Enarchay,

I’m glad you’ve discovered this site, since you seem to be getting many of your questions answered. Like you, I think Andrew’s historical take on New Testament eschatology has a lot of interpretive power, and makes the NT narrative (particularly the words of Jesus) hang together quite well. I highly recommend you read Andrew’s ‘The Coming of the Son of Man’, which fleshes out the arguments you might have heard here.

At the same time, just because Andrew is smart and persuasive doesn’t make him right. There are other smart and persuasive people (e.g. ‘Kingjames1’, Peter Wilkinson, on this very forum) who disagree (sometimes quite strongly) with him. I have had some very frustrating days reading through certain debates where each party sounded right, though they were often in clear contradiction. And so, in the end, it can’t all be solved by appeals to authority (unless you’re Catholic—but Andrew ain’t the Pope). For me, it comes down to my picture of God (which, of course, has evolved over time, but is stable around certain concepts). The traditional doctrine of eternal post-mortem conscious torment doesn’t seem right to me. And I’d hate to be a wishy washy ‘liberal’ who wags the biblical dog with the philosophical tail, but if God so loved us that he sent his son to save us, then ‘hell’ contradicts the very nature of God.

Even folks who are quite traditional, like CS Lewis, realize that God’s character would prevent him from having an active role in ‘maintaining’ hell (which is why Lewis speculates that hell is locked ‘from the inside’—in spite of the traditional pictures which very much see it as locked from the outside). NT Wright (who has more in common with Andrew than other NT scholars) has comments on both ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ here. You’ll notice he stays far away from hell as divinely mandated punitive torture (good move!).

At the end of the day, we must be faithful to God, and faithful to Scripture. Nevertheless, when the latter is ambiguous, I find it safer to err on the side of God not being a sadist.

 Cheers,

 -Daniel-