Exordatius
All knowledge is based on an assumption.
Well said.
Then why do good at all? Your quoting implies that there is no purpose to life but to sin and be punished.
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Should and why do good people that are non believers go to hell?
- Thread starter Dr.J0sh
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Well said.
Then why do good at all? Your quoting implies that there is no purpose to life but to sin and be punished.
SinnerInTheHands
Troubled Christian
I'm a Calvinist, I don't believe in free will. God through us does good.
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Exordatius
All knowledge is based on an assumption.
OK, so by that logic, God is also evil, for he does evil works through us?
I'm not trying to offend you, I just want to understand.
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SinnerInTheHands
Troubled Christian
God is completely sovereign, and thus nothing comes to pass on earth and heaven without His willing permission.
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let us look at this from a worldly view. the bible says all have sinned and no matter how big or small the sin demands our death. so let us say we are on death row for murder. then as you are waiting for your execution date a person comes to you and offers you a deal where you can get a stay of execution and can go free as long as you observe certain rules and conditions. would accept or not?
this is basically what the bible offers everyone. everyone is going to hell except those that have gotten a pardon from Jesus Christ for the wrongs they have committed. Jesus erases our sins so we are not held accountable for them but without Jesus all our sins will be listed against us and the end result will be death not life.
God bless
this is basically what the bible offers everyone. everyone is going to hell except those that have gotten a pardon from Jesus Christ for the wrongs they have committed. Jesus erases our sins so we are not held accountable for them but without Jesus all our sins will be listed against us and the end result will be death not life.
God bless
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Exordatius
All knowledge is based on an assumption.
Which means that God is evil, as he commits evil acts through us. Unless we possess free will, we cannot sin, for all our acts are but an extension of God's will.
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ViaCrucis
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Hell isn't punishment for doing the wrong things. Neither is Hell punishment for believing the wrong things.
Hell is what happens when there is, ultimately, a fundamental rejection of God and the life of God.
I would actually posit that the Scriptures themselves don't have much to say on the topic of Hell; instead Jesus in the Gospels talks about the two sides of the underworld, called She'ol in Hebrew and translated as Hades in Greek. These two sides are called Paradise and Gehenna. Paradise or rather Paradeisos is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Gan-Eden or Garden of Eden; Gehenna is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew Ge-Hinnom or Valley of Hinnom. According to the standard Jewish understanding in the first century everyone went to the common place of the dead, called She'ol/Hades; the righteous dead went to Paradise also sometimes known as Abraham's Bosom or Side because it was the place of the righteous patriarchs of old; the wicked dead went to Gehenna. The purpose here was that the dead were in this place of waiting until Judgment, until resurrection. So, for example, there is a somewhat cryptic passage in 1 Peter ch. 3 that talks about Christ preaching to the captive spirits. This has been understood, historically, as part of Christ's descent into Hades--that is Christ's descent into the place of the dead, and thus part of what is known as the Harrowing of Hell.
Further, in the Western Churches we recite, regularly, the Apostles' Creed in which we confess, "He [Jesus] descended into Hell", the original Latin however reads "descendit ad inferos" or "descended into the depths"; that is, He descended into the place of the dead. Not "hell" in the popular imagination.
This also gets us to understanding how the word "hell" can be pretty confusing for modern English-speakers, as this word is used all over the place to translate and refer to all sorts of different things. For example in the archaic language of the King James Version of the Bible the word "hell" is used to translated the Greek words Gehenna and Hades, as well as the Hebrew word She'ol. And in a number of translations is used to translate the Greek word tartarus in 2 Peter 2:4. Note also that it is the traditional translation of the Latin inferos found in the Apostles' Creed. The idea of "hell" is also brought into biblical passages about judgment and, in the Apocalypse of St. John (the Book of Revelation) understood also to correspond to the lake of fire and brimstone.
That means "hell" gets used as a catch-all for all sorts of words and ideas.
Any meaningful discussion about "hell" first requires that we have some sort of working definition or concept of what we're talking about. Are we talking about the prison of the wicked? The underworld more generally? The state of penultimate or ultimate judgment generally? Etc.
Unsurprisingly the Christian Church, historically, really has never had a dogmatic position when it comes to Hell. For example you won't find it mentioned in any of the ancient Creeds, it was never part of the discussions of any of the original Seven Ecumenical Councils. And the views and opinions of the fathers of the Church and theologians throughout the last two thousand years are hardly unanimous or monolithic.
As such it is possible to find theologians whose view of hell is more-or-less the modern populist view, as a literal place of fire, wailing, and gnashing of teeth where the damned spend eternity in perpetual unending torment, with all the graphic imagery dreamed up by Dante in the Divine Comedy.
Then one will find other theologians who, certainly have more subtle and nuanced opinions and positions. For example St. Gregory of Nyssa regarded the fires of hell to be "purgatorial", describing them as doing to the soul what the refiner's fire does to gold, removing the impurities. In the writings of St. Isaac the Syrian he describes Hell as not a place at all, but instead the disposition of the wicked when confronting the love and presence of God; Isaac describes the flames of hell as the fires of God's love, which for the righteous are unimaginable joy and therefore Heaven but for the wicked are unbearable agony. In more modern times a rather fascinating take on the subject can be found in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, a book I would highly recommend.
So when I, near the beginning said that Hell wasn't about punishment for having done or believed the wrong things, but is about an ultimate rejection of God and the life of God, what do I mean?
I mean that the work of God is restore and renew all things, in Christ God is setting the world right, all creation is being set right. That involves our restoration and justification as sinners by the forgiveness of our sins and the imparting of new life by grace through faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit to the hope of resurrection in the future age; but it means the complete and total restitution and restoration of all things. All creation, the entire universe. So since God is restoring His creation and making us part of that new creation, both now by grace through faith and in the future by resurrection, what would it mean for there to be people who refuse to be part of God's new creation? What would it be for a people to, fundamentally, deny their humanity, to reject grace, and to cling to their own selfish and destructive way? I believe this is, fundamentally, what hell is. It is that ultimate rejection of God, and the life of God. It is, ultimately, to reject life and to choose death, a death that is in some sense more terrible than death (St. John in the Apocalypse calls it a second death, and describes it in the most graphic and horrible way he could imagine, as a lake of fire and brimstone). What would it mean to be, in some sense, dead forever? Not in the annihilationist sense of ceasing to exist, but something far worse, to be dead beyond death.
In The Great Divorce Lewis writes of there being a grumble, we grumble in ourselves, but what if that grumble is never nipped in the bud, but is allowed to grow and flourish. What happens, ultimately, when there's nothing left of us but the grumble? That's hell. Hell isn't where we go, hell begins in ourselves and if not healed becomes a terrifying and consuming inferno that burns us to ashes.
Further, here are some thoughts from the now retired Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright,
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No, that's not what I'm saying.
First, scripture clearly denies the concept of "virtue ethics." There are no acts that are inherently righteous--or unrighteous. Nobody becomes righteous through the collected performance of righteous acts because there are no inherently righteous acts.
To rephrase the old Platonic question: Is an act demanded by God because it is inherently righteous, or is it righteous because it is demanded by God? The answer to that question lies in whether one thinks there is a moral law above God that God Himself is subject to obey, or whether moral law is created by God and therefore subject to Him.
I believe the latter, which means that the righteousness or unrighteousness of an act is wholly dependent on what God says about it. The act has no inherent righteousness or unrighteousness, and I certainly can't make that declaration.
Now, that last part is where "virtue ethics" leads to hell. The person who thinks that an act is inherently righteous or unrighteous apart from what God says about it has merely made his own judgment of right and wrong--the very thing Adam and Eve tried to do. He has become his own moral law and denied that only God has that authority. He has defined for himself what "good person" means, and he demands that God accept his definition. He has defined for himself what a "righteous act" is, and he demands that God accept his "righteous acts."
So, then, the person who God might find acceptable is not the person who has a collection of certain acts that person has declared righteous, but the person who did or would have (and God's omniscience is fully knowledgeable of all "would haves") relied upon Him as the source of righteousness.
The "virtuous life" is the life that constantly seeks to do God's will, not the life that is a collection of certain acts. It is not impossible for a person who has never heard the name of Jesus to have sought to know God and His will--Acts 17 tells us that explicitly, Romans 1 tells that God judges all men by it, and Job provides an example.
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The OP assumes that Christianity says all non-Christians end up in hell. Things aren’t so simple. There’s a position called “inclusivism” which says that although we all need Christ, non-Christians may be saved though him. Recent popes have made statements implying that non-Christians and even atheists may be saved. Many of the Protestant traditions allow this as well. (In particular, Wesley was an inclusivist. Many current Protestant churches go back to his theology.) A recent Pew survey implies that American Christians are about equally divided.
Via Crucis has given a good summary of the range of Christian positions, suggesting one that allows for salvation of non-Christians.
However it’s worth pointing out why many Christians are concerned about the idea that any good person will be saved. There is in the NT a clear concept that God is gracious, that we are all like sheep that stray, and God comes after us even though we don’t deserve it. Thus most Christians worry about implying that people can be good enough on their own, without help from God. Someone has quoted Rom 3:9 ff “There is no one who is righteous…” I’m going to respond separately to that posting, because I’m not sure they’re understood it correctly. But certainly Paul does say that everyone has sinned and needs God’s grace.
So the Christian inclusivist position doesn’t quite say that people can be good enough on their own to be accepted by God. Rather, it says that God’s grace is present with many people who aren’t Christians. Someone can repent of their sins and accept the leading of God without understanding as much about God as we would like.
However even inclusivists understand that it’s possible for people to reject God. Looking around at the world, I’m afraid that there are people who don’t just sin, but who reject that basic approach that Jesus taught. They hate everyone who isn’t just like them, or live entirely for themselves. (Unfortunately, some of these people seem to be Christian.) We don’t know just who God will ultimately save, but I think there are people who have set themselves against God in such a way that they are already outside his Kingdom.
Via Crucis has given a good summary of the range of Christian positions, suggesting one that allows for salvation of non-Christians.
However it’s worth pointing out why many Christians are concerned about the idea that any good person will be saved. There is in the NT a clear concept that God is gracious, that we are all like sheep that stray, and God comes after us even though we don’t deserve it. Thus most Christians worry about implying that people can be good enough on their own, without help from God. Someone has quoted Rom 3:9 ff “There is no one who is righteous…” I’m going to respond separately to that posting, because I’m not sure they’re understood it correctly. But certainly Paul does say that everyone has sinned and needs God’s grace.
So the Christian inclusivist position doesn’t quite say that people can be good enough on their own to be accepted by God. Rather, it says that God’s grace is present with many people who aren’t Christians. Someone can repent of their sins and accept the leading of God without understanding as much about God as we would like.
However even inclusivists understand that it’s possible for people to reject God. Looking around at the world, I’m afraid that there are people who don’t just sin, but who reject that basic approach that Jesus taught. They hate everyone who isn’t just like them, or live entirely for themselves. (Unfortunately, some of these people seem to be Christian.) We don’t know just who God will ultimately save, but I think there are people who have set themselves against God in such a way that they are already outside his Kingdom.
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I generally don't respond to "why" questions about salvation. I'm led to respond now, briefly, with my "why" question:
Why would anyone reject the free gift of eternal life? It's free! No strings attached! God said it, you believe it (Romans 10:8-13), that settles it. Forever. Is there contentment in that? Peace? Life without fear? Life without questioning? Joy for self, family, friends, strangers?
John 14:6, John 3:16-17, John 5:24. Read those references. How hard is that?
This.
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Before looking at this passage, one should look at how “righteous” is used throughout Scripture. In both OT and NT, many people are called righteous. A righteous person is one who lives as God would have us live. They love God and neighbor, and repent when they sin. Righteousness is not an impossible moral perfection, but rather living as one of God’s people.
There are two exceptions to this, Rom 3 and the passages it quotes, Ps 14 and 53. What’s going on? In the OT context, this was clearly hyperbole. The author was despondent over the terrible situation of his people. It’s unlikely that he seriously meant to say that not one person in Israel ever was kind to another person.
In Rom 3, Paul quotes it to show that everyone has sinned and needs God’s grace. This quotation should not be used to reject the more widespread teaching of both OT and NT that there are people who are righteous, not in the sense of being perfect but in the usual sense of the word of being people who accept God’s standards, and repent when they sin.
Jews have the concept of "righteous Gentiles." I think there can be righteous non-Christians, as implied by Rom 2. These are people who, while not knowing the Gospel, have the Gospel written on their hearts.
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com7fy8
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And God knows each person's heart, if and who really has the gospel written in that person's heart.
Unforgiveness can be in the heart of people who have not heard the gospel. Unforgiveness is not the gospel. There are people who are very nice to a lot of people, but they have people whom they will not forgive plus they may have no hope of the unforgiven people ever being forgiven. So, such very nice people do not have the hope of the gospel written in their hearts. Jesus died with hope for any and all people to be forgiven > 1 John 2:2 > Jesus calls to "all" >
"'Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'" (Matthew 11:29)
There are back jungle cultures known for how they have a culture of unforgiveness . . . of keeping generations of vendettas going, keeping on killing each other. So, ones who have not heard the gospel "might" not be exactly righteous in God's love.
"But if we ourselves are fostering unforgiveness, it can be easy for us to see other unforgiving people as being innocent."
"'And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.'" (Mark 11:25)
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Whether one is good is measured by God's Law.
By God's Law no one is good, that's the case. In front of God's Law, we are all sinners without exception. To make it simple, no good man can be as innocent and as good as Adam. Adam was in a realm where humans are living with God. Earth is a place where Satan is the god, when put in such a realm no one can be as good as Adam. Satan himself will make sure that you are no better.
You need a covenant to be saved from the Judgment of Law. Each covenant contains God's grace of salvation through Christ.
Romans 2:16 says that the gentiles are not judged by the same set of law given to the Jews. Although the gentiles don't have the law (Mosaic Law), they will still be judged by law but another set of Law which is written in their hearts.
To be more precise, God needs only one set of Law to be used on the Judgment Day which is reserved for the unsaved. The saved will be saved though God's Grace displayed in the various covenants.
Basically, the gentiles will be saved by God's Grace through Christ if they are deemed qualified by their efforts in observing the Law written in their hearts. The Jews will be saved by God's Grace through Jesus Christ if they are deemed qualified by their efforts in observing the Law given by Moses. The rest will be deemed unqualified by the covenants granted and thus will be judged by God's universal set of Law which Adam broke in Eden. The above applies to all mankind along the history of humanity.
The best of the best, of course is to accept the New Covenant brought us by Jesus Himself.
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CS Lewis was an outspoken inclusivist, and Billy Graham has turned out to be one as well. But it must be emphasized that inclusivism is not universalism.
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