And yet they don’t use “hell” to refer to a particular geographic location. Gehenna denotes that location and connotes the underworld or resting place after death or whatever.
There is a huge nuance of “after death experience/non-experience” in the word “Gehenna” that most people do not mean when they use the word “hell.”
So to say that “hell is simply the English translation for Gehenna” is simplistic to the point of drastic distortion. Because when most people say “hell” they mean “the lake of fire” or eternal punishment–not “whatever Gehenna means.”
Hell is also used as a translation for Sheol, Tartarus, Hades, etc.
I definitely would say hell, Gehenna, and the lake of fire are all the same. It’s not a place of eternal torment ( that does not exist ) and it’s not merely the place of the dead. It’s the all consuming fire of god that destroys both the body and soul and that’s what it represents. The place the resurrected wicked goes to be destroyed. The second death.
As has been observed elsewhere on this thread, Jesus also described a rather obvious parallel between those who would enter “eternal life” and those who would go into “eternal punishment”, which was the same as entering the “eternal fire” prepared for the devil and his angels. Not to mention the parable of the man in torment with a wide chasm that kept him from exiting, and other words about “their fire is not quenched”, “unquenchable fire”, “where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth,” etc.
So dare I respectfully ask, is this not an example of “editing Jesus’s words to fit one’s theology”?
“This life’s dim windows of the soul. Distorts the heavens from pole to pole. And leads you to believe a lie. When you see with, not through, the eye.” (William Blake)
I really don’t like the idea of eternal torment. It raises all kinds of questions for me that I can’t answer.
But I can’t come to Scripture with my narrow set of preferences as a filter. I have to read what’s there whether I like it or not. If I don’t like it I must resolve that within the context that He who speaks is ultimately loving, just, kind… and that in the end whatever happens His goodness will be apparent to us all, even if my reductionist interpretation of eternal things can’t make sense of it.
At this stage, I’m an unwilling believer in the eternal soul thing because of Scripture. Oddly, the clearest picture is perhaps in the rich man and Lazarus (of course, not sitting on a chair all by itself, but aligned with everything else in Scripture.) Yes, it’s a parable. Jesus told parables based on accessible imagery. I struggle very much to think he picked up mythology and presented it for everyone, captured in the the Bible itself, a completely misleading - dishonesty - let’s not beat about - as the background reality for his story.
“And what divine knowledge did Jesus have?” Klax Martin Peter Clarke. (sorry, don’t know how to do the quote thing)
Your presuppositions are showing. It’s a really valid view, I don’t dispute that. But you speak as if we are all standing on the same hill. On your hill, with your perspective, Jesus didn’t have divine knowledge.
For many of us on that hill over in the distance, his claim to be Son of God wasn’t inserted by later editors or his human conclusion but really did come from divine knowledge. He was fully man: he had to learn to walk and speak and learn to read, you can see traces in his words of him studying the scriptures - and then you can see recorded his direct divine interactions with the Father. Personally, if I concluded he had no divine knowledge, I wouldn’t be following him, but that’s me. So why do you ask people who are clearly standing on a different set of world view assumptions that question? Please forgive and correct me if I’ve misunderstood your intent.
None of those examples say that humans will be tortured for all eternity for rejecting Jesus. If they did, then his use of “perish” in John 3:16 would seem contradictory, which would also be a problem. It just makes more sense to me that he’s describing ways of perishing.
In the parable, which means it’s not to be taken literally , but if it is being taken as more literal then all of it should.
You’ll notice the rich man begs to allow him to go back and warn his brothers. That means his brothers are still alive on Earth which means they are in the grave. The rich man in is the grave and so is the beggar. They are not in heaven and hell. But hades.
Acts 24:15 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
15 having a hope in God, which these men cherish themselves, that there shall certainly be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked.
The resurrection takes place at the white throne judgement. Those who hear their names in the book of life receive eternal life and those whose names are not as cast into hell, the lake of fire. All will be judged.
That means the rich man is not yet at the judgement to be destroyed. If he was, there would be no brothers to warn.
Also the thought of a eternal soul is not in the Bible. The only thing that’s eternal is God. God grants eternal life to those who are saved. Those who are not saved don’t get eternal life. They are sent to hell. God destroys both body and soul.
Consider Adam and Eve. Many believe the story indicates they were immortal. But they were not. If they were immortal there would be no need for a tree of life in the garden. Why would immortals need such a thing.
You’ll forgive me, then, for believing this to be an example of “editing” certain of Jesus’s words to fit a certain theology.
For what it is worth, no one I know that believes in an eternal torment in hell does so because they believe or embrace some “pre-existing” theology, and then try to twist or contort the text to try to somehow make Jesus (quite apart from his actual words) appear to be talking about “eternal punishment” in a “place of torment” that is “eternal fire” , where people are “in anguish in this flame”, the fire “unquenchable”, the kind where someone begs for even a drop of water for their tongue, and where their worm does not die nor their fire quenched.
I am afraid I am always suspect of any interpretation that requires me to believe Jesus to be the most inept or incompetent teacher imaginable… Jesus would never in a thousand years have wanted anyone to hear his words and believe by his words that he was even suggesting that any person would experience “eternal punishment” where they would be “in anguish” in a “place of torment” with “eternal fire” that was “unquenchable”…? He would be shocked, shocked to discover that anyone heard his words and somehow interpreted them to mean anyone would experience anything remotely like an eternal punishment where people would be in anguish in eternal fire in a place of torment… That was the last thing he was trying to convey…!
**N.B., the word translated “perish” is a bit more broad in meaning, and can also mean “destroyed”, “killed,” or simply “lost”… Hence I’d be very cautious about using that one (English) term to hand wave the numerous and repeated other graphic descriptions Jesus uses to describe the punishment of those who are “lost”.…
E.g., the word in John 3:16, “…shall not ‘perish’ (ἀπόληται)” is also used to describe…
The lost sheep - “…having a hundred sheep, if he has lost (ἀπολέσας) one of them…” Also “go rather to the lost (ἀπολωλότα ) sheep of the house of Israel.”
The lost coin - “I have found the coin that I had lost (ἀπώλεσα).”
the lost son - “this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost (ἀπολωλὼς) and is found.”
Unlost Rewards - “…he will by no means lose (ἀπολέσῃ) his reward.”
Again, consider how that language was used for Babylon and Edom.
Isaiah 34:5-10 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
5 For My sword is satiated in heaven,
Behold it shall descend for judgment upon Edom
And upon the people whom I have devoted to destruction.
6 The sword of the Lord is filled with blood,
It is sated with fat, with the blood of lambs and goats,
With the fat of the kidneys of rams.
For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah
And a great slaughter in the land of Edom.
7 Wild oxen will also fall with them
And young bulls with strong ones;
Thus their land will be soaked with blood,
And their dust become greasy with fat.
8 For the Lord has a day of vengeance,
A year of recompense for the cause of Zion.
9 Its streams will be turned into pitch,
And its loose earth into brimstone,
And its land will become burning pitch.
10 It will not be quenched night or day;
Its smoke will go up forever.
From generation to generation it will be desolate;
None will pass through it forever and ever.
Here it says Edom will attacked with unquenchable fire and it’s smoke would go up forever and ever. Yet Edom is not on fire to this day. Unquenchable means it can’t be put out before it’s done. So here, all these phrases about eternal this or this ultimately and clearly means destroyed.
So the parable of the rich man fits perfectly with the narrative of ancient Jewish war and justice talk. Jesus explained it perfectly well. The problem is some modern people don’t understand the Torah enough to pick up on the patterns.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
83
My presupposition is that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. His divine knowledge, by being God incarnate, was qualitative. All else was by the Spirit. He communed with the Father, certainly, I very much doubt (British understatement) whether it was conversational. So He knew nothing of the afterlife except by instinct, yearning in the light of Love, metaphorically. He was humanly ignorant of it. And in His hard sayings, as you say, due to the filter of Love, He wasn’t talking about it any way. He was using it to break through to very primitive minds. He still does.
Your presupposition is that the divine cannot perfuse a fully human context; body, mind, milieu, culture. Can’t suffuse myth. Use what it has to deal with. We must presuppose normality. Humanity. Or it is not redeemed. We must presuppose rationality. And we run out of that as in ID - Intelligent Design. We invoke magic when we haven’t exhausted rationality, in, before, below faith. We always will of course, but we need to push the rational boat out much further, for our faith to be communicated in the educated world.
@Klax
Thanks for clarifying your position so beautifully. We’re not as far apart as my presumptiveness, and of course you were entitled to a free shot at my presuppositions. On that topic, you aren’t correct. For one, I have no doubt the divine can suffuse whatever it wants. I don’t presuppose normality.
But I don’t subscribe to your boundaries around what you think Jesus could or couldn’t know - and you make quite a definitive statement: ‘He knew nothing of the afterlife except by instinct, yearning in the light of love, metaphorically.’ Beautiful language, but full of assumption.
I think of Paul: “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.”
His words read as a clear proposition, not metaphor - Paul was pretty clear on his language when he shifted. I don’t think Paul made this up. His experience of having “heard things” sounds, ‘conversational’ even if perhaps it transcends our understanding of conversation. I don’t think Paul is talking from “instinct” about that, yearning in the light of Love. If Paul had divine knowledge, and his encounter with Christ; Peter recalled the encounter on the mountain… I don’t want to prescribe what Jesus could or couldn’t know.
Yet - I acknowledge the rationality of your view - who knows, I may end up there. I’m still wrestling it all through.
I can’t speak for others’ motivations, but I did exactly that. I was taught all about eternal conscious torment when I was a kid, so naturally I interpreted “unquenchable” or “eternal” fire to mean “eternal conscious torment” for most of humanity even when it doesn’t say that.
All I know is, if I’m going to look someone in the eye and tell them “God’s going to torture you forever and ever if you don’t pray this prayer right now” (which isn’t all that far off from what some children’s ministries teach kids), I’d better be pretty darn sure that’s what Scripture teaches. And I’m not.
It may be they don’t feel a need to “twist” anything because it’s already been done for them; and long enough ago that it now carries the psychological weight of venerable tradition in our minds. Apparently these obsessions with infinity and immortal souls were more of a Greek overlay where Platonic themes got merged with early Christian ones. I guess St. Augustine may have been one of the early church fathers that helped cement some of that into place … perhaps not altogether accurately. Not that everything Greek has to be considered wrong, mind you, - I don’t push that kind of binary thinking. But it is possible that those who question this may actually be wanting to look back past some “early twisting” of Christian understandings to see more clearly the actual Christ figure presented in Scriptures - both his life and words. And the figure presented us simply cannot be squared with the fearsome tyrant painted by Jonathan Edwards. Not that we (especially while still in our sin) shouldn’t fear God and fear the judgment to come. Our own sin must be destroyed, even if we insist on clinging to it all the way to hell before we learn to loath it as we must. But God the judge never stops being God the loving Creator, and the Creator never stops being the judge. Mercy and Judgment are both perfectly mingled - one and the same in God’s hands, though if we in our limited ways insist on seeing them as “zero-sum” competitors, even there - scriptures are clear which of the two would ascend over the other (See the end of James 2:13). But we can take it on faith that neither one of those qualities has any inferiority as seen in our God; and as it regards us, it is clear which of these we are to pursue with our neighbor as we emulate God. The beginning of the same verse referenced above makes it frighteningly clear what happens if we choose poorly in this matter. God will see to it that our own merciless judgment is heaped on our own heads until we learn. Those who would turn this ‘unmerciful servant’ lesson into an unending hellfire, finally bereft of any hope are turning James’ words on their head and making judgment triumph over mercy in the end. They are making sin and evil co-eternal with God; and God’s love defeated in the end - or at least limited in its reach. And such permanence of evil would also then render false the great Apostle’s prophecy that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall give praise to God.
Those are the concerns of those of us who see fit to re-apply scriptural light, and finally (and more importantly) Christ’s light to these traditionally-entrenched formulations about the role of hell in God’s plans.
I don’t exactly follow… are you suggesting that Jesus‘ use of words like “eternal”, “unquenchable,” “Place of torment,” “in anguish in this fire,” etc., were erroneously absorbed from Greek or other Pagan tradition?
Fair enough… but on the other hand, let us remember that if we are going to go around and say to people, “you have nothing to worry about… there is no torment that awaits you, after you eat, drink, be merry, and reject Christ, you will simply be snuffed out…” we had better be VERY darn sure that is in fact what Scripture teaches.
And given the multitudinous words, illustrations, parables, and warnings of Jesus about something that he felt it appropriate to describe with such words as “torment” “anguish in this fire,” “eternal punishment,” “eternal fire”, “unquenchable fire,” etc… I am certainly not in a place where I could have any certainty about annihilationism (or universalism).
All things being equal, when I enter eternity, I would rather discover I had given a “false fear” to people who are either there in paradise with me or have simply ceased to exist, than to discover I had given a “false hope” to those who are currently in, and will remain, in torment.
I’m suggesting that we’ve now packed into those phrases “end times” scenarios that do not reflect the God shown us in Christ. And some (much?) of that erroneous packaging probably started with Greek influence.
I don’t see annihilation as “nothing to worry about,” so that is not even close to what I would tell a person.
Fair enough also. Perhaps it’s colored by my own experience of seeing eternal conscious torment weaponized to frighten people into praying a prayer, especially children, but later discovering how underwhelming the biblical case for it is. I would agree with you about false hope, but again, I don’t really see anything hopeful about annihilation. It’s a fate I would want to avoid and I would want to help others avoid it as well.
It sounds like you are really looking out for other people. I commend you for that! And that is what I would say, too, of myself in the past. However, I had to ask myself, what kind of God would threaten to punish someone eternally for not following a concept that most of humanity have never had the chance of understanding well? Does believing in and following a concept of atonement even have anything to do with following His other precepts? Does it fit with the sacrifice of Jesus, who gave His life for us?
Putting the shoe on the other foot, would I feel the same about a Muslim who told me that unless I say the kalimat and follow Allah, I and all the world will burn in Hell? Would I say his Allah is just?
As a result of my negative responses to these questions, I have to strongly consider that the concept of eternal conscious torment does not fit this reasoning, nor God’s character.
There is much else in the Bible that reveals God’s character and will, especially in the interaction of Christ with his creation. Teaching others of this is just a bare start to the process we will spend eternity doing in Heaven–learning of Him.
One of the more eye opening things for me one someone pointing out that death and hades actually get thrown into the lake of fire. Never heard anyone teach that death and the underworld are also going to be eternally tormented.
I agree that the universal eternality of the soul seems to be a Greco concept and not a biblical one. The bible starting in chapter 2 seems to present humans as mortal with the potential for eternal life if they take hold of the tree of life.
It is depressing at times that heaven and hell are not only emphasized much more in modern evangelical circles then they are in scripture but that the conceptions of what they are seem to he much more informed by Greco thought than by Scripture emphasizing things like the superiority of spiritual over physical world, dualism and eternal trajectory being escape from the physical world into a purely spiritual state.
That’s exactly what happened to me as a kid growing up to. I was taught souls are immortal and you live for all eternity in heaven or hell. Then when I read the highly stylistic writings in parables and the book of revelation and saw the same words I assumed it meant the same thing to ancient Jewish people as me. But a few year ago I came across the views of conditional Immortality and laughed at their statements. Then as I begin to study it, I realized quickly that their argument is bullet proof. Even the verses as mentioned that I thought clearly stated eternal torment when I compared that to the language throughout the Torah I realized it was it was just war jargon for destruction. Then when I read back with the eternal torment lenses now off the verses fit back together perfectly. Second death became exactly that. The second, and eternal death where the wicked are destroyed.