God is Love
This is the Good News taught by Yeshua of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ. God is the Father, not just the Source of all that is, but the loving Source of all that is. Or as St. John even more succinctly put it, God is love. Not "loving." Not "full of love," but simply is love, period. Because God is universal love, the early church often held the idea of universal salvation. But unfortunately, the Good News often becomes "mixed news" in modern church pews.
The distorted version of Christianity taught to many is a subtle dualism, with an eternal heaven and eternal hell, eternal bliss and eternal torture, an eternal God saving the few, and an eternal devil snaring the many. This teaching is terribly mistaken, yet widely accepted—even demanded—in many branches of Christianity.
Eternal Torture?
There is the idea that God is love, but will also torment all who "do not accept Jesus" (itself a gross misunderstanding of the gospel) forever. The resulting image is not only monstrous, but an impossible contradiction. It's inconceivable to imagine any person causing the pain of another forever.
Maybe a a day perhaps. Maybe a few years, if I'm exceptionally evil. But who among us would torture even Hitler forever? If he were tortured a year for every person who died in World War II, that's 530,000,000 years. And as some would gladly remind you, that's not even a second as far as forever is concerned.
No one other than a psychopath could torment anyone endlessly. No father could punish his children endlessly. But some say that the One who is Infinite Love does it forever. Something is wrong!
We have been told that:
• the punishment for finite crimes is infinite punishment.
• the One who is infinite Love has finite patience-but patience is a quality of love! (1 Cor. 13;4)
• the One of infinite might has a plan that finite man can thwart.
The threat of eternal torture is like a gun pointed to a person's head. It turns a loving invitation into spiritual rape.
A further problem is that an eternal punishment is pointless, since it does not rehabilitate or heal. Shall we accept this picture at face value, contrary to our own knowledge of love, contrary to our own experience of God's nature, and contrary to innumerable promises of Scripture, or, shall we delve deeper, to get at the mystical truths of what the Bible calls judgment and salvation?
Eternal?
Nothing in the Bible suggests that punishment after death is irrevocable except for the drama of some images and the entrenched mistranslation of some words and passages. The word in the Greek NT most often translated as "forever" or "eternal" is aion which means an age, and the adjectival form, aionian, means age-long. This is the source of the English word eon. The corresponding Hebrew term is olam, "age" or "world."
Both these terms indicate conditions with an indefinite, but not an infinite, duration.
Eternal and forever are unfortunate mistranslations for age and world, both of which end, as God is the Creator and Sustainer of both.
Blessings and light
Alan
This is the Good News taught by Yeshua of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ. God is the Father, not just the Source of all that is, but the loving Source of all that is. Or as St. John even more succinctly put it, God is love. Not "loving." Not "full of love," but simply is love, period. Because God is universal love, the early church often held the idea of universal salvation. But unfortunately, the Good News often becomes "mixed news" in modern church pews.
The distorted version of Christianity taught to many is a subtle dualism, with an eternal heaven and eternal hell, eternal bliss and eternal torture, an eternal God saving the few, and an eternal devil snaring the many. This teaching is terribly mistaken, yet widely accepted—even demanded—in many branches of Christianity.
Eternal Torture?
There is the idea that God is love, but will also torment all who "do not accept Jesus" (itself a gross misunderstanding of the gospel) forever. The resulting image is not only monstrous, but an impossible contradiction. It's inconceivable to imagine any person causing the pain of another forever.
Maybe a a day perhaps. Maybe a few years, if I'm exceptionally evil. But who among us would torture even Hitler forever? If he were tortured a year for every person who died in World War II, that's 530,000,000 years. And as some would gladly remind you, that's not even a second as far as forever is concerned.
No one other than a psychopath could torment anyone endlessly. No father could punish his children endlessly. But some say that the One who is Infinite Love does it forever. Something is wrong!
We have been told that:
• the punishment for finite crimes is infinite punishment.
• the One who is infinite Love has finite patience-but patience is a quality of love! (1 Cor. 13;4)
• the One of infinite might has a plan that finite man can thwart.
The threat of eternal torture is like a gun pointed to a person's head. It turns a loving invitation into spiritual rape.
A further problem is that an eternal punishment is pointless, since it does not rehabilitate or heal. Shall we accept this picture at face value, contrary to our own knowledge of love, contrary to our own experience of God's nature, and contrary to innumerable promises of Scripture, or, shall we delve deeper, to get at the mystical truths of what the Bible calls judgment and salvation?
Eternal?
Nothing in the Bible suggests that punishment after death is irrevocable except for the drama of some images and the entrenched mistranslation of some words and passages. The word in the Greek NT most often translated as "forever" or "eternal" is aion which means an age, and the adjectival form, aionian, means age-long. This is the source of the English word eon. The corresponding Hebrew term is olam, "age" or "world."
Both these terms indicate conditions with an indefinite, but not an infinite, duration.
Eternal and forever are unfortunate mistranslations for age and world, both of which end, as God is the Creator and Sustainer of both.
Blessings and light
Alan
