hell

Jesus doesn’t seem to talk about “hell” as a place. Rather, he describes “hell” as a kind of relationship that one has with oneself, their neighbors and with God. Cultivating neighborly relations among people, disciplining one’s body and harmonizing one’s preaching and practice, and fearfully trusting in God are key ways of keeping oneself out of “hell.”

Prompted by a recent OST post (“The Vatican and a doctrine of universal salvation”), I remembered an entry I read a while back on the blog Out of Ur. It was a short piece posted by Shane Claiborne entitled, "Loving the Hell Out of People". Originally, the longer article was in Prism - America’s Alternative Evangelical Voice. In particular, what caught my attention was the re-interpretation of hell they both presented - hell is seen as here on earth, as something that people suffer through in everyday life. Hell is bodily and physical. Hell is not necessarily or only a metaphysical condition beyond time and place.

I was conversing with someone via e-mail about gehenna, and here is his response to me:

Gehenna is not really used in the Old Testament. The Greek version of the word is geenna. Geenna is used in the Greek NT but it does not occur in the 2nd Century BC Greek translation of the Old Testament, the LXX (Septuagint).

Jesus tells his disciples that they should not fear their persecutors because they cannot ultimately destroy their life before God. But they should fear - along with Israel - the God who will destroy unrepentant Israel in the judgment of gehenna, which is an image of the appalling slaughter that will result from the war against Rome.

without uncertainty it is impossible to please G-d - as faith could not exist without it

[This post was originally attached to the ‘a storyteller’s view of eternity’ thread.]

i have been believing (and doubting) in the god most high - the creator/redeemer of the universe, the god of israel, of scripture - since i was a small child. since i am over 40, this amounts to several decades of deep intellectual wrestles and inexplicably miraculous experiences. i am a fiction writer and a scriptwriter, a storyteller not a theologian, and my favorite way to conceptualize the impossible idea of god is within the stories of cs lewis, jr tolkein, madeleine l’engle and others. i post here, uncertain as to whether i belong in this conversation, being an artist not a theologian, but am rather desperate to have someone to walk with in the questions i feel the “church” has told me not to ask.