Either I’m too dense to understand your point, or this post was meant for someone else. I know you have been having a parallel conversation in this thread, but I have not been following along.
So most of us here could nominate a sort of “club elite” for Hell. That’s a bit like us saying … You’ve got a big job, God - and we know that it’s going to be hard work sorting all of us “normal folk” out - gets a bit tricky you know - since most of us seem to be real mixed bags. But to save you at least some labor, God, we’ve already parsed out the easy cases for you! No need to cogitate much on these - just get them on the next elevator down! Of course most of us wouldn’t stop our lists with just these few over-the-top murderous dictators - there’s actually quite a few more that we’re willing to “help God” with - and a lot closer to home. And by the time we all get done and Hell has to rezone some of its brimstone for additional high-rise developments, … about then somebody says something about grace and muses on what that was for. “Oh yeah!” the rest of us put down our nomination lists to mull this over. “Yeah - this is starting to look pretty grim for all of us now - and there was that thing about grace, wasn’t there!” And then we wonder about that passage where Christ tells his disciples that “whatever y’all do on earth with forgiveness - it’s done in heaven too” - and we wonder afresh how God could have been so trusting of anybody at all down here to let us in on making such calls. And we start refreshing ourselves from the scriptures again on what that ‘grace stuff’ was all about anyway. And we get that uneasy feeling that somehow how we ourselves fare in judgment seems to be related to how we dish it out to others.
-Merv
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Did I tell you about the time I had to pick up my parents at the airport at 5pm? It was 1 o’clock in the afternoon. The airport was an hour away. I decided to get cleaned up and ready to go. I had just taken a shower and was looking for my glasses. I couldn’t find them. I searched and searched and searched. I retraced my steps. I looked everywhere. I was getting desperate. I can’t tell its me my eyes are so bad without my glasses and time was running out. I was in a panic. Couldn’t believe it. I don’t misplace them. I am helpless without them. I always know where they are. It was 4:30. I had looked for hours in every nook and cranny and I was half an hour late and could not find them and having looked everywhere about 4 times, I was bright red in the face flushed with anger. Racing around I caught the side of my face in a big mirror in their bedroom. What was that? I showered earlier but thought I saw a dark splat of dirt on my face. Looking closer I realized I had my glasses on.
The moral of the story is that not infrequently, I show signs of being a blithering idiot. Wrong place. 
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Look at the lives of Hitler and Stalin. I doubt they asked forgiveness in their end. I coukd be wrong but i doubt it.
It doesnt sit well for me God having Stalin in heaven who persecuted Gods own people(or any other brutal dictator on that matter)
You’re still not getting it here, though, Nick. You and so many others (you’re definitely far, far from alone in this!) If YOU don’t like the thought of Stalin in Heaven, then how much less would a perfect God tolerate the thought?! There won’t be any Stalin …as we have known him - for the murderer he is… in heaven - because it couldn’t very well be heaven then, could it! And come to think of it - you and I won’t be there without some major change either, because in the end, there are quite a few things that various folks (not to mention God) could hold over us. Most here get all caught up in thinking "Oh - that’s universalism - and you tie yourselves up in knots trying to avoid any unsanctioned ‘-isms’ " But I’m not trying to be a “universalist” here - I don’t need to fill any such role because I trust that an all-knowing, all-loving, infinitely just God has got this. Completely. He doesn’t need my help or yours. So it’s nothing more than amusing that as people trip over themselves trying to run away from something they’ve labeled as ‘universalism’, they end up not quite being able to trust God to make all the requisite decisions that we ourselves would approve. If God isn’t good enough for this stuff, then he isn’t good enough to save any of us to anything! And if he is good enough, then Stalin will get everything coming to him … and more. Mere vengeful hellfire that you and millions of others would understandably wish on such a one would probably be what Stalin might actually prefer at first too compared to what God really will do with him. But whatever it is; it’s God’s prerogative. And pity the people whose gods aren’t big enough to be trusted with all these judgments!
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Though I believe not everyone will be saved, I base that more off of what scripture says about the wide and narrow gates and other places all throughout scripture. I’m also aware that God says we all fall short. His standard is impossible. Luckily he’s not a prick and realizes it and so he has done a lot of work to help us find Jesus.
My job as a disciple is not to force Jesus on anyone and it’s my job to not judge who deserves to die and remain dead forever and who gets eternal life. It’s my job to love the world and preach hope. For those that accept it , part of my job is to help hold them accountable to righteousness and truth as they do the same for me. One thing that can help ease how judgmental we can be is by having another disciple hold us accountable by confessing our shortcomings to them and vice versa.
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Lets judge Stalins life shall we? (Oor im prohibited to do that as well and youll label me as a “bad” Christian?
His mother wanted him to become a priest. He rejected God and became a dictator.
Killed ,tortured and most importantly persecuted Christians trought his reign(people generally)
Unless Stalin in his death bed repented and actually asked God with his heart changed to forgive him then yes he will be a “changed” Stalin in heaven.
I doubt he did any of those. Usually ones deeds show their heart. So there you are. Its not us that dont get it. Its you and the universalists.
Not interested. And nobody here is trying to “get Stalin off the hook” for any of all the atrocity he is responsible for. So I’m not sure who you are arguing with. Are you seriously worried that God might “go too easy” on Stalin or something?
You literally said Stalin would be in heaven if he changed heart. Have you read my last paragraph?
Whats the point replying to me if you havent read my whole comment?
Sorry … I read it quickly and responded too quickly. Point taken. I’m just not going to agonize over whether or not God’s big enough to “get it all taken care of” in a more fabulously better, just, merciful, and loving way for all parties involved than any of us could ever hope to imagine. So I probably shouldn’t be harping on this any more myself. Have a blessed evening.
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What a nice response. Thanks for being cool.
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Nick…on what basis do you assert that “hell is not a place of torture”? I assume that that is your belief/desire. Is there a basis for it other than an opinion?
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You mean like a bible verse?I take the verses about burning in hell etc etc and all this imagery as allegorical and not literal.So thats my interpertation and my theological belief on this matter.I mean if you believe in it in a literal sense thats fine i just dont
Now we could argue that it might be a place of self-torture where the condmened have no way of perceiving love and campanioship.Just an endless darkness like when you close your eyes and sleep.But for eternity
I have roughly 2 trillion questions about life, death, what’s next?
I know for sure very little. I know hell is not a place I want to go near, ever again. Been there done that. Isn’t it just my luck to have a Near Death Experience in hell? Everybody else who ever had an NDE goes to heaven. I catch fire.
There is a gentleman, Buckin Billy Ray Smith, who is in love with chainsaws and cutting trees. He’s a character. On YouTube.
I have struggled with the question of hell. I have come to my own conclusion. I believe that hell is the second death. Christ talks about “do not fear those who can kill the body, but fear God who can kill both body and soul in hell”. So your body and soul are both dead after the second death. There is another verse that says “the dead know nothing”. And also in Revelation it says that “death and suffering have passed away”. So I do not believe that hell is a place of eternal torment or eternal suffering.
God has given me peace about this.
Are you familiar with the context in which promises along those lines were made?
“God is a God of Justice. and so there is a hell; but God is a God of Mercy, and so it is empty.”
So in this heaven of yours, do women get raped and children abused, or do you have jails or something to prevent things like that and protect the innocent from all this mercy granted to unrepentant criminals?
Obviously not. It’s not enough to be cleared of the guilt of sin; we have to also be purged of the stain of sin, what in modern times are called the defects of character that lead us to do these things. Doing so may take longer than this mortal life.
turn to John . Read the dialogues: that with the Samaritan woman at the well, or that which follows the healing of the man born blind. Look at its pictures: Jesus (if I may use the word) doodling with his finger in the dust ( Jn 8:6,8 ); the unforgettable ’And it was Night…' ( Jn 13:30 ).
I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage - though it may no doubt contain errors - pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell . Or else, some unknown writer in the 2nd century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read. CS
I may have shared this before. But, the boy knew literature and to me he makes sense. I have asked several times a question somewhat related; who in the world could have conceived of the words attributed to Jesus? No one. It is plain to me. No one ever spoke like He did, Vinnie. What is your opinion?
From Bultmann :
‘The personality of Jesus has no importance for the kerygma either of Paul or of John…Indeed the tradition of the earliest Church did not even unconsciously preserve a picture of his personality. Every attempt to reconstruct one remains a play of subjective imagination.’
So there is no personality of Our Lord presented in the New Testament. Through what strange process has this learned German gone in order to make himself blind to what all men except him see? What evidence have we that he would recognize a personality if it were there? For it is Bultmann contra mundum [against the world!].
If anything whatever is common to all believers, and even to many unbelievers, it is the sense that in the Gospels they have met a personality .
There are characters whom we know to be historical but of whom we do not feel that we have any personal knowledge - knowledge by acquaintance; such are Alexander, Attila, or William of Orange. There are others who make no claim to historical reality but whom, none the less, we know as we know real people: Falstaff, Uncle Toby, Mr. Pickwick.
But there are only three characters who, claiming the first sort of reality, also actualy have the second. And surely everyone knows who they are: Plato’s Socrates , the Jesus of the Gospels , and Boswell’s Johnson .
Our acquaintance with them shows itself in a dozen ways. When we look into the Apocryphal gospels , we find ourselves constantly saying of this or that logion , ‘No. Its a fine saying, but not His. That wasn’t how he talked.’ - just as we do with all pseudo-Johnsoniana .
So strong is the flavour of the personality that, even while He says things which, on any other assumption than that of Divine Incarnation in the fullest sense, would be appallingly arrogant, yet we - and many unbelievers too - accept Him at His own valuation when He says,
‘I am meek and lowly of heart.’
Even those passages in the NT which superficially, and in intention, are most concerned with the Divine, and least with the Human nature, bring us face to face with the personality. I am not sure thay they don’t do this more than others.
‘We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of graciousness and reality…which we have looked upon and our hands have handled.’
What is gained by trying to evade or dissipate this shattering immediacy of personal contact by talk about ‘that significance which the early church found that it was impelled to attribute to the Master’? This hits us in the face. Not what they were impelled to do but what impelled them.
I begin to fear that by ‘personality’ Dr. Bultmann means what I should call impersonality : what you’d get in a D.N.B. article or an obituary of a Victorian ‘Life and Letters of Yeshua Bar-Yosef’ in three volumes with photographs!
That then is my first bleat :
These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can’t see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight. CS
He was an honest bloke.
Why couldn’t I put it like that!? “The accounts have the ring of truth to them.” I can’t explain why exactly. I’m not sure myself, but they do. They just sound real and Christ does have a personality and a face and when I’ve run out of words and sit before him, I realize in the most satisfying way that He is the answer and there is nothing left to say. He knows and He is and I grow peacefully and wonderfully still.