MY FRIEND'S VIEW OF HELL:
When reading the Bible, we are limited to earthly analogies. The subject used for the analogy is always within the scope of human experience...
The fire [in the biblical references to Hell] represents the pain experienced at that moment, not necessarily that of a burn victim, but the pain of mental anguish associated with separation from the divine Source of all happiness.
PATRICK:
One explicit earthly analogy for final punishment is the punishment experienced by Sodom and Gomorrah. It was not a mere "separation from the divine Source of happiness" (as you have defined hell). They were punished with "eternal fire." And the results of that punishment are quite plainly stated.
Jude 7 ... Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities... serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.
2 Peter 2:6 ... by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly...
Those quotes are from the very conservative, quite literal English Standard Version. Some writers think they can find some way around the plain meaning by a different rendering of the Greek, but I still believe that God gave us an earthly analogy to final punishment when he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. That gives us a better idea of what the fire is and what it will do than any psychological explanation.
In other words, I believe that Hell will eventually result in the total extinction of those who go there. I do not believe the Bible teaches eternal, conscious suffering.
MY FRIEND'S RESPONSE:
I understand that you take Jude and Peter as predictive in a literal sense. I do not because I view that method as a stumblingblock to truth. With all the evidence available elsewhere, I do not think we can know what things will literally be like after the final judgment. We cannot understand that any more than we can understand how God will raise the dead, or in what form they will be raised. We have analogies that help in some ways and as long as we do not press those analogies too far, we remain open to suggestion and perhaps spiritual enlightenment. Once we go over the line, we loose our ability to see the finer things.
By literalizing, we often trivialize the Bible. No wonder intelligent lost men have become bored with Christian rhetoric. To some extent they are just rebelling against the truth, but some are just tired of hearing someone who refuses to exercise his mind mumble the same observations that some farm-boy become preacher stated a hundred or more years ago.
PATRICK:
I don't interpret the Bible literally in all cases. I no longer believe in a literal 6 day creation. I no longer believe in a worldwide flood (instead, I think it was regional and that the language of Genesis 6-9 must be interpreted as the honest description of what a human would observe, rather than taking the universal sounding language as being literally universal). I no longer believe that the four Gospels agree on every detail of Christ's life (e.g., they give a different order for the temptations of Jesus during his 40 day fast, and they differ about when the veil of the Temple was torn in relation to his death, etc., etc.)
I could list a dozen more examples of where I depart from literalism. I understand that many passages in Scripture are poetic, literally poetic. Modern translations generally indicate the presence of Hebrew poetry by printing that section of Scripture with unjustified margins.
But, in my experience, if anybody tends to repeat old shibboleths about Hell, it's certain people who defend the traditional view of eternal conscious suffering. Just recently a good, godly man who is a simple believer kept bringing up the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man to me as an objection against the annihilation view of Hell. He had no idea that "Hades" was different than "Gehenna," or that the story is not a literal glimpse into the afterlife, or that the condition of ungodly people in the intermediate state is a different issue than their final destiny after Judgment.
Do people who defend the traditional view of Hell have a great impact on intelligent unbelievers? I haven't seen much to make me think so. But I've seen intelligent skeptics be willing to think twice about the idea of Hell when I've explained it as the end of all existence.
I could list a dozen more examples of where I depart from literalism. I understand that many passages in Scripture are poetic, literally poetic. Modern translations generally indicate the presence of Hebrew poetry by printing that section of Scripture with unjustified margins.
But, in my experience, if anybody tends to repeat old shibboleths about Hell, it's certain people who defend the traditional view of eternal conscious suffering. Just recently a good, godly man who is a simple believer kept bringing up the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man to me as an objection against the annihilation view of Hell. He had no idea that "Hades" was different than "Gehenna," or that the story is not a literal glimpse into the afterlife, or that the condition of ungodly people in the intermediate state is a different issue than their final destiny after Judgment.
Do people who defend the traditional view of Hell have a great impact on intelligent unbelievers? I haven't seen much to make me think so. But I've seen intelligent skeptics be willing to think twice about the idea of Hell when I've explained it as the end of all existence.
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