Universalism and Death (by Jeff Cook)
Jul 6, 2015 @ 5:01 by 111 Comments
This post is by Jeff Cook, and I am committed to giving space to Jeff’s public ruminations because they are reasonable and give us space to think through challenging topics with rigor. Jeff Cook: I’ve become convinced this year that the traditional view of hell will not last as a dominant theory among scholars for [Read More...]
Repainting Hell: Jeff Cook’s Closure
Jun 3, 2015 @ 0:02 by 64 Comments
Jeff Cook teaches philosophy at the University of Northern Colorado. He is the author of Everything New: Reimagining Heaven and Hell(Subversive 2012), and a pastor of Atlas Church in Greeley, Colorado. You can connect with him at everythingnew.org and @jeffvcook. One thing I admire about Jeff Cook is his willingness to put his thinking on the line for others to debate, [Read More...]
Repainting Hell: The Argument from Location (Jeff Cook)
May 26, 2015 @ 0:04 by 128 Comments
A solid number of theologians and scholars over the past century have questioned whether the church has understood hell correctly. The most widely held view has interpreted “hell” as “eternal conscious torment,” but this view is not as easily justified through the scriptures or through reason as we might think given its prominence. I wish [Read More...]
Repainting Hell 3: Jeff Cook
May 18, 2015 @ 5:03 by 38 Comments
Repainting Hell : The Argument from Desire (Jeff Cook) As Thomas Aquinas once offered five ways to know a God exists, so too I hope to offer five ways to know that hell is not “eternal conscious torment.” Like Aquinas, my arguments will be philosophical in nature. Though I think there are many solid biblical [Read More...]
Repainting Hell 2 (Jeff Cook)
May 11, 2015 @ 5:13 by 45 Comments
Repainting Hell: The End of Evil (Jeff Cook) As Thomas Aquinas once offered five ways to know a God exists, so too I hope to offer five ways to know that hell is not “eternal conscious torment.” Like Aquinas, my arguments will be philosophical in nature. Though I think there are many solid biblical reasons [Read More...]
Does God’s Mercy Endure Forever, or Does it End?
May 4, 2015 @ 0:04 by 24 Comments
Rob Bell asked the question if God’s mercy would endure forever so that people would have opportunities to turn to God in the afterlife (postmortem opportunity = PO) or if that mercy would end at death. Bell’s answer was a deft move in rhetoric: love wins, he said. Dante’s famous Divine Comedy disagrees for in it we [Read More...]
Repainting Hell: C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright (by Jeff Cook)
Apr 27, 2015 @ 4:54 by 106 Comments
One of the features of this blog I like is the inclusion of disparate voices. I, Scot McKnight, am not the only voice; RJS is another voice; John Frye, Jonathan Storment, and Jeff Cook are other voices. And others send me posts and we post them to give yet more voices a platform to create [Read More...]
Is Heaven Vital for Morality or Not?
Apr 27, 2015 @ 0:05 by 10 Comments
You may well recall the famous scene in Les Miserables in which Jean Valjean comes clean in public to take the place of another who was in fact on trial instead of himself (Valjean). The scene poses the moral theory called altruism, that is, that one does what is good for others in a disinterested manner. It [Read More...]
God’s Love and Hell
Apr 10, 2015 @ 0:09 by 26 Comments
Here’s how he begins the chapter, with a question: How can hell exist if God is truly love and will bring his world to the perfect comic end we explored in the first chapter? The answer? Well, what I want to argue is that hell can exist precisely because God is love. Because God is [Read More...]
The Importance of Heaven and Hell
Mar 10, 2015 @ 0:07 by 15 Comments
No one in the world has thought more about heaven, hell and purgatory than Jerry Walls. He has an academic, but accessible, book on each topic and now he has brought all his thinking together in one far more accessible, rearranged book called Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: A Protestant View of the Cosmic Drama. Just a few [Read More...]
Judgment Day: God’s Home Makeover
Jan 5, 2015 @ 4:46 by 31 Comments
The very claim Christians have always made is that at some day God will judge us all.Every.last.one.of.us. The great, last judgment. The question many have against that claim is this: Is it all that simple, that God will save the Christians and all the non-Christians will be banned from God’s good, eternal blessedness? Yet, I think [Read More...]
“God is on a mission to get the hell out of earth”
Dec 15, 2014 @ 0:05 by 26 Comments
I have been reading Joshua Ryan Butler’s The Skeletons in God’s Closet, the first major section in which is a study of hell – and how it fits into the Bible’s narrative. Hell without a story becomes a torture chamber. Butler begins by clarifying the all too common view of hell: We get hell wrong because we [Read More...]
Skeletons: Introducing Joshua Ryan Butler
Dec 1, 2014 @ 4:25 by 7 Comments
I will tell you why I like Joshua Ryan Butler’s The Skeletons in God’s Closet: The Mercy of Hell, the Surprise of Judgment, the Hope of Holy War. Because he’s young and is sensitive to some of the Bible’s most sensitive issues (see the topics in that subtitle?), because he forges his way into these topics [Read More...]
Is the Lake of Fire Torture? Josh Butler
Oct 10, 2014 @ 0:13 by 37 Comments
IS THE LAKE OF FIRE TORTURE? by Josh Butler, author of the just-out and excellent book, The Skeletons in God’s Closet. More about Josh below. Many a street preacher has used the “lake of fire,” an image in Revelation, to depict God as a sadistic torturer who likes to roast unrepentant rebels like kalua pigs [Read More...]
Evangelical Alliance Examines the Conditionalists
Aug 18, 2014 @ 0:08 by 10 Comments
The Evangelical Alliance is the UK’s version of a genuinely evangelical and ecumenical organization. If I may, American evangelicalism has never been able to get along well enough to form such an organization (unless I’m mistaken). It seeks to bring together all of the UK’s evangelicals; it does not attempt to show how other (supposed) [Read More...]
Can Hell be Restorative?
Aug 7, 2014 @ 0:17 by 28 Comments
Christopher Marshall, a professor at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, thinks so. While I’m not entirely sure he resolves the problems he generates, and he generates them as well as anyone I’ve read, his approach to the problem of hell (Rethinking Hell) is somewhere along the line of conditionalism or annihilationism or final radical [Read More...]
Terrance Tiessen’s Journey to Solve the Hell Problem
Jul 28, 2014 @ 4:57 by 21 Comments
This post is by Terry Tiessen, and I use the post with his permission. I set out to write a blog post that grew rather large. So I have decided to split it into two posts, of which this is the first. Here I will relate the story of my long journey in quest of [Read More...]
Do All Humans have an Immortal Soul?
Jul 24, 2014 @ 0:08 by 14 Comments
If you believe in the immortality of the soul, so it would seem, you would have to believe in endless punishment of the wicked or universalism. In the history of the church, belief in the immortality of the soul has been a constant. Not all, but most have believed God made humans immortal. While N.T. [Read More...]
The Bible’s General Trend and Hell
Jul 21, 2014 @ 5:10 by 47 Comments
In the exceptionally useful anthology of scholarly pieces on conditionalism (or annihilationism) in Rethinking Hell (ed. C.M. Date, GG. Stump, J.W. Anderson), one of the most important contributions is by Harold E. Guillebaud, whose work is now harder to find (I find no copies available through Amazon). Guillebaud lays down some strong lines to open [Read More...]
The Clobber Text for ECT-ers
Jul 16, 2014 @ 2:33 by 24 Comments
The clobber text for those who embrace eternal conscious torment is Revelation 14:11,with vv. 9-10 preceding it. Another way of saying this is that this is the defeater text for conditionalism; another way is to say this is the one text conditionalists have to use gymnastics to explain. Here it is: 9 If anyone worships [Read More...]