Hello all,
Another first timer here on the forum. I come from the CADRE blog (hi Jason, it’s JD) and I’m just beginning to explore the possible biblical basis of universalism. My aim is to be as thorough and critical as I can, so I can only promise to be relentless in my questioning and as comprehensive as possible. So here goes:
I just finished reading Brad Jersak’s book “Her gates will never be shut” and found a lot of what he said intriguing. Especially interesting was his discussion of the meaning of the word Gehenna, usually translated fiery hell. He suggests that by the 1st Century there were still two separate traditions about the meaning of Gehenna, both stemming from its original historical referent, the valley of child sacrifice and of God’s judgment upon Israel: one, the apocalyptic tradition, started interpreting Gehenna spiritually as the place of divine punishment in the afterlife, while the other, the Jeremiadic(?) tradition, retained its historical referent and used Gehenna as a symbol of God’s historical judgment upon Israel. He suggests that Jesus stood within the later tradition, in that Gehenna referred primarily to the coming historical judgment of A.D. 70, and only in a few cases does it refer to something like spiritual deadness, or even a cathartic purging.
An intriguing suggestion, but my problem is that the historical judgment reference of Gehenna seems to apply only to a few of the cases in which it is used. For example, I can see how John the Baptist’s message could be primarily historical. When he calls the Pharisees and Sadducees a ‘generation of vipers’ and asks them who warned them to flee from ‘the wrath to come’ (Matt 3:7), and when he gives his parable of the axe being laid to the root of the trees, and that those who didn’t bear fruit would be cast into the fire, I can just about see him talking about the coming historical judgment. Similarly Jesus’ own condemnation of the ‘offspring of vipers’ can bear a historical meaning (Matt 23:33).
But I cannot see that interpretation applying to the parts of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus warns against saying ‘Thou Fool’, and advises that it is better to lose an eye or a hand than to be cast fully intact into Gehenna (Matt 5:22, 29, 30; 18:9). It seems rather odd to suggest that Jesus is literally suggesting that loping off a limb could somehow spare one from the destruction of Jerusalem! Similarly, the warning about whom one should really fear, the one who has power to cast into Gehenna after death, seems to make little sense on a historical-judgmental interpretation (Matt 10:28; Luke 12:5) Finally, the condemnation of the Pharisees’ evangelistic practice for making their converts twice as much a child of Gehenna as themselves (Matt 23:15) seems inexplicable as implying that they were dragging them into Jerusalem to be trapped by a historical judgment.
If anyone can shed some light on these passages, I’d be grateful. For my part, although Jesus did definitely speak of a national, historical judgment for Israel (I follow a partial preterist reading of the Olivet discourse), he also seems firmly rooted in the apocalyptic tradition and reflects the apocalyptic understanding of Gehenna as a fiery afterlife punishment.