Recently I read a book titled All you want to know about Hell, it explained 3 famous historic perspectives on the nature, duration and purpose of hellfire.
The three viewpoints were that the fires of hell torment (traditional hell,) the fires consume (annihilationism,) and lastly that the fires refine (universalism.)
Long story short (although the author argued well in favour of each and every perspective) I ended up changing my mind on the topic of hell.
Growing up in a non Christian household I’ve made spiritual changes before, but those changes were always in the general direction of a widely agreed upon Christian orthodoxy.
Changing my mind in the past and accepting the deity of Christ, salvation by grace or the inerrancy of the Bible were big decisions to me personally, but in the grand scheme of things those choices are still rubber stamped by billions of people worldwide (unlike holding to what feels like a novel perspective on hell.)
So, like the short story above, my question is have you ever changed your mind on the subject of faith, morals and worldview to go in an unexpected new direction?
Faith: I also grew up in a non-Christian household and it was the Bible that converted me, which I was only reading because I thought I could find proof of reincarnation in it, and wanted to "prove" to Christians "from their own book" that reincarnation was a fact and reality (because until I was converted to Christ and to Christianity through the Bible, I believed in reincarnation).
Morals and world-view: I accept the Bible's teaching on morals and world-view. The god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, and he is not bound.
Hell: From the beginning, the Bible has always changed my mind about anything I was under a false impression about. So once I discovered that there is no word in the original Greek New Testament which translates as "hell", I changed my mind about it. The words which are always translated into the English Bibles as "hell" are Geena, hades and Tartarus - and using one word for all three (making no distinction), creates a simplified castle of mud on the sea's side of the high tide mark, out of a subject the Bible gives vague and scant information about.
In addition to the above words we have the reference in the Revelation to the lake of fire - but hades and Tartarus mean completely different things: All the mentions of sheol in the Hebrew Old Testament are translated as hades in the Greek Sepuaginta - and sheol/hades always seems to refer to the abode of the souls of those who had died., death and hades being two sides of the same coin - both will be thrown into the lake of fire after they have delivered up all the souls in them.
So when someone preaches from the pulpit or reads "hell" in support of what he is preaching, I'm aware that if the word in the verse/s he's preaching on, is hades (not "hell"), then it has nothing to with "hell". It really seems to me that if (if) there is a place of
eternal torment or destruction or whatever, no one has gone there yet.
So I still believe that the Bible is my authority - but I do not necessarily accept "historical", "traditional" or "official" interpretations of it.
