The problem with modernity is that it conceals from view the costs of its progress. Had we known the costs, we'd not be so presumptuous about the past.
What is the cost of progress? In 1750 one third of women would not see a son grow to adulthood. Now if a child dies something has gone wrong. People no longer die of easily preventable diseases. We have introduced political systems which do not just act for a class of land owners. Which bit of modernity is in he slightest way inferior to the past
@tomfrombrunswick7571 it's a worn phrase but happiness is really not because of stuff. If you factor in abortions, life expectancy today is close to middle ages. 1750s is part of modernity as more and more people were congregating in cities. The terrible conditions are simply hidden due to lengthy supply chains. Children mining lithium in Africa are part of the supply chain of our modern devices. What is their lifespan?
@@paveli1181 The medieval period saw 30% of kids dying before five. In Australia the number who die before five in Australia is 10 per hundred thousand. In Australia the number of people born each year is 300.614. So now days about 30 kids die a year. In medieval times the numbers would have been 100,000
@@tomfrombrunswick7571 you don't get it. Nowadays, 20 to 30% die before they are born. Modernity simply shifts the costs where you don't see them. People back then had plenty of kids and losing a few was seen as normal and depended on ability and care of parents. Most today think aborting kids before birth is normal too.
@@paveli1181 The death of kids had nothing to do with the care of parents. It occurred because people had no idea of the causes of infant mortality. The death of a child is always something that causes sadness it is not a nothing. The knowledge of medical care also allows people to live free of pain of chronic disease have reasonable dental care etc
The thing that made me reconsider ECT recently was to realize that the Bible differentiates between the first death (death of the body) and the second death (death of the soul). The death of the body is what we will all experience. The death of the soul, the second death, is the judgment. It doesn't make any sense to use the word "death" to describe "eternal conscious torment". If someone is eternally conscious, their soul is certainly not dead but is very much alive and being tortured. So if the phrase "second death (death of the soul)" means anything, the soul must actually be DEAD, not eternally alive and tortured. I guess this makes me more of an annihilationist.
I have a very good friend, who is a lovely and loving woman, who firmly believes that even saints within non-Christian religions will be condemned to eternal torment, because they didn't believe in Jesus. And she's very smart, and well-educated. Blows my mind....
It's one thing to advocate for new readings, it's another thing to say what the new readings would be, and how they would preserve reverence for the Bible. Less diagnosis and more cure, please.
Right. I was listening to this video with bluetooth headphones on while I was in a different room from my computer and the video ended so abruptly I thought my internet had gone out or something. There was no biblical basis for his push to have a new reading. I was waiting for him to bring up some verses for how to think differently about it, but there was nothing. For the record, I think I agree with him that ECT isn't the right interpretation, but there was nothing else offered!
Based partly on my life experience I would have to say that I reject all religions that incorporate the carrot & stick mentalitv. I recognize that it works somewhat within the human condition but a God is not human. Unless it is derived from human minds.
*"Knock knock."* *"Who's there?"* *"It's me, Jesus... Let me in."* *"Let you in why?"* *"So I can save you."* *"Save me from what?"* *"From what I'm going to do to you if you don't let me in."* *If you leave a response I can't leave one to then it will be deleted.*
@@gordon3186 Hi again. I don't have control over your ability to post replies to your own comment. You are ignorant of what Christians actually believe, and your snide attitude, in conjunction with your incompetence in the subject matter, makes you look like a fool.
Good words and I have wrestled much w/ my evolving views... I have had many since starting in Word of Faith, into Calvary Chapel, then to Free Presbyterian... finished with 14 years at our ARCBA Reformed Baptist Church. We have been out the Reformed Baptist for almost 5 years. PM if anyone is interested or has had similar experience...
Love your stuff Randal, but i think if you're going to criticise Lewis's doctrine of hell, you should allow his preemptive response: “In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: 'What are you asking God to do?' to wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does." Is there a point where an eternal soul must be allowed to fully and finally reject Christ's sacrifice for them. If God respects their will and autonomy, he must.
I'm binging on your videos - I've only just discovered them and I love what you do, and I share your repugnance at biblical violence. My problem is that biblical violence is not merely peripheral to the Christian faith, but is integral to our story, namely the death and resurrection of Jesus. The idea that Jesus died for our sins is at the heart of Paul's message, from which it made its way into the gospels - it's something we can't possibly avoid. I do believe in a God of love, but I can't reconcile that belief with the idea that such a God would require the suffering and death of anyone, least of all his "beloved son," in order to reconcile us wayward sinners to him. In fact, it flies in the face of the message of the Hebrew Bible, that teaches that the path of repentance, of teshuva, is always available. Consequently, I both love the Christian faith, and am utterly repulsed by it, simultaneously. The belief that Jesus died for our sins is one that I believe makes perfect sense in the context of the first century, and for very many centuries thereafter. For most of human history the answer to human conflict has been violence, which both protected the community against destructive forces, and healed it from the harm caused by the same. We now live in a very different moral universe that views violence as perpetuating the destructiveness it was designed to heal. But what do we then do with the cross? The cross is the centre of the Christian faith, but I, for one, can't accept it at all as the sign of God's love. The better part of the United Church has now, basically, thrown out the Bible altogether, because it violates our fundamental moral convictions. What I love most about the United Church is that it is made up of people who will go to hell and back for the sake of its moral commitments (which it did post-1988 over the homosexuality issue). But the result is that we are a community that no longer knows what it believes. We can't live with or without the gospel story, and that plays hell with our survival as a denomination. We don't know, anymore, why we exist. I don't know any way out of this dilemma - do you have any ideas?
@@Randal_Rauser I've heard a lot about Rene Girard, but have never explored his thought. I guess it's time I did so! I'm actually very surprised that I reacted so emotionally to your videos - I wasn't aware of how important Christianity still is to me. That's something I need to think about. My knee-jerk reaction is to just reject it, but evidently I'm doing myself a disfavour by doing so. This is something I need to work on. Many of us in the United Church tend to have that knee-jerk reaction, and yet we're still there. The story and the tradition still matter to us deeply, however much we criticize it. Thank you for your videos, because they are leading me to think more deeply about my relationship to the faith.
@@Randal_Rauser Could you recommend a book about Girard's theology? I get his theory of mimetic violence and the role of the scapegoat, but I haven't been exposed to his theology - in fact, I didn't know he had one! Jeremy Duncan at Commons Church in Calgary has a great video series on Girard that is helping me, but I'd like to read deeper. I had dismissed Girard in the past as his ideas struck me as another grand theory that claimed to explain everything about human culture through one simple mechanism, but maybe his theology is going to really work for me. That would be just amazing! Thanks very much for your time.
Hell is an event and not a place. The wages of sin is death - eternal death. The lie of torture hell is one of Satan's masterpieces. It has made as many atheists as wine, women and song. But if you believe in hell as described, why don't you seek to avoid it? You go to the dentist if you have a hole in your tooth. You don't say "This is unfair."
Bart Ehrman has talked about the history of resurrection and eternity. 1. Resurrection required a body. Preferably the best body possible which is why people are to be buried within 48 hours. There is a telling scene in the beginning of "The Kindgom of God" movie where a clergy threatens a lay peasant woman to dig up her dead husband and chop off his head, thus making him un-resurrectable. Today, Americans have like a 50% cremation rate and rising. How does resurrection work? Does god just start with the soul? 2. How old is Betty White when she is resurrected? I often pick recently dead old celebrities to ask this thought experiment. Is Betty the age that she died? I've asked this question of Christians over the decades and the best answer given is that god has promised some kind of perfect existence and beyond that nothing is known. That seems like a pretty s***y answer for such an important topic. What's interesting about this question is the juxtaposition with resurretion requiring a burial. If early Christians thought resurrection only needed a soul then why the immediate burial? How did this square with cremation centuries ago? If someone was cremated were they thought to be denied resurrection? 3. Eternity to Christians pre-education was one-life span, like around 100 years. These people were uneducated and the concept of infinity would have been lost on them. Bart mentioned this in passing but I think it would be an interesting topic to understand how they lay person thought of eternity prior to public eduction.
@@MybridWonderful if you are representing his views correctly, then Bart Ehrman has a very unsophisticated understanding of the (many) traditional ways of understanding the resurrection which have existed throughout Christian history. If you'd like some recommendations of readings to balance your perspective, I'd be happy to offer them to you.
"My house is locked from the inside, and yet here I am in the living room..." - Is your house a house of horrors where you are just suffering, weeping and gnashing teeth? What a silly response.
@zelenisok the topic was how does one enter a locked area. The answer is either it wasn't locked at entry or one had a key. Insulting people when you don't understand the topic reflects very poorly on you.
The topic is hell. Both in the video and in the comment by B. S. Lewis here. Not any random locked space. I didnt insult you, I said your response is silly, which it is. And this one is too. Weird stuff.
So you're basically saying it's wrong for God to subject people who rejected Him to eternal torment and punishment, based on your understanding. Who are you to question God on His form of justice, thinking God is too merciful to subject His creation to eternal punishment? God says in Scripture that He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy. If we reject God's mercy through receiving the gift of His only begotten Son Jesus Christ paying for our sins on the cross with His blood, we're only getting what we rightfully deserve from God -- nothing more and nothing less.
Who are YOU to say that “Hell is God’s form of justice”, in the first place ? All you have is a very old collection of human writings, called the Bible. You can’t prove the truth of ANY of those writings on the existence and character of a non physical divine being, the existence and character of an afterlife, and existence and character of some form of ultimate justice, beyond what humans carry out while alive.
Hmm. That’s a really odd remark. Humans with power aren’t anything to go by. Humans with power are often depraved and evil. God (if he exists, which you obviously don’t believe) is benevolent and good. Please commence to misunderstand and straw man what I’ve just said, but as usual with your comments here this one is inane troll nonsense.
@ There is no evidence at all for a God, and all claims about its characteristics are mere supposition. What we do know is that power corrupts. Why wouldn’t that apply to a God?
@davethebrahman9870 You are wrong, there is evidence that God exists. But your larger point is wrong either way. If God exists, then he is incorruptible. What you are saying is wrong by definition. You don't even have to believe in God to see that it's wrong.
This is a straight up herecy. How can one deny the Judgment and eternal salvation/punishment as the result of God's Justice and remain true to Christian faith? I simply don't understand and ask for some education on this, please, someone.
My understanding is that before ect became popular, most Christians where universalists and anhilliationists. ECT didn't really start to become popular until sometime around 400 AD. the greek word translated to mean eternal is Aion which means age, as many scholars have pointed out a punishment that lasts an age isn't never ending.
In the early Church and among the early Church Fathers, there was some debate regarding the concept of eternal hell. The only type of universalism that was accused of heresy was Origen's claim that even the devil would be saved in the end. The Church cannot fully condemn universalism because some important and respected Church Fathers believed in it, such as Gregory of Nyssa, Clement of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor, etc. As I mentioned, in the early Church there were three views of hell: eternal, universalist, and annihilationism, with universalism being the most common. Later, the Church decided to adopt Augustine's view of eternal hell, but even Augustine described the universalists as “indeed very many.” What he meant was that they were a “vast majority.” Now, who is right? I don’t know. The problem is that no matter which view of hell you subscribe to, there are passages in the Bible that support all three of them. No matter which one you believe, you must be ready to ignore the passages that say otherwise. No one is denying hell or the seriousness of sin, just the fire-and-brimstone eternal version of it.
@@tombaron-z5w Many are indeed denying hell and the very concept of sin. Perhaps you merely mean no (or few) Christians do, but IMO the inability of believers to make proper sense and agree about basic tenets should prompt some reconsideration.
@@steveng.clinard1766 Yes i meant Christians...as for reconsideration...the most brilliant theologianans and saints have tried to reconcile the texts that speak of hell since the dawn of christianity....but no one has ever came close to reconcile all texts in a view so that they don t seem to contradict, and of course there are moral issues, translation issues, political issues that also run into the equation. But yeah we should still try cause change isn't always heretical and no Christian denomination has remained entirely unchanged in its dogma or teachings over the centuries. Personally I hope the universalists are right it’s hard to reconcile a God who demands justice but seems to punish endlessly, which feels inconsistent with a just and loving nature.
It's refreshing to have a sane voice in christianity, in complete opposition of Low Bar Bill's.
The problem with modernity is that it conceals from view the costs of its progress. Had we known the costs, we'd not be so presumptuous about the past.
What is the cost of progress? In 1750 one third of women would not see a son grow to adulthood. Now if a child dies something has gone wrong. People no longer die of easily preventable diseases. We have introduced political systems which do not just act for a class of land owners. Which bit of modernity is in he slightest way inferior to the past
@tomfrombrunswick7571 it's a worn phrase but happiness is really not because of stuff. If you factor in abortions, life expectancy today is close to middle ages. 1750s is part of modernity as more and more people were congregating in cities. The terrible conditions are simply hidden due to lengthy supply chains. Children mining lithium in Africa are part of the supply chain of our modern devices. What is their lifespan?
@@paveli1181 The medieval period saw 30% of kids dying before five. In Australia the number who die before five in Australia is 10 per hundred thousand.
In Australia the number of people born each year is 300.614. So now days about 30 kids die a year. In medieval times the numbers would have been 100,000
@@tomfrombrunswick7571 you don't get it. Nowadays, 20 to 30% die before they are born. Modernity simply shifts the costs where you don't see them. People back then had plenty of kids and losing a few was seen as normal and depended on ability and care of parents. Most today think aborting kids before birth is normal too.
@@paveli1181 The death of kids had nothing to do with the care of parents. It occurred because people had no idea of the causes of infant mortality. The death of a child is always something that causes sadness it is not a nothing.
The knowledge of medical care also allows people to live free of pain of chronic disease have reasonable dental care etc
The thing that made me reconsider ECT recently was to realize that the Bible differentiates between the first death (death of the body) and the second death (death of the soul). The death of the body is what we will all experience. The death of the soul, the second death, is the judgment.
It doesn't make any sense to use the word "death" to describe "eternal conscious torment". If someone is eternally conscious, their soul is certainly not dead but is very much alive and being tortured. So if the phrase "second death (death of the soul)" means anything, the soul must actually be DEAD, not eternally alive and tortured. I guess this makes me more of an annihilationist.
Thank you so much for this. I hope the issues you expose will become a widespread discussion.
I have a very good friend, who is a lovely and loving woman, who firmly believes that even saints within non-Christian religions will be condemned to eternal torment, because they didn't believe in Jesus. And she's very smart, and well-educated. Blows my mind....
It's one thing to advocate for new readings, it's another thing to say what the new readings would be, and how they would preserve reverence for the Bible. Less diagnosis and more cure, please.
Right. I was listening to this video with bluetooth headphones on while I was in a different room from my computer and the video ended so abruptly I thought my internet had gone out or something. There was no biblical basis for his push to have a new reading. I was waiting for him to bring up some verses for how to think differently about it, but there was nothing.
For the record, I think I agree with him that ECT isn't the right interpretation, but there was nothing else offered!
Based partly on my life experience I would have to say that I reject all religions that incorporate the carrot & stick mentalitv. I recognize that it works somewhat within the human condition but a God is not human. Unless it is derived from human minds.
But how can you possibly know what happens to us after we die apart from divine revelation?
*"Knock knock."*
*"Who's there?"*
*"It's me, Jesus... Let me in."*
*"Let you in why?"*
*"So I can save you."*
*"Save me from what?"*
*"From what I'm going to do to you if you don't let me in."*
*If you leave a response I can't leave one to then it will be deleted.*
@@gordon3186 Hi again. I don't have control over your ability to post replies to your own comment.
You are ignorant of what Christians actually believe, and your snide attitude, in conjunction with your incompetence in the subject matter, makes you look like a fool.
What?
These aren't "readings" of the text. It is just what it says.
Good words and I have wrestled much w/ my evolving views... I have had many since starting in Word of Faith, into Calvary Chapel, then to Free Presbyterian... finished with 14 years at our ARCBA Reformed Baptist Church. We have been out the Reformed Baptist for almost 5 years. PM if anyone is interested or has had similar experience...
Love your stuff Randal, but i think if you're going to criticise Lewis's doctrine of hell, you should allow his preemptive response:
“In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: 'What are you asking God to do?' to wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does."
Is there a point where an eternal soul must be allowed to fully and finally reject Christ's sacrifice for them. If God respects their will and autonomy, he must.
I'm binging on your videos - I've only just discovered them and I love what you do, and I share your repugnance at biblical violence.
My problem is that biblical violence is not merely peripheral to the Christian faith, but is integral to our story, namely the death and resurrection of Jesus. The idea that Jesus died for our sins is at the heart of Paul's message, from which it made its way into the gospels - it's something we can't possibly avoid. I do believe in a God of love, but I can't reconcile that belief with the idea that such a God would require the suffering and death of anyone, least of all his "beloved son," in order to reconcile us wayward sinners to him. In fact, it flies in the face of the message of the Hebrew Bible, that teaches that the path of repentance, of teshuva, is always available. Consequently, I both love the Christian faith, and am utterly repulsed by it, simultaneously.
The belief that Jesus died for our sins is one that I believe makes perfect sense in the context of the first century, and for very many centuries thereafter. For most of human history the answer to human conflict has been violence, which both protected the community against destructive forces, and healed it from the harm caused by the same. We now live in a very different moral universe that views violence as perpetuating the destructiveness it was designed to heal. But what do we then do with the cross? The cross is the centre of the Christian faith, but I, for one, can't accept it at all as the sign of God's love.
The better part of the United Church has now, basically, thrown out the Bible altogether, because it violates our fundamental moral convictions. What I love most about the United Church is that it is made up of people who will go to hell and back for the sake of its moral commitments (which it did post-1988 over the homosexuality issue). But the result is that we are a community that no longer knows what it believes. We can't live with or without the gospel story, and that plays hell with our survival as a denomination. We don't know, anymore, why we exist. I don't know any way out of this dilemma - do you have any ideas?
You could explore a girardean reading of atonement.
@@Randal_Rauser I've heard a lot about Rene Girard, but have never explored his thought. I guess it's time I did so! I'm actually very surprised that I reacted so emotionally to your videos - I wasn't aware of how important Christianity still is to me. That's something I need to think about. My knee-jerk reaction is to just reject it, but evidently I'm doing myself a disfavour by doing so. This is something I need to work on. Many of us in the United Church tend to have that knee-jerk reaction, and yet we're still there. The story and the tradition still matter to us deeply, however much we criticize it.
Thank you for your videos, because they are leading me to think more deeply about my relationship to the faith.
@@Randal_Rauser Could you recommend a book about Girard's theology? I get his theory of mimetic violence and the role of the scapegoat, but I haven't been exposed to his theology - in fact, I didn't know he had one! Jeremy Duncan at Commons Church in Calgary has a great video series on Girard that is helping me, but I'd like to read deeper. I had dismissed Girard in the past as his ideas struck me as another grand theory that claimed to explain everything about human culture through one simple mechanism, but maybe his theology is going to really work for me. That would be just amazing! Thanks very much for your time.
@@elizabethmorton4904 Try Brad Jersak's book: www.amazon.com/More-Christlike-God-Beautiful-Gospel/dp/1889973165/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GK9K2AN8LP5F&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.0aG3mGYWzj1F3Q8_bai-Zzz34iY2rPphs154OWlK12FurmlQhUMsiqdKhtpR1gSxg2Y73YlLq498HawgtBXZO99mOtpXSk4NCwF5_13E5fNScNLlG1gC-cFDe16YsjP_o9J3gAsnWt0-tlMTBXjGuTy0UH9xnkfMio5G7KVxVBn1I-W9SjLmPUXlpiZ8kTDIN4nWVQ9Zl5LCUAhKdJSQ70HMz5TSqeiL9BK_YUAA3WA.3Wl-TaoNVs5UzVZwvh3ep61GfBh11xhB4LO-RpAeu8Q&dib_tag=se&keywords=a+more+christlike+god&qid=1734913009&sprefix=a+more+christlike+god%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1
Also Brian Zahnd, "Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God."
Hell is an event and not a place. The wages of sin is death - eternal death. The lie of torture hell is one of Satan's masterpieces. It has made as many atheists as wine, women and song. But if you believe in hell as described, why don't you seek to avoid it? You go to the dentist if you have a hole in your tooth. You don't say "This is unfair."
God decides what is a fair punishment for sins.
WHY WOULD THEY GET RID OF TORTURE PART OF THE WAX MUSEUM?!? I WOULD BE SO A SOOOO DISAPPOINTED 12 YEAR OLD!!
Have you seen an illustrated copy of Foxe's Book of Martyrs? My mom told me it scared the hell out of her as a kid.
@ChristianCatboy yes... I had it in my library. Grim... it got my anticatholic juices flowing!
Read Pope Urban's address to the Christian people.
Bart Ehrman has talked about the history of resurrection and eternity.
1. Resurrection required a body. Preferably the best body possible which is why people are to be buried within 48 hours. There is a telling scene in the beginning of "The Kindgom of God" movie where a clergy threatens a lay peasant woman to dig up her dead husband and chop off his head, thus making him un-resurrectable. Today, Americans have like a 50% cremation rate and rising. How does resurrection work? Does god just start with the soul?
2. How old is Betty White when she is resurrected? I often pick recently dead old celebrities to ask this thought experiment. Is Betty the age that she died? I've asked this question of Christians over the decades and the best answer given is that god has promised some kind of perfect existence and beyond that nothing is known. That seems like a pretty s***y answer for such an important topic. What's interesting about this question is the juxtaposition with resurretion requiring a burial. If early Christians thought resurrection only needed a soul then why the immediate burial? How did this square with cremation centuries ago? If someone was cremated were they thought to be denied resurrection?
3. Eternity to Christians pre-education was one-life span, like around 100 years. These people were uneducated and the concept of infinity would have been lost on them. Bart mentioned this in passing but I think it would be an interesting topic to understand how they lay person thought of eternity prior to public eduction.
@@MybridWonderful if you are representing his views correctly, then Bart Ehrman has a very unsophisticated understanding of the (many) traditional ways of understanding the resurrection which have existed throughout Christian history. If you'd like some recommendations of readings to balance your perspective, I'd be happy to offer them to you.
Hey Randall. If hell is locked from the inside, no one could get in in the first place.
My house is locked from the inside, and yet here I am in the living room...
@Randal_Rauser then your house wasn't locked from the inside.
Unless you believe every human is born into hell.
"My house is locked from the inside, and yet here I am in the living room..."
- Is your house a house of horrors where you are just suffering, weeping and gnashing teeth? What a silly response.
@zelenisok the topic was how does one enter a locked area. The answer is either it wasn't locked at entry or one had a key. Insulting people when you don't understand the topic reflects very poorly on you.
The topic is hell. Both in the video and in the comment by B. S. Lewis here. Not any random locked space. I didnt insult you, I said your response is silly, which it is. And this one is too. Weird stuff.
So you're basically saying it's wrong for God to subject people who rejected Him to eternal torment and punishment, based on your understanding. Who are you to question God on His form of justice, thinking God is too merciful to subject His creation to eternal punishment? God says in Scripture that He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy. If we reject God's mercy through receiving the gift of His only begotten Son Jesus Christ paying for our sins on the cross with His blood, we're only getting what we rightfully deserve from God -- nothing more and nothing less.
Who are YOU to say that “Hell is God’s form of justice”, in the first place ? All you have is a very old collection of human writings, called the Bible. You can’t prove the truth of ANY of those writings on the existence and character of a non physical divine being, the existence and character of an afterlife, and existence and character of some form of ultimate justice, beyond what humans carry out while alive.
@@VicGeorge2K6 How is God just? It isn’t justice to sacrifice the innocent for the sins of the guilty. It isn’t mercy either.
Thank God no God exists. Who knows how evil something with complete power would be, if humans with power are anything to go by!
Hmm. That’s a really odd remark. Humans with power aren’t anything to go by. Humans with power are often depraved and evil. God (if he exists, which you obviously don’t believe) is benevolent and good. Please commence to misunderstand and straw man what I’ve just said, but as usual with your comments here this one is inane troll nonsense.
@ There is no evidence at all for a God, and all claims about its characteristics are mere supposition. What we do know is that power corrupts. Why wouldn’t that apply to a God?
@davethebrahman9870 You are wrong, there is evidence that God exists. But your larger point is wrong either way.
If God exists, then he is incorruptible. What you are saying is wrong by definition. You don't even have to believe in God to see that it's wrong.
@ What is the evidence for God? If such a being does exist, how do you know its characteristics?
@davethebrahman9870 Read The Experience of God, by David Bentley Hart. That book will answer both of your questions quite thoroughly.
This is a straight up herecy. How can one deny the Judgment and eternal salvation/punishment as the result of God's Justice and remain true to Christian faith? I simply don't understand and ask for some education on this, please, someone.
It's all made up. It doesn't have to be consistent.
My understanding is that before ect became popular, most Christians where universalists and anhilliationists.
ECT didn't really start to become popular until sometime around 400 AD.
the greek word translated to mean eternal is Aion which means age, as many scholars have pointed out a punishment that lasts an age isn't never ending.
In the early Church and among the early Church Fathers, there was some debate regarding the concept of eternal hell. The only type of universalism that was accused of heresy was Origen's claim that even the devil would be saved in the end. The Church cannot fully condemn universalism because some important and respected Church Fathers believed in it, such as Gregory of Nyssa, Clement of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor, etc. As I mentioned, in the early Church there were three views of hell: eternal, universalist, and annihilationism, with universalism being the most common. Later, the Church decided to adopt Augustine's view of eternal hell, but even Augustine described the universalists as “indeed very many.” What he meant was that they were a “vast majority.” Now, who is right? I don’t know. The problem is that no matter which view of hell you subscribe to, there are passages in the Bible that support all three of them. No matter which one you believe, you must be ready to ignore the passages that say otherwise. No one is denying hell or the seriousness of sin, just the fire-and-brimstone eternal version of it.
@@tombaron-z5w Many are indeed denying hell and the very concept of sin.
Perhaps you merely mean no (or few) Christians do, but IMO the inability of believers to make proper sense and agree about basic tenets should prompt some reconsideration.
@@steveng.clinard1766 Yes i meant Christians...as for reconsideration...the most brilliant theologianans and saints have tried to reconcile the texts that speak of hell since the dawn of christianity....but no one has ever came close to reconcile all texts in a view so that they don t seem to contradict, and of course there are moral issues, translation issues, political issues that also run into the equation. But yeah we should still try cause change isn't always heretical and no Christian denomination has remained entirely unchanged in its dogma or teachings over the centuries. Personally I hope the universalists are right it’s hard to reconcile a God who demands justice but seems to punish endlessly, which feels inconsistent with a just and loving nature.