Hell, is it a part of the Gospel?

The “Hell”  word in th eBible is a bad translation of the following: 

Gehenna

Hades

Sheol

Death

“The bottomless pit”

Tartarus 

Aionios fire 

Aionios punishment 

The lake of fire 

“Where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched”

“Weeping and gnashing of teeth”

Etc.

All of these have contexts and original meanings which don’t mean “eternal torment in the afterlife.”

Hell is unbiblical."

~J.M Wright

"The word "Hell" is not in the Bible. "Gehenna" is. "Hell" is a mistranslation. "Gehenna" is the right translation. Either you're ignorant of this, or you've read it and yet choose to deliberately go with the mistranslation. Now you know.

The concept of "hell", or eternal torment in the afterlife is literally and exactly nowhere in the Old Testament. "Gehenna" however is in the OT just a few times. It is a literal place, right outside of Jerusalem, where Israel practiced gross idolatry and later became called "the Valley of Slaughter" because of its reputation of idolatry and loathsomeness. Dead bodies were thrown in Gehenna and they were eaten by worms and turned to ashes by fire.

This provides the context of Jesus’ usage of "Gehenna". Jesus quotes Isaiah when talking about Gehenna when he says "where the worm doesn't die and the fire is not quenched". He's referring back to the valley of Gehenna, directly quoting Isaiah 66:24, which says "...the dead bodies, the worms that eat them up will not die and the fire that consumes them will not be quenched." This literally happened. Dead bodies were eaten up by unquenchable fire and worms fed on the dead bodies until they were consumed to nothing. Interesting thing is, go to that Valley of Slaughter today and look in it and you will not see the fire still burning nor will you see immortal worms feeding on miraculously preserved dead bodies. The bodies are gone, the worms are gone, the fire is gone. The point is that the fire would not be deterred in burning up the dead bodies to nothing, the worms would not be deterred in eating up the dead bodies to nothing. And keep in mind these are mortal dead bodies in this life, not immortal conscious souls in the afterlife.

To read eternal torment into that is either gross ignorance or deliberate deception.

Even "eternal fire" or "eternal punishment" is a mistranslation, as "eternal" is a mistranslation of the Greek word "aionios", which does not mean "never-ending" or anything of the sort. It means "of the age to come", or to Plato, who may have invented the word, it means something which has its source in God and the unseen realm. It has nothing to do with ongoing, never-ending time.

There is literally no verse in scripture that can prop up the ridiculous, pagan, non-Jewish concept of eternal torment.

Spread the word to try to get rid of the ignorance on this issue.

This is not some new politically correct idea that people are making up because they don't like hard biblical truths. There is a long list of early fathers who rejected eternal torment because they understood these correct meanings of words, they didn't believe in the immortality of the soul (a pagan Greek belief), they had a touch of sanity (a good thing to have for theology), and they recognized that the scriptures either taught conditional immortality and/or final universal reconciliation. Eternal torment was the minority belief in the early church, and amongst those who were less familiar with the original meanings of the text. It did not become the prominent belief until after 500 AD, with the help of the violent organized institutional church established under Constantine.

Hell is not a good translation of Gehenna and it never will be. Gehenna was a real place with a real history in the Jewish mind, and it must be read in that context. Once it is read in that context, the idea of eternal torment falls to pieces, as it should."

~J.M Wright

"Many raised in church still don’t know there’s no literal place of ‘hell’ or torment created by God. Did you know Jesus never once talked about hell? Or that the ancient Jews didn’t believe in a place of punishment or reward after death? Were you aware not one of the four (4) different words turned into ‘hell’ in our Bibles have anything to do with a place where God torments humans (or angels) and that the entire idea was ‘engineered’ into scripture based on mythical Greek philosophy?

Maybe you didn’t know Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (around AD 400), and then later on King James added these ideas of ‘everlasting torment’ in their Bibles for the effect of fear and control over people who were then told to only read their ‘authorized versions’, OR that every translation which now has hell in it merely followed their lead along the way.

Did you know there are at least 28 translations (some dating all the way back to the 1700’s) that never once speak of hell or the idea of everlasting torment for humans?

The truth of the matter is- ‘church taught history’ and ‘actual world history’ don’t always line up with each other." 

~D. Carringer 

"The Greek word “aionios" is the word translated "eternal" every time you see it in the New Testament, including where it talks about “eternal fire” and “eternal punishment”. This word “aionios" does not mean never-ending. The Greeks had a word which signified “endless” ("aidios") but that word was not employed for these matters.

Dr. J.W. Hansen, in his short book Aion-Aionios, mentions Aristotle’s use of the word aidios saying,

“[Aristotle] says: ‘aion sunekes kai aidios,’ ‘an eternal (aidios) aion 'pertaining to God.’ The fact that Aristotle found it necessary to add aidios to aion to ascribe eternity to God demonstrates that he found no sense of eternity in the word aion, and utterly discards the idea that he held the word to mean endless duration.” (p. 22)

The word “aionios" is the adjective form of aion which is where we get our word “eon”, which means an age most of the time but also means "an unknown period". It is equal to the Hebrew word "olam", which can mean "age", or can communicate something more poetic like if one were to say something is "into the horizon." "Olam” is used for hills ("the everlasting hills"), ages ("from everlasting to everlasting" literally "from age to age"), and judgments on Israel in the Old Testament that had a beginning and an end.

G. Campbell Morgan, a now deceased yet renowned Bible expositor, makes the following remarkable observation concerning “aionios”:

"Let me say to Bible students that we must be very careful how we use the word eternity. We have fallen into great error in our constant use of that word. There is no word in the whole book of God corresponding with our eternal, which, as commonly used among us, means absolutely without end."

• "It must be admitted that the Greek word which is rendered 'eternal' does not, in itself, involve endlessness, but rather, duration, whether through an age or succession of ages, and that it is therefore applied in the New Testament to periods of time that have had both a beginning and ending." (Elliots Commentary on the Whole Bible)

• "The adjective 'aionios' in like manner carries the idea of time. Neither the noun nor the adjective in themselves carries the sense of 'endless' or 'everlasting.' Aionios means enduring through or pertaining to a period of time." (Dr. Marvin Vincent, Word Studies of the New Testament)

• "Since aion meant 'age,' aionios means, properly, 'belonging to an age,' or 'age-long,' and anyone who asserts that it must mean 'endless' defends a position which even Augustine practically abandoned twelve centuries ago. Even if aion always meant 'eternity,' which is not the case in classic or Hellenistic Greek, aionios could still mean only 'belonging to eternity' and not 'lasting through it.'" (Dr. Farrars book, Mercy and Judgment)

• "Since, as we have seen, the noun aion refers to a period of time it appears, very improbable that the derived adjective aionios would indicate infinite duration, nor have we found any evidence in Greek writing to show that such a concept was expressed by this term." (Time and Eternity by G. T. Stevenson)

• "The Bible has no expression for endlessness. All the Biblical terms imply or denote long periods." (Professor Herman Oldhausen, German Lutheran theologian)

• "The Hebrew was destitute of any single word to express endless duration. The pure idea of eternity is not found in any of the ancient languages." (Professor Knappe of Halle)

Professor J.I. Packer admits, “Granted that, as is rightly urged, ‘eternal’ (aionios) in the New Testament means ‘belonging to the age to come’ rather than expressing any directly chronological notion [as in endlessness].”

Professor N.T. Wright agrees and says the following:

“Aionios relates to the Greek ‘aion’, which often roughly translates the Hebrew ‘olam’. Some Jews thought of there being two ‘ages’ – ha olam ha-zeh, the present age, and ha olam ha-ba, the age to come. Aionian punishment and the like would be the punishment in the age to come.”

“Eternal life” and “eternal punishment” could more properly be translated “life of the age to come” and “punishment of the age to come”, not denoting endlessness. The “life of the age to come” does not end, and this is not signified by the word "aionios", but because it is the divine life of the resurrection where death no longer reigns and we exist for what we were purposed, not to mention that other Scriptures talk about us being given immortality. The “punishment of the age to come” does end, because God’s justice is restorative, punishment is not what any creature is purposed for, and God’s will is for all to be reconciled and have life.

If it is confusing to you that “Aionios” is used for a life that doesn’t end and for a punishment that does end, then let me provide an easy example. If I say “I will eat cake tomorrow” and “I will die tomorrow”, I have used the word “tomorrow” both for something that will be temporary as well as for something that will be permanent. “Tomorrow” does not describe something temporary or permanent, but merely a future time when something will happen.

The fact that Bibles should correctly read “punishment of the age to come” and “fire of the age to come” instead of “eternal punishment/fire” opens up a variety of possibilities, even ones that St. Gregory of Nyssa entertained, which was that this punishment was curative.

What about where it says of the beast and the false prophet: "The smoke of their torment rises forever and ever"? The original Greek word is:

"aionas ton aionon."

"Aion" is where we get our word "eon" and it means essentially the same thing: an age. "Ton" does not mean "and" but rather "of" or "belonging to". So a proper translation of this is "The smoke of their torment rises unto the age of the ages." This makes sense when you realize that forever and ever doesn't even make sense. Forever and then another ever? Forever plus some more ever? “Forever and ever” to us has become a way to emphasize a things eternality, but in the Greek such a concept did not exist and its redundancy would have been considered ridiculous.

"Perhaps the most significant example of this for our purposes is Isaiah 34:9-10, for it closely parallels the two passages in Revelation. In this passage Isaiah says that the fire that shall consume Edom shall burn 'night and day' and 'shall not be quenched.' Its smoke 'shall go up forever' and no one shall pass through this land again 'forever and ever.' Obviously, this is symbolic, for the fire and smoke of Edom’s judgment isn’t still ascending today. If this is true of Isaiah, we should be less inclined to interpret similar expressions in the book of Revelation literally." - Greg Boyd

Nowhere in Scripture does it declare that the consequence of sin has to do with some legal punishment over some eternal length of time, namely never-ending, but everywhere it says that the consequence of sin is an ontological corruption leading to death. A death that God triumphs over in Christ, who, as the second Adam, is as consequentially universal in scope as the first Adam."

~J.M Wright 

God's justice - is to show mercy and compassion

“This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another." Zechariah 7:9

"Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. ..."

Isaiah 30:18

""The lake of fire" is for cleansing the image of God we are all created in. All through the scriptures God is likened to fire. In the OT the Jews never talked about "hell" but about a refiners crucible that removed dross from the precious metals. The word wrongly translated as "torment" literally means a testing stone, and it was a kind of stone a refiner of metal would use, where they would rub metal on this stone and smoke would rise to determine the quality of the metal. It's true meaning is taken away in strongs concordance and others like it that have many theological biases, some concondordances don't hide these meanings. "Fire" is literally in Greek "pur" and is where the word pure comes from and purifying. Sulfur and brimstone both speak of cleansing and also the Divine Presence. Funny people say hades (wrongly translated as "hell") is forever, and yet it is thrown into Gods presence(the lake of fire) where people, probably including you and me, are "tested"(revealed the true value of) with Gods sulfur and brimstone.. all metaphors - pointing to God healing humankind in His Divine Presence - from the highly metaphorical book of revelation. You can't pick and choose what parts of the book are metaphors and what parts are not metaphors according to YOUR doctrines. Jesus did say that ALL will be purified("salted") with fire. And Paul said that our God is a consuming fire. Guess what fire does? It purifies metal. Jesus did liken us to a lost coin. A coin never looses its value when lost and dirty, but it is found and put under fire to cleanse the dirt off of it and in turn with a whole lotta fiery love - reveals the image(of God) that was always there!"

~M. Knickle 

"Punishment in NT:

The word for punishment is kolasis. The word was originally a gardening word, and its original meaning was pruning trees.

In Greek there are two words for punishment, timoria and kolasis, and there is a quite definite distinction between them.

Aristotle defines the difference; kolasis is for the sake of the one who suffers it; timoria is for the sake of the one who inflicts it. Plato says that no one punishes (kolazei) simply because he has done wrong - that would be to take unreasonable vengeance (timoreitai). We punish (kolazei) a wrong-doer in order that he may not do wrong again (Protagoras 323 E).

Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis 4.24; 7.16) defines kolasis as pure discipline, and timoria as the return of evil for evil.

Aulus Gellius says that kolasis is given that a man may be corrected; timoria is given that dignity and authority may be vindicated (The Attic Nights7.14). The difference is quite clear in Greek and it is always observed. Timoria is retributive punishment. Kolasis is always given to amend and to cure.

(William Barclay from The Apostles Creed)

Timoria, vengeful punishment, is used twice

Acts 22:5, 26:11

Both of these are Paul’s account of how he used to persecute Christians. God is not like Saul, the Pharisees and Priests.

Kolasis, the divine corrective punishment is the judgment of Matt 25:46, I John 4:17-18. There is a corrective punishment in the age (aionia) to come. Some have already been perfected in love and had all fear cast out. They abide in love and in life in God. However, the judgment (crisis/decision) is for those who have lives in the flesh and not yet accepted this love and life. They will be corrected and perfected by God’s love and life in Christ by the Spirit. The plan of Abba, Jesus and Holy Spirit is the restoration of all things to live in their perfect love."

~Eric Wilding

Matthew 25:46 And, these, shall go away, into, age-abiding, correction, but, the righteous, into, age-abiding, life.

(Literal translation)

""What is the Vengeance and Wrath of God? 

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  (Romans 12:19-21)

The vengeance and wrath of God is not as humans think of these qualities and actions.  God is not a hypocrite, asking humans to do something that He would not do, feed and give to those in need of grace, provision and love.  His vengeance and wrath is always higher than human legalistic, elitist and  exclusivitic vengeance and wrath.    

This can be a difficult message to receive.  Some will go on believing that God is angry and they will fear this God.  Some will look to their works (law keeping or faith) to save them from this angry God.  In turn, they believe that others are still under the anger of God because these others do not keep the law or have faith the way they day.  They will go on creating more enemies of their God, further hardening the hearts of others, who already believe that they are the enemies of God.  This is not the true God, but the god of children lost in the nightmare of their darkened imaginations of what they suppose wrath to be.  

Jesus shows us the vengeance and wrath of God, passionately loving those who claim to be His enemies, overcoming evil with good.  Jesus poured out the Father's vengeance and wrath from the cross, forgiving those who killed Him.    God's wrath (Greek, "Orge") is His passion, overwhelming anything that would oppose His love.

God's wrath and vengeance looks like His life by His Spirit being poured out on His enemies and filling them.  He raises His "enemies"--everyone who thought they were children of anger--to be seated with Him in Jesus Christ in the heavenly places to show the immeasurable richness of His mercy, grace and love (Ephesians 2: 1-10).  He did this for all, when we were powerless, dead enemies; He reconciled all the ungodly and reconciled them to Himself--made us all one with and in Himself (Romans 5: 1-11).  He did not do this for some of His enemies, the ones with less sins than others.  He did it for all, from the least to the greatest--like Saul of Tarsus. 

If one believes one is an "enemy" of God and doesn't want to receive this love and oneness, it seems like hot coals on their heads rather than fiery tongues of fire. The wine of joy can seem like the grapes of wrath, and the heaven can seem like hell.  This is the condition for many "believers" and "unbelievers" now, because they do not believe the fullness of the gospel.  

Nevertheless, vengeance and wrath is unchanging love that frees and restores the blinded, the lame, the brokenhearted, the oppressed, the wicked, the disobedient and the dead. 

Abba, Jesus and Holy Spirit always overcomes evil with good for all."

~Eric Wilding

"Your understanding of the nature of Hell will be conditioned by the nature of the God you preach. What motivated Paul’s ministry? “The fear of Hell compels us” or “the love of Christ compels us?” What if we’ve missed the boat altogether … what if CS Lewis and so many of the Orthodox fathers and Catholic mystics were right in saying that the love of God is the very thing that lights up the fires of Hell? What if God IS Hell? What if Hell is Heaven wrongly received? What if our God is an all-consuming fire, and His inescapable love is the very thing that torments those who reject it? What if His loving forgiveness is experienced as coals of fire on the heads of those who refuse to embrace it, consumed with shame, guilt and remorse? And meanwhile, what if the gates of Heaven really are always standing open day and night (Rev. 21), open to those who refuse to approach Him, though His fierce love is always toward them, as Christ preaches to those souls in prison, as the Father stands reasoning with the elder brother outside the party, and as the Good Shepherd never ceases to look for the lost sheep?

What if we've had "wrath" itself totally wrong? What if Paul was right in Romans 1 in saying God's wrath is against the ungodliness that destroys us? Is "wrath" a vindictive aspect of His divine retribution, or could it be a facet of God's Fatherly, corrective, restorative love that is FOR us?

I don't claim a metaphysical understanding of Hell, but this is the direction I lean because I have a Christ-conditioned understanding of what God looks like.

Gregory Nazianzen

"God Himself is Paradise and punishment for man, since each tastes God’s energies according to the condition of his soul.”

Isaac the Syrian

“The power of love works in two ways: it torments sinners, even as happens here when a friend suffers from a friend; but it becomes a source of joy for those who have observed its duties. … As for me I say that those who are tormented in hell are tormented by the invasion of love. What is there more bitter and violent than the pains of love? Those who feel they have sinned against love bear in themselves a damnation much heavier than the most dreaded punishments. The suffering with which sinning against love afflicts the heart is more keenly felt than any other torment. It is absurd to assume that the sinners in hell are deprived of God’s love. Love is offered impartially. But by its very power it acts in two ways. It torments sinners, as happens here on earth when we are tormented by the presence of a friend to whom we have been unfaithful. And it gives joy to those who have been faithful. … That is what the torment of hell is in my opinion: remorse. But love inebriates the souls of the sons and daughters of Heaven by its delectability.”

Thomas Merton

“Our God also is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy. But if we refuse His love and remain in the coldness of sin and opposition to Him and to other men then will His fire (by our own choice rather than His) become our everlasting enemy, and Love, instead of being our joy, will become our torment and our destruction.”

Peter Kreeft

“In reality, the damned are in the same place as the saved—in reality! But they hate it; it is their Hell. The saved love it, and it is their Heaven. It is like two people sitting side by side at an opera or a rock concert: the very thing that is Heaven to one is Hell to the other. Dostoyevski says, 'We are all in paradise, but we won’t see it'…Hell is not literally the 'wrath of God.' The love of God is an objective fact; the 'wrath of God' is a human projection of our own wrath upon God, as the Lady Julian saw—a disastrous misinterpretation of God’s love as wrath. God really says to all His creatures, 'I know you and I love you' but they hear Him saying, 'I never knew you; depart from me.' It is like angry children misinterpreting their loving parents’ affectionate advances as threats. They project their own hate onto their parents’ love and experience love as an enemy—which it is: an enemy to their egotistic defenses against joy…

“Since God is love, since love is the essence of the divine life, the consequence of loss of this life is loss of love...Though the damned do not love God, God loves them, and this is their torture. The very fires of Hell are made of the love of God! Love received by one who only wants to hate and fight thwarts his deepest want and is therefore torture. If God could stop loving the damned, Hell would cease to be pure torture. If the sun could stop shining, lovers of the dark would no longer be tortured by it. But the sun could sooner cease to shine than God cease to be God...The lovelessness of the damned blinds them to the light of glory in which they stand, the glory of God’s fire. God is in the fire that to them is Hell. God is in Hell ('If I make my bed in Hell, Thou art there' [Ps 139:8]) but the damned do not know Him.”

Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos

"The general teaching of the holy Fathers of the Church is that Paradise and hell do not exist from God’s point of view, but from man’s. It is true that Paradise and hell exist as two ways of life, but it is not God who created them. In the patristic tradition it is clear that there are not two ways, but God Himself is Paradise for the saints and God Himself is hell for the sinners.

"This is inseparably linked with the teaching of the Fathers about reconciliation and man’s enmity towards God. Nowhere in holy Scripture does it appear that God is reconciled with men, but that Christ reconciles man to God. Moreover it appears in the whole patristic Tradition that God is never opposed to man, but man opposes himself to God by having no communion and participation with Him. Thus man makes God his enemy and God does not make man His enemy. Through the sin which he commits, man sees God in an angry and hostile way.""

~John Crowder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzgWjG-0dac (God is Hell - The Jesus Trip)

"When you are presented with the gospel and you resist it, that is clearly a dysfunction of your will.

If you come to the final judgment, would God be perfectly just and perfectly loving if He condemned you for saying 'No' to Him with a dysfunctional will? That is like blaming a blind person for not being seeing, and that is not right.

In the way that Paul had his eyes opened to Christ on the road to Damascus, at the final judgment every eye will see Him... and when every eye will see Him, the things which cause dysfunction to our will (the world, the flesh and the devil) will be removed from our eyes." ~Maximus the Confessor

The Saul/Paul Prototype 

by Dr. of Love, Eric Wilding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3RI-HOJC8s

Lazarus and the Rich Man (Part 1) A Parable?

by Dr. of Love, Eric Wilding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G54G6_JGwg

Parable of the Wedding Feast: For Many Are Called, But Few Are Chosen

by Dr. of Love, Eric Wilding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9e7AVMQ3ac

"There are many people who claim they went to Heaven and saw that EVERYONE was going to be saved. Why should their testimony be rejected? Those who saw everyone saved have FAR more scriptural support than those who believe billions are going to be endlessly tormented. Why should we accept one group’s testimony over the other? It is also possible that their fear-filled minds misinterpreted what they were seeing. We must get our information from the scriptures, NOT from a handful of dreams someone may or may not have had. Bad nightmares do not make for sound doctrine upon which to build one’s house."

~G.Amirault

What in Hell (Holy Saturday)

by Dr. of Love, Eric Wilding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOthRxmXCPE

Hell's Illusion

by Don Keathley 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILK_eem1Xi0

Aion Part 1 | Eternal Punishment is Not Biblical

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77xXIZyP34

Did Jesus come to save us from hell?

by Michael McElyea 

https://www.facebook.com/michael.mcelyea.3/videos/10214846182974256/

HELL as eternal conscious torment does not exist!

Then what about what Jesus said when he spoke about eternal fire ... eternal punishment… Torment!!

This Language is all symbolic!!

Here's the proof! 

Share this to the world!

by Santo Calarco 

https://www.facebook.com/santo.calarco.5/posts/10154797666569533

Objective vs. Subjective 

by Matt Spinks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z7bgSrZ9Sk&list=PL66016C4E55D4573B&index=74

Universal Salvation: A Whistle-Stop Introduction

by Robin Parry

https://youtu.be/TofvLLm_LqI

What is the Gospel - Session 1 

by Bruce Wauchope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi8xTPT-Gs8

Cana Presents: The Trinity

by Dr. C Baxter Kruger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCiI23dAYEg

It is Finished 

by John Crowder 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPrAP6CvDuM

Hallelujah in Hell

by Peter Hiett 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F27jxwHDrzM

God is Love 

by Dr. of Love, Eric Wilding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0ZllOThwwY

…

For your reflection:

Lazarus was dead for four days before Jesus raised him from the dead. Following his resurrection Lazarus did not go around giving interviews, or right a book relating the bliss of heaven, or the horrors of hell. Nor did Jesus question him about any aspect of his death experience.

Yet…people who have been revived after thirty minutes or so of unconsciousness will write a book, and go around giving hours long testimonies about their death experience regarding the beauty of heaven or the horrors of hell, and answer the question of pastors and prophets, for huge profit!

MMMMMMM…I guess Jesus and Lazarus missed out on a great opportunity!

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To study the Bible from a religious viewpoint without thinking, reasoning, or questioning is spiritually a waste of time.

…

Preaching eternal torment as a doctrine is gross ignorance or deliberate deception. There is literally no verse in scripture that can prop up the pagan, non-Jewish concept of eternal torment.

…

If you continue to care what Religion thinks about you, you will always be its prisoner.