How familiar are you with how this subject was treated in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity?
Agreed. I guess I’m glad that you also find it disturbing, but I’m pretty sure I’m not making this stuff up. I don’t know how far off thread-topic we’re allowed to go, but I’d be interested in hearing your understanding of what the gospel is.
No I haven’t read those two books. Do they directly address their positions on hell? I find NT Wright quite slippery to pin down on controversial issues. As far as McKnight, it seems he has sympathy for conditionalism, but is still in the “traditional” ETC camp.
I have to say, one of my pet peeves is people who believe in eternal punishment, but mask it or try to slough it off as a minor issue. I haven’t read enough of McKnight to know if he fits the bill.
Somewhat familiar….not primary sources, but I’ve read some books on hell lately (it’s been really uplifting) and so gleaned some info indirectly. From what I remember, 2nd Temple views were pretty mixed and I know there are a lot of fire and brimstone references pretty early on in Christianity. I’m definitely open to hear your take though.
Well for a start, there was no doctrine of the immortal soul in First Temple Judaism, and it only originated in later Second Temple Judaism. The first century Jewish sources are mixed, but there’s a general agreement that there’s very little in the New Testament to indicate belief in an immortal soul, and no clear teaching of eternal conscious torment in any hell. Consequently it is no surprise to find a definite early Christian witness to mortalism and unconsciousness at death, instead of post death transmigration to heaven and hell, up to the ninth century. I can provide you with reading material if you like.
I believe in a Local Eden. God created the world (and people) by thiestic evolution as described in Genesis 1, and then created Adam and the garden in Eden through special creation as described in Genesis 2. When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, sin entered the garden for the first time. Sin had been alive and well outside the garden long before. What Adam and Eve did in the garden was to choose to be culpable for their actions, and they represented us when they did it in that each of us would make the same choice. This is God’s way of proving to us that he is not evil for creating us. Because we are not God, we are not perfect and therefore we will sin, and some of us will choose to reject God. Without the experiment of Adam and Eve, we could argue that God is the author of evil. Because of Adam and Eve, we can see that we are culpable. We can see that given the choice of living in a perfect garden, vs. being able to choose right from wrong for ourselves, we each would choose to have knowledge of good and evil. The result is that we require a world to live in that challenges us, and is difficult, and is filled with other people who have the freedom to make the wrong choices and hurt us. So, sin is just the necessary logical result of free will. Adam and Eve are the answer to the Problem of Pain. Jesus is the solution to the Problem of Pain.
Part of the protestant reformation is the belief of Adam as being our representative. Once we understand this concept of Adam as our representative (not as our “Federal Head” which is a concept dependent on us all being descendants of Adam and our being somehow guilty of the sins or our ancestors and carriers of some strange apple derived genetic pollution) anyway, once we understand the concept of Adam being our representative who simply made the same choice in the Garden of Eden to choose to have knowledge of what is Good and what is Evil, then we can correctly interpret Genesis 2 and all of the verses in the bible without having to spin them to protect an artificial concept of “original sin” which is not itself a biblical concept, but rather an inherited concept from Aristotle which is incorrect. The more correct interpretation of Genesis 2 is that we all suffer from “ubiquitous sin” as a result of not being God which means not being perfect. If we are different than perfect, then we are imperfect and prone to sin. God knows this. . . he is all-knowing. So, this raises the ethical question of “if God knew in advance that we would sin, then creating a world full of sinful people is in itself sinful, because justice would require our punishment and creating sinful people just to punish them is in itself sinful/evil” It is exactly this ethical conundrum that is resolved by Adam and Eve in Eden. Adam and Eve in Eden prove that we all (humanity) choose to know the difference between good and evil. We choose to be culpable. Even when specially created out of dust in a perfect garden where there is no death and all of the animals are herbivores and we can eat from any tree in the garden but one, we all would still choose to have knowledge of good and evil. The irony is that once we have the knowledge of good and evil, we no longer have the moral defense of ignorance. Also, we are no longer suited to live in a perfect and safe environment. We crave challenge and danger and achievement and therefore have to be kicked out of the perfect garden into a more suitable habitat. Eden, inhabited by culpable people would be wrecked by them, and would become a padded cage. Adam and Eve were kicked out of a padded cage into a playground where they could run and skin their knees, and where their kids could exercise their free will by killing each other.
YEC’s are afraid that losing the concept of original sin destroys the work of Jesus on the Cross. That is simply incorrect. There are multiple theories of Atonement, and most of them are not mutually exclusive. Jesus lived a perfect life. Jesus was murdered. Jesus forgave his murderers. Might does not make right. God is all powerful, but that is not the source of his moral authority. God’s moral authority derives from his moral perfection. Jesus’ death is inarguable proof that Jesus is better than we are, and “we” means everyone who has ever lived. We do not have the moral authority to judge one another. Who are you to judge me when you are just as bad? Who am I to judge you when I am just as bad as you? Jesus, being blameless, is literally morally superior and has the moral authority to judge each and every one of us. One of the possible outcomes of judgement is forgiveness. Jesus is morally able to offer us forgiveness. Jesus commands us to forgive one another, and because he has the moral authority to forgive us, he offers us a simple and perfectly morally just deal. Matthew 6:14-15 says, “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Similarly, Luke 6:37 states, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned.” This is simply how salvation works. This may be news to people who have been taught that simply by having faith, one is saved, however when you look at the verses that teach about saving faith, they lead you back to the verses that tell us like Luke 6:46, “Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” If we have saving faith, then we follow the dictates of that faith to do what Jesus commands, and that is to forgive others.
Jesus also tells us to repent, ie. Mark 1:15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” Repent literally means “to turn around”. But what is sin anyway? Why does God care about sin in the first place, and how can sin disqualify a person from the Kingdom of God or from the New Jerusalem? Why are some resurrected to eternal life and some resurrected to eternal torment? How can a perfect and just God allow anything like eternal torment? Jesus when asked what the most important commandment was, turned the question around and we are told that there are two commandments that are the most important. Mark 12:29-31 states, “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Interestingly, the 10 commandments fit inside these two new testament commandments. The first 4 of the 10 commandments are about loving God and not loving idols (including money, sex, power, all of the modern and timeless idols). Commandments 6 through 10 are all of the things that we do to hurt one another which then require our forgiveness one to another. So, repenting means not hurting each other, and giving God his due credit and not worshiping things that are not God. Most of what people consider to be victimless crimes or victimless sins are shown to be idolatry when examined. So, sin disqualifies idolaters because idolaters would never want to enter the New Jerusalem because there is no barrier between us and God there, and the idolater would be forced to give up his idolatry. Similarly, sinners who do not forgive others cannot carry their grudges into the Kingdom of Heaven because there can be no hate or resentment in the Kingdom of Heaven. So if you want to keep your hate and keep fighting and keep worshiping idols, then there has to be somewhere else for you to go. That place is called Hell. In Hell you get to keep your idols and your grudges. In Hell you get to be separated from God, and in fact God, who knows the hairs on your head while you are on earth, in Hell, God does not look on you at all. So, what kind of place must Hell be then? We can get some idea by looking at places and times in history when God was rejected in favor of hate. So, for instance, you can go on the internet and see people in orange jumpsuits being beheaded and set on fire as a result of others rebellion against Jesus. Similarly, we can look at times in history, such as the 288 or so protestants that were burned alive by “Bloody Queen Mary” which was the result of her idolatry of wealth and power. I believe that the fires of Hell are lit by Hell’s inhabitants, and to try to blame God for Hell is the ultimate hypocrisy. Long story short, God is perfect, we are not, YEC is not biblical. @Paul_Allen1
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It should be mentioned that hell is sung about and lauded "e.g. very popular song, “Highway to Hell”. If God allows them to run to hell with great energy, as they boast of how many sins they commit, does this become a problem for the Christian faith? I think not.
I think ECT is a horrible fit with the OT. I agree it was developed later.[quote=“Jonathan_Burke, post:86, topic:5677”]
The first century Jewish sources are mixed, but there’s a general agreement that there’s very little in the New Testament to indicate belief in an immortal soul, and no clear teaching of eternal conscious torment in any hell.
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It depends what you mean by “very little,” but I think there are MANY Christian theologians and apologists who will disagree with you that “there’s a general agreement that there’s very little in the New Testament to indicate belief in an immortal soul, and no clear teaching of eternal conscious torment in any hell.” When you say “general agreement,” are you saying annihilationism is the accepted majority view now?
I haven’t taken a position on what the most biblical reading is. I’m simply saying that ETC/ETP is the traditional, majority view of Christianity through the centuries.
I don’t disagree that there is some “early Christian witness to mortalism.” Do you think there was a time when it was the majority view?
Yeah, what reading would you recommend?
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It is not really the goal of either book to examine some sort of theology of hell.
McKnight contends that your summary of “the gospel” as “Get saved so you don’t go to hell when you die” is a misrepresentation of the Kingdom gospel Jesus and the apostles preached and discounts the entirety of God’s story on earth. The book is a summary of his “robust gospel” stuff that he has developed elsewhere for a number or years now.
Wright takes on the idea of “what happens when we die” and challenges views of heaven, hell, and purgatory and compares them what the Bible actually says.
Both are Evangelical Bible scholars who take the Bible as authoritative. The Bible talks about hell and judgment, so they aren’t just going to throw out the idea completely as distasteful and unfortunate.
Some tangents are better than others. 
My understanding of the gospel is that it is the story of how God has worked and continues to work in human history to bring his Kingdom to earth, The story goes something like this’:
God created the world and everything in it. He chose human beings out of his creation to be his representatives in his mission of ruling the world in a way that made it flourish and develop in line with the order God established.
Humans failed miserably because they were selfish and prideful and could not submit to God’s rule. Chaos and brokenness ensued. The relationship and shared mission between God and humans was compromised.
God made a special covenant with Abraham to set the world right and reconcile humans to himself, each other, and the rest of creation. He sent Moses to lead Abraham’s descendants out of slavery and establish a unique community to further God’s mission on earth. Israel kept rebelling against God’s rule and wanted a human king. Their human kings failed to be faithful as God’s representatives. Eventually God’s people were defeated by their enemies, his special community was scattered, and everyone had almost lost hope in God’s promise to set things right.
That’s when God sent himself to be born a human being, to unite himself with his creation and do what no human had even done before, live as a faithful representative under God’s rule. Jesus was the true king of God’s people. He lived in perfect obedience to God and even though he was tempted in every way, he stayed faithful to God’s mission. He showed everyone how to love and serve God and people the way God wants us to. He did many miracles and signs to prove he was God’s chosen one, sent to bring people back into loving relationship with God.
He wasn’t the kind of king the people were hoping for, so God’s own people turned against him and demanded Jesus’ death. He was executed on a cross, even though he was innocent, and in his death, he took the rebellion of the world on himself and received the punishment for it. He died, was buried, and God raised him to eternal life on the third day.
Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, sin, death, and the power of evil were defeated forever. All the traitors can now come to God their king without fear, because through Jesus they are forgiven and welcomed as God’s own children. The loving relationship God wants to have with his people is possible because Jesus’ faithfulness and obedience fixed once and for all what was broken by humanity’s rebellion.
After Jesus’ resurrection, he appeared alive to his disciples, to the apostles, and to over 500 people, and then God took him to heaven. Now he is seated at the right hand of God as Lord of everything ruling the world. He will come again someday to judge everyone with perfect justice and set up his kingdom which will last forever. For everyone who believes, death is not permanent, and they will be raised to eternal life with Jesus at the final Resurrection when heaven unites with earth and God’s kingdom comes in its fullness.
God sends his Spirit to live in everyone who believes that Jesus is the risen Lord. Through faith and because of God’s undeserved kindness, we are united with Christ; his death on the cross puts an end to the rebellion in our hearts, and his resurrection gives a new, purified life. God’s spirit gives us power to live lives of obedience, just like Jesus. His Spirit unites believers together as the Church to imitate Christ (the ultimate faithful representative of God) in the world by our love and service. His Spirit gives us boldness and authority to tell a world in rebellion that Jesus is the risen King and his kingdom is coming.
All the people, powers, and structures that seek to undermine God’s justice and goodness on earth will answer to him one day and will ultimately be defeated. Those who have suffered injustice and persecution in this life for God’s kingdom will be vindicated. In the meantime, God’s grace and forgiveness are freely available to everyone who believes and all are welcome to become adopted children of God. Together as God’s people we carry on Jesus’ mission of putting things right until he returns to put everything right once and for all in God’s New Creation.
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You are throwing dust in the air.
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Whether the New Testament teaches the human soul is immortal fro its creation … or is made immortal by the saving grace of Jesus is rather irrelevant to the issue of Hell.
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You are trying to revise Christian thinking based on your own bias.
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We have a difficult enough time affecting the YEC mentality without tackling immortality and the scope of Hellfire.
The thread is on the issue of what is “redeemed” in an Evolutionary model…
It’s not irrelevant. There is no soul at all. Talk of if being immortal or being immortal is nonsense. And if people are not made immortal until the return of Christ, then they can’t be in hell when they die.
No I am not. Eternal torment in hell wasn’t part of original Christianity, and this position was preserved prominently in Christianity for at least the first nine centuries. Modern scholarship has moved significantly away from the position that the immortal soul and eternal conscious torment are taught in the Bible. These are not my ideas, it’s mainstream scholarship that’s currently revising Christianity on these topics.
On the contrary, the doctrines of the immortal soul and eternal conscious torment have been under fire for decades, and a huge shift has taken place in mainstream theology on these subjects. The Anglicans dropped the immortal soul in the 1940s. Since then the doctrine of eternal conscious torment has become marginalized in mainstream Christianity, and standard Bible commentaries note the absence of the immortal soul from the Old Testament and the extremely weak support for it which can be inferred from the New Testament.
I strongly suggest you read some modern commentary on the subject and get up to date. As a basic introduction you could start with this robustly referenced section of the Christian mortalism page on Wikipedia
Regardless of the character of the soul’s existence in the intermediate state, biblical scholarship affirms that a disembodied soul is unnatural and at best transitional. Bromiley argues that “the soul and the body belong together, so that without either the one or the other there is no true man. Disembodied existence in Sheol is unreal. Paul does not seek a life outside the body, but wants to be clothed with a new and spiritual body (1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 5).”[197]
The mortalist disbelief in the existence of a naturally immortal soul,[1][198] is affirmed as biblical teaching by a range of standard scholarly Jewish and Christian sources. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought (1995) says, “There is no concept of an immortal soul in the Old Testament, nor does the New Testament ever call the human soul immortal.”[199] Harper’s Bible Dictionary (1st ed. 1985) says that “For a Hebrew, ‘soul’ indicated the unity of a human person; Hebrews were living bodies, they did not have bodies”.[200] Cressey 1996 says, “But to the Bible man is not a soul in a body but a body/soul unity”.[201] Avery-Peck 2000 says, “Scripture does not present even a rudimentarily developed theology of the soul”[202] and “The notion of the soul as an independent force that animates human life but that can exist apart from the human body—either prior to conception and birth or subsequent to life and death—is the product only of later Judaism”.[203]
The New Dictionary of Theology says that the Septuagint translated the Hebrew word nefesh by the Greek word psyche, but the latter does not have the same sense in Greek thought.[204] The Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, 2000 says, “Far from referring simply to one aspect of a person, “soul” refers to the whole person”.[205] The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says, “Possibly Jn. 6:33 also includes an allusion to the general life-giving function. This teaching rules out all ideas of an emanation of the soul.”[206] and “The soul and the body belong together, so that without either the one or the other there is no true man”.[207] The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, 1987 says, “Indeed, the salvation of the “immortal soul” has sometimes been a commonplace in preaching, but it is fundamentally unbiblical.”[184]
The Encyclopedia of Christianity, 2003 says “The Hebrew Bible does not present the human soul (nepeš) or spirit (rûah) as an immortal substance, and for the most part it envisions the dead as ghosts in Sheol, the dark, sleepy underworld”.[208] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2005 says, “there is practically no specific teaching on the subject in the Bible beyond an underlying assumption of some form of afterlife (see immortality)”.[209] The Zondervan Encyclopedia of the Bible (rev ed.), 2009 says “It is this essential soul-body oneness that provides the uniqueness of the biblical concept of the resurrection of the body as distinguished from the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul”.[210]
The mortalist disbelief in the existence of a naturally immortal soul[1][211] is also affirmed as biblical teaching by various modern theologians,[212][213][214][g][216][217][218] and Hebblethwaite observes the doctrine is “not popular amongst Christian theologians or among Christian philosophers today”.[219][220].
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It makes for little difference to the average Christian if Jesus rectifies non-immortal human souls into an immortal existence in Heaven … and/or if God wills that the wicked will suffer in eternity.
This is a word game you pursue with any number of your correspondents… but to the average Christian, let alone the YECs, it matters not whether immortality is intrinsic or awarded to humanity.
You don’t find me quibbling over the New Testament … insisting that it must be wrong, because there is no discussion of general resurrection in Heaven in the Old Testament.
Generally speaking, there were three schools of thought:
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No souls to speak of… even with a living body, unless one defines the soul as the mind the body supports.
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Souls that emerge with the body of flesh - - where the body is the filament, and the soul is the light generated by the filament. So no souls while the body “sleeps” in death … waiting for the reconstruction of the body to enjoy the benefits of the general resurrection.
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Souls that exist independently of the body … as demonstrated in the ancient work History of the Rechabites… believed to be a Jewish work with a Christianized beginning and ending…
Thanks for laying this out for me. Many questions pop up, but I’ll try to pick my spots sparingly.
Did God contact all the humans at some point to inform them of what’s going – to establish a “relationship and shared mission”? [quote=“Christy, post:91, topic:5677”]
he took the rebellion of the world on himself and received the punishment for it.
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Just to be clear, we do deserve punishment for not being perfect? Is this a minor part of the story?[quote=“Christy, post:91, topic:5677”]
Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, sin, death, and the power of evil were defeated forever.
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They were? What do you mean by this?
I’d like to come back to the Yuck-statement: “The idea of being saved from hell is central to the gospel.”
I understand you want to flesh out a larger narrative, but I’m still not clear how being saved from hell isn’t crucial to your gospel. What does it take to avoid hell (or avoid being annihilated)?
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He revealed himself to some of them. That is the point of the Adam and Eve narrative. I consider myself part of the story of Israel. That’s the story I have in the Bible. Are there other stories that God has revealed to other people over the course of history? Maybe. I believe that anyone who has sincerely sought God in life will find him and will be given the chance to recognize Jesus as Lord. But it also seems clear that much of humanity is not that interested in seeking God with their whole heart.
Atonement is a pretty major part of the story. Here is how I think of it, and I’m not claiming it is the only way, or that I’m sure I’m right, but for what it is worth, it’s my conceptualization. I don’t see sin primarily as moral imperfection, I see it as a rejection of God’s rightful rule. I know it grates against our modern individualistic and democratic sensibilities, but I don’t think God set the world up as a democracy. He set it up as a kingdom. We don’t have a good concept of kingdom because in human history we have only ever seen the rule of imperfect kings with arbitrary authority. Still, God has asserted his kingship over his world and even though at the moment it is a contested and not-fully enforced kingship, someday, that will change. Those who live in the kingdom and reject God’s kingship are rebels. In order for God to ultimately assert his rightful authority and establish his kingdom in its fullness, he has to deal with the rebels and the traitors. It is his desire to pardon them for treason and bring them into the kingdom as rightful citizens in good standing. According to the order and justice God established in the world, there was a cost to this pardon, but God chose to take the cost on himself.
About evil and death being defeated at the cross. I don’t know all that it means. I believe there is a physical dimension to the universe and an overlapping and intersecting spiritual dimension. God’s ultimate creative goal is the uniting of the two dimensions. At the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, and Pentecost, God’s world has broken into our world, and is continuing to break in. At the cross something happened in the spiritual dimension that has permanent ramifications for our physical dimension. Certain barriers between the two were destroyed.
It’s yucky because it’s not “good news.” Hey, guess what, God is planning to sentence you to an eternity of eternal conscious torment, but good news, you can get out of it. That’s not good news, it’s freaky news.
I don’t think being saved from hell is the proper motivation for recognizing God’s kingship. It is twisted. It is based on fear. I don’t think the question is “What does it take to avoid hell?” "The question is “what does it take to gain the hope of participating in the New Creation?” “What does it take to be right with God?” I think genuine faith and submission to God is motivated by the experience of love and grace and recognition of God’s character as good and just.
I know you don’t think avoiding hell should be one’s motivation for being a Christian, but effectively, is this what the atonement did - allow people to avoid hell?
I guess if traditional means: we all need redemption through Christ, yes, that is me.
I tend to believe we are judged based on knowledge. If a person dies without knowing of Christ, it is not logical to think that person would be judged the same as others steeped in the knowledge, but choosing another path non- the less.
But the crux of the issue is not what i think is true.
Nor anyone else.
Where we stand every day is a heart issue between each one of us and the Lord.
You may be importing issues which resulting from post-fall condition into pre-fall existence. There results confusion.
So is someone more or less inclined towards sin if he has no knowledge of what is good and evil? So many folks are keen to turn Adam’s decision to eat the fruit into some kind of galactic magic act … and yet:
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he had no intention of sin in his head to begin with;
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how does having an intention to sin transmit to all of creation?
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what transmits to all of humanity is humaness . . . the very same humaness that Adam had even before the “intentional act with unintentioned sin” !
So let me re-post what I already posted…
In other words: Adam sinned because he was human and/or because he didn’t know anything about Good or Evil …
The atonement made reconciliation with God possible. All Christians agree on that. It is the central point of the atonement. Whether or not you think the atonement “allows people to avoid hell” would depend on your theology.
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Do you think the atonement allowed people to avoid hell?