The doctrine of hell has always been part of Christian theology. Unfortunately, hell has had a bit of a checkered past. From the Apocalypse of Peter’s gruesome depictions of women hanging over boiling mire, to skin curling images of hell in Dante’s Inferno, to Jonathan Edwards’s blistering sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, to twentieth-century Bible-belt preachers barking with anger about the wrath to come, hell has been used—and some would say abused—to scare people into obedience or increase their tithe.