bible and impose it on several different biblical words, we can expect confusion. And that’s exactly what we have.

The mindset of applying hell to all the bad people who don’t make it to a nice place in the afterlife is universal and deeply rooted, even in the minds of Bible translators. After the Reformation and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent, two of the earliest and most important English versions of the Bible were published—the Catholic Douay Reims Version and the Protestant King James Version. In these Bibles, both Sheol and Hades, together with Gehenna, appear as the English word “hell.” And it’s theorized that these translations were both influenced by Saint Augustine’s theology.

As a result, most English Bible translations uses “hell” for the words Gehenna, Hades, and Tartarus. For a long time the only version that did not was Young’s Literal Translation, published in 1862. As with everything else in his translation, Young keeps intact all the Greek words referring to the afterlife. But with all the modern versions dumping several different terms into one hell basket, it’s no surprise that we have hundreds of millions of English speakers who view hell simplistically and unbiblically. Thankfully, more modern translations are now properly distinguishing Hades from hell, or at least adding notations. Gehenna is almost always rendered “hell.”

The word and concept of hell are used with countless religions, taking on all kinds of images and metaphors. Ancient mythologies and contemporary folk religions on every continent, as well as the major religions of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism all have concepts of hell. And they’re all different. Images of other religions’ hells, as well as comic-bookish depictions of demons in red suits with pitchforks, get confused with biblical distinctives.

If we have to keep the term hell, and I can’t imagine it going away, we should at least be careful which biblical word we apply it to. That one word—and only that one—is Gehenna.

What the Gehenna?

Every city needs a garbage dump. And before recycling, places like Jerusalem burned their garbage—day and night for millennia. In this same place, Kings Ahaz and Manasseh sacrificed their own sons (2 Chronicles 28:3 and 33:6). The dump was the valley on the south side of Jerusalem, the Valley of Ben Hinnom (son of Hinnom), or the Valley of Hinnom, in Hebrew Ge Hinnom. Jesus takes this imagery of refuse, perpetual fire, and human sacrifice, along with the name, to describe for us the eternal destiny of the damned, rendered in Greek as “Gehenna.”

With the exception of one reference in James 3:6 (by Jesus’ brother), Jesus is the only one in the Bible to use the term Gehenna. We should take to heart that the One who loves us the most is the one who gives the scariest warnings.

When Jesus recommends ridding ourselves of our hands and eyes rather than sinning, he uses the imagery of “eternal fire” and “the fire of Gehenna” (Matthew 18:8–9) to describe the judgment. Mark 9:43’s version reads, “Gehenna, where the fire never goes out.” Mark adds that the “worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (9:48). Matthew 25:41 says Jesus will tell the people on his left to go to “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Revelation 20:10 identifies this as “the lake of burning sulfur,” and says people will be thrown in it, three times calling it the “lake of fire” (20:14–15).

Jesus is also the only one to use the phrase “weeping and gnashing of teeth” for end time judgment—and only in Matthew. He uses the phrase in six different occurrences, every time in a parable. The phrase is joined with images of “the fiery furnace” (13:42, 50) and “darkness” (8:12; 22:13; 25:30). And it makes sense: Though fire produces light, a furnace is always considered a dark place. This is also the place of “hypocrites” (24:51). Is Jesus talking about Gehenna? Consider this: In direct expository teaching he always uses the place name Gehenna. But in parables he speaks consistently in the genre of narrative, and instead of saying Gehenna, he uses the imagery of fire, darkness, and “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

The term “judgment,” referring to God’s end-time judgment, is all over the Bible. It is the phrase Paul uses instead of describing hell directly when he says to those who are stubborn and unrepentant, “You are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:5). The Book of Hebrews brings the two together, saying that if we deliberately keep on sinning, we have “only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire” (10:27).

Gehenna, then, is what most people really mean when they say hell: judgment, punishment, fire, eternal misery. But we do not see anything about the devil or demons poking people with pitchforks or anything close to that. According to Scripture, these fallen angels will suffer in Gehenna too—but only at the end of time (Revelation 20:7–15). Now they’re in Tartarus (more on that in another article).

Today the Hinnom Valley is a city park. No surprise that not much was built there, and it’s the city’s main venue for outdoor rock concerts. You can imagine all the jokes that go on. But the Gehenna we can’t see is no joke.

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Art credit: Gerd Altmann | Pixaby