Skeptical about hell

[xpower]

I don't believe in eternal torment and I'm skeptical about the traditional depiction of hell. I think I'm starting to view Hell that's more like a type of "purgatory" or a place of purification and Penance where humans are purified of their sins and eventually get out and come to the Lord (eventually). Can you be a Christian and believe this?

 

[Merlin]

It is hard to believe in Jesus yet reject his teachings.
The idea of hell comes from the teachings of Jesus.

 

[xpower]

I did not say hell does not exist, I just don't think it is some fiery torture pit where people are burned forever, but instead I think it's a place of purification and repentance.

 

[LionL]

Jesus belief in Hell is one of the reasons I don't agree with everything He says - but that makes me non-Christian

 

[skalle]

I guess I'm a heretic as well... I don't believe hell exists, and I believe in universal salvation. Hell is being in the presence of God Whom you don't love. However, I believe everyone in His presence will eventually come to see Him for Who He is, and there will be no suffering. That doesn't jive with most of Christianity, but that's okay with me.

Also, first post! Yay me!

 

[SnowyMacie]

I did not say hell does not exist, I just don't think it is some fiery torture pit where people are burned forever, but instead I think it's a place of purification and repentance.

Have you considered the Eastern Orthodox view? We believe that Hell, basically, will be those who are in the presence of God while not in communion with God and willfully reject his love.

 

[SnowyMacie]

I guess I'm a heretic as well... I don't believe hell exists, and I believe in universal salvation. Hell is being in the presence of God Whom you don't love. However, I believe everyone in His presence will eventually come to see Him for Who He is, and there will be no suffering. That doesn't jive with most of Christianity, but that's okay with me.

Also, first post! Yay me!

Personally, I hope for universal reconciliation.

 

[Hieronymus]

I don't believe in eternal torment and I'm skeptical about the traditional depiction of hell. I think I'm starting to view Hell that's more like a type of "purgatory" or a place of purification and Penance where humans are purified of their sins and eventually get out and come to the Lord (eventually). Can you be a Christian and believe this?

Yes.
You're correct.
John 3:16 should say enough, but the traditional teachings and the peer pressure behind it have us believe in an eternal life in torment.
This is why many Christians had to harden their hearts towards non-believers, so that they can justify the idea if merciless torture by God.
It's also why many people hate and deny God.
It's deeply sad.

 

[Hieronymus]

Personally, I hope for universal reconciliation.

So do i, but eternal life is conditional. John 3:16

 

[SnowyMacie]

So do i, but eternal life is conditional. John 3:16

That's generally why I say hope for and not believe in.

 

[Eryk]

Different things to think about here.

The idea that what we are is determined by the summing-up of our choices when our life is over. The is the definitive truth of what we are, so it's true forever. Christianity takes our lives and our choices and the weight of our responsibility very seriously. This is not a cruel idea. It's just.

But that's a karmic take on justice. It's different when we're thinking about a personal God pouring out his wrath, raging against sinners, for an infinite duration of time. I am trying to deal stoically with life as I find it, and I am free when I let the past go, so I don't think of judgement and vengeance as being holy. I'm prone to these feelings as a human, but I'm not proud of them. Maybe it's a different thing when we're talking about God. I just don't know.

 

[Hieronymus]

I'd like to share 2 videos (of pod-casts) on the subject:

Case for annihilism:

Debunking the case against annihilism:

(the YT links seem to 'auto-embed', sorry..)

Channel "Rethinking hell", they have a website too and links are in the descriptions.

("Their worm will not die, their flame will not die" is what devours the dead).

 

[Hieronymus]

Different things to think about here.

The idea that what we are is determined by the summing-up of our choices when our life is over. The is the definitive truth of what we are, so it's true forever. Christianity takes our lives and our choices and the weight of our responsibility very seriously. This is not a cruel idea. It's just.

But that's a karmic take on justice. It's different when we're thinking about a personal God pouring out his wrath, raging against sinners, for an infinite duration of time. I am trying to deal stoically with life as I find it, and I am free when I let the past go, so I don't think of judgement and vengeance as being holy. I'm prone to these feelings as a human, but I'm not proud of them. Maybe it's a different thing when we're talking about God. I just don't know.

The 2nd death is infinite, not the torment in the consuming fire.

 

[Abella30]

I consider myself a Christian and I believe something similar. I pretty much hope/assume that universal reconciliation will happen at some point and I don't worry about it further. The EO theory of hell also makes sense to me but I still assume all will come to love God at some point.

 

[graceandpeace]

I think it is definetly within the bounds of Christianity to hope for universal salvation, but I don't think we can profess with certainty that this will occur.

I also don't believe in "eternal conscious torment." There is something a priest once said in a class I was in that has been something to consider for me. He said, the only person who won't be forgiven is the person who can't accept forgiveness. So will all persons accept forgiveness? I don't know.

 

[hedrick]

There’s an active thread in Unorthodox Theology on annihilation if you’re interested in specifics. CF considers anything other than eternal torment to be unorthodox.

My personal view is that it’s unclear from Scripture exactly how the afterlife works. It is clear that we will be held accountable. Jesus has plenty of parables that include punishment. But the language is certainly full of symbols.

The problem is that we have language using destruction, punishment, and death. All of those are used with “eternal.” But when you start looking at the details of the passages and the OT background, you see that the prophets at times used “eternal” for things that had eternal implications, but where the actions themselves didn’t last forever. I.e. eternal punishment could be punishment in the afterlife, but that the punishment itself doesn’t necessarily last forever. Based on this, it’s now a minority view even among evangelicals that the damned are destroyed. I think the exegesis behind that view is pretty solid. The view that everyone is eventually reconciled is hard to attribute to the Revelation, but could conceivably be seen in Paul. I’m not so sure about Jesus, but I haven’t looked at this as carefully as annihilation.

The situation is different for liberal Christians than conservative ones, because we accept that different NT writers may have different views. If it’s reasonable to think the Jesus and Paul thought something, the fact that the Revelation disagrees probably isn’t a fatal objection for us. It would be for conservative Protestants.

There’s a reasonable consensus among traditional Christians (traditional in sense of our Traditional Theology forum, not conservative evangelicals) that it is orthodox to hope that no one ends up in hell, but not to teach that hell doesn’t exist or is definitely empty.

 

[skalle]

I think the only reasonable view to take on the matter is that of the Eastern Orthodox. Everything else just wreaks of a vengeful God Who isn't love.

 

[JackRT]

As human beings we are bounded in both time and place. That is to say, we are finite. On the other hand we think of God as completely unbounded. God exists outside of both time and space. God is present everywhere and at all times. That is to say, God is infinite. This is the orthodox theistic understanding of God. To compare the finite to the infinite is beyond our human comprehension. Even to compare a grain of sand to Mount Everest falls far, far, far short. All of this brings up a number of questions in my mind.

The first question being “How is it even possible for a finite creature to offend an infinite God?” Could a grain of sand offend Mount Everest?

The second question being “If it were possible for the finite to offend the infinite, would the infinite punishment of a finite creature be just?” I will attempt to craft an analogy. You are in a park enjoying a picnic lunch when you glance down and notice an ant crawling across your sandwich. You are offended. How do you react? You have a number of options. You could ignore the ant. You could brush the ant away. You could move to a different location. You could kill the ant. You could kill the entire ant colony. You could capture the ant and confine it and proceed to torture it for several weeks until it finally dies. That last option is quite inadequate as a comparison to hell because hell is infinite in duration whereas the ant can only be tortured for a finite length of time.


To me the concept of hell flies in the face of any concept of a just and compassionate God. Hell would seem to be an entirely human invention based on a vindictive concept of retributatory justice. Perhaps we have the wrong idea of hell. Perhaps we have the wrong idea of justice. Perhaps we have the wrong idea of God. I completely reject the concept of hell as it is traditionally understood in most Christian churches.

 

[hedrick]

duplicate post

 

[hedrick]

I’ve been part of a very long argument in Controversial Theology about this. It’s gotten too ugly to be useful. But as a result I’ve looked at a number of the key passages. For me as a liberal Christian, Jesus’ own teachings are the standard. But even Jesus seems to spoken in different ways:

* In several passages he talks about judgement in terms of fire. Several of the more explicit passages seem to imply a fire that destroys.
* the term Gehenna is used (translated hell in NRSV); it is sometimes associated with fire
* another image is the outer darkness, with weeping and gnashing of teeth
* the rich man in Luke 16:19 is being tormented in Hades (note that Hades is not the same thing as Gehenna, and may well be temporary)
* “eternal punishment” is used once, Mat 25:46, and “eternal fire” twice, Mat 18:8 25:41

It is challenging to produce a single description from all of these. Liberal exegesis tends to take typical usage over unusual or extreme usage. (This is the opposite of conservative exegesis, which tends to take the most extreme usage as controlling.) So I’m going to assume that the overall picture is of exclusion and destruction. I think the references to eternal fire can easily be understood using OT example, in which the fire is eternal, but things thrown into it aren’t. I think Luke 16:19 might well have used current Jewish imagery to make a point.

But if we take Jesus’ typical descriptions, I think we have to assume that he intended both being thrown into outer darkness and being burned up by chaff as the same thing. I’d say Jesus didn’t intend to teach a specific literal future for those who are excluded. Could exclusion and destruction reasonably both be reasonable images for the same thing? Sure. I doubt that someone permanently excluded from contact with the source of life is going to have much existence left. Whether they are directly destroyed, as suggested by the fire image, or just fade into nothing, as suggested by the outer darkness, doesn’t seem much of a difference.

Here's N T Wright's speculation, which I think is consistent with both, though perhaps more so with outer darkness.

“I don’t find any of these three traditional options completely satisfactory, but I think a somewhat different form of conditionalism may be the best we can do. We should of course always stress that the question of who shall eventually be saved is up to God and God alone, and that we can never say of anyone for certain, including Hitler and bin Laden, that they have gone so far down the road of wickedness that they are beyond redemption. I take it, however, that there are many who do continue down that road to the bitter end. How can we think wisely and biblically about their fate?”

“The central fact about humans in the Bible is that they bear the image of God (Genesis 1.26-8, etc.). … But they can only be maintained in his image, as genuine humans, by worshipping him; they depend on him for their life and character. The rest of creation, by contrast, is subject to decay and death. If we worship it, or some part of it, instead of the life-giving God, we are invoking death upon ourselves instead of life.

“This opens up a possibility: that a human being who continually and with settled intent worships that which is not God can ultimately cease completely to bear God’s image. Such a creature would become, in other words, ex-human: a creature that once bore the image of God but does so no longer, and can never do so again. Humans do, I believe, possess the freedom (some would say even the ‘right’, but I think that is difficult language at this point) to choose to worship creation rather than the creator. The God who made them and loves them grants them that freedom, even though they may misuse it. The New Testament indicates strongly that there are some, perhaps many, who go that route.”

Wright considers this a type of conditionalism. However I first ran into this by a book by a Catholic author, advocating a traditional view of hell. So the idea of eternal punishment and annihilation may in fact have some room for overlap. I would call what Wright describes destruction or second death.