“Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Soverieng LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?’” Ezekiel 33: 11.
I know I’m not supposed to disagree with established Christian doctrines, but many of them make no logical sense to me. The teaching on an eternal burning hell is one of those that leaves me cold. May be it’s just my Seventh-day Adventist background resurfacing from where I hid it or something but I can’t fathom how God could justify frying people for the rest of eternity just because they refused Him. Especially once I read that verse above and one other like it (see Ezekiel 18: 32), it just didn’t make sense.
Follow me on this for a while because I know many people who won’t and just flat refuse to listen to this line of reasoning.
There are people in the world who will torture others till they die, then resucitate them to do it all over again. These monsters of humanity carry this on for as long as they can keep killing and bringing them back to life. Anyone on earth in their right mind calls this monsterous and inhumane, sick and wrong, psychotic and insane. For those of us who abhor the halocaust the current teaching on hell should hold no less revulsion.
That’s what I think of the doctrine of hell as it stands today. It’s not the God I know, nor does it match the statement above in Ezekiel. I wish I could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this doctrine is messed up but there are references in Scripture which make it sound like God will do exactly this.
That there is a teaching on hell, judgment, punishment and reward, I can’t disagree with at all because it’s stated pretty plainly in the Bible. What I can disagree with is the interpretation of the texts available on this subject because I believe those who teach this doctrine in its present form ignore or don’t see the connection to the other passages on the subject.
But then something else occurred to me that kind of blew me away. Abraham begged for Sodom and Gamorrah to be saved and negotiated with God down to ten righteous people in the whole of the valley. Moses actually argued effectively with God that if He destroyed the people of Israel right then, His reputation with the nations would be tarnished.
One other thing I’ve noticed in Scripture that might just be applicable here: Fire always symbolizes purification. When a person throws gold in the fire, it means that they are separating the other minerals and “impurities” (whatever is not gold) out to get to the base metal. Scripture calls God an “all consuming fire” (see Hebrews 12: 29), which tells us He is the purifier of all things.
One person I talked to suggested that God Himself was hell fire and that everyone passes through Him. That would be consistent with 1 Corinthians 3: 10-15, which says: By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.
Everyone passes through the fire, it sounds like to me from this passage. Fire is the great purifier of metal, disease and human souls. God will clean up the universe by all accounts and use Himself as the source of the flames. Who else or what else could He use? The Bible claims He is the source of all things, so for something to exist outside His power it would mean there’s another god out there. Since our God denies this as even a possibility, we must conclude that He’s the source of hell fire as much as all life.
An Equation that Doesn’t Add Up
Again, follow the equation through to its sum: If God is the only source of life, then nothing else can have life without Him sustaining them. If this is true, then God will be the one to supply hell fire (in the current teaching of it) with its heat and restoring life to those in the flames. Fire burns up and consumes whatever it touches if left alone, therefore for a human to continue burning throughout eternity they would have to be continuously restored to enough health to continue the torture. Some teachers make this a soul thing, but there again, a soul cannot be a living one unless God gives it life. This means if He actually does this kind of thing to those who reject Him, He becomes like the very human monsters we know mentioned above.
I am not calling God a monster, rather I’m saying that the perception of many Christians on this subject is schizophrenic. They tout a God of love, compassion, patience, mercy, kindness and forgiveness, then say in the next sentence that God will burn everyone for eternity and keep them alive so they can continue suffering. That is insanity to me and any sane person living wouldn’t accept a person doing this kind of thing to a dog let alone a human being. So why do we seem to think it a natural thing for God to do so? He’s supposed to be free of our vengeful attitudes, without sin.
The human psyche inserts the dichotomy into the message of the Bible. We bring the dichotomy of hating abortion because it disrespects life even in its beginning stages, murder, genocide and war disgust us as useless and contrary to God’s nature, then we turn right around and tell those who don’t believe that they will fry in hell fire for eternity in torturous consciousness.
Where’s the sense in that?
I don’t find God’s judgment as hard to understand as I do His followers insistence on an eternal torture chamber. Jesus told us to forgive our enemies, pray for them and do good to them in order to be like our Father in heaven. This attribute doesn’t speak to me of a God who would torture souls from necessity or pleasure for eternity. I do believe, however, that the fire of facing ourselves before God’s pure presence will be enough to either clear away the sin left at that time or consume us entirely if we have nothing of Him left to salvage.
Rebellion against God is rejection of life. If God is the only source of life in the universe, to deny Him this even as credit is to deny life. If at the judgment we come face to face with God, will we still deny Him His place in creation? If we do, what does that say about us? If God is the only source of life and in Him we live, move and have our being, to deny who He is, what He tells us about our design and rebel against His natural rulership of all He’s created is not only foolish but death. For make no mistake, to reject the source of life is rejecting life itself.
Death is non-existence. It has to be the opposite of life for life is existence, consciousness and sentience (see Ecclesiastes 9:5). To have life without the possibility of death is to make us self-contained and self-determining yet our very nature on earth at present shows us that isn’t true.
So, in my understanding of it, God does away with sin, which is rebellion against Him, uses fire to clean up creation of all that is infected or identified with it, then salvages and recreates what is left. I believe in justice and judgment for they make sense to me, I just don’t think Scripture teaches an end to sin the way some believe and have believed for nearly 2000 years.
I could be wrong.
Tags: death, doctrine, fire, God, God's love, hell, hell fire, Jesus, judgment, punishment, sin
June 24, 2008 at 5:58 pm |
[...] Dichotomy … which is rebellion against Him, uses fire to clean up creation of all that is infected or identified with it, then salvages and recreates what is left. I believe in justice and judgment for they make sense to me, I just don’t think … [...]
June 25, 2008 at 3:16 am |
Hmm…I wasn’t actually seeking comfort but pointing out a belief I found to be a dichotomy. I’m not being defensive here but curious if you had any more to say to spark discussion of your view…?
June 25, 2008 at 10:07 pm |
You might want to check out the E. Orthodox Church on this subject. Their doctrine of hell is very interesting. Like the real question: Does evil have a real and lasting ontology? Evil certainly is real, but it never ends but in negation and loss. As CS Lewis said, hell would be more self-chosen by those who would rather be alone, than repent and turn toward God in Christ! It is much harder to love, for this is real and lasting ontology!
Fr. Robert
June 26, 2008 at 1:45 am |
June 26, 2008 at 3:53 am |
Christians must have some presuppsitions, i.e. Judeo-Christian. Without this we cannot have our basic but most profound truth and reality – the Incarnation of Christ. Everything begins here for the real Christian! St. John 1:14.
Father Robert
June 26, 2008 at 3:54 am |
*presuppositions
June 26, 2008 at 5:11 am |
I figured you could spell it…I miss keys all the time.
Robert, our “presuppositions” have to come from the Bible. Yet if we don’t read it correctly or the translation limits our view, we could hold “truth” with error in it. I’m not questioning the validity of Scripture as much as I’m questioning our interpretation of it.
Take the word “consume” as applied to hellfire and those in it. In the current theology it doesn’t mean anything because the word means to completely use up or destroy. And there’s another word used for those who go against God: Destroy. If something is destroyed, it ceases to exist. But in the doctrine of hell as it stands, destroy doesn’t mean what it usually means but something more vague and unending.
Malachi 4: 1-3 makes it sound like it will have a beginning and an end. Revelation 20: 7-15 makes it sound like it has no end. So my question still stands: If God is a God of mercy, grace and justice, how can He do something which on earth we term as madness? And, again, can we negotiate for the lost?
June 26, 2008 at 5:42 am |
Johnny,
Indeed you are right, we must try very hard. I taught philosophy and theology in Jerusalem for several years. We must always honor the biblical text. Exegesis first! On this subject you might like one EW Bullinger. Died 1913 I think, he was a low church biblical Anglican.
Fr. Robert
D. Phil., Th.D.
June 26, 2008 at 7:23 am |
Ok, where can I find it online or is it still in print?
I like the thoughts C. S. Lewis wrote in “The Great Divorce” which indicated hell as being small enough to fit on the head of a pin…
One thing, Robert, that I have read though is that we are to take Scripture as a whole, Jesus even said it could not be broken. I’ve heard about the term “progressive revelation” and understood its explanation. But what I find fascinating is the complete dismissal of some verses which speak to this issue over others which agree with current trends in doctrinal teachings.
I grew up Seventh-day Adventist. Since the mid 80s I have been more or less just a Christian, yet the teachings they espouse on the judgment still makes sense to me–not their timeline or the 144k teachings but the fact that there will be a definite end as there was a beginning.
Take language exegesis if you want to play with the term: When we use opposites in language it’s usually to contrast. Light, dark; day, night; wet, dry, alive, dead.
Of the three examples mentioned, I find it rather odd that death doesn’t mean nothingness but another state of consciousness. It doesn’t bother me or offend my past understanding, it just seems like we can’t believe that we could come from nothing, become something then pass to nothing again. One theologian I knew in South Africa claimed that the soul was nothing more than God’s blueprint of the person’s identity (he happened to be SDA so you’ll understand his preference).
I’m not partial to a view on death right now nor am I looking to accept one, rather I just want to understand the whole of Scripture on the judgment itself. From what I’ve read of the NT, it quotes and regurgitates the OT constantly with a new twist of the new covenant in play. Yet Paul claims that all Scripture is God breathed (2 Timothy 3: 16), and if we take that exegetically, it points completely at the time of the writing to the OT without inclusion of any of the NT volumes which were in the process of being written at the time. In fact, there was no NT writings canonized just letters and a few copies of the gospels floating around.
I guess my point is that with that being the case, their only “Bible” at the time were the Jewish Scriptures of Genesis through Malachi. This being the case, Paul is speaking about the revelation of the Law and Prophets bringing about the clear understanding of Christ’s mission. Thus, the progressive revelation must include anything written before the cross as well all that was written after as having a piece of the riddle.
Does this make sense? I hope so.
June 26, 2008 at 4:11 pm |
Johnny,
I can appreciate your biblical struggle. In fact few people who confess the Judeo-Christian faith sometimes even care. So your search is a good one!
I think we have to first look at the historical situation and again reality, as best we can. The best history we have right now, tells us that nothing was written by the Church, that has become canonical for at least 30 years after the death of Christ. And as you express the Bible of the early Church was the OT, and that was the Greek Septuagint version. And the Jewish text of books was not decided till after the first century, that is someting else to remember. Also, when St. Paul quoted the OT in his Letters, he often does not use the Septuagint alone, but uses the Hebrew text, and is often quite free with the text, or does what we might call, paraphrases it. So we are left with the fact, that the early and Apostolic Church was itself, the authority in these matters, (Acts 2:42). And as we see in Galatians St. Paul was given his whole understanding by personal revelation from God (Gal.1:12…see also Eph.3:1-4). Also, it needs to be noted that the Wisdom Books, from what is called the Apocrypha. These books: Wisdom of Solomon, and Wisdom of Ben Sira, seem to be books that both Jesus and Paul must have read. The whole nature and understanding of Wisdom, was much more personal and even personified, and appears again to be in the mind of their quotes. You should also note that for the Anglican Church, and the E. Orthodox Church, their use of these books, and the whole so-called deutero-canonical books, is quite different than the Protestant and evangelical churches.
So for both the Jews (and the Diaspora Jews), and the Christian Church, the use of the OT included the so-called Apocrypha books. So the issue of what is the Word of God, and how it is to be understood? Becomes even more important. And as I see, cannot be understood without the nature and reality of the historic and Apostolic Church itself. In the end, we simply must have the aspect of historical theology! If I did not recommend it yet? You should read JND Kelly’s classic book: Early Christian Doctrines, simply a must read!
In such a small place as the blog, one cannot express the full reality to all this, so this is just a surface statement. But if you read Kelly’s book, you will be helped greatly. Finally, the nature of NT exegesis appears to be that of the typological and typology…1 Cor.10:1-13.
Sincerely In Christ,
Fr. Robert
June 26, 2008 at 4:22 pm |
PS Johnny, EW Bullinger’s books are on-line, as too JND Kelly’s book.
June 27, 2008 at 3:37 am |
Thanks for the input. Keep in touch. It’s fun to dialogue about these things.
If you ever get a chance, meet a friend of mine named Jerome Wernow. He pastors one of the churches I lead worship for and is a professor at Western Semnary here in Portland, OR, USA.
Here’s a link: http://www.gracepointfellowship.org/