Go to hell ?

Gotta give a huge shout out and thanks so much to one of my mentors from afar and good friend Mike DeVries , who posted the link for this article.

"Eternal misery is a horrifying possibility.  But it won't be a fiery cavern where demons poke you with pitchforks--or is it?  Hell has never been a fashionable destination, but in recent years it’s met a fate that even the most passé hotspots don’t endure; people suspect it doesn’t exist. Or, if it does exist, it attracts no customers; "we are permitted to hope that hell is empty" is how this is sometimes phrased. Even the most conservative Christians have a hard time putting a positive spin on a wrathful God who flings evildoers into flaming torment.


 

  

It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of a prideful, vindictive God that they have fled from Jesus’ fold. No wonder some become atheists; who would want to spend eternity with such a tyrant?

Yet I’m going to make a case for hell, though not the one you see in cartoons, a fiery cavern where demons poke you with pitchforks. Dante made that kind of thing look pretty exciting, but "The Inferno" was written almost 1,300 years after the gospels. When you strip away European and medieval assumptions, and look at the writings of Christians in lands and cultures closer to Jesus’ time, you get a different picture."

Make sure you check out the rest of the article on beliefnet, I assure you it's worth the time.

Hell by Frederica Mathewes-Green

Comments

[Chris]

Excellent! Thanks for putting up the link. It confirms a lot of what we've discussed in the past and reminds me of a fairly recent post at Paradoxology.