Yes. We believe in both.
But we don’t understand them the way most of your Baptist relatives do, and that difference matters. It’s not that we’ve watered anything down or gone soft on sin. We just see what heaven and hell actually are from a different angle.
Not Places, But States
Here’s the thing. Heaven and hell aren’t locations God created, like a gated community for the good folks and a torture chamber for the bad ones. They’re two different experiences of the same reality: God’s presence.
Everyone will stand before God after death and at the final judgment. Everyone will experience His glory, His love, His uncreated light. The saints will experience that presence as paradise. The damned will experience it as torment.
St. Isaac the Syrian put it this way: “God does not punish someone in the future. Rather, each person makes himself receptive to the partaking of God. And the partaking of God is bliss, while the non-partaking of Him is punishment.”
Think of it like standing in front of the sun. If your eyes are healthy, light is beautiful. If they’re diseased, that same light burns. The sun hasn’t changed. You have.
God’s Love Doesn’t Change
This is where we part ways with a lot of fire-and-brimstone preaching you might’ve heard growing up in Southeast Texas. God doesn’t stop loving anyone. He doesn’t flip a switch at death and start hating the people who rejected Him. His love is constant, unchanging, poured out equally on everyone.
Hell happens when someone can’t or won’t receive that love. They’ve spent their whole life turning away from God, hardening their heart, choosing themselves over Him. At death, that becomes permanent. God’s love, which could have been their joy, becomes their torment because they’re facing it with a heart that’s closed, bitter, twisted in on itself.
It’s not that God sends anyone to hell. People choose it. They’ve been choosing it all along.
What Happens After Death
We believe in a particular judgment right after death and a general judgment when Christ returns. Between now and then, the dead aren’t just sleeping or waiting in some neutral holding area. They’re conscious, aware, experiencing a foretaste of what’s coming. That’s why we pray for the departed. They’re alive in Christ, and our prayers matter.
When Christ comes again, everyone gets resurrected. Body and soul reunited. Then comes the final judgment, and what was begun becomes permanent. The righteous enter fully into communion with God, what we call theosis or deification. They become by grace what Christ is by nature. That’s heaven.
The wicked experience eternal separation, not because God has moved away from them but because they’ve refused the transformation that would let them enjoy His presence. That’s hell.
Why This Matters for You Now
If you’re coming from a Protestant background, you might be used to thinking of salvation as a one-time decision. You walked an aisle, you prayed a prayer, you’re in. Heaven’s settled.
We don’t see it that way. Salvation is a process. You’re being saved, right now, as you cooperate with God’s grace. Every time you fast, every time you confess, every time you receive the Eucharist, every time you forgive someone who hurt you, you’re being healed. You’re becoming the kind of person who can stand in God’s presence and experience it as joy instead of fire.
That’s what the Christian life is about. Not fire insurance. Transformation.
And here’s the hope in all this: God’s mercy is bigger than we can imagine. We don’t know who’s in hell or even if anyone is. We know it’s possible. We know it’s real. We take Christ’s warnings seriously. But we also know that Christ descended into Hades and broke its gates. We know He desires all people to be saved. We trust His mercy more than we fear His justice.
So yes, we believe in heaven and hell. We just think they’re more serious, more real, and ultimately more about God’s love than most people realize. If you want to read more about this, Fr. Thomas Hopko’s “The Names of Jesus” has a good section on judgment that’s worth your time. Or just come to Vespers on Saturday evening and listen to the prayers for the departed. You’ll hear how the Church thinks about these things, week in and week out.
