Do we "deserve" hell.....

[robert skynner]

One thing that understanding the Universalist writings has done (and is still doing) for me is that I see our Father in a new light - one of His immense love for mankind. It was kind of hard to see Him in that light as one understanding Western punitive and retributive eschatology. This gives me hope and more love for Him.

Hello Light of the East, how would you explain Matthew 25:46: “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” The word "eternal" is the same in both instances.

 

[robert skynner]

indeed, so those in hell are still loved by God, and that love is what causes the torment.

Do you have scripture for this please, and how does that work, would you please explain this, thank you.

 

[Light of the East]

Hello Light of the East, how would you explain Matthew 25:46: “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” The word "eternal" is the same in both instances.

It is explained by the fact that the word in Greek is "aionios," which does not mean everlasting, it means "age-long." This is a punishment which lasts for the the age which is yet to come. Beyond that, we do not have an exact description of what that means.

However, there is more. When Augustine saw this, he supposed that since the idea of eternal life is a life which is everlasting and without end, this must be a description of the punishment also. But this is not so in the understanding of how adjectives work. The meaning of an adjective is determined by the noun that it describes. So to say for instance "a tall man was standing next to a tall building" does not mean that both are the same height. The best the man could be would be around 7 feet tall. The building could be the Empire State Building.

Now don't jump on me about this. I'm just sharing what I have read about the issue.

I think a good question for you to ponder would be this: how is it that the Greek speaking Fathers of the Church in the first three centuries could come up with this idea of universal salvation faced with such verses in Scripture as you just posted? (Which is, BTW, a good and reasonable question as we look at it in the English translation). It wasn't until Latin speaking men started trying to translate from the Greek that a great number of problems with the translations began, including the understanding of hell and punishment as ever-lasting, which got its start with Augustine.

I find it interesting that Traditional Catholics will quote Augustine glowingly and yet not stop to consider that his writings are the foundation of the reprehensible doctrine of the Calvinists called Predestination of the Damned (i.e., that God of His own will predestines a great number to damnation) and yet they shred Protestant doctrine (and rightly so) as heresy. Doesn't make sense to me. When Augustine's writings reached Constantinople and the Greek Fathers of Orthodoxy read them, they were aghast as some of the things he wrote, but by then it was too late to stop him. His stuff had taken hold of most of the Empire.

They didn't have Facebook back then!

 

[Light of the East]

there's a paper by Vladimir Moss called "The River of Fire Revisited" which does a good job of balancing out Kalomiros.

I think I might have read that, but I'm going to go look it up again.

 

[Light of the East]

Do you have scripture for this please, and how does that work, would you please explain this, thank you.

1 John 4: 8

God is love. As I explain to Muslims with whom I dialogue, it is not that "God loves," but that God IS love. If a person loves, he can choose to stop loving any time he wishes. But the fact that God IS love means that He can do nothing else but love. That is His ontological state, the very thing that He is. He can no more stop loving His Creation than water can stop being wet.

As for the wicked, because their ontological state is one of desiring evil, because they have other things which are more important to them than God, they will find His presence to be tormenting. Have you ever been at a party and been introduced to someone who turns out to not only be a dreadful bore, but will not let you go? Terrible, isn't it? You keep praying for someone to come and rescue you from the presence of this chap whose half-crazed ramblings are driving you nuts. You excuse yourself to "go to the bathroom" and this guy finds you again and keeps going. It is madness and you want to be impolite and bolt for the door.

Now multiply this a million times a trillion times infinity and you get a small sense of it. The sinner wants his sin. The fornicator is looking for lust. The greedy for money. The self-important want glory. What no one wants as a sinner is to give all their very being to God, to give themselves fully to be immersed in Him. The sinner is the center of his little universe, and no one else should take that place. He, in fact, I would surmise, actually wants what the devil wants - to be the King of the Universe, the center of attention, to be honored and worshipped in all things. It is simply contrary to his deepest desires that anyone else but he should be the center of attention. Surely you have seen this in raw form in tiny children who are absolute brats?

There is no Scripture that specifically says this, but God does tell us to use our reason in coming to understand Him and His world as best we can in our limited understanding.

I hope that helps a little. The question for me is this: can the sinner be cured of this in the next life (our sin is a sickness in the East, not a legal question of guilt) or is it permanent? It is not that God ever stops being love, it is whether or not that love can be responded to in the next life by those who have rejected it in this life - which of course gets into all kinds of interesting questions of motive, the condition of one's heart, whether or not one really heard the Gospel or heard some Fundamentalist mashup of it that has nothing to do with the Gospel, and on and on and on......

Ultimately, as I think of it, it has to come down to our own ontology. Is there a point in our ontological being in which we so harden ourselves that no matter how much love we are given by God, it just burns more fiercely and torments us more? That is why sin is a dreadful thing we should run from.

 

[Light of the East]

there's a paper by Vladimir Moss called "The River of Fire Revisited" which does a good job of balancing out Kalomiros.

I am starting to see problems with this already and I'm not even three paragraphs in.

Question for you. Is the writer Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant?

EDIT: Never mind. I have figured out that he is Orthodox. No Catholic or Protestant is familiar with the language he uses in the paper.

Nonetheless, it appears that he has been significantly influenced by Western thinking. I might have a go at discussing some of his points.

 

[Light of the East]

“What Westerners call justice,” writes Kalomiros, “ought rather to be called resentment and vengeance of the worst kind”. This is especially evident, he says, in the western (Catholic) dogmas of original sin and redemption. Thus according to the western dogma of original sin, justice “is not at all just since it punishes and demands satisfaction from persons who were not at all responsible for the sin of their forefathers”.

One must think that the writer of this article is unfamiliar with the horrendous descriptions of hell envisioned during the Medieval Age and the description of St. Thomas Aquinas in which he states that the redeemed will see the torments of the damned and rejoice in them. I can can only frame such attitudes as that as resentment and vengeance of the worst kind rather than any sort of expression of the God who is love. Indeed, Western justice seems more about getting even with the offender than it does about rehabilitation, as evidenced by the prison system which we have developed here in the United States. I disagree, and I think that Kalomiros is spot on in his description.

Is this God?

One would think so, reading Western Medieval tracts on the subject.

 

[Light of the East]

I will not here attempt to examine whether Catholic theologians’ concept of justice is really “resentment and vengeance of the worst kind”, nor whether western atheism really originates in a reaction against it. I will only point out how strange it is that the Holy Fathers said so little about this, and that we had to wait until the appearance of Alexander Kalomiros (and his immediate forerunners, such as John Romanides) before it was revealed that a false conception of justice was the core heresy of the West.

Okay. Turn that around. I think it odd that the extreme descriptions of hell did not appear until 13 centuries after Christ and some 1000 years after the Eastern Fathers described God in terms of love and mercy. I find it odd that it took some 1400 years for someone to appear to describe God and the saints as enjoying the torments of the damned as did Aquinas. The author fails to consider this also.

Nor did they agree with Kalomiros in considering Augustine of Hippo to be the fount of the western heresies.

Ever hear of Calvinism and double predestination? How about the concepts of original sin and sexual transmission of sin?

 

[Light of the East]

Justice means nothing if it does not mean a balancing of good against evil, so that evil is destroyed through its being outweighed by the good.

Well, this is interesting. I've never heard that definition before. What I have heard from both Orthodox and Catholic writers is that justice is giving to one what is due to him/her. In the context of Creation, I have come to understand it as giving us what is our due in accordance with our human dignity as creatures made in the image of God.

Am I wrong on this?

 

[jckstraw72]

What I like about Moss is that he does not attempt to define Orthodoxy in terms of being NOT Western, as Kalomiros and Romanides tend to do. He just lets Orthodoxy be Orthodoxy. There's no doubt that the Eastern Fathers also talk about torments in Hell. The saints enjoying the torments of others is over the top, but the east is not tormentless.

 

[ArmyMatt]

Do you have scripture for this please, and how does that work, would you please explain this, thank you.

Scripture teaches that God is love and He does not change. John's Gospel states outright that the Judgment is the Light has come and men prefer darkness to light.

think of how the same sun with both harden clay and melt wax. the sun simply shines and just "is." it is the nature of what is in the sun's presence that determines what happens. in the OT, the same fire that killed the Chaldeans was bedewed for the Three Holy Youths.

 

[~Anastasia~]

there's a paper by Vladimir Moss called "The River of Fire Revisited" which does a good job of balancing out Kalomiros.

I'm going to have to look for that.

It's actually been a while since I fully read River of Fire, and I remember having some issues with it, but I was not very well-informed about Orthodoxy yet.

I'd like to participate, perhaps, in the current conversation, but I can't sort out what is River of Fire, what is Moss, and the context of each, so I think I'll keep thoughts to myself until I get a handle on at least that much ...

Thanks for mentioning the paper by Moss.

And thanks for mentioning that the East is not torment-less. I sometimes get the idea that some go that far, and I can't do that. Much as it might be a comfort to believe so.

 

[Light of the East]

What I like about Moss is that he does not attempt to define Orthodoxy in terms of being NOT Western, as Kalomiros and Romanides tend to do. He just lets Orthodoxy be Orthodoxy. There's no doubt that the Eastern Fathers also talk about torments in Hell. The saints enjoying the torments of others is over the top, but the east is not tormentless.

Certainly we have much evidence that the Early Fathers spoke of torments in hell, but there are two things that I would love to have answered.

1. Did they use the word "sheol" or the Greek equivalent for the grave, as opposed to hell as we have been taught it?

2. Did they speak of this as being eternal or of limited duration until justice is met?

 

[ArmyMatt]

1. Did they use the word "sheol" or the Greek equivalent for the grave, as opposed to hell as we have been taught it?

they used hell, and the torment is real. hell, though, only exists after the final Judgment. sheol is a foretaste of the torment to come. according to St Mark of Ephesus, that can save some. but for those that are on the left of the Father at the end, hell will be unending. our hope is that it will be none.

2. Did they speak of this as being eternal or of limited duration until justice is met?

eternal. there is no temporary hell. sheol might be temporary for some, but hell is unending.

 

[TaiKamiya720]

What would be the Orthodox position on such a statement? I was perusing a Catholic forum board and the statement was made that all mankind "deserves" hell. That sounds to me like one is approaching our being and salvation again from a legal position. In other words, rather than saying that hell is a consequence of our choices, it makes it sound like:

"You chose sin therefore you deserve to be punished."

Punishment as law rather than consequence.

Thoughts?

No, we, as Orthodox Christians, don't believe that everyone deserves to burn in hell. What makes Orthodox Christianity unique to other Christian sects is that the Orthodox Church is considered a hospital for souls. Whereas the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches are considered a courtroom for souls, since they believe that Christ died to satisfy God's wrath on humanity, for Catholics and many Protestants believe that all have broken God's law. On the other hand, in Orthodox Christianity, we believe that Christ died to bring humanity back into communion with God. But Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and most Protestants all agree that humans cannot get to Christ by our own good works and that the only way to get to Him is to have faith in Christ.

 

[Christina C]

they used hell, and the torment is real. hell, though, only exists after the final Judgment. sheol is a foretaste of the torment to come. according to St Mark of Ephesus, that can save some. but for those that are on the left of the Father at the end, hell will be unending. our hope is that it will be none.



eternal. there is no temporary hell. sheol might be temporary for some, but hell is unending.

So, there is some hope then for those like the rich man in the story of the rich man and Lazarus is St Luke's gospel.
The Rich Man and Lazarus | St. Mary Orthodox Church in Central Square, Cambridge

 

[ArmyMatt]

So, there is some hope then for those like the rich man in the story of the rich man and Lazarus is St Luke's gospel.

there is always hope. whether or not the rich man accepts the hope God offers is on him. if he ends up lost in the end, it is because he prefers himself to God and neighbor, and God's providence will always honor that choice.

 

[robert skynner]

there is always hope. whether or not the rich man accepts the hope God offers is on him. if he ends up lost in the end, it is because he prefers himself to God and neighbor, and God's providence will always honor that choice.

I would disagree Matt! After death there is no chance to change our eternal state, you can repent and change your future during life, but not after death.

 

[Light of the East]

I would disagree Matt! After death there is no chance to change our eternal state, you can repent and change your future during life, but not after death.

May I have your proof of this, please?

 

[ArmyMatt]

After death there is no chance to change our eternal state, you can repent and change your future during life, but not after death.

well, according to St Mark of Ephesus, you are wrong. personally, I agree with his take on Orthodoxy that there is always hope, and that one is never truly dead until after the Final Judgment, AND the experiences of the saints (such as St Xenia of St Petersburg) show otherwise.