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An Introduction to Hell in The Gospels, The Words of Jesus

September 30, 2010 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

“There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this [Hell], if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.” C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Continued from a previous post.

After several weeks of laying the groundwork, we at last come to what I believe is the most critical part of our study on the Christian doctrine of Hell. Because of Jesus’ unique relationship with the Father, not to mention the fact that He was indeed God in the flesh, we simply cannot dismiss His words about Judgment and the final disposition of those who ultimately reject God.

In thumbing through the Gospels, especially in some translations, it might appear that Jesus taught a great deal about Hell, and in fact many expositors of the Bible have asserted exactly that. Depending on the church that you may have been attending, the odds are that you have probably heard “Hellfire and Brimstone” sermons where proof-texts from the Gospels are peppered throughout the homily. It would appear that Jesus had a great deal to say about Hell.

Or did He?

In my own research, I have identified only 22 verses in the Gospels where Jesus appears to be talking about Hell. A number of those verses are in passages that are repeated by one of the other Evangelists, and a in a couple of those passages the term used is repeated several times in quick succession (i.e Matthew 5:22,29,30 and Mark 9:43,45,47). Several others appear to be a case of Jesus telling the same story, but in a different fashion, so we can similarly group those together.

In short, those 22 verses where Jesus is seemingly talking about “hell” can be grouped into 11 separate passages, with some of the material in those passages overlapping between accounts in different passages within the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke) .

There is another fascinating anomaly to be found in the Gospels when Jesus is talking about “hell”. Instead of sticking to the use of just one word for hell as we commonly do, there are four different word uses that we find in these passages.

The first, and most commonly used (11 times) is Gehenna. We have encountered Gehenna before, back in Isaiah when we were looking for Hell in the Old Testament. Gehenna was (and is) a physical location outside of Jerusalem where there was a bit of Old Testament prophecy concerning some bad things that were going to occur and was considered a “really bad place” by the Jews of Jesus’ day. Gehenna is used in the Gospel in Matthew 5:22, 29, 30, 18:9, 10:28 23:28 and 23:33, Mark 9:43, 45, 47 and Luke 12:5. As I have alluded to previously, I don’t think that these verses have anything at all to do with “Hell”.

The next word used by Jesus in the Gospels is our old friend Hades. Surprisingly, it is only found 4 times in the Gospels, and in all but one of those instances seems to be simply referring to the Hebrew Sheol. The one exception is the ever popular parable of “Lazarus and The Rich Man”, a favorite proof text for many who assert that Hell is real and Jesus proved it right here. I will be writing at least one entire post on this parable and what I think Jesus was presenting here (you might be very surprised), and I might indeed have to break it down into two posts. The verses in the Gospels where Jesus uses the term Hades are found in Matthew 11:23, 16:18 (the aforementioned parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man) and in Luke 10:15, 16:23.

Another term that Jesus used and is commonly interpreted as a reference to Hell is “outer darkness”.  Jesus uses this term after the healing of the Centurions servant in Matthew 8:12, and again in Matthew 22:13 (the parable of the wedding banquet) and Matthew 25:30 in the Parable of the Talents. Notably this last usage is immediately prior to one of the strongest verses in the Gospels describing Hell as a place of eternal fire and torment.

That verse is of course Matthew 25:41, and is the final example of the different terminology used by Jesus that has been interpreted as Hellfire. That terminology is “fire”. There are three other times in the Gospels that we find Jesus referring to Judgment as “fire”. Two of them appear to be very related and are found in Matthew 7:19 and John 15:6 (incidentally, this is the only solid mention of hell in John’s Gospel). The other instance is the passage found in Matthew 13:39-42 and is found immediately after the Parable of the Wheat and Tares and the Parable of the Mustard seed.

So why did Jesus use four different words in describing the same Hell? Wouldn’t it have been much easier to stick with just one?  Why couldn’t He have just called it “The Lake of Fire” as John did in the Revelation. Could He have possibly been referring to four different concepts instead of one?

I am convinced that all of the references to Gehenna have nothing to do with Hell as the place for the final disposition of lost souls after the Final Judgment, and I will cover that when I get to the passages in question. Likewise, I do not believe that in the instances where Jesus uses the term Hades that He is referring to Hell as we know it, including the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man.

With regards to the “outer darkness” passages I must admit that I am still not entirely sure, but I will also examine these passages in depth.

I do however believe that the passages where fire and burning are used in the passages that I previously mentioned more than likely deal with what we typically call Hell, most especially the passage in Matthew 25:41. With that said, I’m do not believe that the evidence will show that Hell to be a place of eternal conscious torment.  Examining the wording used in these passages, especially some of the key terms in the original Greek, leaves quite a bit of latitude in the interpretation of what Jesus actually did and did not say.

As I said in my last post, this may take a while to work through all of these passages. If the reader is aware of any crucial passages in the Gospels that I am leaving out, please alert me to them, although I think that I have covered them all. Once I am done with the Gospels, I will move forward with the rest of the New Testament (where amazingly little is said about Hell), and eventually get to the Revelation. From there, I will begin to move through the Patristics.

Filed Under: Hell, Jesus Christ, The Bible, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Ben Witherington III on “Imputed Righteousness”

September 30, 2010 By Randy Olds 1 Comment

As with a good portion of Reformed theology, the notion of “imputed righteousness” has never made a lot of sense to me. However much I have read the “proof-texts” that many of those in the Reformed camp have presented, I still have not been able to see exactly what they are asserting, at least not in my Bible. And the idea that the righteousness of Christ is somehow or another “transferred” (or imputed) to a believer at the moment of his or her conversion really hasn’t made much sense to me on a logical fashion either.

There have been a number of times over the last year or two that I considering diving into this notion, but after dipping my toes into the different essays that I read on the subject, I decided to back off and save tackling this subject for another day ( some might remember that I actually started to write a series of posts on it this spring but realized that I was over my head). I find the whole Piper/Wright Justification debate, the Faith in Christ/Faithfulness of Christ debate as well as this notion of imputed righteousness to be interlocked, and frankly I think that it is important to be able to understand these ideas in an attempt to live the ethically pleasing lives that I believe that God has called us to live.

But enough with the lengthy introduction. I have been reading Ben Witherington III’s book “The Indelible Image” for the last few weeks, which is in actuality a book on Christian Ethics. I’ve been moving rather slowly through it, alternating my readings through my daily Bible Study, my research on Hell, as well as continuing through Thomas Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ.

Tonight I got to the portion of the book where Witherington discusses this whole “imputed righteousness” notion (pp. 223-227)

“What, then, about the notion of “imputed righteousness”? Is this a Pauline idea, or is this something that the early Reformers, such as Calvin and Luther and Erasmus, read into the text? We should remember that Luther especially was responding to the abuses of the papacy when it came to things such as indulgences, the attempt to buy years off of time spent in purgatory. It is no surprise that when Luther realized that this practice was at odds with what Paul said about salvation as a gift, he overreacted in the way he did to all sorts of works or good deeds, not just the works of the Mosaic law, which is what Paul is critiquing. We must consider first the quotation of Genesis 15:6 in Romans 4:3, where Paul follows the LXX [Septuagint], which has the passive voice “was counted/reckoned rather than the active voice “he counted” which is what the Hebrew has. I must stress that this quotation has nothing to do with Christ’s righteousness being counted in place of the believers righteousness. The text is quite explicit: it was Abraham’s faith that was reckoned to him as his righteousness. The former is credited in lieu of or as the latter. Notice that this is not forensic language but rather accounting or bookkeeping language (emphasis mine). There is a difference. In this quotation Paul is not talking about a legal fiction but rather about an exchange. God accepts one thing from Abraham in lieu of his giving God something else. ”

Witherington then goes on to examine a number of other texts where some have found the idea of  “imputed righteousness” such as in 1 Corinthians 30 and Philippians 3:9 and compares these to other Pauline texts that seem to say otherwise. After Witherington deals with the scriptural references fro and against “imputed righteousness” and comes to the conclusion that Paul did not say anything to that effect, he looks for the source of this doctrine.

Witherington continues:

“Once more we must ask, “If imputed righteousness is not in Paul’s thought, whence comes this idea that Christ’s alien righteousness is imputed to beleivers?” As it turns out, it comes from Erasmus, who bequeathed it to some of the later Reformers1. Erasmus chose to depart from the Vulgate rendering of Romans 4, which had “Abraham believed God and it was reputed [reputatum] to him unto justice.” Erasmus instead, drawing on the language of the lawyers of his day, rendered the text as follows: “Abraham believed God and it was imputed [imputatum] to him for justice.” This is the rendering found in Erasmus’ famous 1516 Greek New Testament, which was to have great influence both on the Reformers and on the early English translations of the New Testament. This might not have been so important except that Melanchthon used Erasmus’ Greek New Testament, and this sort of rendering was passed on into later Lutheran orthodoxy. Thus, an “imputation” understanding of the term diakaiosyne was imported into Pauline discussion, and has been a part of it ever since.”

A couple of paragraphs later, Witherington discusses the ethical ramifications of “imputed righteousness”:

“…Where it the case that when God looks at believers, he sees only Christ, that in turn would mean that God is prepared to be deceived or at least overlook Christian sin and not hold believers accountable for it. This is the direct opposite of what Paul says in Galatians 4 and 1 Corinthians 6. These ideas amount to a presentation to us of a God of legal fiction who in the end is less than totally righteous. This too would contradict the teachings of Jesus that God was requiring a higher righteousness of Jesus’ followers than Moses required of his, indeed even higher than the very particular Pharisees. It may be asked, “Why would God expect less of the believer under grace after the Spirit had been given than he expected and required under the Mosaic law?” This whole idea hardly comports with the intensification of demands that we find in the ethics of both Jesus and Paul.”

Some day soon, I plan to revisit all of these ideas of justification, imputed righteousness and the faith/faithfulness of Christ. When I do, I think that I will re-examine this portion (that I have bookmarked on my blog) of Witherington’s book, as he has explained it (imputed righteousness) better to me that anyone else to date.

  1. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation; A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, 1996, p. 24 [↩]
Filed Under: Justification, soteriology, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Scot McKnights Second Part of “Beyond The Abyss”

September 29, 2010 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

Scot McKnight has posted the the second of what looks to be a four part review of Hell in Sharon Baker’s new book “Razing Hell”. As before, the conversation on Scot’s blog is even better than the post itself. I have added Baker’s book to my Amazon Wish List.

Filed Under: Hell

Clark Pinnock on The Injustice of Eternal Hell

September 29, 2010 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

I stumbled upon these quotes by the late Clark Pinnock today and decided to share them: 

“…we are asked to believe that God endlessly tortures sinners by the million, sinners who perish because the Father has decided not to elect them to salvation [while they were alive on earth], though he could have done so, and whose torments are supposed to gladden the hearts of believers in heaven. The problems with this doctrine are both extensive and profound.” Clark Pinnock, “Four views on Hell,” Zondervan, (1992), Page 136

“How can Christians possibly project a deity of such cruelty and vindictiveness whose ways include inflicting everlasting torture upon his creatures, however sinful they may have been? Surely a God who would do such a thing is more nearly like Satan than like God, at least by any ordinary moral standards, and by the gospel itself.“ Clark H. Pinnock, “The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent,” Criswell Theological Review 4 (1990-Spring), Pages 246-47.

Filed Under: Clark Pinnock, Hell Tagged With: ,

From Cult to Christian, The Long Journey Home

September 29, 2010 By Randy Olds 7 Comments

Today I stumbled upon another blog of a woman who is chronicling her journey out of religious abuse. I lingered for a while, reading some of her posts…feeling her pain.

There are essentially three types of blogs that I follow. I have found a number of respected Christian scholars, most of whom are professors at one university or another. Of these, I tend to avoid those who are too far extreme either to the left or the right. I also follow a number of seminarians, of who most are working on advanced theology degrees. These advanced students often ask questions that others are afraid to ask.

The last category of bloggers that I like to read are those who have been involved in some sort of cult or “extreme fundamentalism” and are trying to find their way home. Many, but not all, of these spent time in the same cult that I grew up in, Armstrongism.

I read the professors and the academic types because I seek to learn from them. Although I don’t always agree with their conclusions, they delve much deeper into various theological ideas than I will ever find in a Sunday School class. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have weeded down the blogs that I follow to those who approach theology and the Bible with open minds and are willing to ask the same hard questions that I do.

And hard questions I ask.

I think that growing up in a cult will force a person to do one of two things. Either give up on religion completely, or start completely from scratch. I’ve seen a great many who grew up in the cult that I did who did the former, and I was very close to giving up on God my own self. How could I trust anything that any religious leader said when the one that I grew up thinking was “God’s Apostle” turned out to be blatantly wrong on 90% of what he taught?

Fortunately, God never gave up on me, and the day eventually came when I set out to once-and-for-all determine if Christianity’s claims had any validity at all. Through many, many painstaking hours of study and a few heartfelt prayers, I finally determined that the basic claim of Christianity must be true. That is, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived, died on the cross, and was resurrected three days later. And that He did it for me.

However, past that basic fact, I have had to prove nearly every tenant of the Christian faith for myself, and that is still an ongoing process.I had to start from scratch.

Just because a bunch of people came up with a creed or two, or a church committee developed a “statement of faith” is simply not good enough for me. Having been burned, and burned badly, by the Worldwide Church of God’s erroneous “statement of faith”, I doubt that I will ever be able to simply say, “Hey, that’s a great creed, I think I’ll go with it!”

So, as I read through the blogs of recovering fundamentalists, quivering daughters, and cult survivors of all sorts, I realize that it is much the same for all of these people. Like me, most of these have lost faith not in God, but in those who tell us who God is. Quite often, the cult survivors that I run across escaped the cults that they were in decades ago, but are still struggling to find a Christian church that they can feel comfortable in and a pastor that they can trust.

For me, it’s been over twenty years since I set foot in an Armstrongite church, but I know that I still haven’t fully recovered. Of course, I spent a good many years of those two decades in no church at all, and it has only been in the last few years that I really started digging into the Bible in earnest to find the message held within. But that too is often a hallmark of cult survivors.

The shell-shock of coming out of a cult often discourages survivors from any sort of church membership at all. And as I pointed out in a post last year, the experience quite often drives cult survivors into a stance of complete disbelief or atheism.

Perhaps the day will come when I read an account of someones journey away from spiritual abuse and it won’t hit that nerve that is still raw. Perhaps one day I will have, to my satisfaction, proven enough of the tenants of the creeds that I can stop asking so many questions. Perhaps one day I will find myself completely healed from having grown up in a cult, and simply call myself Christian, instead of “a-Christian-who-grew-up-in-a-cult-but-who-is-now-just-a-normal-Christian.”

Filed Under: About Me, Armstrongism, atheism, cults, Fundamentalism, Spiritual Abuse Tagged With:

Hell, The Story Up ‘Til Now

September 28, 2010 By Randy Olds 2 Comments

Continued from a previous post.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to look a little more at the influences on the Intertestamental writings, but upon further reflection, I think that I have covered the subject material sufficiently, and am anxious to move on to what Jesus had to say on the matter.

Over the last few weeks I have attempted to illuminate the evolution of hell in Jewish thought, beginning with the Old Testament views of Sheol and moving through some of the mythologies that developed during the Intertestamental period. The point of the exercise has been to try and gain an understanding of what the “Jew on the Street” might have thought about Heaven, Hell and the afterlife at the time of Christ.

Some might say that the inclusion of the material found in 1 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, as well as the exploration of Greek Mythology was unnecessary. After all, wasn’t Jesus crystal clear about Judgment and Hell? Jesus did indeed have quite a bit to say about those things and we will begin to explore them next. However, it seems to me that when Jesus used words like “Gehenna”, “Hades”, “Outer Darkness” as well as “the eternal fire reserved for the Devil and his angels”, it behooves us to understand what those terms would have meant to His audience, as well as what He was communicating to us.

The apocalypses and mythologies are important not because Jesus believed them, but because many of those in His audience did. Not only that, but later theologians apparently read a lot of those mythologies back into Jesus’ own words in an attempt to harmonize Jesus’ words about Judgment and Hell with these Jewish Apocalyptic writings. Tertullian, Clement and others apparently considered works like 1 Enoch as valid as the Gospels themselves and some of the conclusions that they came up with in their attempted harmonization, at least in relation to the doctrine of Hell, seems to me to have resulted in what ended up as Catholic dogma that the Reformation unfortunately never quite shook off.

Therefore, I want to now go to the Gospels and see exactly what Jesus did and did not say about Hell. I have identified 21 verses contained in 11 passages where Jesus uses the terms that I identified above. Some Bible translations use the word “Hell” for nearly all of them, although the better translations will use Gehenna, Hades and so forth.

In my next post, I will identify these passages and verses and try to break them down into categories. I will then look at all 11 passages and see how different theologians have interpreted them. I am hoping not to have to write 11 posts, one on each passage, but that may well end up being the case. I have already written a great deal more on the subject than I originally thought that I would when I began this series. However, I am committed now, so I plan to see this little (or perhaps not so little) series on Hell all the way to the end. The few weeks that I intended for this series may indeed stretch out to a couple of months.

With that said, I still do not intend to blog exclusively on the subject of Hell during this period. I need to stretch my legs occasionally, and will therefore intersperse the remaining posts as I see fit with other material.

Questioning Hell Main Page

Filed Under: blogging, Hell, Jesus Christ, Uncategorized
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