Dear Randy,
I have provided the scripture in the link above with my paper and Edward Moore’s papers on the Apokatastasis. The theory comes from the most prolific biblical scholar.
Best wishes, Shawn
@NickolaosPappas, don’t get lost in the thickets with Shawn and his preoccupations with details about alleged angelic and demonic intrigue. He goes far beyond what the Bible says about any of that. It is all quite a mix of some truth with … well … ‘other stuff’; which in any case, has no bearing on what we are taught about how to live and serve God here and now.
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Dear Mervin,
This question is about the unorthodox doctrine of universalism. All I am doing is explaining this for the uninformed. Orthodoxy offers no redemption for the fallen angels, and this is why there is no teaching of the spirits of God, but does not mean they do not exists as Revelation 4 describes.
Best wishes, Shawn
You just contradicted yourself
So please correct me, what does orthodoxy say about the redemption of the fallen angels?
That has nothing to do with you contradicring yourself. You said
Then
I did not contradict myself. I said I was presenting an unorthodox doctrine.
How though? You just said that the orthodox teaching(assuming you didn’t talk about the specific eastern orthodox teaching ) said this. Previously you claimed that your view offers a redemption for satan. So how is your view rothodox if it doesnt agree with the orthodox teaching?
please clarify
While I haven’t read his new book yet, Bart Ehrman recently wrote an article for Time.
I don’t know if anyone had comments?
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Thanks for that link, James.
Ehrman gives a lot of interesting and plausible-sounding history there. I’ve heard those explanations from others too - about “Hell” really being “Gehenna” - the trash heap outside the city gates, that does indeed continually have smoke rising, but would not involve continued torment for any individual tossed there to die.
The Christian would probably dispute Ehrman’s final conclusion, though, that nobody has anything to fear after death. Even if Jesus wasn’t speaking of unending torture, he still was quite emphatic about the resurrection … of the righteous to life and everybody else to judgment. If nobody is to have any fear whatsoever of judgment after death, then many of Jesus teachings would be reduced to nonsense … e.g. we would be so desperate to avoid wickedness that we would rather forego even a hand or an eye if it took such action to keep us on the right way. Such a thing as regrets still very much existed as far as Jesus was concerned, even if the Greek concept of the immortal, disembodied soul was yet to be merged into later Christian thought.
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Isnt Erhman the man who i made a thread about his views on the afterlife? If you are interested @JES10 here is the link Afterlife and The Old Testament - #82 by Klax
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Well - sure. I’m certain that nobody among recent scholars was suggesting that this place must look actually like a modern land fill, even if we use that for our nearest comparison at hand. The O.T. descriptions of the place where bodies would be found sounds pretty much like what has been described - so … yes. Even from your own link, it looks very much like it actually did happen.
It was nee a rubbish dump Mervin. There was no such thing as everything was recycled apart from potsherds.
Yeah - I already agreed with that correction. What I’m saying is that it’s immaterial to me whether we now refer to it (symbolically) as a “rubbish heap” or whether it was actually a ‘desecrated’ spot of ill repute where corpses or bones might be unceremoniously dumped as a final and loathsome insult. It seems to me that such a place really existed, whether or not it looked like what we moderns think of as a “rubbish heap”. References to “rising smoke and fires” or “undying worms” may still be a bit mysterious and opaque to me (probably something of a cultural remove), but the whole concept of being “on the outside - and desecratingly so” seems to have been a very real thing to their culture.
Aye, sorry, there would have been no fires. It’s all symbolic, fed by Tophet.
Well - apparently there were to the Hebrew mind of the time (or at least on the strength of the O.T. passages quoted that speak of bodies - sacrifices - that had been burned there.) Jesus probably wouldn’t have been referencing stuff that had no connectivity with the cultural knowledge of the day.
Aye, the fires of Tophet were extinguished over 600 years before.
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