…zzzz …zzzz ..zz 《blink》um, what? Me? I have no idea. I barely got past the first post in this thread. There are too many implicit assumptions to unravel here. Not worth it - back to sl《yawn》eep fo…zzzz …zzzz
- Roy’s response to my question is: “…zzzz …zzzz ..zz 《blink》um, what? Me? I have no idea. I barely got past the first post in this thread. There are too many implicit assumptions to unravel here. Not worth it - back to sl《yawn》eep fo…zzzz …zzzz”
- And that’s precisely why I’m pressing the point—because the conclusion is being asserted as though those assumptions were already settled.
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The first passage in question is Revelation 14:9-20. I agree the passage is severe and not to be softened. But I don’t think it can simply be read through the lens of Lateran IV as though its meaning were already fixed.
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Revelation 14:9–20 is densely symbolic. It combines multiple images—drinking the wine of God’s wrath, torment with fire and sulfur in the presence of the Lamb, smoke rising forever, the blessed dead at rest, and then the harvest and winepress with blood flowing for miles. These are not mechanically consistent descriptions; they are apocalyptic images conveying the seriousness and finality of divine judgment.
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So the question is not whether the judgment is real or severe—I fully agree that it is—but whether this imagery functions as a literal, sequential account of eternal conscious torment. I don’t think the passage itself requires that conclusion.
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For example, “no rest day or night” describes unrelieved judgment, but does not by itself establish its duration. And “smoke rising forever” is stock prophetic imagery (cf. Isaiah 34) for irreversible judgment, not necessarily an ongoing process.
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More broadly, the chapter moves between the living, the dead who “rest from their labors,” and embodied harvest imagery. That makes it difficult to read it as a precise metaphysical description of disembodied souls undergoing endless torment.
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So my point isn’t to deny judgment or reduce its seriousness. It’s simply that Revelation 14, read on its own terms, does not settle the question in the way a later doctrinal formulation assumes. In other words, 13th century Lateran IV may tell us how a Council at the time interpreted these texts, but it doesn’t follow that Revelation 14 itself requires that interpretation.
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The second passage in question,Revelation 20:10-15, is not a procedural description of how the afterlife operates. It’s a symbolic vision of final judgment. The text itself mixes categories: the devil is explicitly said to be tormented forever, while the fate of humans is described as “the second death.” Death and Hades are also thrown into the lake of fire, which clearly cannot be read literally but signifies the abolition of death itself.
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The references to “the sea,” “Death,” and “Hades” giving up the dead are not a map of where souls are stored, but a way of saying that no one escapes judgment—every realm of death yields its dead.
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So the passage clearly affirms universal resurrection and real judgment. What it does not provide is a detailed metaphysical account of the intermediate state or a single, unambiguous description of the nature of final punishment. The imagery is theological and symbolic, not a literal schematic.
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Revelation 20 tells us that all are raised and judged, and that death itself is abolished—but it does not give a literal blueprint of where souls wait or exactly how final punishment operates. It also definitely raises the question, where are all that have died before Judgement Day.
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The conclusion of eternal conscious torment is not stated directly in the passages from Revelation 14 and 20; it is inferred from how the imagery is interpreted.
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I guess that the issue comes down to this: you apparently think that the Church could have collectively erred for 2000 years in its interpretation of the Scriptures and that we, after 2000 years, come come up not with a coherent development of doctrine but a contradiction. But the question is, and it’s a serious one, not a rethorical one: why would God leave Christians in the darkness about fundamental doctrines for 2000 years when He promised the opposite in the Gospels? And if the Church has erred for 2000 years, what makes you think that our modern judgment may not be erroneous as well? In other words: where do we draw the line? This is not a rethorical question by any stretch of the imagination, is a very serious one.
Unlike some people, I do not claim to “know what is true”. Some people claim to “know what God is thinking”, but I do not. I am simply searching for an explanation that seems to comport with my existing beliefs in a more settling way.
I appreciate the caution about apocalyptic imagery, and I agree that Revelation is not a literal schematic of the afterlife, but that point does not get us to annihilationism, as symbolic language still signifies a determinate reality.
The imagery is apocalyptic; but it is apocalyptic imagery of ongoing punishment, not of simple extinction.
More fundamentally, where do we end up if doctrines believed by the Church from the beginning can be set aside whenever a private interpretation seems plausible? Once that door is opened, there is no obvious stopping point. There are Christians who deny even the existence of the soul, despite Christ’s own words: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul”. The Church, for her part, teaches that the spiritual soul is immortal and does not perish at death and has always taught that from the beginning and as I said that’s a direct teaching from Jesus, which some Christians (I’m not taking about you) contradict, thinking that Jesus could have erred on the subject or that all the words that the Scripture uses when it talks about souls can be interpreted as a mere metaphor, when the reality (according to them) is that we aren’t hylomorphic beings but monistic beings who at death simply cease to exist and will return to existence only after the final Resurrection (which would contradict not only what Jesus and the Church taught from the beginning but even the experiences of billions of people who had experiences with the spirits of the dead, and if the brain is assumed to be that deceitful then I don’t see how even the resurrection accounts can hold much weight, even if they talk a real resurrection in a glorified body).
Precisely the same problem appears with anti-Trinitarian readings of Scripture. They weren’t absurd on their face; they could sound quite plausible (which is why most christians at a certain point became arians).
Arians could point to many passages which, read narrowly and apart from the Church’s rule of faith, could be well made to sound subordinationist. That is exactly why Nicaea was necessary. The Council didn’t invent the divinity of Christ; it judged between competing scriptural interpretations and confessed the Son as “true God from true God”, “begotten, not made”, and “consubstantial with the Father”.
So the mere fact that someone can produce a seemingly plausible biblical interpretation proves very little, as Anti-Trinitarianism could do the same. Once private judgment is allowed to overrule what the Church has believed from the beginning and later defined, there is no principled stopping point.
Also, you talk about Lateran IV teaches that after the resurrection the wicked receive “eternal punishment with the devil”, but it’s not only Lateran IV (which some people on this forum Assumed to have been influenced by Dante, as if the Church could have been influenced by him and as if it didn’t happen 50 years before his birth), even the anti-Origen anathemas of Constantinople II (553 A.D, 700 years before the fourth Lateran Council) reject the claim that the punishment of demons and wicked men is “only temporary” and “will one day have an end”.
If it is any consolation, the Church has never declared any particular person to be damned. Nevertheless, from the beginning she has been very clear about the fate of those who are damned. My strictly personal view is that the vast majority of human beings, including many non-Christians, are ultimately saved through the grace of Christ, though most will likely require purification. My own view is that only those who are so wicked as to be beyond redemption will ultimately be damned. This is also Fr. Most’s interpretation: he holds that God decrees predestination in light of a person’s foreseen lack of ultimate resistance to grace. By contrast, there is very little basis for the idea that the wicked will be annihilated. Even the Fathers of the Church, long before any conciliar definition, spoke with a clear and consistent consensus on this matter.
That is a “take-away” message Knor. I have noticed that in response to a deep query about logic, many on these threads insist on telling us what they believe. As if only they “know the truth.” We don’t care what another person believes an interpretation to be. We are searching for a human way of thinking about God separate from the claims about God. We cannot know the truth with certainty. So much of the scripture required translation, historical context, and then interpretation shaped by cultures and beliefs. That same criticism applies to a Church canon and to the Second Council of Constantinople (as [Massimiliano](Profile - 1Cor15.54 - The BioLogos Forum says). Neither uncovered a new divine thought! They simply resolved disputes among humans regarding how to interpret existing beliefs. They carried authority, but it was still mediated through human judgements.
We are constructing coherent moral frameworks that align with our readings, our church traditions, and our sense of justice, mercy and meaning. My way of saying this has been that we are “searching for comfort” as we try to harmonize what is consistent and reconcile discovered differences. That is all we can do, no matter that some think they can read God’s mind.
The bolded passage seems to suggest that you are just looking for confirmation of what you want to hear.
As for the first point, no one knows the truth in a vacuum; no human being does. The Holy Spirit does, however, and Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would guide us into all truth.
John 16:13: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth. For he will not speak on his own, but he will speak whatever he hears.’
It’s difficult to know what to make of those words if what some people claim were true (namely, that most Christians have believed a number of falsehoods on matters of great importance to the faith, such as the soul, the fate of the damned, and the nature of the Eucharist, to name only a few. All of these teachings were held from the beginning and were only later given conciliar definition when they were challenged by heresies).
I don’t see how that view (which effectively empties John 16:13 of any real meaning, and indeed seems to assert the opposite) can lead, logically, to anything other than substantial agnosticism in the end. Maybe hopeful agnosticism, but agnosticism nontheless.
Should a Christian be a de-facto agnostic?
Jesus says the opposite. I’m sorry, but I believe Him when He says that the Holy Spirit would guide us into all truth. I do not think those words can be interpreted in a way that strips them of any substantial meaning (or worse, reverses their meaning altogether).
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I think we’re now dealing with two different questions that shouldn’t be conflated.
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One is a question of authority—how Scripture is to be interpreted within a given tradition, and what weight should be given to councils, Fathers, and continuity of teaching. The other is a question of what the text itself specifies.
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My comments have been directed at the second. When I say Revelation is symbolic and not a literal schematic, I’m not arguing for annihilationism, nor am I claiming that any private interpretation should override tradition. I’m making the narrower point that the imagery itself does not function as a self-interpreting proof of eternal conscious torment.
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Saying that symbolic language signifies a determinate reality is true—but it doesn’t follow that it signifies one specific model of that reality to the exclusion of others. That step still requires interpretation.
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On the question of tradition: I agree that continuity matters, and that not every plausible reading should be treated as equally valid. But appealing to what the Church has later defined answers the question of what a tradition teaches, not necessarily the question of what a given passage requires on its own terms.
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The analogy with Arianism is helpful, but it actually makes the distinction clearer. Nicaea did not simply repeat the text; it adjudicated between competing interpretations of it. That shows that the text itself did not settle the matter without interpretation.
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That’s all I’m pointing out here. I’m not proposing a rival doctrinal system, and I’m not setting aside tradition wholesale. The issue isn’t whether tradition has reached a conclusion, but whether the texts themselves leave room for interpretive judgment—and I think they do.
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Revelation itself calls the lake of fire “the second death.” That raises the question of what “death” means in that context. At minimum, it shows that the text does not simply equate final judgment with eternal conscious torment, but leaves the nature of that judgment open to interpretation.
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Rather than signalling a view of salvation or God, I am trying to indicate thr need for clarity in the OP. Different faiths and cultures may not comprehend the question as presented because of the many assumptions behind each word.
Even within Christianity the concept of salvation and salvation from/to what varies.
And what is meant b the Kingdom of God - now, later, both?
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Exactly. That was my point, wasn’t it ? Even Arianism could present itself as a plausible interpretation of the texts. What led the Church to define the doctrine of the Trinity? It was the fact that something held and believed from the beginning (by the apostles, after the Resurrection, by the early Christians, and by the Fathers of the Church), namely, that Jesus is the one God and yet is not the Father, was challenged by rival interpretations that were ultimately condemned as heretical.
The same principle applies to later doctrinal definitions. If no one had challenged the divinity of our Lord, the Church probably would not have formulated the doctrine of the Trinity in such precise terms ( even so, I believe that 1 John 4:8 is the most compelling passage bearing witness to the Trinitarian nature of God, because if God is love, then relationality must be intrinsic to the Godhead, since love is by its very nature essentially relational, which is why i believe that 1 John 4:8 is even stronger than then already very strong prologue of the John’s Gospel, or Romans 9:5 or Colossians 2:9).
The most important thing, btw, is certainly the concrete practice in our lives of what Jesus taught us.
- I would contest that too—that you, or anyone else, can tell me “what is true” on this issue. I’m not claiming certainty; I’m testing whether the claims being made actually hold up.
- Reading that as a claim to “know the truth” confuses analysis with assertion.
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- It so happens that I agree with your historical point: the Church did not invent doctrines like the Trinity, but clarified them in response to competing interpretations.
But that actually reinforces the distinction I’ve been making. The need for Nicaea shows that the text itself did not function as a self-interpreting, unambiguous statement of doctrine. It required interpretation, debate, and ultimately a theological judgment. - My point here is narrower. I’m not disputing that the Church has reached conclusions, nor proposing to overturn them. I’m asking whether the biblical texts themselves—particularly passages like those in Revelation—require a single, specific account of final punishment.
- The Arian controversy shows that plausible interpretations can exist even when the Church ultimately judges between them. It doesn’t follow that the text itself leaves no room for interpretive judgment; in fact, it shows the opposite. So again, the issue I’m raising is not about rejecting doctrine, but about whether the conclusions being drawn are directly entailed by the text, or whether they depend on a broader interpretive framework.
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Not at all. It is called reconciling various beliefs into a coherent mindset.
Not true. He offers us guidance, not certainty. I am on a journey toward truth with no certainty of ownership of it.
It is extremely tiresome to have to sort through your attempts to simplify and assert a knowledge with a finality that is undeserved.
I am certainly NOT doing that, in any way, shape, form or fashion. In fact, I am doing the exact opposite…I do not know the truth. I am looking for, and advising for the attempt to reconcile issues such that they will offer comfort. Neither the Church canons, the Second Council, and certainly not you, can “know” the truth.
You are correct; but the main point is that, from the very beginning, the Church’s interpretation of the texts was never regarded as secondary or optional. Heresies such as Arianism were not condemned because the biblical texts, taken in isolation without tradition made those positions absolutely and unambiguously impossible to maintain. They were condemned because the Church had always interpreted Scripture within the rule of faith it had received, above all in light of the divinity of Christ. Christ’s divinity was consistent with the teaching of the apostles, their successors, and the various pre-Nicene Fathers; Arianism was not. That is why it was condemned: not because it was simply impossible to derive from the texts, but because it stood in contradiction to the faith the Church had received and always professed.
The problem is that what any given passage appears to require on its own terms can open the door to a bewildering range of interpretations. That is why there are, by some recent estimates, around 45,000 Christian denominations or rites worldwide today, up from about 2,000 in 1900, 13,100 in 1970, 31,000 in 2000, and 44,700 in 2020.
And these differences are often real, substantial, and deeply theological. They concern doctrine, ecclesiology, authority in the Church, the sacraments, and the liturgy. The point, then, is not merely that Christianity has splintered into thousands of administrative bodies, but that it has fragmented into communities that often differ on matters of faith and church order at a very deep level.
This kind of multiplication is overwhelmingly a post-Reformation phenomenon. Christianity had experienced earlier schisms, of course, but the explosion into tens of thousands of denominations belongs above all to the world that emerged after the Protestant Reformation. And this is hardly surprising, because once private judgment is effectively legitimized (once free examination is allowed not only to question the Church’s interpretation on matters not definitively defined, but even to contradict truths of faith that had been taught from the beginning) fragmentation becomes virtually inevitable.
If no binding interpretive authority remains, then doctrinal division is not an accident, but the predictable consequence. I seriously doubt that this confusion was part of God’s plan; I would attribute it instead to human free will.
Taken in isolation, I think the texts do point to the eternity of punishment as well, and make the idea of annihilation seem rather strained. Not impossible, though, and I can see why one may interpreted them that way. But again, the texts themselves can also be interpreted in ways that lend support to various heresies on other doctrines as well—such as the divinity of Christ or the nature of the Eucharist, to name only two, because many more could be named. In fact, I think the existence of the soul is perhaps one of the doctrines most unambiguously taught in the Gospels by Jesus Himself, and yet even that is denied by some Christians.
So I am not denying that the texts themselves can be read in a certain way. What I am saying is that, once that principle is conceded (namely, that texts may be read and interpreted in isolation, without regard for what the Church has taught and what the Fathers of the Church taught), it opens a rabbit hole from which it is extremely difficult to escape.
They definitely depend on a broader interpretive framework, and always have. That is precisely why Scripture itself tells us that we cannot rely on Scripture alone.
2 Thessalonians 2:15: “So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.”
The New Testament itself was written by the Church for the Church; it was not a kind of magical text that simply appeared out of nowhere. That is why interpreting it through the lens of private judgment gives rise to multiple errors and to unavoidable fragmentation.
1 Cor 15,3-5: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.”
I don’t think you’re in a position to set the terms for how the rest of us answer whether a perfectly loving God would have to overcome all resistance.
John 16:13: “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears”
These are not my words, man; they are the Chief’s. And how can “guidance into all truth” be reconciled with the idea that, for centuries and centuries on end, we may have believed falsehoods about matters of faith of great importance?
You’re blurring an important distinction here. The tradition Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 is a specific early apostolic proclamation with defined content. That is not identical to later traditional interpretations of apocalyptic passages in Revelation. Both may fall under the broad word “tradition,” but they are not the same kind of thing and should not be treated as though they carried identical weight.
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