Hell? Nah.....

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This post and the next were copied from this site. It follows a section that talks about ecclesia, the word translated "church" which means a group or crowd, a congregation or gathering.

“It is not the will of God that even one of the least of these be lost.”Matthew 18:14

How can we accept the idea of ecclesia if some folks are going to be separated from God and everyone else to exist forever in unending torment? How do we trust in the existence of a loving God or a benign Universe where such a thing could happen? Thankfully, we don’t have to as Jesus made it pretty clear that God does not wish for anyone to be lost and God gets to have things His Way. But then, how do we make sense of hell?Classically, hell is the “you’re going to burn in fire forever if you don’t shape up” theory. No one gets saved from hell, everyone there is tormented in separation from God, forever. But how could that be if it is not God’s will that any be lost? Besides, it seems so unlike a loving God’s plan and there is so much testimony from people who have had NDEs and from mediums that this is untrue, that many simply assume there’s no such place at all. If you are a Christian, however, you face the dilemma of running into language in Scripture, again and again, that seems to describe being condemned to everlasting torment. You may be told that it’s “God’s justice” or a “mystery” and you have to just accept it. What if you can’t?There is a story about Galileo first observing Saturn through his primitive telescope and perceiving Saturn’s rings as smaller planets or moons that never changed in their aspect to the larger Saturn. Except when they disappeared completely. Only to pop back into his sight at other times. Unable to explain this phenomenon - “Eventually, the frustrated Galileo decided never to look at Saturn again.” (Discover vol. 25, no. 6, pg. 36)If you cannot accept the idea of hell and you also cannot escape the concept in Scripture, you are in danger of deciding that Scripture hardly merits your attention at all. Can you stay a Christian and just decide to only believe Him, sometimes? Do you decide that Scripture is just mostly not true? Then how do you know what is true? Pretty soon people aren’t just ignoring parts of the sky, they are tossing their telescopes into the trash.But: What if we can trust Scripture and also trust Jesus and also trust ourselves and have it all make sense? What if, on careful examination, we see that: Jesus never said anyone was going to hell. That is, Jesus never said anyone would end up suffering forever in a state separated from God from which there is no exit.What if, instead, those verses have some really good information about The Way Things Work and the interaction between this life and the next? McKenzie tells us “The Hb [Hebrew] conception of man made it impossible for any idea of the afterlife to arise which was not a restoration of life to the body.” (McKenzie pg. 731) He also tells us that the idea of resurrection cannot clearly be traced either in, or outside of, Biblical sources. By the time we get to the New Testament, there is a developed but controversial belief in bodily resurrection combined with an idea of a “last day,” as we recall Martha saying in John 11:24 “I know he [Lazarus] will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” Resurrection was not an idea accepted by all the Jewish people, but was common among the Pharisees, apparently.We know some of what other people said, but what did Jesus say? What did He actually reveal about the afterlife? What did He say about punishment and reward? Is there some place of fire and torment God will send us if we break one of the rules or all of them?The word “hell” as we use it never appears in the Gospels, though some translations of Scripture have freely substituted “hell” for other words. But many Christians still believe that Jesus described hell as a place where we would be tortured endlessly. A reasonable belief based on standard translation passages like this:

“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not care for you?” …. “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”Matthew 25:44-46

"Eternal punishment" sounds pretty bad. The Greek word aionios (Strong’s Number 165-166) translated “eternal” can mean: no beginning, no end, no beginning or end. It can carry the connotation of something “from the most ancient time” or “before time was.” (Thayer 165) This is an adjective that describes something about the punishment, rather than the length of time one will be subject to it. That is, Jesus said: this is the consequence that has always existed and always will, not: “This is the punishment the person will experience forever.”If you leap from a five-story building you will be hurt. Your injuries are not “punishments” for jumping, this is simply the consequence that has always existed for a physical body: throw it onto a hard surface from a height and it breaks. Similarly, Jesus is explaining how the universe works. It has always been the case, from the beginning of Time and will always be the case, that certain actions have certain consequences beyond physical death.What is the “eternal life” that He speaks of here? Didn’t we say that life was just always eternal? That we don’t “end” in any case?“Life” here is not “existence,” which would be psuche, but zoë which might simply be defined as "ultimate joy." The way things work and always have is that ultimate joy has always existed and some will attain that from this lifetime and some will go to another consequence that has always existed: kolasis. Appearing in many standard translations as “punishment,” kolasis is a form of a root word that can mean “to lop or prune,” “to check, curb or restrain” or “to chastise, correct, punish.” (Thayer 2849, 2851)Being uncharitable has always been and always will be a condition in need of correction, not as in “beaten with a stick until you learn better.” But as in, “take away the part that doesn’t work.” Whenever we see Jesus using “eternal,” we can understand that in terms of His explaining to us the system by which the universe operates: the choices we make here have consequences beyond this state of existence. Our destination is reached, our goal attained, only by certain choices and not by others. You cannot get to the moon by doing jumping jacks in a mineshaft; you cannot get to zoë, (more specifically defined as absolute fullness of life in God or a genuine life blessed in this world or the next) by some system other than the one Jesus reveals to us. Jesus doesn’t say we will never get there if we make that choice, He says we will need correction.

“I am the true vine and my Father is the vine-grower. He takes away every branch in me that bears no fruit, and every branch that bears fruit He prunes to make it more fruitful.”John 15:1-2

SN 5590 psuche - Appearing 105 times in the NT as “soul,” “life,” “mind” and “heart.” Psuche also is used idiomatically, as in John 10:24, according to scholars, and translated as “doubt” or “suspense.” However, this is not an actual translation of the word, but a contemporary rendition of the idiom. The text at 10:24 deals with the Jews demanding of Jesus “How long are you going to keep us in suspense?” and demanding He tell them plainly if He is the Messiah. The notes of the NAB translate the Greek idiom more literally as: “How long will you take away our life?” We might translate it very literally as “Until how long will you cause the life of ours to cease?” We might compare it to “waiting with baited breath” or the idea we can’t get on with life because we are waiting for someone to finish (“I’m not getting any younger here, Fred, what’s your point?”)The Greek word here that is translated “take away” or “cause to cease” is Strong’s 142 airo, which also can be translated “raise” or “take up.” It is certainly possible to translate the passage: “How long will it be until you raise us up from life since you are the Messiah; tell us plainly!” I am not asserting that the Greek idiom is either correct or incorrect, only exploring the layers of meaning so often inherent in the text of the Gospels.Distinguishing psuche from pneuma from zoe in ancient literature is problematic, to say the least, and definitively impossible, at most. And, in both translation and the original works, the writers seem to mean and use words like “soul” or “spirit” interchangeably. Looking at closely related words can be one key to understanding, and in the case of 5590 psuche, we can look at 5591 psuchikos which Thayer defines as “having the nature and characteristics of the psuche, i.e. of the principle of animal life” and also “governed by the …sensuous nature with its subjection to appetite and passion.” Hence, life as psuche is fleshbound.While Strong would have us believe that certain Greek words in this context “exactly correspond” with some Hebrew words (see Strong’s entry for 5590) it seems to this writer as if what Jesus was saying in the NT was significantly tangential to the classic understandings of the Hebrews in terms of life, soul and eternal existence.SN 2222 zoe - Life. From the extensive entry in Thayer:. “The state of one who is possessed of vitality or is animate.” - “of a life preserved in the midst of all perils” - “of the absolute fullness of life both essential and ethical which belongs to God…” - “life after resurrection.” Zoe appears 134 times in NT and many of these references carry more mundane meanings: “alive,” “existing.” But Jesus uses only zoe and never other words translated as “life” such as psuche when He speaks of the nature of eternal existence beyond living in the body on earth.

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If the concept of a place of torment we never get out of is discarded as a misunderstanding, how did it arise in the first place? Possibly, it more correctly arose in “the second place.”Christianity was, for the first few hundred years, scattered, unorganized, repressed and persecuted. But it existed, for the most part, in the Roman Empire; the writings and teaching interpreted by people in terms of this overriding cultural influence. (Keep in mind the while the Roman culture was the overriding influence throughout the Empire, the Greek culture heavily influenced the Roman, so one is inextricable from the other in many cases.) When Constantine won a great battle and became Emperor, he also established Christianity as the state religion.The classic, if not earliest, conception of hell, of the afterlife generally, resembles nothing so much as part of the Roman afterworld: Hades. Hades wasn’t hell, it was the place all people went to live after death and it comprised a variety of “lands.” You ended up in one or another depending on what kind of person you’d been in life. Remember what we call Roman “mythology” wasn’t mythical to them, this was their religion and they had a well-developed and ancient set of beliefs. It's also not much of leap to compare the three parts of the Roman Hades with the Catholic version of afterlife: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell.The Romans believed that in Hades the dead live in a counterpart of material, earthly existence. The righteous live without pain or problem in the Elysian Fields, ruled by the god Cronos in peace and everlasting light. There is “Hades in general” where most of us will stay. But the wicked are tormented in Tartarus, (also the name of the god who rules there) a deep, sunless abyss. Tartarus is probably the only word reasonably translated “hell” in the New Testament. Used only once in Scripture, in the form of a verb tartaroo (Strong’s 5020) in 2 Peter 2:4. From the KJV:“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them to chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; …”In the NAB, the word is translated more literally, and can be either the name of the God or the place. As modern translators of the Bible, Christian translators would want to avoid giving the impression that Peter believed in pagan gods, but also be as accurate as possible, the same passage:“For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but condemned them to the chains of Tartarus and handed them over to be kept for judgment; … ”Whichever translation you prefer, it sounds very much like a sentence written by someone who believed in the Roman version of afterlife. As scholars place the writing of this letter in the mid-second century and as it is “ascribed” to Peter who had been martyred in Rome, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine this letter as coming from a Roman writer. (It was an accepted literary convention at the time for an author to ascribe his own work to a renowned source. Hence, we have the common misperception that Saint John wrote the book of Revelation.)In the Gospels, if what Jesus said is reported accurately in Scripture, and if we are still operating under a very old misunderstanding of what He said, then just what did He say? Consequences after death for actions in life was something Jesus often spoke of, and he very often used the analogy of Gehenna, a valley south of Jerusalem where refuse and dead animals were dumped and burned. (SN 1067 - gehenna - Gehenna, the Valley of the son of Hinnom, place of “eternal” fires, misery and banishment. If translated, usually translated as “hell.”) However, you rarely find a translation of Scripture (the New American Bible is a notable exception) where the translator has used “Gehenna,” the actual place name Jesus used in His analogies. Instead, in almost all English translations, Bibles have substituted “hell.” If we reinsert Gehenna, what can we understand Jesus to have told us?Gehenna, which comes from an Aramaic word ge-hinnam, would be an abbreviated form of the full name of the place in Hebrew, “valley of the son of Hinnom.” (McKenzie pgs 299-300) Historically, Gehenna was the site of a pagan shrine where human sacrifice was practiced and it was cursed by Jeremiah. (Jeremiah 7:30-33)By Jesus’ time, it was so long an enormous trash dump, that the fires burning there had burned for decades, the fire smoldering deep under great piles of refuse. And so we have Jesus’ reference to the “unquenchable fire” in Mark 9:43. Because the Sheol of the Hebrews had long been described as an underground world of darkness, it is easy to see how they made the connection to descending into a valley continually shrouded in clouds of smoke and ash that kept in it a kind of “eternal” darkness.Those who frequented Gehenna were the unclean, the criminals and the mentally ill, ejected by society, identified as suffering for their sins in life. In Matthew 8:12 Jesus is quoted as speaking of some being “driven out into the outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” Away from Jerusalem in the darkness of that valley, there must have been much wailing. Gehenna represented the worst possible outcome of one’s life: hopelessness and suffering, darkness and filth, rejection and isolation. Sounds like hell to me.Gehenna is not the analogy for a place where some may end up after death, but a state of being of those that ended up there, being separated from other people and from what was holy. If you were a leper you could be relegated to Gehenna, to eat of unclean things in the smoky stench until you were cleansed of your disease. If you were a criminal, you might hide there forever, as in your whole life, unless you were forgiven or your debt paid somehow. The people in Gehenna were even outcast from one another, the criminal afraid of being contaminated by the leper, the leper afraid of being robbed or murdered, both afraid of the psychotic, often thought to be possessed by demons. So, for one in Gehenna, being able to go to Jerusalem to live, to worship in the Temple and be restored to society: all such a person could desire, is a very good analogy for heaven. Made clean, healed, forgiven - reconciled to God and to the people, finally part of the ecclesia.We can see how ideas about sin and being outcast, about death and afterlife developed together with the history of the valley of Hinnom. In light of a very long cultural belief that punishment and reward were meted out during this life, if you were outcast, even if you were not a criminal, you must have done something wrong. Originally, having leprosy or being insane were considered punishments for either your sins or those of your father. People who had these afflictions were outcast.Later on, being outcast in a place of darkness and eternal fire and unholy things became the punishment, instead of the thing that sent you there, so punishment moved from something that happened to you in this life to something that happened after death. And because so many who were banished to the actual Gehenna died there, the idea came about that after death, one could go to a place of never ending torment, as the torment of those in Gehenna lasted their whole lives. Soon, death/Sheol//Gehenna became interchangeable terms and conflated concepts, translated into English as hell.To understand this, we always must remember in Scripture, especially in Jesus’ public teaching, He spoke in parables, in analogies and symbols. If Jerusalem is the place of safety behind walls that cannot be breached, of the Temple and the most sacred Holy of Holies, the actual place where God dwells, then Jerusalem represents heaven, the city of the afterlife, the home of God the Father. And outside those gates? Life on Earth: the road, the countryside, all with various amounts of trial and risk, and the worst place of all: Gehenna. If one is not in the afterlife (Jerusalem), then one is in Time: on the road toward the gates of the Holy City, working and living in the villages and fields, or stuck in the hell on earth that some live in, off in a dark valley, making little progress.

“Agree with your adversary quickly, while you are on the way with him,lest your adversary deliver you to the judge, the judge hand you over to the officer, and you be thrown into prison.I tell you truly, you will by no means get out of there till you have paid the last penny.”Matthew 5:25-26

If Jesus did not teach that we would be tormented endlessly after we die, or punished at all, for that matter, it raises an obvious objection:Isn’t there supposed to be punishment?Well, no. John tells us so when he refers to “...Jesus Christ the righteous one who is expiation for our sins. And not just for our sins, but the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2:1-2) Expiation is atonement and reparation, the price paid. A thief will have the things he stole taken from him and returned to the rightful owner and then still have to serve time in prison as punishment. Jesus did our time, so, there is no punishment or John would have been speaking an untruth.But we still have to give back the stuff.There are natural laws to the universe and one of them is that there are consequences to acts. Bread cast upon the waters returns one hundred fold and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Some people call this karma. Whatever we steal, we must send back, sometimes called the “karmic debt.” In heavenly terms we must take back what we have given out that is negative and, in a feat of cosmic alchemy, transform that into what is positive. We can, and must, make darkness into Light.Jesus gave us a symbol for the consequence of creating darkness instead of increasing light: Gehenna, a place where people were isolated, from one another and from what was holy. They were in a word, unreconciled. Jesus brings us salvation, the release from the prison of Time, the power at the very gates of “hell” to overcome being thrust back, so we can get safely inside the gates.

[semaj550 0]

I'll admit that I didn't read the whole thing but I do feel like addressing the idea of hell and God's desire for people to go to hell.Hell is very necessary to preserve the very nature of God. It's not a flaming pit into which God's throws sinners. Rather it is the eternal separation from God that people so openly desire by turning their backs on God. If Hell weren't the punishment for one's rejection of God and one's demand to be at the centre of the universe, it would be to lessen the very nature of God. Of course God wishes eternal unity with all of His Creation. However, he loved humans so much that He gave us free will that we may experience life in ways no other of His creations can. By creating free will, God also created the possibility for sin. If God allows people to sin, in defiance of the things He asks of them He becomes a being no longer worthy of worship; no longer omnipotent.Hell wasn't God's intention for people, it was His backup plan.

[Loismustdie 0]

Lol.

[crowTrobot 2]

Hell wasn't God's intention for people, it was His backup plan.

why would an omniscient god need a backup plan lol

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I'll admit that I didn't read the whole thing but I do feel like addressing the idea of hell and God's desire for people to go to hell.Hell is very necessary to preserve the very nature of God. It's not a flaming pit into which God's throws sinners. Rather it is the eternal separation from God that people so openly desire by turning their backs on God. If Hell weren't the punishment for one's rejection of God and one's demand to be at the centre of the universe, it would be to lessen the very nature of God. Of course God wishes eternal unity with all of His Creation. However, he loved humans so much that He gave us free will that we may experience life in ways no other of His creations can. By creating free will, God also created the possibility for sin. If God allows people to sin, in defiance of the things He asks of them He becomes a being no longer worthy of worship; no longer omnipotent.Hell wasn't God's intention for people, it was His backup plan.

I don't understand how this would happen: If Hell weren't the punishment for one's rejection of God and one's demand to be at the centre of the universe, it would be to lessen the very nature of God. The part I don't get is why allowing people to sin would make God unworthy of worship? Jesus told us a lot of things because we were getting them wrong, I think. He said, shortly after the thing about the Father wanting all to be saved, that you should forgive as many times as necessary - endlessly, according to Scripture scholars. What it says in the quote is that there are consequences to sin, but that being separated from God forever isn't part of that, it is, in fact, contrary to His will. Since Jesus never used the word for Hell, but said Gehenna, (even the word "Hades" didn't mean "hell" it just meant afterlife) it seems to me like we are accepting the pagan version of things instead of Jesus.' It was the Romans who created the idea of an afterlife with three places (like Heaven Purgatory and Hell) there was hades, the regular life after death, tartaroo, hell, and the land of the Sun, where rich folks and the very heroic got to go be with the chief gods. It wasn't a Jewish idea and it wasn't what Jesus said.

[Loismustdie 0]

I don't understand how this would happen: If Hell weren't the punishment for one's rejection of God and one's demand to be at the centre of the universe, it would be to lessen the very nature of God. The part I don't get is why allowing people to sin would make God unworthy of worship? Jesus told us a lot of things because we were getting them wrong, I think. He said, shortly after the thing about the Father wanting all to be saved, that you should forgive as many times as necessary - endlessly, according to Scripture scholars. What it says in the quote is that there are consequences to sin, but that being separated from God forever isn't part of that, it is, in fact, contrary to His will. Since Jesus never used the word for Hell, but said Gehenna, (even the word "Hades" didn't mean "hell" it just meant afterlife) it seems to me like we are accepting the pagan version of things instead of Jesus.' It was the Romans who created the idea of an afterlife with three places (like Heaven Purgatory and Hell) there was hades, the regular life after death, tartaroo, hell, and the land of the Sun, where rich folks and the very heroic got to go be with the chief gods. It wasn't a Jewish idea and it wasn't what Jesus said.

Somewhere- probably guiding your hands- Satan is grinning like a MF.

[semaj550 0]

why would an omniscient god need a backup plan lol

Plan A = HeavenPlan B = HellGod gave us free will, knowing full well that some of us would choose to follow Plan B. His desire for us to follow Plan A is very clear. However, giving us the freedom to reject it requires a Plan B.

[Loismustdie 0]

Plan A = HeavenPlan B = HellGod gave us free will, knowing full well that some of us would choose to follow Plan B. His desire for us to follow Plan A is very clear. However, giving us the freedom to reject it requires a Plan B.

I wouldn't say that. Hell was created for the Devil and his Angels,and the inclusion of human souls just made sense in that if you don't serve God who do you serve? Satan.(Some more than others.) So, plan B wasn't neccesarily created, it's just the logical conclusion if you choose to serve Satan.

[semaj550 0]

I wouldn't say that. Hell was created for the Devil and his Angels,and the inclusion of human souls just made sense in that if you don't serve God who do you serve? Satan.(Some more than others.) So, plan B wasn't neccesarily created, it's just the logical conclusion if you choose to serve Satan.

I don't think we are really saying anything too different.

[BWToth 0]

Why did/does god allow Satan to thrive?

[LongLiveYorke 38]

Why did/does god allow Satan to thrive?

Because otherwise the world would be very boring, wouldn't it? We'd all be Amish or something. Scary, I know!

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I wouldn't say that. Hell was created for the Devil and his Angels,and the inclusion of human souls just made sense in that if you don't serve God who do you serve? Satan.(Some more than others.) So, plan B wasn't neccesarily created, it's just the logical conclusion if you choose to serve Satan.

Can you give a Scripture citation or other reference to back this up, or is this just how it makes sense to you? Which is fine, of course, I just wondered if it came from somewhere.

[semaj550 0]

Why did/does god allow Satan to thrive?

Believe it or not, God loves Satan as much as He does you or I.

[BWToth 0]

Believe it or not, God loves Satan as much as He does you or I.

pretty scary isn't it. If he loves him so much why doesn't he bring him back to heaven. If he loves us why doesn't he guarantee everyone heaven.if he loves satan and man, why not destroy hell and put satan and all men in to heaven?Say you have a brother. You love him. He becomes evil. You have the power to change his inner-brainworkings to make him good/opposite of evil. Do you use your power to change you're brother? I'd guess that you would. God IS in that position but for some reason he chooses not to help his ex-friend satan. Something isn't right.

[semaj550 0]

pretty scary isn't it. If he loves him so much why doesn't he bring him back to heaven. If he loves us why doesn't he guarantee everyone heaven.if he loves satan and man, why not destroy hell and put satan and all men in to heaven?

Are you asking this genuinely or sarcasticly? I'll answer assuming the former.Satan is the ultimate defiance of God. Heaven is eternal union with God and that is something Satan continuously and eternally rejects. Satan separates himself from Heaven.The issue of God's love is a bit more interesting topic though. A guarantee of everyone ending up in Heaven would not be loving of God. It would be to strip everyone of freewill. Rejection of God is rejection of Heaven. If you don't want God you quite obviously don't want Heaven either. God's love is allowing you to make that choice.In a sense, God does guarantee you Heaven though. All you have to do is repent your sins and seek reconciliation with God. There isn't anything you can do that God won't forgive; all you have to do is choose God.

[solderz 0]

Jesus is Satan....and he was just ****ing with you.

[BWToth 0]

In a sense, God does guarantee you Heaven though. All you have to do is repent your sins and seek reconciliation with God. There isn't anything you can do that God won't forgive; all you have to do is choose God.

So what happens to the brazilian tree dancer from the other thread? Heaven or Hell?

[semaj550 0]

So what happens to the brazilian tree dancer from the other thread? Heaven or Hell?

I couldn't tell you, I'm not God.

[BWToth 0]

I couldn't tell you, I'm not God.

According to you, if you don't repent and seek reconciliation you go to hell, so according to that, tree dancer goes to hell. right?

[BuffDan 0]

According to you, if you don't repent and seek reconciliation you go to hell, so according to that, tree dancer goes to hell. right?

Unless he recants a microsecond before death of course. Same thing with the murderer, rapist, etc...

[semaj550 0]

According to you, if you don't repent and seek reconciliation you go to hell, so according to that, tree dancer goes to hell. right?

I'm going to have to wait to come back to this after work but I'll do my best to get back to you on this one tonight.

[BWToth 0]

fair enough.

[11 to 1 0]

Unless he recants a microsecond before death of course. Same thing with the murderer, rapist, etc...

This is a guy in a Brazilian rainforest who knows nothing but what he knows from his tribe. He is doing his best to be the best persion he can be. He believes that God, by whatever name he calls that) resides in the tree. He obeys all laws as he knows them, is kind to his 5 wives and various children and generous to the less fortunate members of his tribe. What mistake has he made so egregious that he will go to hell if he doesn't recant....what and to whom?

[BWToth 0]

What mistake has he made so egregious that he will go to hell if he doesn't recant?

I think that's the point he's making.