# Bishop Barron - on Whether Hell is Crowded or Empty

An episode of [Daily Sermons With Bishop Robert Barron](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/6783446284), 8 Aug 2026, 9:25.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/73269750/bishop_barron_on_whether_hell_is_crowded_or_empty.mp3



## Transcript

[0:11] Speaker 1: Rob Bell is a evangelist and pastor, a leader in
[0:13] Speaker 1: this emerging church movement. He just wrote a book called
[0:17] Speaker 1: Love Wins, and it's a book about eternal life, and
[0:21] Speaker 1: he takes out a more or less universalist position, meaning
[0:25] Speaker 1: everyone gets saved, so in the end, everyone gets to Heaven.
[0:29] Speaker 1: And it's kicked up a controversy among Christians because a
[0:33] Speaker 1: lot of his coreligionists, a lot of his fellow evangelicals,
[0:36] Speaker 1: are saying this is just not a biblical teaching. The
[0:39] Speaker 1: Bible is very clear on the existence of Hell, the
[0:41] Speaker 1: danger of it, etc. And so this controversy made the
[0:45] Speaker 1: CNN website, which I thought was interesting, proving that Hell
[0:48] Speaker 1: excused upon is still a burning question in the culture.
[0:54] Speaker 1: It's not a new question. This is a very old
[0:57] Speaker 1: issue within Christian theology. Might surprise and dismay some people.
[1:02] Speaker 1: The biblical figure who talks most about Hell is Jesus
[1:07] Speaker 1: of Nazareth. So look in the New Testament you'll find
[1:10] Speaker 1: lots of references to Hell. On the lips of Jesus.
[1:13] Speaker 1: He warns again and again of Gehenna and it's never
[1:17] Speaker 1: ending fire. Think of the parable of Lazarus and divies.
[1:20] Speaker 1: You know where the rich Man is separated by this
[1:24] Speaker 1: infinite gulf, you know, from the bosom of Abraham, think
[1:28] Speaker 1: of Matthew twenty five. That's a sort of startling parable
[1:32] Speaker 1: where you know, God will separate the goats from the shape,
[1:35] Speaker 1: and it's pretty clear that some go off to an
[1:37] Speaker 1: eternal punishment. So we didn't just drag this language of
[1:41] Speaker 1: hell out of nowhere. I mean, it's coming up from
[1:44] Speaker 1: Jesus himself. And then as the tradition unfolds, we see
[1:48] Speaker 1: this question debated back and forth and lots of different positions.
[1:52] Speaker 1: Taken third century, one of the greatest theologians of the
[1:56] Speaker 1: whole tradition, Origin of Alexandria, steaks out a position not
[2:00] Speaker 1: all that dissimilar from rob Bell's. Origin claimed that in
[2:06] Speaker 1: the end, perhaps after a long period of trial and testing,
[2:11] Speaker 1: but in the end, everybody will be saved, including the
[2:14] Speaker 1: fallen angels, including Satan himself. It's a position that's called
[2:18] Speaker 1: a pacatastasis in the Greek, meaning restoration. All things will
[2:22] Speaker 1: be restored at the end of time. Well, the Church
[2:26] Speaker 1: condemned apocatastasis, and it said it wasn't taking hell seriously enough. Now,
[2:32] Speaker 1: in reaction to Origin, you might say, someone like Augustin
[2:36] Speaker 1: of Hippo comes along. The great fifth century bishop and
[2:39] Speaker 1: theologian Augustine had a much more pessimistic approach to this question.
[2:44] Speaker 1: He said that original sin resulted in what he called
[2:47] Speaker 1: the masa dam nada. It means the damned mass So
[2:52] Speaker 1: the whole human race is basically deserving of hell. But God,
[2:57] Speaker 1: in his infinite, inscrutable mercy picks a handful of souls
[3:01] Speaker 1: out of the massa dam nada and saves them. So
[3:04] Speaker 1: it's pretty dark. You know, most people will be damned,
[3:07] Speaker 1: Augustine clearly thinks. Now, though it's hard for me to
[3:11] Speaker 1: admit this, my great hero Thomas Aquinas is largely Augustinian
[3:15] Speaker 1: in his view on hell. He also thinks most people
[3:18] Speaker 1: will be damned. In fact, a quainsmen so far as
[3:21] Speaker 1: to say that part of the joy of heaven is
[3:25] Speaker 1: to see the suffering of the damned, because you're noticing
[3:28] Speaker 1: how just God is. Well, okay, now, you know I
[3:32] Speaker 1: love Thomas Aquinas, but these are pretty dark views on
[3:37] Speaker 1: this question. Now, come up to the twentieth century. The
[3:40] Speaker 1: great Protestant theologian Carl Bart, one of the most influential
[3:45] Speaker 1: of the modern theologians. He stakes out a position not
[3:48] Speaker 1: all that's dissimilar from Origins or rob Bells. It's pretty
[3:52] Speaker 1: much a universalist position that in the Cross of Jesus,
[3:55] Speaker 1: all people are saved, and the church's job is to
[3:58] Speaker 1: announce this good news to the now. One of his colleagues,
[4:03] Speaker 1: a fellow Swiss and a friend of his, was Hans
[4:06] Speaker 1: Or von Baltasar, the Catholic theologian. Baltar took in a
[4:10] Speaker 1: good deal of the Bartian spirit, I think reacted against
[4:15] Speaker 1: this Augustinian and thimistic, rather dark view on hell. Baltar
[4:20] Speaker 1: said this, we may reasonably hope that all people will
[4:25] Speaker 1: be saved. You see what he's doing is he's pulling
[4:28] Speaker 1: back from bart and origin and from a complete Apocatasa's
[4:33] Speaker 1: position that we know all people will be saved. No, no,
[4:37] Speaker 1: we don't know that. But we may reasonably hope that
[4:41] Speaker 1: all people will be saved. Why because of the dramatic
[4:45] Speaker 1: thing that God did through the life, death, and resurrection
[4:49] Speaker 1: of Jesus, God sending his son all the way to
[4:53] Speaker 1: the limits of god forsakenness, so as to bring back
[4:56] Speaker 1: into the divine life all those who had wandered far
[4:59] Speaker 1: from it. That's the way he reads the redemption. That's
[5:02] Speaker 1: pretty powerful. That God the Son went all the way
[5:06] Speaker 1: to the limits, even into sin and even into death,
[5:09] Speaker 1: so as to bring the whole world back. Because of that,
[5:11] Speaker 1: we may reasonably hope that all people will be saved.
[5:16] Speaker 1: Do we know it? Know why? Because human freedom can
[5:20] Speaker 1: still resist even that acrobatic act of love. Okay, my
[5:27] Speaker 1: own view, having surveyed this grand tradition, my own view
[5:31] Speaker 1: is that Baltasar has it pretty much right. I think
[5:35] Speaker 1: that God desires all people to be saved. God has
[5:40] Speaker 1: gone to the limits of god forsakenness to affect this salvation.
[5:47] Speaker 1: Can it be resisted? Yes, And that's why we have
[5:51] Speaker 1: to hold to the existence of hell at least as
[5:54] Speaker 1: a possibility. See Hell or Gehannah the Fire All that
[5:59] Speaker 1: those are space and visual metaphors for the state of
[6:04] Speaker 1: deep loneliness that comes from having rejected the divine love.
[6:10] Speaker 1: That's why I put it. Hell is not so much
[6:12] Speaker 1: a place we use spatial metaphors for it. It's a
[6:15] Speaker 1: conditions a state of being. It's having refused in freedom
[6:19] Speaker 1: of the divine love, and it results in this terrible loneliness.
[6:27] Speaker 1: We have to accept the possibility of hell. We have
[6:29] Speaker 1: to accept the existence of it as a possibility because
[6:32] Speaker 1: of human freedom. But are any human beings in Hell?
[6:38] Speaker 1: We don't know. We don't know. The Church has never
[6:40] Speaker 1: declared on that subject. And we may pray that all
[6:46] Speaker 1: be saved, and may even reasonably hope that all people
[6:49] Speaker 1: will be saved. So it's a universalism if you want,
[6:53] Speaker 1: but not of the kind of origin bart or rob
[6:56] Speaker 1: Bell variety where I know everyone's going to be saved,
[7:00] Speaker 1: a theologically grounded, reasonable hope that all will be saved.
[7:06] Speaker 1: You know. In light of that, let me say a
[7:08] Speaker 1: word about C. S. Lewis, because he had one of
[7:11] Speaker 1: the best images I think for hell. He said, the
[7:14] Speaker 1: door to Hell is always locked from the inside, not
[7:19] Speaker 1: from the outside. It's not so much that God sends
[7:23] Speaker 1: someone to Hell and then locks the door. Rather we
[7:27] Speaker 1: send ourselves there. If anyone's in Hell, he or she
[7:32] Speaker 1: has sent himself or sent herself there and now has
[7:36] Speaker 1: locked the door. I've used the image before of heaven's
[7:39] Speaker 1: like this great party. It's a share of the divine life.
[7:43] Speaker 1: Everyone's invited. Hell would be the state of that person
[7:48] Speaker 1: who has slunk into the corner and refused to join
[7:53] Speaker 1: the party. Has locked himself into this dark and sad
[7:58] Speaker 1: and lonely place, not somewhat sent there by an avenging God,
[8:03] Speaker 1: but a self imposed exile. That's hell as a possibility,
[8:10] Speaker 1: just a last thought. Hell, he might say, is a
[8:14] Speaker 1: corollary of two more fundamental teachings, namely that God is
[8:18] Speaker 1: love and that we are free. You can't hold to
[8:22] Speaker 1: those two, and I think everyone wants to hold of
[8:24] Speaker 1: those two things, that God is love and we're free.
[8:27] Speaker 1: If those are both true, you have to accept hell
[8:29] Speaker 1: as a possibility because the divine love can be refused
[8:34] Speaker 1: in our in freedom. When it's refused, it causes pain.
[8:38] Speaker 1: You know. It's as simple as that. That's why Lewis
[8:41] Speaker 1: again says, the love of God lights up the fires
[8:45] Speaker 1: of hell. See what he means is the love of
[8:48] Speaker 1: God resisted hurts. It pains us, but not an arbitrary imposition.
[8:56] Speaker 1: It's a self imposed exile. I think that's the best
[9:01] Speaker 1: way from the Catholic perspective to grasp this complex issue
[9:06] Speaker 1: of hell and salvation. Bottom line, we may reasonably hope
[9:11] Speaker 1: that all people will be saved

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