What Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians believe about heaven and hell

The United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and the Episcopal Church all confess in the Nicene Creed that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” and they look for “the life of the world to come.” On hell, their documents speak in two voices. Some older confessions teach that the wicked will be punished forever, while recent statements dwell on the breadth of God’s grace and on humility about anyone else’s salvation.

People usually search this question for a reason. Some were raised on sermons about hell and still feel the fear. Others are grieving a parent or a friend who never believed. Underneath both is the question whether God can be trusted with the people you love.

What do Methodists believe about heaven and hell?

The United Methodist Church, the largest Methodist church in the United States, teaches that every person stands under the judgment of Jesus Christ and that God offers salvation to all. Its Confession of Faith, one of the doctrinal standards in the Book of Discipline, speaks of the resurrection of the dead, the righteous to eternal life and the wicked to “endless condemnation” (Article XII).

Methodists also hold, with John Wesley, that God’s grace reaches every person before they know it and that Christ died for all. In 2019 Ask The UMC, a service of the church’s communications agency, explained that the church does not teach universal salvation, the belief that everyone will in the end be saved. It added, “We do not believe that God predestines some to salvation and others to condemnation.”

What do Lutherans believe about heaven and hell?

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest Lutheran church in the United States, teaches that God saves people by grace alone, received through faith in Christ, and it counts the Augsburg Confession of 1530 among its confessional writings. Article XVII of that confession teaches that Christ will raise the dead, give the godly “eternal life and everlasting joys,” and condemn the ungodly “to be tormented without end.”

The ELCA’s recent teaching puts its weight on God’s freedom to be gracious. A Declaration of Inter-Religious Commitment, adopted by the Churchwide Assembly in 2019, says that “Faith is a response to the love of God, not a prerequisite for that love,” and that “we cannot know the limits of God’s grace and love.” It adds that the full story of a neighbor’s relationship with God “is beyond our knowledge, and even our calling.”

What do Presbyterians believe about heaven and hell?

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the largest Presbyterian church in the United States, keeps twelve creeds, confessions, and catechisms in its Book of Confessions. Among them, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) teaches that the wicked “shall be cast into eternal torments” (6.181). The church’s newest confession, A Brief Statement of Faith (1991), begins, “In life and in death we belong to God,” and ends by rejoicing that nothing in life or in death can separate us from God’s love in Christ.

In 2002 the 214th General Assembly approved a statement called “Hope in the Lord Jesus Christ” by a vote of 497 to 11. It confesses that “Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord.” It then says that Presbyterians “neither restrict the grace of God to those who profess explicit faith in Christ nor assume that all people are saved regardless of faith,” because “Grace, love, and communion belong to God, and are not ours to determine.”

What do Episcopalians believe about heaven and hell?

The Episcopal Church, the member of the worldwide Anglican Communion in the United States, sums up its teaching in the Catechism of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer: “By heaven, we mean eternal life in our enjoyment of God; by hell, we mean eternal death in our rejection of God.” The catechism describes hell as the condition of a person who refuses God, and it says nothing about fire or torment.

The same catechism explains why Episcopalians pray for the dead: they still hold the dead in their love, and they trust that those who serve God will keep growing in God’s love until they see God as God is.

What do the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, and American Baptists believe?

The United Church of Christ says it has “no rigid formulation of doctrine or attachment to creeds.” Its Statement of Faith, adopted by the General Synod in 1959, confesses that God “judges men and nations by his righteous will declared through prophets and apostles,” and it ends with the promise of “eternal life in his kingdom which has no end.”

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) does not use creeds as tests of faith and encourages its members to study Scripture for themselves. American Baptist Churches USA emphasizes “the Lordship and atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ” and invites people to be reconciled to God “through faith in Jesus Christ.” None of the three binds its members to a creed, so none of them has an official doctrine of hell.

What do Scripture and the tradition say?

Scripture describes heaven as God’s presence among people. Jesus told his frightened disciples, “In my Father’s house are many homes” (John 14:2), and the last vision of the Bible is of God living with humanity:

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more. The first things have passed away.

Revelation 21:4

The Bible’s language of judgment answers the cry of people who have suffered evil: “How long, Master, the holy and true, until you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10). Jesus aims his sharpest warnings at those who harm “little ones” (Matthew 18:6) and at those who ignore the hungry and the stranger (Matthew 25:45). Many mainline theologians read Gehenna, fire, and outer darkness as the Bible’s picture-language for that judgment on wrongdoing, which tells victims that what was done to them matters to God. For more on the words behind “hell,” see Hell and the mercy of God.

Christians who believe that hell is endless point to Jesus’s words about “eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46), and they stand with Augustine and Calvin and with many evangelical churches today. They hold this view out of reverence for Scripture.

Other Christians, from the early church to the present, have hoped that God’s love will have the last word. Scripture says that God “desires all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4) and “has bound all to disobedience, that he might have mercy on all” (Romans 11:32). Paul writes:

When all things have been subjected to him, then the Son will also himself be subjected to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all.

1 Corinthians 15:28

Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century bishop honored as a saint in the Orthodox Church, reasoned that “when it shall be that every will rests in God, evil will be reduced to complete annihilation.” Isaac the Syrian taught that those in Gehenna are scourged by love, and Julian of Norwich heard Christ promise that all shall be well. In the twentieth century the Reformed theologian Karl Barth refused to rule out the salvation of all. The First Letter of John says that “God is love” (1 John 4:16), and a God who is love does not torment anyone forever. Many mainline Christians trust that the judgment of God is the judgment of a love that heals. On people of other faiths, see Do non-Christians go to hell?

A word of hope

If you are afraid for yourself or for someone you love, you can bring that fear to God in prayer, as Christians have always prayed for the living and the dead. These churches differ in their wording, yet each confesses that the judge of all is Christ, who wept at a friend’s grave and prayed for those who crucified him.

For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from God’s love which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38–39