Hell in Christian Doctrine and Imagination (original) (raw)
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QUAERENS: Journal of Theology and Christianity Studies, 2022
According to the view that is relatively common in the wider Christian culture, heaven and hell basically deserve compensation for the kind of earthly life we lead. Good people go to heaven as a worthy reward for a virtuous life, and bad people go to hell as a just punishment for an immoral life; in that way, the scale of justice is sometimes considered balanced. But almost all Christian theologians regard such a view, however commonly it may be in popular culture, as too simplistic and unsampled; the biblical perspective, as they see it, is much more subtle than that. It is important to acknowledge the polemical and apologetic setting of its development. Judaism underwent modifications to protect the Jewish faith and chastise apostates in the face of invading Hellenism. For the early Christ-movement, continued growth was necessary to defend itself against both internal defection and first-century Judaism and Greco-Roman paganism. The early church fathers believed that using the dre...
Hell revisited: A socio-critical enquiry into the roots and relevance of hell for the church today
2008
Hell is being written out of theology and banned from serious conversation; for most scholars and modern-minded people it has become more or less a theoretical issue. Yet it remains alive and burning in the Western mind - there has been a surge in the amount of popular literature written on the subject from the 1990’s onwards. Why the sudden interest? Is there a pattern or social trend that can begin to explain the phenomenon? Part of the responsible way of dealing with the history of a concept such as hell is to point towards the social and political reasons for the emergence and need for certain concepts in particular contexts and circumstances, as they are all utilitarian concepts which are employed and abandoned as needs change and sentiments shift. This article will investigate the rise of the concept of hell by investigating the ancient sources in which it first appears, in order to establish what factors made the concept popular then and now. In doing so, a continuum will be identified between the first origin of these ideas and their present popularity.
Numen Special Issue: The Uses of Hell 56.2-3, 2009, pp. 282-97, 2009
Th e paper re-examines the evidence concerning the early Christian conceptions of punishment of sinners in the afterlife. It commences with the New Testament and the ideas attributed to Jesus and moves on to the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter, composed about a generation later, which enjoyed great popularity among several early Christian circles and was seriously considered for inclusion in the New Testament canon. It is claimed that as it now reads, Apoc. Pet. advances ideas about hell that sharply contrast those presented in the New Testament. To solve this riddle, it is proposed that the Apoc. Pet., as it has been preserved, was reorganized at a much later stage to meet the needs of the developing Church. Its original meaning was consequently twisted almost beyond recognition. In its earliest layers, the apocryphal document appears to have been mostly concerned, just like the New Testament, with salvation rather than everlasting chastisement.
Forever Present To Curse: Establishing the Christian Doctrine of Hell
Hell is a place where, after death, the souls of unrepentant sinners are eternally tormented by the unmediated presence of God, manifested in his wrath. This claim is confirmed through (i) an exegetical study of the words used to indicate “hell” in the Bible, (ii) a biblical-theological overview of the presence of God manifest in either blessing or cursing throughout the Scriptures, and (iii) a consideration of matters componential to a proper systematic theology of hell.
Chapter 2: HELL – and Its Other Side
Justice That Transforms: Restorative Justice – "Not Enough!" , 2024
The doctrine of hell necessarily arises in the context of a Christian consideration of violence. For a theological discussion of violence inevitably brings one to the most extreme instance of violence in God, if the traditional, most dominant, Western doctrine of hell is indeed “biblical” — namely, eternal conscious punishment of the unbeliever. This paper, inclusion of which also is in large part is in Volume Three of this series: "WAR AND HELL – and Exception-Clause Footnote Theology."
Christian Heaven and Hell: Real or Imagined?
Heaven and hell are not, and have never been static concepts. Just like the doctrine of the Trinity and the nature of Christ were not revealed in their final form, but developed over hundreds of years in response to theological challenges, the concepts of heaven and hell have changed over the centuries and have differed between various Christian traditions in order that they adapt to particular social, historical and spiritual circumstances. An illustration of this can be seen in the Catholic concept of purgatory, where the dead are purified of their sins before entering heaven. This concept can be seen as a development within Catholicism which did not make the transition to Protestantism where it was rejected as unnecessary for the salvation of souls. Frithjof Schuon observes that in eschatological logic, “the Catholic dogma of purgatory results from the idea of justification through works whereas the Protestant denial of purgatory results from the idea of justification through faith.” From this point of view, heaven and hell are ends whereas the means vary according to theological emphasis. The use of the term purgatory and the concept which it represents, far from being found within the New Testament, did not come into use until much later than the concept of hell, and as Keck points out, these words – heaven and hell - do not simply appear but are part of “larger complexes of ideas that have important histories.” This essay will explore some of those histories and developments.