Powerpoint 3 Flashcards
Church’s Historical Teaching
Acknowledgement - Scripture teaches the intermediate and eternal conscious torment of the wicked.
Indifference - Negative side/warning to “escape” and “flee” from the “wrath to come” is downplayed/ignored while the positive side of God’s love in Christ is overstated to the exclusion of everything else (Mt. 23:33; Lk. 3:7).
Ignorance - People do not know why they should believe in hell. There is avoidance. No one wants to hear a “hell-fire and brimstone’ preacher.
Doubt - Preaching on this doctrine becomes “unkind,” “unloving,” or “negative.” Is there really a hell?
Denial -Influence of cults or other religions enter/books attack Biblical view/heretical views influence believers
Irritation - Orthodox theologians ignore the challenge by either down playing the challenge; not enough time to deal with it; passing fad just ignore.
Affirmation - When false views increase within the church, there is a re-affirmation and teaching of Biblical view
Acknowledgement - Church states its position until the cycle begins again.
Five Views on Hell
Literal – A place of everlasting punishment for the wicked.
Metaphorical – No redemption for wicked but end is uncertain.
Purgatorial – A place of divine cleansing for the righteous who die with unconfessed sins; receive judgment and punishment over a period of time. The righteous living can offer prayers or do good works as payment against time to serve.
Conditional - A temporary punishment: wicked are redeemed for eternal life or annihilated (made non-existent).
Universalism- All people will be saved
Literal: A place of everlasting punishment for the wicked
Possible location for majority of human race
Place of endless, conscious punishment
- Physical torment (literal)
- A state of being always separate from God
A place of no exit
Various levels of punishment based on a person’s sins
Permanent residence of Satan, Anti-Christ, False Prophet, Hades, fallen angels
Conditional Immortality or Annihilationism
A temporary punishment: wicked are redeemed for eternal life or annihilated (made non-existent).
- Some people will not be saved
- The human soul is not naturally immortal
- Eternal existence is God’s gift to the redeemed
- Unrepentant will receive temporary conscious punishment
- At final resurrection, unrepentant are destroyed/cease to exist
Metaphorical: Early written pictures
- Blasphemers hanging by their tongues
- Adulterous women hanging over boiling mud by their hair braids or necks
- Slanderers chew their tongues; hot irons burn their eyes.
- Murderers are cast into pits filled with poisonous snakes while worms fill their bodies
- Church gossipers stand in a pool of burning sulphur and pitch
- Those who turn their backs on God are slowly roasted over a spit.
Metaphorical (J.J. Packer)
“Do not try to imagine what it is like to be in hell…the mistake is to take such pictures as physical descriptions, when in fact they are images symbolizing realities…far worse than the symbols themselves.”
Metaphorical (Billy Graham)
“Could it be that the fire Jesus talked about is an eternal search for God that is never quenched? That, indeed, would be hell. To be away from God forever, separated from His Presence.”
Metaphorical (Biblical Images of Hell)
The biblical images of hell present a reality that cannot be fully understood but can be recognized as a reality that presents living conditions that will be absent of God.
To assume that these biblical images are in and of them selves literal descriptions of hell is to have the Bible say more than what it says.
Definition of Purgatorial
A place of divine cleansing for the righteous who die with unconfessed sins; receive judgment and punishment over a period of time. The righteous living can offer prayers or do good works as payment against time to serve.
Universalism: All People Will Be Saved
All people will be saved
God restores the creation to perfect harmony
Eternal punishment contradicts the love of God
- His love is stronger than human resistance
- His power overcomes sin and evil
Hell, if it exists, is not eternal
Punishment is remedial, leading sinner to repentance
Satan can be redeemed
Theological Development of Hell
Sheol (65x):
place the dead go: righteous and the unrighteous. A place where there would be no hope of return.
Hints of Change:
Psalm 17:15 – “I will see your face when I awake…”
Psalm 49:15 – “But God will redeem my life from the grave; he will surely take me to himself.”
Daniel 12:2 - “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.”
Hades (10x):
4x in Revelation with its end revealed in 20:14
Intermediate State:
Intertestamental view focusing on the justice of God where the godly dead could not be present with the ungodly dead, if the goal (teleos) of life is fellowship with God. [DISPUTED VIEW]
Related Verses:
The Rich Man and Lazarus - Luke 16: 19-31
Ephesians 4:7-10
Philippians 1:20-23
