The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Is God Violent In Hell? Does That Influence Us?—Cavanaugh

Featured Writers Alex Smith
#72

This issue is, I think, specific to the 16th-century milieu of western Europe, with the Reformation and the Council of Trent. The Protestants proclaimed sola scriptura, while the Roman Catholics proclaimed Scripture plus Tradition. It is to be expected that a western Christian would basically ask, “Where do the Orthodox fit into our 16th-century fight?” On this as on so many different issues, the Orthodox do not fit into the western paradigm. “Come on! Cut the nonsense and tell us where you fit in!” Trust me. We don’t fit. It’s like asking if a piece of granite is closer to female or closer to male. The granite does not fit into the Protestant-Roman Catholic spectrum.

We have to remember the huge fact that printing basically did not exist until after the fall of Constantinople in A. D. 1453. Printing is a modern invention. That means that for more than 1,500 years, at least 99% of Christians did not have access to written scriptural texts. The few written texts (all laboriously and therefore expensively copied by hand) were in the possession of the clergy and of monks and of a few rich men. Now let us in our imaginations go inside 11th-century Hagia Sophia, the biggest church in all of the Orthodox world. It stood in Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Roman Empire. All the riches of the world flowed into it. Almost every square inch of its walls was covered in mosaic icons made of gold, semi-precious stones, and gemstones, done by the finest artists of the Empire. The building itself was the largest in the western world. The Roman Emperor himself and all his family regularly attended liturgy in Hagia Sophia. My point is that Hagia Sophia lacked for nothing. If the Orthodox Church thought something was even a little bit important, Hagia Sophia had it in spades.

Now imagine attending liturgy there. You will notice that virtually the entire liturgy consists of extensive quotations from scriptural texts, along with close meditations upon those texts. You’ll notice that those chanting the texts are doing so from large volumes covered in pure gold. If you draw near you will see that these scriptural texts are read from the following four different volumes from amongst an entire library of volumes (including the multi-volume Menaion, the Festal Triodion, the Pentekostarion, etc.):

The Prophetologion
The Psalter
The Apostolos
The Evangelion

If you look through these above four volumes, you will notice that all but the Psalter are arranged according to the calendar. Each of these three starts with September 1 (the Church’s new year) and ends with August 31. As you page through the Prophetologion, you will see that it consists of readings (averaging, perhaps, 15-20 verses each) from the Septuagint. The Apostolos consists of readings from Acts and from the Epistles of the Apostles James, Peter, John, Jude, and Paul. The Evangelion consists of readings from the Gospels of Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Psalter has 150 Psalms grouped into 20 sections called kathismata, along with the Nine Odes.

On any given day of the year, the Church has prescribed readings from each of the above four tomes. These readings are done in the context of the liturgy. They are preceded and followed by the Church’s presentation and interpretation of the texts. They are certainly not presented in a vacuum. Further, they are chanted in the midst of a church building full of iconography, which is rigorously defined (particularly by the Seventh Ecumenical Council) in terms of its subject matter and in terms of its style. Additionally, the icons are not arranged haphazardly, but are instead arranged in a precise manner, radiating out from the icon of Christ Pantocrator (Greek for “Lord of the Universe”) done in mosaics on the dome overhead.

Take all of that together in one indivisible and organic whole: That is the liturgy. That is the teaching of the Church. That is the word of the Apostles given them by Christ.

WHOOSH! OK. Back to the 21st century. As you think about what you experienced and saw, you would realize that you never saw what you would call a “Bible”, complete with 66 books starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation. There was no one part of the liturgy that you could extract from the rest and have it sit in judgment on other elements of the liturgy. It is as though someone sneaked into the Church and grabbed (from amongst twenty or so volumes) the Prophetologion, the Psalter, the Apostolos, and the Evangelion and proceeded to cut them up, throw away parts, keep other parts, and re-arrange the kept parts. Then he held aloft that resulting book cut-and-pasted together (newly christened as “the Bible”) and said, “This condemns everything else in this building!”

But on top of that, the Bible thus assembled from parts of the Prophetologion, Psalter, Apostolos, and Evangelion would be incomplete. Where is the book of Revelation? Where is the book of Esther? They are totally absent! The Psalms, Gospels, Acts, and Epistles are all complete, but much of the Old Testament is missing! Where are the other 25 chapters of Leviticus? Where is most of Job? Etc.

Qaz, I don’t know if you will find all of this a satisfactory answer or not, but it’s the best I can do. You asked a simple question, but I’m afraid that I do not have a simple answer for you. Kind of like asking a gentle man the following yes-or-no question: “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” He cannot truthfully answer with a simple yes or no, but must give a more complicated answer that denies the assumptions of the question.

#73

Thanks, G, for that explanation, which is very informative!

There must be a huge amount of commonality of belief between the 3 rivers, though? (prot, cath, Eox) . What do all 3 have incommon, as far as religious truth?

#74

Here’s a chart, Dave, that shows similarities and differences:

Comparison between Orthodoxy, Protestantism & Roman Catholicism:

#75

The simplest answer would be “the Nicene Creed” (which the Orthodox call “the Symbol of Faith”), but of course there are differences even there. The Orthodox retain the text hammered-out at the Second Ecumenical Council in A. D. 381. The Roman Catholic Church added the Latin word “filioque” (meaning “and the Son”) to the Creed in A. D. 1014 (thus changing the statement that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father” into the statement “proceeds from the Father and the Son”). The Protestants adopted this amended version of the Creed. On top of that, each of the three has different understandings of the meaning of the text (for example, the meaning of the word “Church”). That said, there are a lot of commonalities centered upon the Nicene Creed.

#76

Thx to both of you.

#77

“Precisely that point”?!
Not so.
All you say in your thread is that you have no proof that any Greek Church Father believed in hell.
The Greek Church Fathers were not the ones in question.
The point both Qaz and I raised is that authoritative figures in the ‘orthodox’ church openly promote the doctrine of eternal suffering. Furthermore, with regards to those who die as unrepentant sinners, this is the only readily available teaching from the ‘orthodox’ church. This is not a fringe element. This is the teaching of the ‘orthodox’ church.
It is quite clear that your reply did not address this situation and I can only conclude that you do not wish to contemplate the reality of your church’s teaching. So I will not pursue this point any further. It seems that it may be a delicate topic for you at present and I have no wish to upset you.
God bless
John

#78

I believe Geoffrey stopped at this shop and got a new pair, of rose-colored glasses. So you have to blame his eye ware. :exclamation: :laughing:

Anyway, I did share this earlier from an interesting blog entitled Eclectic Orthodoxy. Here are a couple interesting elements:

About
Readings in Universalism

Let me quote from the About page:

This I also found interesting, which comes from the same source - an Eastern Orthodox priest (i.e. regarding the Three Holy Hierarchs)

It would be nice to review the concept of eternal bliss and damnation in Orthoxody, from the WIki article at Eastern Orthodox Christian theology

As an Inclusivist (Positions for the Lost) + Purgatorial Conditionalist, I side with that philosophical and theological, Eastern Orthodox viewpoint. Except that any hell aspect is not eternal.

Or to put it another way. In the AMC series The Walking Dead, if the Zombies are neither reverted back to human form, destroyed nor exiled, a perfect creation is not established. Torturing the zombies is never a viewpoint, I side with. I do side with a post mortem attempt to save the zombies. And I hope they all become human again. :smiley:

I side with these quotes, from the Purgatorial Conditionalist article:

The problem with Geoffrey’s position

The problem I find with Geoffrey’s position is this. He can’t find hell anyway mentioned in the 1700 page Orthodoxy liturgy - therefore, it doesn’t exist. Well, I can’t find it in the liturgy of the Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans either (unless they present it inadvertently, in a scriptural reading). But Holy Scripture (although various canons) is part of the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican churches. But it does exist in their canons of holy scripture.

I have a friend named Dora, who has been a member of the Greek Orthodox church all her life. She has a masters from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Oxford. She is fluent in Koine and contemporary Greek, Russian and English. She certainly wouldn’t agree with Geoffrey’s portrayal of Orthodoxy’s view - on the afterlife.

And regarding scholars, PhD, academics, etc. They have an objective stance on presenting things. So they would say that Orthodoxy has traditionally taught hell as real and never ending suffering. Same with the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. Whether we agree with that, is a different matter. Certainly, in contemporary Protestant teaching, there is room for various viewpoints:

Universalism
P-Zombie
Exile
Annihilation
Symbolic descriptions of hell
Port Mortem redemption opportunities

Suppose if I go to Ecuador - for example. And I spend my time at rich gated communities and country clubs. I might say crime doesn’t exist in Ecuador. I’m wearing rose colored glasses. But the statistical evidence says otherwise. :smiley:

I would be hard pressed to choose between Geoffrey’s super optimistic view (i.e. no post mortem punishment) and Davo’s full Preterist view. Come to think of it, I have the same problem with Hillary C. and Donald T. Except that the US used to have an interesting policy. They used to give tons of money to ruthless world dictators - to keep communists from ruling. So I can do the same, with electing a checkered politician with political experience - over one with none. :laughing:

#79

Ah, I misunderstood you. When you wrote “Fathers” I thought you meant the glorified saints of the Church, whom we refer to as the Church Fathers. My apologies.

If I am not misunderstanding you again, am I correct in saying that you are referring to present-day Orthodox clergy who write and publish books containing their opinions about Orthodoxy? If so, please see my post in this present thread with the following date and time: Fri Aug 19, 2016 8:48 am (beginning with the words “No. An Orthodox clergyman is authoritative only insofar as he is Orthodox.”). Even were it the case (which, thank God, it is not) that every single Orthodox bishop and priest were to write books affirming never-ending damnation, it would be of no concern to me. (If it were the case that Orthodoxy were defined by its bishops’ opinions about Hell or about anything else, Orthodoxy would be a hopeless tissue of contradictions!) The Church’s one voice is the liturgy. I have attended countless hours of the Church’s liturgical services, and I have studied approximately 1,700 pages of the Church’s liturgical texts. (These texts are readily available for purchase. I can supply ISBNs if desired.) Never-ending hell is absent. It’s just not there.

If someone were to ask, “Then how can all these Orthodox clergy assert the reality of never-ending Hell?”, then I would ask in return, “How could all the Orthodox clergy fall into the Arian heresy in the 4th century, into the Monothelite heresy in the 7th century, the Filioquist heresy in the 13th and 15th centuries, and etc.?” (Answer: Because we are all fallible.)

Or if someone were to ask, “How can Orthodox believers ignore the plain teaching of the Orthodox liturgy of universal salvation?”, then I would mention a fact recounted by Leo Tolstoi: In the 19th century, Russians on the street in Moscow were asked in a sort of poll, “Who are the three Persons of the Trinity?” Now keep in mind that the phrase “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” is chanted about 20 times in each Sunday’s liturgy (not even counting the countless times those words are chanted in other liturgies). Assuming a man going to church every Sunday, he would hear that Trinitarian formula over 1,000 times each year. Assuming an average age of 30 on the part of those Muscovites asked, and assuming that they slept through it all for their first five years, then they heard “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” over 25,000 times before being asked to name the three Persons of the Trinity. Scandalously, very few got it right. The single most common answer was “Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and St. Nicholas”. :laughing:

Now, I ask you: Does that not make one almost despair of teaching anyone anything? If the liturgy can tell a man 25,000 times that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are the three Persons of the Trinity, and yet he still scratches his head and moronically mumbles “Jesus, Mary, and Nicholas”… Well, it’s hardly a wonder that people think that Hell is in there, too.

To take it full circle: It’s as inexplicable and as confounding as whole teams of scholars for different English translations of the Bible translating “Gehenna” as “Hell”. This Hell thing makes people ignore the plain text of the Bible and the plain words of the Orthodox liturgy.

#80

A quick note: I entreat everyone not to trust anyone (including myself) about the Orthodox Church. Go straight to the source. Read her liturgical texts. (Or better yet, attend her liturgies.) Why rely on second-hand opinions when you can go straight to the source? :slight_smile:

#81

The Islamic clerics would say the same thing, Geoffrey, regarding the Koran, the Islamic laws, their scholars, etc. But as someone who dabbled all my life in academia (either full or part time), I also look at what the scholars, PhD researchers, etc., have to say on a subject. :smiley:

Hence, I would trust a Wiki article, as long as it’s properly footnoted and I can double check the original sources - if I need to. :smiley:

#83

And the Islamic clerics would be right. C. S. Lewis said the best way to learn about Plato is to read Plato’s writings rather than read some scholar’s book or article about Plato.

I’d be fascinated to see a properly-translated quote from the Orthodox liturgy teaching an eschatological stance other than universalism. One would think that non-universalism would be present somewhere in the years of liturgies I’ve attended or in the 1,700 pages of liturgy I’ve studied.

Remember that the “scholars, PhD researchers, etc.” are the very people who assure us that the Bible teaches never-ending Hell. All Christians–whether Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant–are burdened by the fact that a majority of fellow believers ignorantly believe in never-ending Hell. The persistence of belief in Hell across all demographics makes me wonder if it is literally inspired by demons.

#84

I read that book decades ago. My dim memories of it are that it is a mixed bag, but with more good than bad.

#85

On the contrary, looking around the world, I see many people in the grave and/or living in hell right now. Neither one is empty. I cannot say what happens after we leave this earth, however, when I hear about murder/suicide cases, I wonder if these people fear God? They must not, seeing that their last act on earth is killing someone else and then doing away with themselves. To say for example that someone goes and shoots up a school, destroying many lives in the process, and then upon killing himself afterward, snap, he is instantly Christ-like, just doesn’t seem quite right to me.

#86

This I amended to an earlier post. But I’ll share it here. :laughing:

The problem with Geoffrey’s position

The problem I find with Geoffrey’s position is this. He can’t find hell anyway mentioned in the 1700 page Orthodoxy liturgy - therefore, it doesn’t exist. Well, I can’t find it in the liturgy of the Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans either (unless they present it inadvertently, in a scriptural reading) . But Holy Scripture (although various canons) is part of the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican churches. But it does exist in their canons of holy scripture.

I have a friend named Dora, who has been a member of the Greek Orthodox church all her life. She has a masters from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Oxford. She is fluent in Koine and contemporary Greek, Russian and English. She certainly wouldn’t agree with Geoffrey’s portrayal of Orthodoxy’s view - on the afterlife.

And regarding scholars, PhD, academics, etc. They have an objective stance on presenting things. So they would say that Orthodoxy has traditionally taught hell as real and never ending suffering. Same with the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. Whether we agree with that, is a different matter. Certainly, in contemporary Protestant teaching, there is room for various viewpoints:

Universalism
P-Zombie
Exile
Annihilation
Symbolic descriptions of hell
Port Mortem redemption opportunities

Suppose if I go to Ecuador - for example. And I spend my time at rich gated communities and country clubs. I might say crime doesn’t exist in Ecuador. I’m wearing rose colored glasses. But the statistical evidence says otherwise. :smiley:

I would be hard pressed to choose between Geoffrey’s super optimistic view (i.e. no post mortem punishment) and Davo’s full Preterist view. Come to think of it, I have the same problem with Hillary C. and Donald T. Except that the US used to have an interesting policy. They used to give tons of money to ruthless world dictators - to keep communists from ruling. So I can do the same, with electing a checkered politician with political experience - over one with none. :laughing:

#88

Yes, they do show bias. Take, for example, a PhD candidate doing a doctoral thesis - true story. Two of her professors on the dissertation committee had competing theories. And they kept having her change her presentation, to incorporate more of their theories - conflicting ones, mind you. Finally, she did go above their heads. And the department head told them to stop. She was finally able to complete the dissertation.

Yes, if they present journal articles or books, presenting their own ideas and theories - they show bias. But if they are conducting scientific experiments, doing field research, writing books on historical topics, etc. - they have to minimize or try not, to show bias.

#89

To clarify: When the Orthodox Church teaches that Christ emptied the grave in A. D. 30, it means that all the souls of all those who had physically died were taken up to Heaven. Their bodies will not be resurrected until the Second Coming of Christ.

Also, the Church recognizes that obviously this fallen world is full of sin and suffering.

Why does a sinner becoming instantly Christ-like not “seem quite right” to you? Is it perhaps that you feel he needs to suffer first? Rest assured he has suffered, and deeply so. The only thing that matters in this world is possessing the joy of Christ. Everything else, according to St. Paul, is manure. (I’m refraining from using a 4-letter Anglo-Saxon word here.) But we all are so worldly and so stupid that we think that what really matters is possessing a bunch of manure (which we refer to as wealth, status, power, health, etc.). So we look at this shooter and think that he hasn’t been judged and punished yet. After all, he has a bunch of manure!

Ah, but what he doesn’t have is the joy of Christ. Without that, everything is loss. With it, all is bliss. (This is why the martyrs frequently go to their deaths singing joyous hymns with ecstatic joy.) That shooter didn’t have to wait for some future date to suffer the consequences of his sins. All sin is immediately judged and punished–and the punishment is the lack of the joy of Christ.

Alas, we are all so stupid and sinful that we tend to say, “Bah! What kind of punishment is that? That’s a stupid punishment. If I thought that’s the only kind of punishment there was, watch out!” These, of course, are the words of our fallen nature.

#90

Holy Fool, I think we are coming to the bedrock of our disagreement. A few points:

  1. I am glad to hear that if never-ending hell is mentioned in the liturgies of the Roman Catholics and of the Lutherans, it must be rare. It strengthens my position that Hell doesn’t make sense even from a Roman Catholic or from a Protestant viewpoint.

  2. When I’m accused of being too optimistic or of wearing rose-colored glasses, I’m reminded of the following incident in George MacDonald’s life: Someone said to him that his views were “too good to be true”. He thought a moment and replied, “No, they are just so good that they must be true!” This is not merely a cutesy quip. This is deep truth. The idea of an idiotic, fallen human being (such as myself) dreaming up something BETTER THAN GOD is preposterous. It’s beyond preposterous. The idea of anyone in Heaven feeling a faint disappointment is risible. “You know, this isn’t too bad, but I expected better.” :laughing: So my only error on this score is not thinking grandly enough. To put it in your terms, I’m not yet optimistic enough and my lenses aren’t a deep enough shade of rose. The holy Trinity is ineffably higher, purer, and better than any of our conceptions.

  3. The fact that “experts” say that the Bible teaches never-ending Hell is one of the cardinal reasons that I fundamentally distrust their judgment and even their ability to cogently read. Gehenna = Valley of Hinnon, Hades = the grave, and Tartaros = Tartaros. There is no Hell in the Bible. These scholars are like Pooh and Piglet wandering in a circle in the snow tracking heffalumps, finding that the numbers of heffalumps keep growing. (“Look at how many tracks there are now, Pooh!”) The scholars quote and re-quote and re-re-quote each other until they have quite a corpus built up. “Ah, the assured results of modern scholarship.” To show that the emperor has no clothes, I re-issue my challenge that has not been met in all the years I’ve issued it: I have seen scholar after scholar assert that at the time of Jesus, the word “Gehenna” was commonly understood to refer to post-mortem punishments. I ask for one–ONE–quote from a source certainly written no later than A. D. 30 that uses the word “Gehenna” to refer to post-mortem punishments. I have been waiting for years. I suspect I will wait for the rest of my life. This is a piece of scholarly nonsense that has made the rounds so many times that nobody knows who originally told the fib.

  4. I am aware that the majority of all Christians–whether Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant–believe in Hell, in part because of the scholars chasing heffalumps. As St. Macrina asked her brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, “Since when are the opinions of the herd an index to the truth?” Or St. Paul (Romans 3:4): “Let God be true but every man a liar.”

  5. Now a piece of biography. Perhaps I am the only man in the world this has ever happened to, but I can assure you that it has happened at least once because it happened to me. I converted to Orthodoxy around age 23. (I am 46 now.) I, alas, read a lot of books about Orthodoxy written by Orthodox authors. They were a scandal to me. I thought I was reading what the Church taught, and as a result I fell away from the Church for a great many years. As the years passed I was struck by what my old priest used to say: “The liturgy is the teaching of the Church. Everything else is merely someone’s opinion.” I gave away and/or sold all of my books on Orthodoxy without exception. With the money made I bought my 1,700 pages of liturgical books. Before I had read a third of the way through I had returned to the bosom of the Church. What I read in the liturgy is pure gold, pure sunlight, perfect crystalline diamond with no darkness at all. In contrast, what I read in the other “Orthodox” books was dark, turgid, murky, and heavy. The fact that the liturgy, the very voice of the Church is utterly free from the darkness that comes from the hearts of the Orthodox believers is one more proof that the liturgy is the unsullied teaching of Christ. Anything that can remain spotlessly pure after being handled by 2,000 years worth of morons and sinners is the very truth of God.

#91

Thanks, Geoffrey.

Hum. Is this one of the 2 Dave’s from the forum?

I do understand where you are coming from, Geoffrey. And if your universal position is true - so much the better. It would save many folks unneeded suffering - on the other side. I can’t agree with Gregory McDonald, in that purification would - or could - take millions of years (if this is a proper understanding - based on forum commentary). It needs to have an endpoint. But I do side with postmortem opportunities for salvation. And free will - as many theologians and philosophers (both contemporary and historical) have said - needs to be respected. It’s my biggest obstacle to be an actual universalist, rather than a hopeful one. Come to think of it, it’s probably a big stumbling block for most people.

I kind of look at this forum as The Canterbury Tales. And part of the fun is all the interesting folks Chaucer met on the way. So in my rendering, a Holy Fool theologian and a Socratic P-Zombie philosopher, is journeying on the forum. And he meets various interesting characters:

A super optimistic Orthodox member, who doesn’t believe in any postmortem correction
A Full Preterist
Someone from Mexico, who believes historical Biblical wine is grape juice
Someone who believes Christianity and all religions, can be explained away by social psychology experiments
Someone who believes in Libertarian free will and universalism. God will keep rolling the dice on the other side, until they make the right free choice.
Etc.

Let me share a couple lines from Wiki:

And in the outside world, the church scene is interesting: :laughing:

Anyway, now back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But I must warn folks. Some of the tales are rather raunchy (After all, it’s classical, well renown and historical literature). :smiley:

Anyway, if I didn’t meet interesting characters here, I’ll be as bored as the Zar (whom I wrote about a while ago). To appreciate it, you need to first read Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Golly. I miss the good old days, when I used to read and write about literature and philosophy - in the academic world. :laughing:

#92

It is a huge error to think that a person immediately transforms into a righteous person the instant He encounters God. In this life, when a person becomes a Christian, he doesn’t become instantly righteous. In some cases, some aspects of the old life are gone instantly, but in everyone, there are elements of the old life that still hang on and must be expunged. This takes time. This requires discipline (not punishment in the sense of penalty). As per my signature statement:

This is borne out in the following passage:

In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:4-11 ESV)

When a person’s character is such that he continually works evil, that character needs to be changed—regenerated. We need discipline ( a word from “disciple”=“learner”). We need to learn to be righteous, and that takes time. Sometimes we need chastisement in order to willingly learn. There is no reason to think that a person’s character will be changed instantaneously just because he has died.

A Christian, that is, a disciple of Christ or learner of Christ, has been learning throughout life, through his relationship with Christ. He will not need as much discipline in the next life and a person who has been a Christ rejector throughout life, especially one who continued to do horrible acts of harm to others right up to his death. For through such acts, his evil character was solidified.

The Gehenna of which Christ spoke is not merely the valley of Hinnon near Jerusalem. His many warnings to avoid it does not apply to a place where bodies are burned. Why worry about what happens to one’s body after death? Rather Christ was warning people to avoid the severe correction of Gehenna in the afterlife. But you are right in indicating that “hades” is tantamount to “the grave,” in spite of the fact that many in Jesus’ day regarded hades also as a place of punishment after death. Jesus’ parable of Dives and Lazarus, was based on this prevalent idea.

If people become righteous instantly, why didn’t those angels that sinned have this instant transformation? Rather they were cast into Tartaros and place into “pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment.” (2 Peter 2:4)

After giving a few more examples of God correcting people, Peter concludes with this statement:

The Lord knows how to deliver the devout out of trial, but to reserve the unrighteous for a day of judgment, to be corrected. (2 Peter 2:9)

So the unrighteous will be corrected. And even Christians, though with a less severe correction, for:

“EVERYONE will be salted with fire” (Mark 9:49). Both fire and salt are purifying agents.

#94

There’s also an interesting article, by a Japanese Christian minister, who believes in second change theology:

Salvation for the Dead -Hades is not Hell- Biblical Second Chance Theology for Dead People in Hades

P.S. The sections** Bible Verses Speak about the Second Chance** and "Second Chance" is Not an Obstacle for Evangelism are interesting. Let me quote from the second heading (keep in mind, I do not fully agree with all his article ideas):

It should also be noted that Geoffrey, Paidion and Rev. Arimasa Kubo, have different perspectives on after life redemption possibilities. :exclamation: :slight_smile: