Do we all need to experience Hell to enable us understand God's grace and walk the path leading to Heaven?

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The spiritual process is often likened to what’s called the monomyth. The monomyth is the classic “hero’s journey” that is so often depicted in stories and media. As described by Joseph Campbell in his seminal “The Hero With A Thousand Faces,” a hero journeys into a world of supernatural wonder. Fabulous, strange antagonists are found that need to be overcome. Overcome he does, and the reward is a boon that can be brought back to the mundane world.

When you realize that the supernatural world is very often a subterranean world that is often considered a dystopian society where horrible things happen, and you can see how this world being traveled through is Hell. It’s hard to see Lord of the Rings’ Mordor as anything but a kind of Hell, the horrors of which are repugnant to well-meaning warriors.

The underworld can also be a symbol for the murky world of the inner mind and the creative process. The comforting presence of society and one’s loved ones is left to journey through a dark, personal Hell that was always present, just never really acknowledged until it became necessary for personal growth.

Is this underworld Christian Hell? Well, no, though you can certainly write great stories of heroes actually going to Christian Hell. The concept of Christian Hell evolved as a motivating factor to keep wayward souls on the straight and narrow. Any Christian should be keen to understand the political aspects of their religion, because when you get right down to it, Christianity’s willingness to get political is one of its great strengths. Still, the idea has great thematic power and I love exploring it and reading stories about demons and devils and the sorts of things they do.

The underworld rather is a much older concept that is often held to be “as old as humanity itself.” Christians tend to not make much space for a non-Hell underworld, but Jews call theirs sheol, and it’s a dull, dismal place where the dead go to live until it’s time for G-d to put his ultimate plan into action.

The concept of Hell, as well as Heaven, can be characterized as not just a place people go in the afterlife, but also as transcendent concepts that can be applied to the here and now. I love the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven extending out from the world after into this one, and exploring the literary and mystical wriggles. You can consider different ideas about how Heaven and Hell operate and then apply the ideas to your immediate existence.

I hold Hell as a place where you’re forced to make bad decisions over and over again, and then similarly forced to deal with the consequences. You couldn’t learn the lessons while you were fully cognizant and in control of your own free will, yet you still want to reside in Heaven, (this is my own divergence from Christian theology, which seems to love to paint Hell as a punishment rather than as an integral part of God’s plan for everyone. In my understanding of Christian soteriology, everyone gets saved eventually, omnibenevolence allows no other possibility) so you’ll have to learn these lessons in Hell rather than in the much more benign environment of God’s grace. Eventually you’ll realize the necessity and true purpose behind the need to ask for salvation.

But Hell can only be seen by me as a last resort. Individual Christians might characterize some of their experiences as going through Hell, and I can’t help but compare such experiences to the real horrors that are experienced by drug addicts and the like. Yeah not even close.

Some people are just lucky. They don’t need the unspeakable horror of Hell in order to better themselves as people and Christians. They can listen to God. Hell is made necessary by the fact that people want to enjoy God without the need for listening to Him. But that’s not possible, so a choice is presented. Going through Hell is less preferable to having a hero’s journey-type experience, where an underworld that isn’t Hell is presented to you to make sense of and master.

To wrap up, no, you don’t need to go through Hell. Hell is different and special and only necessary for a small number of people who simply can’t see reason for unfathomable reasons. In Hell, God makes the unfathomable real. You don’t want to experience that, and it’s not really necessary.