what the hell is hell?
Am I seriously charging this topic like some stupid ram who must slam its head into another? Apparently, yes. And this, obviously, is going to take to life probably several posts over the next few weeks (probably months). I am just about to finish up the third and final book in Brian Mclaren’s A New Kind of Christian Trilogy: The Last Word and the Word After That in which he deconstructs the church’s teaching on the Doctrine of Hell for only the past 2,000 or so years. In essence, and this is probably slighting the book too much - but I’ll take that liberty for now, the church’s tradtional position on Hell is that it is a hole in a sinking ship and that much of what Jesus taught about Hell was not that it was a literal destiny for the un-repentant; rather, it was a rhetorical device using the common understanding of the contemporary Greek/Roman culture’s view of the evil-dead (which was built upon Mesopotamian and Egypitian views) to try to spur the Pharisees onto repentance of a different kind: social justice. Now, let me be clear here, the Bible is replete with statements about justice in the here and now, and, in fact, I am quite blown away by how quickly we gloss over such commands, ignoring something God and the inspired writers considered so vital, but that is not the point of Jesus’ teachings on Hell. Rather, it seems that Jesus is using culturally understood metaphors to describe a real place that he wants no one to go to; doesn’t the Bible somewhere say that God wants all to come to repentance? Thought so.
Why is this such a big deal? I don’t want to and won’t be one of those Christians who is obsessed with the Doctrine of Hell yet at the same time I believe it is a vital Doctrine, one that must be examined (and even questioned), but not deviated from the reality of. What bothers me (here bothers is synonymous with “makes furious”) is that we, now, have many of our own (or so-called own) throwing out the doctrine because they claim that just as no human father would inflict such unbearable punishment on his child, neither would God. The problems with that analogy are many, but the most glaring is that when your theology moves in such a way that it is overtly and uncompromisingly anthro-centric there is little concern left for the justice that God himself deserves. In saying that it’s not loving or just for God to deem the unrepentant to eternal torment (as Revelation and other Scriptures describe) the focus has been placed on mankind and what should be done to them rather than the importance that God in his holiness deserves justice more than any of his disobedient-peon-creatures. Also (and I am going on the offensive against the Emergent-types), there is this mega-theme that runs throughout the Bible called wrath of God, which by sheer tonnage of verses (over 600) far outnumbers those which speak of God’s love, grace and mercy combined (I just stole the last sentence from Mark Driscoll and now that I’ve cited him, it’s no longer stealing). This is not something that can simply be maneuvered around to make us all feel warm and fuzzy in our state of blatant disobedience. To ignore this is to ignore what God wants us to know about himself and sadly, that includes a real Hell and a real eternity.
Jesus spoke about Hell more than anyone in the Bible (eleven times, if I count correctly) and it wasn’t simply a rhetorical tool - it was a severe and loving warning: Don’t go there.
(All this and we’ve not even talked about a verse — so much more to come).
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Comments
you should do a post titled “What the hell is heaven?”…i have my own confusions about what it will be like…
ha, NT Wright had a pretty good article about that in TIME a few months back.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1710844,00.html?iref=werecommend
Wow, that was interesting…I definitely agree with him for the most part, but how does Wright handle the verse about meeting Jesus in the clouds?
Research more. Know where that word is coming from. It is a long walk, proove all things.
“The word Hell, in the Old Testament, is always a translation of the Hebrew word Sheol, which occurs sixty-four times, and is rendered “hell” thirty-two times, “grave” twenty-nine times, and “pit” three times”
….
“It is very plain that neither in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, nor in the New, does the word hades convey the meaning which the present English word hell, in the Christian usage, always conveys to our minds.”
http://www.auburn.edu/~allenkc/tbhell.html
Pray earnestly to the Father to grant you humbleness and understanding; grab a book from the library, or use google.
Peace.
Isaiah 66:24 : “And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched…”
Matthew 25:41 : “Then He (Jesus) will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels…”
dude, excellent post, i hadn’t thought of many of the things you mentioned…good stuff…