"As Christians, we forgive other people (their debts to us) because God has forgiven us (our debt to God)." Its worth pointing out that the Lord's prayer has the cause and effect the other way round - forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those ..... etc.
I think the "as" there doesn't mean "because" but "in the same manner that". Not causal but comparative.
I'm with @mousethief here, that we know how to forgive because we have experienced forgiveness ourselves; and long to be forgiven by God as we ourselves have been able to forgive.
I'd agree too. I had a Greek professor who wrote on this in a journal article I can't lay hands on now; but as I recall, he took it to mean "Forgive us, for see! we are imitating you, Father." Not that our action causes his, or even that our action is particularly good or perfect; but rather that his ongoing action of forgiving us is resulting in us doing the same thing on a much humbler level, and we want to tell him so, like children do.
The two are closely aligned in my book, of course. You can't have one without the other. We can't uncouple or disaggregate them without damaging one or the other or both.
But you knew I'd say that... 😉
The other view you allude to with the devil presiding over some kind of eternal medieval torture chamber and/or infants being condemned to the former is 'popular' but neither 'traditional' nor 'scriptural.'
'Popular' as in 'widely accepted' not as in 'The Beatles were one of the most popular beat-combos of their generation.'
To be fair though, most conservative Christians or literalists don't see Hell as somewhere where the Devil is in charge and having a whale of a time either.
With respect, I disagree. There might be a few uber trad RCs and tub-thumping who subscribe to that model but they are ( despite their noisiness) vanishingly rare.
Even the official RCC line re disposal of righteous heathens and unbaptised infants(i.e. limbo as taught in my Triddy youth) went by the board a bloody long time ago.
'Popular' as in 'widely accepted' not as in 'The Beatles were one of the most popular beat-combos of their generation.'
I would say to the degree it’s a “popular” belief, it’s more akin to the latter, not the former. It’s the stuff of popular culture as reflected in movies, TV shows, New Yorker cartoons and the like—much like the idea that people become angels when they die. But it’s not something that’s actually widely believed among Christians of whatever sort, at least not in my experience.
Alright, perhaps 'widely accepted' wasn't the right phrase to use.
I think it is the case though, that in the 'popular imagination', if I may put it that way, Hell is seen as a place where the Devil presides over lost souls and has a whale of a time torturing them for eternity.
I'm not saying that traditional RCs or Sydney Anglicans see it in those terms.
Generally speaking though, I think this is the kind of view 'non-church goers' have, which isn't the same as them actually believing in Hell of course. But as a 'cultural' idea that's the idea found in popular culture.
Coming back to the OP, I still maintain that there are a range of views even within traditional conservative evangelicalism - if I may use the 't' word again.
I've come across very literal evangelicals who believe in some kind of conditional resurrection (rather than a 'general' one) or who believe that Hell isn't eternal.
I'm not saying they are right orvwrong, simply that a range of views exist even in very conservative circles.
I can understand why @KarlLB focuses on the kind of views he's been exposed to, and I was exposed to them too.
That isn't to ignore or minimise the effect it seems to have had.
But @Leaf, @Lamb Chopped and others have put forward alternative viewpoints from within what we might call a 'traditional' paradigm (or a scriptural one if the 't' word is unacceptable 😉), but to no avail, it seems.
I'm coming at it from a very similar position to theirs, of course, despite whatever semantic and other differences there might be.
I'd see both of them as thoroughly orthodox (small o) in these matters, not that I'm judge and jury on that but can only speak as I find.
The bottom line for me is that Christ talks about Hell, so we have to take it seriously, whether literally or metaphorically.
There are also scriptural indications, notably in Romans 2, of what we might call a 'wider hope' and whilst my own Big T Tradition stops short of full-on Universalism, I can certainly see scriptural justification for that to a certain extent.
I wouldn't 'dogmatise' this of course as us Big O types don't tend to dogmatise anything that hasn't already been done so in a conciliar way. Which doesn't mean that a future Ecumenical Council mightn't come to some kind of agreement on the issue.
Until then, my own particular Tradition 'allows' a range of views on this issue, most if not all of which can be found elsewhere within Christianity as a whole.
Most, if not all, of these views have been expressed here already and by people who come from other Christian traditions, whether Lutheran, Anglican, RC, Reformed or whatever else.
I agree with them all. Or all that fall within an orthodox (small o) paradigm as I understand it as someone on the Big O side of things.
The only issue I'd have is with rigidly literal fundamentalists of whatever stripe and as has been observed already, there ain't many of those posting here these days.
This doesn't make the prospect of Hell or divine judgement any less scary, but it does avoid the rather reductionist approach found in some presentations of the Gospel in some quarters.
Am I the only one who has never heard hell mentioned in church? Oh, just remembered the Creed..... But that's a compulsory part of the Liturgy, so it doesn't count. Never heard it from the pulpit, or in conversations with fellow Christians.
Maybe I am just lucky.
Am I the only one who has never heard hell mentioned in church? Oh, just remembered the Creed..... But that's a compulsory part of the Liturgy, so it doesn't count. Never heard it from the pulpit, or in conversations with fellow Christians.
Maybe I am just lucky.
I won’t go so far as to”never,” mainly because I'm sure I’ve forgotten a lot of what I’ve heard mentioned in church over 60+ years. But I could go with “rarely.” It’s certainly not something that’s ever gotten much real attention.
In our churches, it rarely gets preached about on the grounds that "you aren't going there," so why spend a lot of time on it? Better to spend that time learning how to tell others about Jesus appropriately, that sort of thing.
Am I the only one who has never heard hell mentioned in church? Oh, just remembered the Creed..... But that's a compulsory part of the Liturgy, so it doesn't count. Never heard it from the pulpit, or in conversations with fellow Christians.
Maybe I am just lucky.
There's a medieval doom painting somewhere in a British town, is it Northampton? I'm afraid I don't remember much about it other than it's high up in a big old church and has pretty graphic depictions of hell. I'm willing to believe it might be after Dante, but I suppose it shows that there were visual reminders of the hellfire in churches.
There’s a reconstructed painting of hell at St Teilo’s Church in the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans in Cardiff. I'm not sure if that one is original to that church or borrowed from elsewhere. It’s rather Hieronymus Bosch in style.
There are plenty of pre-Dante depictions of Hell Mouths and so forth in Italy and elsewhere.
As was observed by someone upthread, Dante was dealing with ideas current in his time - and previously.
Heck, grisly and scary depictions of Hell aren't confined to the medieval West. There are some striking examples on the outside of monasteries in Romania.
It's interesting that Saint Sophrony had the scales wielded by a little demon in a fresco if the Last Judgement at the Orthodox monastery in Essex tipped heavily in favour of leniency rather than condemnation.
@Lamb Chopped - what makes you so sure you lot aren't going there? 😉 I'd have thought 'heretickal' Lutherans would be the first to be cast into outer darkness. Closely followed by the Reformed ... 😉
I jest of course.
On a serious note, I wish our lot spent more time preaching on how to live out and share the Gospel more effectively. Our Bishop, God bless him, simply goes round saying, 'Love God. Love your neighbour. Attend the Liturgy.'
@Lamb Chopped - what makes you so sure you lot aren't going there? 😉 I'd have thought 'heretickal' Lutherans would be the first to be cast into outer darkness. Closely followed by the Reformed ... 😉
I jest of course.
Despite the numerous times you’ve been told that these jests, if they were ever funny to start with, have worn very thin among those of us they’re aimed at. Adding “I jest of course,” doesn’t suddenly make them funny; it just highlights that you don’t seem to care how others have told you they come across.
In our churches, it rarely gets preached about on the grounds that "you aren't going there," so why spend a lot of time on it? Better to spend that time learning how to tell others about Jesus appropriately, that sort of thing.
For me, that "you aren't going there" isn't the point. It's all the people who shouldn't be but apparently are who are the problem.
Which is why this thread was started. It's really aimed at people with a relatively restricted idea of who goes to heaven - I escaped an environment where it was generally believed that only Christians escaped Hell, and they were pretty suspicious of Catholics too. I spent years trying to screw myself up to accept that idea and I wonder how people who accept it long term cope with it.
No, those wicked evil RCs would be the first to be cast into the sulphurous flames ...
Or should it be the Copts and other Orientals?
It was the Arians who got there first ...
All of which is a digression to say that it isn't only fundamentalist Protestants who go in for that sort of thing.
Coming back to the point, though, there wasn't an enormous emphasis on Hell back in my charismatic evangelical days, although it was certainly there in the background. One of the criticisms I remember conservative evangelicals levelling at us was that we seemed more interested in having a whoopy time than presenting the Gospel with due seriousness.
Heck, I used to rail about that myself and certainly called for more hellfire and damnation, but not in a tub-thumping kind of way.
I wouldn't do that now of course but would certainly say that it behoves all of us to take the call for repentance seriously. Gamaliel, I'm looking at you primarily ...
Do we 'need' a dose of sulphur to remind us to take our discipleship seriously?
Why did our Lord allude to the idea? I'm not sure we've answered that one, or if we have I'm probably so sinful that I've missed it.
C.S.Lewis wrote in several places implying that the torments of hell are inflicted by devils.
The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce are not consistent with each other at the literal level, which is unsurprising as they are both fictions. Neither is supposed to be a literal report on the afterlife - both are actually about sin.
In our churches, it rarely gets preached about on the grounds that "you aren't going there," so why spend a lot of time on it? Better to spend that time learning how to tell others about Jesus appropriately, that sort of thing.
For me, that "you aren't going there" isn't the point. It's all the people who shouldn't be but apparently are who are the problem.
Which is why this thread was started. It's really aimed at people with a relatively restricted idea of who goes to heaven . . . .
Perhaps that’s one of the challenges here. Are there many such people on the Ship? There are perhaps more shipmates who have it in their history, but many of us don’t even have that.
In our churches, it rarely gets preached about on the grounds that "you aren't going there," so why spend a lot of time on it? Better to spend that time learning how to tell others about Jesus appropriately, that sort of thing.
For me, that "you aren't going there" isn't the point. It's all the people who shouldn't be but apparently are who are the problem.
Which is why this thread was started. It's really aimed at people with a relatively restricted idea of who goes to heaven . . . .
Perhaps that’s one of the challenges here. Are there many such people on the Ship? There are perhaps more shipmates who have it in their history, but many of us don’t even have that.
I think the moral - and on its coat-tails the coping with - problem with Hell tends to infinity as its proposed conscious duration increases.
My first step away from conscious eternal torment for everyone not signing on the JesusAsMyPersonalLordAndSaviour(TM) line was to annihilationism.
Hi
Can people please remember they are not in Hell or Purgatory - please do not use slurs for other denominations or make jokes about them or anyone else going to hell. This is a sensitive hurtful issue for some people posting here and needs to be treated sensitively. This is now the third time I've had to warn about this on this thread
Also @Gamma Gamaliel this is the second warning to you from a host for behaving like this and excusing it as 'joking'. A third time means referral to admin so please dont do that
[ corrected from original host post, as it turns out I've warned three times about this problem but it turns out the first time was to a different poster]
Ok - although I'd have thought from the tone and tenor of my latest posts that my target wasn't other churches, denominations or traditions but the tendency to demonise them. The only person I'm really calling a sinner is myself.
But yes, this is Epiphanies and different rules apply here.
And yes, it is a sensitive subject and people can get upset if we make light of it.
I think I'll stop posting here in Epiphanies and go back to my customary haunts.
Everyone else has covered the ground better than I can.
@Lamb Chopped - what makes you so sure you lot aren't going there? 😉 I'd have thought 'heretickal' Lutherans would be the first to be cast into outer darkness. Closely followed by the Reformed ... 😉
I jest of course.
Despite the numerous times you’ve been told that these jests, if they were ever funny to start with, have worn very thin among those of us they’re aimed at. Adding “I jest of course,” doesn’t suddenly make them funny; it just highlights that you don’t seem to care how others have told you they come across.
Sorry, I missed this. I'll decamp from this thread but before doing so would like to point out that I certainly don't expect to see Lutherans, Anglicans, RCs, Reformed or Christians of any other tradition cast into outer darkness. Nor do I regard them as 'hereticks' - note the archaic spelling.
I would have thought the hyperbole and irony was so self-evident as to go without saying but if that's not how it comes across then the fault clearly lies with me and I will accept your admonition and the warnings from @Louise.
FWIW I thought I'd made it clear that I respect and agree with comments on this thread made by many Shipmates from all manner of Christian traditions. I stand by that. We have far more in common than those issues that keep us apart.
All that said, my comments have clearly come across badly 😢 so I will withdraw them and withdraw from this discussion too.
I don't believe in infant damnation. It doesn't make any sense from any perspective, scriptural or otherwise. I think the way I'd put it is that I believe in a universal salvation rather than a personal one. Christ came for the world to be saved, it would not make sense for Christ to condemn infants.
I suppose in that case I trust God more than I trust the Bible or other humans. And that might be a bedrock for me. Even if I were to say my faith was grounded in Scripture, it's only there to point to Christ, not to itself. So I trust Christ. And I can't fathom Christ - as depicted - damning infants. It just doesn't compute.
I might suspect that people who get more locked into hellfire and damnation want to turn Jesus into a weapon they can aim at other people, perceived "enemies," so they can terrify them into submission. And sometimes that might be tempting (abolitionists come to mind, if you think I'm only thinking of political conservatives.) But it's something I'm wary of.
As @Nick Tamen observed, that kind of fearmongering tends to end thinking, and it's not good to not-think.
In our churches, it rarely gets preached about on the grounds that "you aren't going there," so why spend a lot of time on it? Better to spend that time learning how to tell others about Jesus appropriately, that sort of thing.
For me, that "you aren't going there" isn't the point. It's all the people who shouldn't be but apparently are who are the problem.
Which is why this thread was started. It's really aimed at people with a relatively restricted idea of who goes to heaven - I escaped an environment where it was generally believed that only Christians escaped Hell, and they were pretty suspicious of Catholics too. I spent years trying to screw myself up to accept that idea and I wonder how people who accept it long term cope with it.
I accepted it for long enough to have stayed with me. I've been trying to remember how I came to terms with it.
In an evangelical context, it's not unusual for the idea of the unsaved going to hell to be used to motivate the faithful to preach the gospel. This I found somewhat disturbing. But I don't remember being as troubled by the idea that only a restricted number of people go to heaven while everyone else goes to hell. If your care-providers seem OK with it, if that's what the rules are, that's what you live with. As the years grew tall, I found the problem of evil - the question addressed by theodicies - a bigger problem for my faith.
Possibly similarly to Lamb Chopped, I think there was an idea that going to hell was something that no longer applied to us - those inside the walls (of the church, the Kingdom, etc) - but to "the world" outside.
It seems likely that these ways of coping with the possibility of hell result in the idea being accepted, incorporated into one's worldview. What the consequences of this are in the longer term is another question…
Using Evangelical ways of describing things - if your family is not Christian, "the World" is not outside. It is the environment in which you live and breathe and which forms your closest relationships.
If you don't really know the people outside the Church, I suppose it becomes possible to believe they are TEAPOTs (Those Evil Awful People Over There), but I could never internalise the view - although I'd claim I believed it because it was Sound and it was What Christians Believed - that people, in general, deserved to go to Hell.
Being OK with it because it isn't going to happen to you, for my money, requires a degree of whatever the opposite of empathy is that feels like it borders on sociopathic.
I think it is likely we might be at war with Russia in a few years time. I know nuclear war is a thing that can happen. I know climate change is accelerating and if it is not managed large parts of current human settlement may become uninhabitable - and extreme weather events and other natural disasters may become more frequent and devasting. I know and believe these things in one sense, on an another level I don’t really engage with them emotionally thinking about other things and hoping they won’t actually happen.
I suspect living with a belief in eternal Hell as the fate of some people, or even large numbers of people, is probably quite similar.
I don’t think extinction rebellion protestors live with the kind of mental anguish people experience knowing they’ll be executed tomorrow. People know and believe stuff - but the visceral fear you might expect as an outcome of those beliefs is often not there.
I think it is likely we might be at war with Russia in a few years time. I know nuclear war is a thing that can happen. I know climate change is accelerating and if it is not managed large parts of current human settlement may become uninhabitable - and extreme weather events and other natural disasters may become more frequent and devasting. I know and believe these things in one sense, on an another level I don’t really engage with them emotionally thinking about other things and hoping they won’t actually happen.
I suspect living with a belief in eternal Hell as the fate of some people, or even large numbers of people, is probably quite similar.
I don’t think extinction rebellion protestors live with the kind of mental anguish people experience knowing they’ll be executed tomorrow. People know and believe stuff - but the visceral fear you might expect as an outcome of those beliefs is often not there.
That's a thing. I think I remember hearing someone trying to persuade people that you should be trying to save people from damnation with the same zeal that you'd employ to save people from a burning building. Like..."Your house in on fire! Get out!"
In reality, walking up to random strangers and telling them that you're saving them from an invisible house fire is going to get you a lot of funny looks.
Yes, that meme with the cute dog from years ago comes to mind, and I feel old. This is fine.
I suspect activists trying to drum up concern about climate change have similar vibes. Heck, even when ICE was roving around my neighborhood this past summer, I noticed how it would've been relatively easy for me - a concerned citizen - to spend my days being concerned with my already considerable plate of personal responsibilities. Taking care of kids, supporting @Gwai , running errands, making sure bills are paid, trying to keep some semblance of a social life, staying informed enough on current events so I know what is worth protesting...all of this is already a lot of work!
There's a songwriter, Tyler Childers, I've been in love with lately, and he a song called Hard Times that takes this logic to an unhealthy extreme when you're down and out:
Well the sign at the church says I'll reap what I'm sowin'
But I ain't lost sleep, it'll come in due time
And if the Lord wants to take me, I'm here for the taking
'Cause Hell's probably better than tryin' to get by
My life is pretty good, so don't take that too seriously, but I really don't always have time to get caught up in existential threats. I'm swamped with temporal ones.
It’s partly because there are too many terrible things, too many threats to one’s life and those of the people you love, too many threats to your and everyone else’s eternal salvation. You simply can not panic about all of them at once, you’d drive yourself into a catatonic stupor.
As I look at this thread, it seems to me that we have a division between those who think the default is forgiveness, acceptance and Heaven, and those who think the default is damnation and Hell. Maybe this is just optimism versus pessimism.
It’s partly because there are too many terrible things, too many threats to one’s life and those of the people you love, too many threats to your and everyone else’s eternal salvation. You simply can not panic about all of them at once, you’d drive yourself into a catatonic stupor.
Yeah, in darker modes I think "catatonic stupor" isn't inaccurate. I sometimes think I have a soldier's mindset. You just discipline your mind to focus exclusively on the thing that you need to do and if the rest of the world goes to hell...couldn't manage that. But I can manage this.
Tricky part sometimes is finding the one thing I can manage. It's stuff like "wash the dishes."
This is also why dreadfully hard video games can be appealing.
A big narrative that stuck to me for a long time, intersection of secular politics and theology, was that dispensationalism - that whole "Jesus will come back and hoover up all the good people straight into heaven" thing - thrived on the existential despair of WWI, the failure of the progressive movement in the early 20th century.
People see a world that's collapsing on multiple levels and it makes the idea that they can just "run away" viscerally appealing. And it's easy to criticize at a distance, like a morphine addict seeking artificial happiness, but there's some rational self interest in it. When the world seems to grim and deadening, "go to heaven" seems more appealing. This is where Marx gets his "opiate of the masses" rhetorical flourish, which worked so well that people still quote it over a century later. And hey, it'll get you through a work day.
Of course, for that theology, earth itself is turning into hell and Christianity is the escape from this hellish, overwhelming existence. Earth itself is the incentive to flee into Christ's arms. Put to music here, I like this arrangement.
We really aren't wired for modern life. Maybe hell is for some people a comfort because the moral binary makes life simpler. Of course, you end up making a lot of complicated problems by simplifying, which some of us are - I expect - keenly aware of.
And while some people think hell is a seriously scary question, sometimes there are even more pressing questions, like Can I take my hounds to heaven? Implied in the question is "if not, I'll just go downstairs, thanks."
That song just slaps, and feels kind of relevant to this thread. People have expectations.
… although I'd claim I believed it because it was Sound and it was What Christians Believed - that people, in general, deserved to go to Hell.
Being OK with it because it isn't going to happen to you, for my money, requires a degree of whatever the opposite of empathy is that feels like it borders on sociopathic.
This had crossed my mind, and sociopaths are able to form attachments to groups. But the ability of sociopaths to collectively form groups seems limited.
… I know climate change is accelerating and if it is not managed large parts of current human settlement may become uninhabitable - and extreme weather events and other natural disasters may become more frequent and devasting. I know and believe these things in one sense, on an another level I don’t really engage with them emotionally thinking about other things and hoping they won’t actually happen.
On the other hand, eco-anxiety is a sufficiently recognised issue to lead to the creation of support groups, and to have become a topic for research.
Eco-anxiety support groups have also been created locally, nationally, and globally. These groups allow people to discuss their fears about climate change and receive advice from other members on how to address those fears. Peer-to-peer support groups have also emerged among individuals who have moved through the stages of grief into acceptance of climate impacts as ongoing and, to some degree, inevitable.
Climate psychology is a field that aims to further our understanding of our psychological processes' relationship to the climate and our environment. It aims to study both how the climate can impact our own thoughts and behaviors, as well as how our thoughts and behaviors impact the climate.
The phobia of hell, also known as Hadephobia or Stygiophobia, is an intense and irrational fear of eternal damnation. It goes beyond the typical contemplation of afterlife consequences that many religious individuals experience. This phobia can manifest in various ways, from intrusive thoughts about burning in hellfire to overwhelming guilt over perceived sins.
…
The prevalence of this phobia is difficult to quantify, as many sufferers keep their fears hidden due to shame or fear of judgment. However, mental health professionals report an increasing number of cases, particularly in regions with strong religious influences. The impact on daily life can be devastating, leading to social isolation, difficulty maintaining relationships, and even an inability to function in work or school settings.
For religious people, a concept of Hell as a place of eternal torment for the wicked is pervasive. However, very little research has explored the mental health implications of this belief. We investigate this by developing the Hell Anxiety Scale (HXS) and testing its relationship with other well-established measures of psychological functioning. Surprisingly, Hell anxiety was not related to dogmatism, religious fundamentalism, or overall religiosity, but primarily hinged on self-rated probability of going to Hell and belief in free will. HXS demonstrated very low correlation with the fear and anxiety subscales for neuroticism, suggesting that Hell anxiety may not be due to a tendency towards fear or anxiety, but is perhaps a rational response to personal theological premises. We also find that fear of Hell has strong relations with negative religious coping and death anxiety, thus establishing this measure’s distinctiveness and construct validity.
On the other hand, eco-anxiety is a sufficiently recognised issue to lead to the creation of support groups, and to have become a topic for research.
Eco-anxiety support groups have also been created locally, nationally, and globally. These groups allow people to discuss their fears about climate change and receive advice from other members on how to address those fears. Peer-to-peer support groups have also emerged among individuals who have moved through the stages of grief into acceptance of climate impacts as ongoing and, to some degree, inevitable.
Climate psychology is a field that aims to further our understanding of our psychological processes' relationship to the climate and our environment. It aims to study both how the climate can impact our own thoughts and behaviors, as well as how our thoughts and behaviors impact the climate.
We introduced eco-anxiety into the grief section of our death, dying and bereavement module about 3 years ago.
I must admit when I read 'Hell Anxiety Scale' I thought we'd fast-forwarded to April 1st. But no.
What's happened to a belief based on a Sure Salvation ??
I must admit when I read 'Hell Anxiety Scale' I thought we'd fast-forwarded to April 1st. But no.
What's happened to a belief based on a Sure Salvation ??
Again, even if you believe you're definitely saved, Hell might remain a possibility for people you care about.
This is briefly considered in the study, but there's a limit to what you can cover with initial research.
Study 3: HXS relationships Theory
Given the defining characteristics of some traditional beliefs about Hell (specifically, that it includes torment of some sort across an eternal timeframe), anxiety about this particular possible post-life outcome seems rational in the sense that this response is not disproportionate to the potential harm (assuming certain theological premises). This enormous potentiality for anxiety caused by a strong Hell belief is compounded even farther when the fate of family members and other associates is also potentially interpreted through this framework.
Indeed, from a purely rational choice perspective the question might be raised as to why the widespread belief in Hell does not cause even more fear and religious motivation than it does. While not the primary emphasis of this investigation, cognitive neutralisers for the consequences of Hell belief may play a role in our findings, and it is worth discussing the implications of Hell belief from a purely rational choice perspective in order to provide a reference point to discuss the ways in which Hell belief and fears are manifested in ways that are not strictly rational, but may take on the characteristics of bounded rationality due to cognitive biases.
Specifically, if Hell is equivalent to a large negative utility multiplied by eternity, then, in the spirit of Pascal’s Wager, any non-negligible, positive probability of going to Hell should logically be met with as much fear and religious devotion and activity as is possible for an individual, since any negative utility incurred in this life is automatically outweighed by the infinite multiplier of Hell for eternity. (This reasoning was not lost on modern period proponents of Hell belief, many of whom argued against the existence of Hell in private, but maintained that such a conclusion should be kept from the potentially problematic masses.)
I must admit when I read 'Hell Anxiety Scale' I thought we'd fast-forwarded to April 1st. But no.
What's happened to a belief based on a Sure Salvation ??
Again, even if you believe you're definitely saved, Hell might remain a possibility for people you care about.
If you combine belief in salvation with that "all-embracing compassion" that religious people are supposed to cultivate, this can become on hell of a trap. If you "pray for your enemies," wouldn't that include hoping for their salvation?
It does put a different take on that parable in the gospels in which the poor man Lazarus asks Jesus if he can do anything for the rich man in hell and Jesus basically tells him "No, he had a lifetime to do better. It's too late." And that's one of the few passages in which you do see the more Dantean imagery of unmitigated conscious suffering.
I would imagine that even watching various infamously monstrous people suffer would get old after a certain period of time, if you're not some kind of monster yourself. Wouldn't it?
First of all, Lazarus doesn't ask--it's the man in hell who asks--if that's the way to describe where he is--and it's Abraham who answers him, not Jesus. Second, watching people suffer is not a major component of the life of the blessed--I'm trying to recall whether it's a single Bible verse that even hints at this, or none. It's certainly out of whack with what i know both of God and of decent people. And third, we are again talking about hell as if it were an endless experience taking place in the same timeframe as Heaven. But the pictures of hell we get in the Bible concentrate on finality, not duration. For all we know, hell may be like a point where heaven is a line, a plane, or something higher. Given God's personality, I can't see him getting any pleasure out of having to oversee an ongoing torture factory.
First of all, Lazarus doesn't ask--it's the man in hell who asks--if that's the way to describe where he is--and it's Abraham who answers him, not Jesus.
The Greek says the rich man is in “Hades,” while Lazarus is at “Abraham’s bosom” or “Abraham’s side.”
And what he asks are that Lazarus bring him a bit of water to cool his tongue—to which the answer is “you had good things in life, while he was poor, and he can’t come here anyway”—and that Lazarus be sent to his family to warn them, to which Abraham responds “They have Moses and the prophets.”
Interestingly (and perhaps tangentially), the story ends with this:
“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
Which makes me wonder if we’re missing the point if we take the story as an actual description of possible afterlife “destinations,” rather than being primarily about Jesus’s identification with and fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.
Comments
I think the "as" there doesn't mean "because" but "in the same manner that". Not causal but comparative.
The two are closely aligned in my book, of course. You can't have one without the other. We can't uncouple or disaggregate them without damaging one or the other or both.
But you knew I'd say that... 😉
The other view you allude to with the devil presiding over some kind of eternal medieval torture chamber and/or infants being condemned to the former is 'popular' but neither 'traditional' nor 'scriptural.'
To be fair though, most conservative Christians or literalists don't see Hell as somewhere where the Devil is in charge and having a whale of a time either.
Even the official RCC line re disposal of righteous heathens and unbaptised infants(i.e. limbo as taught in my Triddy youth) went by the board a bloody long time ago.
I think it is the case though, that in the 'popular imagination', if I may put it that way, Hell is seen as a place where the Devil presides over lost souls and has a whale of a time torturing them for eternity.
I'm not saying that traditional RCs or Sydney Anglicans see it in those terms.
Generally speaking though, I think this is the kind of view 'non-church goers' have, which isn't the same as them actually believing in Hell of course. But as a 'cultural' idea that's the idea found in popular culture.
Coming back to the OP, I still maintain that there are a range of views even within traditional conservative evangelicalism - if I may use the 't' word again.
I've come across very literal evangelicals who believe in some kind of conditional resurrection (rather than a 'general' one) or who believe that Hell isn't eternal.
I'm not saying they are right orvwrong, simply that a range of views exist even in very conservative circles.
I can understand why @KarlLB focuses on the kind of views he's been exposed to, and I was exposed to them too.
That isn't to ignore or minimise the effect it seems to have had.
But @Leaf, @Lamb Chopped and others have put forward alternative viewpoints from within what we might call a 'traditional' paradigm (or a scriptural one if the 't' word is unacceptable 😉), but to no avail, it seems.
I'm coming at it from a very similar position to theirs, of course, despite whatever semantic and other differences there might be.
I'd see both of them as thoroughly orthodox (small o) in these matters, not that I'm judge and jury on that but can only speak as I find.
The bottom line for me is that Christ talks about Hell, so we have to take it seriously, whether literally or metaphorically.
There are also scriptural indications, notably in Romans 2, of what we might call a 'wider hope' and whilst my own Big T Tradition stops short of full-on Universalism, I can certainly see scriptural justification for that to a certain extent.
I wouldn't 'dogmatise' this of course as us Big O types don't tend to dogmatise anything that hasn't already been done so in a conciliar way. Which doesn't mean that a future Ecumenical Council mightn't come to some kind of agreement on the issue.
Until then, my own particular Tradition 'allows' a range of views on this issue, most if not all of which can be found elsewhere within Christianity as a whole.
Most, if not all, of these views have been expressed here already and by people who come from other Christian traditions, whether Lutheran, Anglican, RC, Reformed or whatever else.
I agree with them all. Or all that fall within an orthodox (small o) paradigm as I understand it as someone on the Big O side of things.
The only issue I'd have is with rigidly literal fundamentalists of whatever stripe and as has been observed already, there ain't many of those posting here these days.
This doesn't make the prospect of Hell or divine judgement any less scary, but it does avoid the rather reductionist approach found in some presentations of the Gospel in some quarters.
Maybe I am just lucky.
There's a medieval doom painting somewhere in a British town, is it Northampton? I'm afraid I don't remember much about it other than it's high up in a big old church and has pretty graphic depictions of hell. I'm willing to believe it might be after Dante, but I suppose it shows that there were visual reminders of the hellfire in churches.
As was observed by someone upthread, Dante was dealing with ideas current in his time - and previously.
Heck, grisly and scary depictions of Hell aren't confined to the medieval West. There are some striking examples on the outside of monasteries in Romania.
It's interesting that Saint Sophrony had the scales wielded by a little demon in a fresco if the Last Judgement at the Orthodox monastery in Essex tipped heavily in favour of leniency rather than condemnation.
@Lamb Chopped - what makes you so sure you lot aren't going there? 😉 I'd have thought 'heretickal' Lutherans would be the first to be cast into outer darkness. Closely followed by the Reformed ... 😉
I jest of course.
On a serious note, I wish our lot spent more time preaching on how to live out and share the Gospel more effectively. Our Bishop, God bless him, simply goes round saying, 'Love God. Love your neighbour. Attend the Liturgy.'
Yes, fine.
We know that ...
For me, that "you aren't going there" isn't the point. It's all the people who shouldn't be but apparently are who are the problem.
Which is why this thread was started. It's really aimed at people with a relatively restricted idea of who goes to heaven - I escaped an environment where it was generally believed that only Christians escaped Hell, and they were pretty suspicious of Catholics too. I spent years trying to screw myself up to accept that idea and I wonder how people who accept it long term cope with it.
Or should it be the Copts and other Orientals?
It was the Arians who got there first ...
All of which is a digression to say that it isn't only fundamentalist Protestants who go in for that sort of thing.
Coming back to the point, though, there wasn't an enormous emphasis on Hell back in my charismatic evangelical days, although it was certainly there in the background. One of the criticisms I remember conservative evangelicals levelling at us was that we seemed more interested in having a whoopy time than presenting the Gospel with due seriousness.
Heck, I used to rail about that myself and certainly called for more hellfire and damnation, but not in a tub-thumping kind of way.
I wouldn't do that now of course but would certainly say that it behoves all of us to take the call for repentance seriously. Gamaliel, I'm looking at you primarily ...
Do we 'need' a dose of sulphur to remind us to take our discipleship seriously?
Why did our Lord allude to the idea? I'm not sure we've answered that one, or if we have I'm probably so sinful that I've missed it.
I think the moral - and on its coat-tails the coping with - problem with Hell tends to infinity as its proposed conscious duration increases.
My first step away from conscious eternal torment for everyone not signing on the JesusAsMyPersonalLordAndSaviour(TM) line was to annihilationism.
Hi
Can people please remember they are not in Hell or Purgatory - please do not use slurs for other denominations or make jokes about them or anyone else going to hell. This is a sensitive hurtful issue for some people posting here and needs to be treated sensitively. This is now the third time I've had to warn about this on this thread
Also @Gamma Gamaliel this is the second warning to you from a host for behaving like this and excusing it as 'joking'. A third time means referral to admin so please dont do that
[ corrected from original host post, as it turns out I've warned three times about this problem but it turns out the first time was to a different poster]
Louise
Epiphanies Host
Formal hosting tags off
But yes, this is Epiphanies and different rules apply here.
And yes, it is a sensitive subject and people can get upset if we make light of it.
I think I'll stop posting here in Epiphanies and go back to my customary haunts.
Everyone else has covered the ground better than I can.
Sorry, I missed this. I'll decamp from this thread but before doing so would like to point out that I certainly don't expect to see Lutherans, Anglicans, RCs, Reformed or Christians of any other tradition cast into outer darkness. Nor do I regard them as 'hereticks' - note the archaic spelling.
I would have thought the hyperbole and irony was so self-evident as to go without saying but if that's not how it comes across then the fault clearly lies with me and I will accept your admonition and the warnings from @Louise.
FWIW I thought I'd made it clear that I respect and agree with comments on this thread made by many Shipmates from all manner of Christian traditions. I stand by that. We have far more in common than those issues that keep us apart.
All that said, my comments have clearly come across badly 😢 so I will withdraw them and withdraw from this discussion too.
Ach, pardon me for being an intermittent poster.
I don't believe in infant damnation. It doesn't make any sense from any perspective, scriptural or otherwise. I think the way I'd put it is that I believe in a universal salvation rather than a personal one. Christ came for the world to be saved, it would not make sense for Christ to condemn infants.
I suppose in that case I trust God more than I trust the Bible or other humans. And that might be a bedrock for me. Even if I were to say my faith was grounded in Scripture, it's only there to point to Christ, not to itself. So I trust Christ. And I can't fathom Christ - as depicted - damning infants. It just doesn't compute.
I might suspect that people who get more locked into hellfire and damnation want to turn Jesus into a weapon they can aim at other people, perceived "enemies," so they can terrify them into submission. And sometimes that might be tempting (abolitionists come to mind, if you think I'm only thinking of political conservatives.) But it's something I'm wary of.
As @Nick Tamen observed, that kind of fearmongering tends to end thinking, and it's not good to not-think.
In an evangelical context, it's not unusual for the idea of the unsaved going to hell to be used to motivate the faithful to preach the gospel. This I found somewhat disturbing. But I don't remember being as troubled by the idea that only a restricted number of people go to heaven while everyone else goes to hell. If your care-providers seem OK with it, if that's what the rules are, that's what you live with. As the years grew tall, I found the problem of evil - the question addressed by theodicies - a bigger problem for my faith.
Possibly similarly to Lamb Chopped, I think there was an idea that going to hell was something that no longer applied to us - those inside the walls (of the church, the Kingdom, etc) - but to "the world" outside.
It seems likely that these ways of coping with the possibility of hell result in the idea being accepted, incorporated into one's worldview. What the consequences of this are in the longer term is another question…
If you don't really know the people outside the Church, I suppose it becomes possible to believe they are TEAPOTs (Those Evil Awful People Over There), but I could never internalise the view - although I'd claim I believed it because it was Sound and it was What Christians Believed - that people, in general, deserved to go to Hell.
Being OK with it because it isn't going to happen to you, for my money, requires a degree of whatever the opposite of empathy is that feels like it borders on sociopathic.
I suspect living with a belief in eternal Hell as the fate of some people, or even large numbers of people, is probably quite similar.
I don’t think extinction rebellion protestors live with the kind of mental anguish people experience knowing they’ll be executed tomorrow. People know and believe stuff - but the visceral fear you might expect as an outcome of those beliefs is often not there.
That's a thing. I think I remember hearing someone trying to persuade people that you should be trying to save people from damnation with the same zeal that you'd employ to save people from a burning building. Like..."Your house in on fire! Get out!"
In reality, walking up to random strangers and telling them that you're saving them from an invisible house fire is going to get you a lot of funny looks.
Yes, that meme with the cute dog from years ago comes to mind, and I feel old. This is fine.
I suspect activists trying to drum up concern about climate change have similar vibes. Heck, even when ICE was roving around my neighborhood this past summer, I noticed how it would've been relatively easy for me - a concerned citizen - to spend my days being concerned with my already considerable plate of personal responsibilities. Taking care of kids, supporting @Gwai , running errands, making sure bills are paid, trying to keep some semblance of a social life, staying informed enough on current events so I know what is worth protesting...all of this is already a lot of work!
There's a songwriter, Tyler Childers, I've been in love with lately, and he a song called Hard Times that takes this logic to an unhealthy extreme when you're down and out:
My life is pretty good, so don't take that too seriously, but I really don't always have time to get caught up in existential threats. I'm swamped with temporal ones.
Yeah, in darker modes I think "catatonic stupor" isn't inaccurate. I sometimes think I have a soldier's mindset. You just discipline your mind to focus exclusively on the thing that you need to do and if the rest of the world goes to hell...couldn't manage that. But I can manage this.
Tricky part sometimes is finding the one thing I can manage. It's stuff like "wash the dishes."
This is also why dreadfully hard video games can be appealing.
People see a world that's collapsing on multiple levels and it makes the idea that they can just "run away" viscerally appealing. And it's easy to criticize at a distance, like a morphine addict seeking artificial happiness, but there's some rational self interest in it. When the world seems to grim and deadening, "go to heaven" seems more appealing. This is where Marx gets his "opiate of the masses" rhetorical flourish, which worked so well that people still quote it over a century later. And hey, it'll get you through a work day.
Of course, for that theology, earth itself is turning into hell and Christianity is the escape from this hellish, overwhelming existence. Earth itself is the incentive to flee into Christ's arms. Put to music here, I like this arrangement.
We really aren't wired for modern life. Maybe hell is for some people a comfort because the moral binary makes life simpler. Of course, you end up making a lot of complicated problems by simplifying, which some of us are - I expect - keenly aware of.
That song just slaps, and feels kind of relevant to this thread. People have expectations.
Happy New Year in a couple of days.
On the other hand, eco-anxiety is a sufficiently recognised issue to lead to the creation of support groups, and to have become a topic for research.
This leads me to think about what form hell-anxiety support groups might take.
What's happened to a belief based on a Sure Salvation ??
Again, even if you believe you're definitely saved, Hell might remain a possibility for people you care about.
If you combine belief in salvation with that "all-embracing compassion" that religious people are supposed to cultivate, this can become on hell of a trap. If you "pray for your enemies," wouldn't that include hoping for their salvation?
It does put a different take on that parable in the gospels in which the poor man Lazarus asks Jesus if he can do anything for the rich man in hell and Jesus basically tells him "No, he had a lifetime to do better. It's too late." And that's one of the few passages in which you do see the more Dantean imagery of unmitigated conscious suffering.
I would imagine that even watching various infamously monstrous people suffer would get old after a certain period of time, if you're not some kind of monster yourself. Wouldn't it?
And what he asks are that Lazarus bring him a bit of water to cool his tongue—to which the answer is “you had good things in life, while he was poor, and he can’t come here anyway”—and that Lazarus be sent to his family to warn them, to which Abraham responds “They have Moses and the prophets.”
Interestingly (and perhaps tangentially), the story ends with this: Which makes me wonder if we’re missing the point if we take the story as an actual description of possible afterlife “destinations,” rather than being primarily about Jesus’s identification with and fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.