Category: hell
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Ah, Gehenna: Rey Didn’t Start The Fire
In my post on Gehenna (part of my Hellish Week) I made a statement that I had read in several places and which needs to be retracted because it is historical dubious. Here is what I said: What they forget to mention is that the site wasn’t merely for garbage; it was a place for…
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A Hellish Week
This will serve as the series home for my posts on Hell. Prayer Monday: An Unanswered Prayer Quotable: Irenaeus On the Real Heaven and Hell Philosophical Responses to the Denial of Hell (Hell? Oh!) An examination of Sheol in the Old Testament (What the Sheol?) An examination of Gehenna, Hades (etc.) in the New Testament…
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What About Hell I Don’t Know
Textually, as I covered in a couple of posts before this, I must affirm a literal hell which consists of judgment, separation from God, punishment, eternality and should be rightfully shunned. I think it is dangerous to say the place doesn’t exist when the volume of Scripture teeters with the weight of the matter. I…
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Hell? Yeah.
I’ve touched on lots of Scripture (in both Testaments) but I needed to bring up some broad theological points. I didn’t want to make this a book, I just wanted to put up a few posts that pointed out that the Scriptures are fraught with the doctrine of hell and Christians should believe it. This…
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Hell? No?
At this point, naysayers are quick to say that I’m building a theology off a metaphor. He was using the term Gehenna—which is the burning the trash heap outside of Jerusalem; he was not using the term Sheol. To which the response is, obviously longer in the last post that Christ added details that had…
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Get The Gehenna Out of Here?
People love talking about the love of Jesus. Man, that Old Testament was brutal—the God there equally so: ordering death of people, constantly warning of impending judgment, horrid stuff. But the Jesus of the New Testament is fundamentally different: loving, warm, drawing all men to himself, eating with sinners and judging no one! Not like…
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Prayer Mondays: An Unanswered Prayer
Barring my faulty memory (and if I’m not lazy) I want to post prayers on Monday from all over Church History and then throughout the modern day, and then my own. But this one comes from a story Jesus told and it reveals an unanswered prayer by a man in Hell. “And he cried and…
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What the Sheol?
One of the first points folk bring up about Hell is that if it is as horrible as people say it is, and if the way to avoid it is to believe God, then why didn’t God bring it up before the New Testament? Before Matthew or Mark (whichever was first) we don’t get an…
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Quotables: Irenaeus On The Real Heaven and Hell
Every now and then I like posting something incisive that was written in the past because it speaks so well into the present. The sweet thing about this is that these guys, who are often waved away today, have dealt with a lot of the same issues while remaining simultaneously (by the modern mind) ignored.…
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Philosophy Fridays: Hell? Oh!
Folk who know me might remember that the reason I became a believer was, in the first case, a fear of hell. Well, a roundabout fear anyway: I had just seen the Exorcist and hell became a reality to my young brain. Some atheists like to say hell is an abusive scare tactic and that…