Erroneous Idea of Eternal Hell Obscures Good News Of Gospel - Jacob Wright

The good news is that God has come to restore this shattered world, NOT that if we happen to come across the right beliefs then God might not torture us for eternity. 

The idea that you have to tell people the scariest most horrifying thing ever ("eternal Hell") in order to present the "good news" of a formula to be saved from it is the absurdity of all absurdities.

I've had people tell me "That's what makes the good news so good! You can't have good news without the bad news!" It’s as if these people have forgotten that the world is full of suffering, disease, fear, violence, war, heartbreak, injustice, poverty, and finally death. The state of this world is the bad news, and everyone lives it.

The good news is not that if we happen to get the right beliefs then God might not torture us forever after this short life in which we all experience suffering. The good news is that God has come to this world to make things right!

The idea that the good news actually means “avoiding some eternal afterlife horror” is nothing more than using the fear of death to propagate worse news than we ever imagined, that the world is worse than we thought!

Eternal torment infinitely eclipses any sort of good news. Eternal torment is a dark shadow overcasting the contemporary understanding and articulation of gospel, and it needs to be removed.

The truth is, the good news is that God has come to restore this shattered world and mercifully bring it to justice, eradicate suffering, and vindicate human meaning within the cosmos. It's as simple as that. The kingdom come. It's what the prophets have declared from the beginning of the world.

"Holiness" = Be Christlike - Jacob M Wright

Jesus said that when we love our enemies, overcome evil with good, and are kind to all, then we will be perfect as our Father is perfect. That is holiness.

When we're studying scripture and we read that God says "Be holy as I am holy," it means that God wants us to be like Jesus. This is because Jesus is the best revelation of what God is like.

When we say that "God is holy" we cannot mean that God is something other than like Jesus. We cannot mean God is cruel, vindictive, and unChristlike. That is how all other humans are, not Jesus.

We cannot mean that God can't look upon sin or won't allow sin or sinners in his presence. That is how the Pharisees were, not Jesus.

When God tells us to "Be holy,” it means that God is calling us to be like Jesus. Jesus said that when we love our enemies, overcome evil with good, and are kind to all, then we will be perfect as our Father is perfect. That is holiness.


"You cannot describe God as cruel, capricious, vindictive, and then justify it by saying, 'God is holy.' No. God's holiness looks like Jesus."
- Brian Zahnd

"The holiness of God is expressed as empathetic self-giving."
- Archbishop Lazar

"Holiness is love of God and of others carried to a sublime extravagance."
- Jean Baptiste H. Lacordaire

The Mistranslation Of "Hell" In The Bible - Jacob Wright

The concept of "hell" or eternal torment in the afterlife is based on mistranslations and not based on Biblical teaching.

The word "Hell" that we have in the Bible is a mistranslation of the word "Gehenna." The word "Gehenna" appears just a few times is in the Old Testament. The concept of "hell", or eternal torment in the afterlife is literally and exactly nowhere in the Old Testament.

Gehenna is a literal place, right outside of Jerusalem, where Israel practiced gross idolatry and later became called "the Valley of Slaughter" because of its reputation of idolatry and loathsomeness. Dead bodies were thrown in Gehenna and they were eaten by worms and turned to ashes by fire.

So What Did Jesus Mean We Spoke About "Gehenna?"
The understanding of historical and geographical details provides the context of Jesus usage of "Gehenna." Jesus quotes Isaiah when talking about Gehenna when he says "where the worm doesn't die and the fire is not quenched".

He's referring back to the valley of Gehenna, directly quoting Isaiah 66:24, which says "...the dead bodies, the worms that eat them up will not die and the fire that consumes them will not be quenched."

This literally happened. Dead bodies were eaten up by unquenchable fire and worms fed on the dead bodies until they were consumed to nothing.

If you were to visit that Valley of Slaughter today,  you wouldn't see the fire still burning nor will you see immortal worms feeding on miraculously preserved dead bodies. The bodies are gone, the worms are gone, the fire is gone. The point Isaiah and Jesus were making is that the fire would not be deterred in burning up the dead bodies to nothing, the worms would not be deterred in eating up the dead bodies to nothing. And keep in mind these are mortal dead bodies in this life, not immortal conscious souls in the afterlife.

To read eternal torment into that is misguided.

"Eternal" Is Also A Mistranslation
Even "eternal fire" or "eternal punishment" is a mistranslation, as "eternal" is a mistranslation of the Greek word "aionios", which does not mean "never-ending" or anything of the sort. It means "of the age to come", or to Plato - who may have invented the word - it means something which has its source in God and the unseen realm. It has nothing to do with ongoing, never-ending time.

There is literally no verse in scripture that can prop up the pagan, non-Jewish concept of eternal torment.

Early Church Fathers Didn't Teach Eternal Torment
This is not some new, "politically correct" idea that people are making up. There is a long list of early fathers who rejected eternal torment because they understood these correct meanings of words, they didn't believe in the immortality of the soul (a pagan Greek belief), and they recognized that the scriptures either taught conditional immortality and/or final universal reconciliation.

Eternal torment was the minority belief in the early church, and among those who were less familiar with the original meanings of the text. It did not become the prominent belief until after 500 AD, with the help of the violent organized institutional church established under Constantine.

Hell is not a good translation of “Gehenna” and it never will be. Gehenna was a real place with a real history in the Jewish mind, and it must be read in that context. Once it is read in that context, the idea of eternal torment falls to pieces, as it should.

Larry Norman's "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" & Unbiblical Christian Culture - Jacob Wright

Whole swaths of western Christian world passionately believe and espouse a strange doctrine that can be found nowhere in scripture and was completely foreign to church theology until the 1800's.

Remember the song "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" written by Larry Norman in the 60's and covered by DC Talk in the 90's? It's about Christians worldwide suddenly disappearing in The Rapture.

I remember sleepless, anxious nights as a child sitting alone on the staircase of the house where I grew up.  I wondered if I should go wake my parents to comfort me, terrified that Jesus would return and take my family away leaving me behind because I was not right with him due to some unconfessed sin or something.

I still can't believe that whole swaths of western Christian world passionately believe and espouse a strange doctrine that can be found nowhere in scripture and was completely foreign to church theology until the 1800's.

Thankfully, I think due to the availability of information on the Internet, good Bible exegetes like NT Wright, and a thousand failed false prophecies of when the rapture would happen, and maybe some really bad rapture movies, the rapture is being left behind by a lot of the western church.

But this is also a lesson concerning popular theology. Look how The Rapture became a self-evident "Biblical truth" within a century.

What else might we have wrong?

What else are we projecting onto scripture because of how we have been told to read scripture?