Twice a year, Derek Ryan Kubilus, senior pastor at First United Methodist Church in Ashland, Ohio, offers an eight-week seminar to his congregants on a topic that he feels they want or need to explore. In 2019, he found himself fielding a lot of questions on a very specific topic: hell.
People were not asking academic or abstract questions, says Kubilus, whose debut book, Holy Hell: A Case Against Eternal Damnation, will be published by Eerdmans on February 27. “A lot of people were haunted by various ideas of hell,” he says. One woman was convinced her father was burning in hell. Another had been told by a Catholic priest her deceased child was “in someplace called limbo.”
“In every church I’ve ever served, I’ve known at least one person who was utterly convinced they themselves were going to go to hell and be tortured forever,” Kubilus notes.
Sociological research confirms Kubilus’s observation. The Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study found that 82% of evangelical Christians report belief in a “hell of eternal damnation.” As he delved into extensive textual and historical research, Kubilus, a 40-year-old lifelong Methodist who felt a calling to the ministry as a teenager, noted something else about the congregants who were so worried about hell: “They come to church anyway.”
Kubilus argues in the book that translations from Greek and Hebrew “have been massaged over time to include the idea that God has punished the damned eternally.” Citing biblical scholars including Alvin F. Kimel and Ilaria Ramelli, Kubilus discusses examples like the Greek word aionios, which means “of the age” but was translated in the fourth century by the early church leader St. Jerome into the Latin word aeturnum, which means “eternal” or “forever.”
Words translated as punishment, discipline, and chastening, all of which are used in Christian descriptions of hell, have similarly complex histories, he says. “There’s always been a group of people in Christianity who think it’s important that most people walk around thinking that God tortures people forever,” he adds. “When those people translate the Bible, you come up with some pretty interesting things.”
The book isn’t Kubilus’s first foray into untangling what he sees as misguided Christian ideology. In 2021, he launched Cross Over Q, a podcast intended to confront QAnon and provide healing from a Christian perspective. The podcast earned national attention when it was featured on 60 Minutes; Kubilus has called the politically motivated conspiracy group QAnon “the most violent and dangerous Christian heresy to come along this century.”
In Holy Hell, Kubilus argues for what he calls “universalism from a biblical and theological perspective.” That means that no one—regardless of whether or not they live as Christians—should expect to face perpetual torment in hell after they die, and Kubilus hopes his findings can alter the way people view God.
“This is not an academic exercise—the idea of eternal torment tortures people who are alive and breathing today,” he explains. “This is a conversation that needs to be brought into pulpits and fellowship halls and sanctuaries, as an exploration of just how big God’s love really is.”
A lack of eternal damnation doesn’t mean there’s no divine reckoning awaiting souls in the afterlife. “The scriptures make it clear that there is something worth avoiding if you can work it out on this side of the grave,” Kubilus says. “But, that punishment does not last forever—and the purpose of it is holiness and reconciliation.”
Lisa Ann Cockrel, the acquisitions editor at Eerdmans who worked on Holy Hell, says Kubilus is “both wry and kind, perhaps reflecting his status as both a millennial and a pastor. Derek is thoughtful and passionate about releasing Christians from the fear of hell. Derek’s assurance that you can be a faithful Christian and not believe in hell will give some people the breathing room they need to stay engaged with the church.”
Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a freelance writer and coauthor of The Yoga Effect: A Proven Program for Depression and Anxiety.
