"Hell, No!"

I am come to the conclusion that every issue in Christianity is bound by paradox. Indeed I see that paradox is God's calling card.

Some are irreconcilable to us in our present state of being: chiefly these are  the Trinity, and  the dual nature of the God Man Jesus Christ. We take these on faith for there is no alternative.

Some refuse this, and seek to reconcile the paradox, and this by denying it. Thus we get the Arians who deny the Trinity outright, or the Oneness Pentecostals, also anti trinitarians,  who make the Son everything and deny that the Father is a somehow a separate Being to whom He prayed, or  we get tritheists, though these are usually anti christians who claim tritheism as a reason for rejecting the faith altogether. Or, as regards the nature of the Son we get Nestorians versus Monophysites or the Docetists versus those who, in a crude form of  Arianism made the Son only a human hero. In every case the resolution of the paradox, in denying it, is heresy. It is better not to consider the issue than to go to heresy, but this modern man often refuses to do

The paradoxes of law and grace, those that affect christian living directly I take to be resolvable by understanding the inward nature of sin; in this and in the one other case I am considering this day in this piece of work the resolution is plainly spelled out in Scripture but it is so offensive to self righteous modern human nature that it is denied outright.

I mean the paradox of a loving God who sends sinners to eternal suffering in hell.

It is not my intention here  to justify this idea beyond the plain biblical statement of resolution herein, namely the cross of Christ. I do intend to demonstrate that it is in fact what Scripture says, and that those who twist scrpture to justify their own contention that this is not so are indulging in dishonest scholarship. Therefore I am not so much resolving the paradox  as I am seeking to establish that it is real and must be faced.

I am aware of two strands of thought, two arguments  used to deny the reality of eternal conscious torment in hell that are more substantial than the purely emotive cry that such is so monstrous that a loving God would not do such a thing. This last crie de coeur I will address  at the end of this piece.

Insofar as I have followed the writings of those who preach thus, I see them in the work of Rob Bell's "Love Wins"  and in the pdf download "Hell Know" by Dirk Waren

One strand claims that the torment is not forever and ever. and justified appeal to the Greek term αιώνας   των  αιωνων. I would demonstrate by simple exposition of other uses of this Greek phrase translated "
forever and ever"  that time of endless duration is indeed what it means. This is as far as I can see Rob Bell's line

The other claims that "death" and "destruction" mean what we as moderns take them to mean, not what the Biblical context reveals them to be and then the author proceeds to interpret  every relevant passage in scripture, and he is nothing if not dogged for Mr Waren does indeed list them all, in the light of this misconception. Therefore I would demonstrate that  the misconception of wrenching words out of their biblical context, interpreting them in a modern sense, then applying the twisted rendering to the passages from which the words were taken  is indeed the only warranted explanation for what he has done.

To work, then.

Both authors concede that there is a punishment of sinners in hell. One attacks the biblical truth as to the duration of said punishment  and the other deals to the nature  of it.

These two points I take to be salient, the veritable core of the issue, and therefore I do not see the need to refute  in detail everything they have written. Brevity is the soul of wit and it is something I am learning only of late.

Rob Bell denies he is a universalist. Yet to him the ultimate destination of humans is heaven. I am hard pressed to see how this differs from Univeralism in ultimate intent, but as he knows full well that the very term is inflammatory to orthodox  Christians he will studiously avoid it.

So to him hell is a punishment of limited duration and after men have done their time they will get out and he welcomed to heaven.

The core of his argument here is the meaning of the Greek term  αιώνας   των  αιωνων

That they should be tormented day and night forever and ever, (revelation 22:10)  and here the phrase transliterated as aionas ton aionon is used, is anathema to Bell.

He maintains that the word aionas means age, not an eternity, and in this, strictly speaking, he is quite right. But he has disregarded even the immediate context of the word. Sometimes the meaning is held not in the word but the phrase. Naive literalists with no regard for context and the idiomatic structure of language will usually miss this out , but this is the case in every language.

For instance in the New Zealand idiom "to spit the dummy"   the meaning of the verb to spit is plain, but a dummy is anything from that which sits on a ventriloquist's knee to  the pacifer a baby used to suck on, and it is this which is referred to in this colourful colloquialism, for the phrase means to lose one's temper in the sense of an angry baby spitting out the dummy in infantile fury.  The meaning can not be found in the individual words Indeed the meaning can only be found in the phrase as a whole and even then in the social context from whence the idiom arose

Likewise to walk the plank is one thing but to walk the dog is quite another: the meaning is in the entire phrase.

This can be confirmed by looking at the others usages of the term forever and ever, and more specifically the Greek phrase aionas ton aionon -   αιωνας των  αιωνων .

This is where electronic concordances show themselves  immensely useful. Indeed they remove any excuse for poor scholarship being so readily available


(tbc)