FAQ
Primary Site Goal
The primary goal
of this website is
to establish that many
common teachings
regarding the nature of Hell
are misleading and unbiblical, through
providing careful documentation
from the Bible, history, and literature,
and offering sound reasoning and commentary in
support of this goal.
With this goal specifically in
mind, the further purposes of providing the articles and
resources on this site are four-fold:
1. To encourage readers to
examine their own assumptions about Hell.
2. To provide a central resource
of articles on the topic for use in discipleship.
3. To provide a central
repository of reference materials and documentation for the
convenience of those doing research or writing on the topic,
including Greek and Hebrew definitions, scripture collections,
and lexicons.
4. To emphasize and reinforce the
methods of sound reasoning (logic) and sound exegesis (biblical
interpretation) as they apply in particular to consideration of
the topics of Hell and the Afterlife.
The topics of Hell and the
Afterlife have many facets, and cannot be adequately covered,
even in overview, in a single article. Thus there are many
inter-related articles on this website that approach the topics
from a variety of perspectives, to offer a more well-rounded
view of the issues. The ultimate conclusions reached here are
based on the interweaving of the facts and commentary contained
in the complete collection of articles on the website.
In order to approach the topics in a systematic way, a
Reading Guide is provided that
suggests a logical progression through the articles. Links at
the bottom of each article direct the reader to the next article
in the Reading Guide series.
Understandably, many visitors to the site will
not go through the articles in the order presented in the Reading Guide.
Most will no doubt only dip into one or a few specific articles.
This will likely leave them with some unanswered questions. If
so, they may not
realize that most of their concerns about the confusing or
controversial aspects of the issues covered are eventually
addressed by a combination of various articles on the site. Thus the main thrust of
this FAQ is to give VERY brief answers to common questions, and then
offer links to the
articles that more fully address issues related to those
questions.
Please Note:
If you
feel, after reading a limited amount of material on this
site,
that you simply must try to "set the author straight"
on aspects of the doctrines discussed,
please read
through this FAQ first.
You may well find that your questions or concerns
are already
addressed here,
or in the specific articles linked from here.
Pam Dewey
Webauthor, Is It True What They Say About Hell? website
Q
1. This is a really
complicated website with many long articles. I don't have time
to read it all right now. Can't you briefly describe the main
points you are trying to communicate with all this material?
A
Yes. See Hell in a Nutshell.
Q
2. Are you saying that there is "no
such thing as Hell"?
A
No. I am saying that most of the common conceptions
regarding Hell are not based on the Bible, but on myths, fables,
faulty interpretations of Bible passages, illogical reasoning,
and spurious "visions" of people who have claimed to have
"visited" Hell. See The Many Faces
of Hell for an overview of these non-biblical sources.
Q
3. Are you saying that the
unrepentant will not ever be punished for their sins?
A
No. I am saying that the punishment will not consist of
never-ending, eternal torment and torture in an ever-burning
Hell. See The Justice of God?
and Tortures of the Damned? for
commentary on this issue.
Q
4. Isn't the fear
connected to the ever-burning Hell doctrine an effective tool of
evangelism? Even if the ultimate fate of the unrepentant isn't
never-ending torment and torture after this life , isn't is wiser to let people THINK
it is? Otherwise they will not fear to die without becoming a
converted Christian.
A.
None of the authors of the New Testament, and none of the
descriptions in the Book of Acts of the content of the preaching
of the Apostles, include the threat of never-ending torture in
Hell as a component of spreading the Gospel--the Good News--of
Jesus Christ. It would seem wise to follow their example. For a
more detailed consideration of this topic, see
Fear of Hell--Effective Tool of
Evangelism?
Q
5. How can all those
millions of people who have taught and believed the ever-burning
hell/ eternal torture doctrine for 2000 years
be wrong?
A
For those who have a Protestant background, this would be a
very odd question. Much of the standard doctrinal
foundation of most Protestant denominations was not taught and
believed for the first 1500 years of Christianity--especially
after the rise of the Roman Catholic church to universal power.
So millions upon millions believed many exceptionally different
things for all that time compared to common beliefs today.
Were they right just because there were so many of them?
Strangely enough, the doctrine of an ever-burning Hell, with all
of the details of specific never-ending torments and tortures
for the unsaved, seems to have entered the Protestant world
directly from Catholicism, not from the Bible. Although
Protestants did not accept the elements of Purgatory and Limbo,
much of the rest of the standard conservative Protestant
"perspective on Hell" comes almost unrevised straight out of
Dante's Inferno, written by a devout 14th century Roman
Catholic.
The bottom line--"numbers of
believers" has never been a valid criteria for establishing
whether a doctrine is truly biblical or not. The appropriate
criteria is whether or not the doctrine can be established
solely through examining the scriptures rather than from
incorporating external myth, fable, superstitions, and alleged
visions. See The Many Faces of Hell
for commentary and documentation on the non-biblical sources of
the common view of Hell.
Q
6. What religious
denomination do you belong to?
A
I am not formally affiliated with any religious
denomination. The material provided on this website is a result
of my own personal forty-plus years of Bible study, along with
extensive research into the whole panorama of Protestant, Roman
Catholic, and "independent" Christian theology of the past 2000
years. If individual points of my conclusions line up with
specific points of the teachings of some particular religious
groups, theologians, or Bible teachers, that may indicate that I
have read some of their material and found myself in agreement
with it--I have read widely for many years. Or it may just
indicate that I have read the same Bible and have come to the
same conclusions independently.
The conclusions
shared on this website are by no means unique to me.
Many of them are similar to those
promoted by many other religious authors and scholars from a
wide variety of Christian backgrounds. Nor are these conclusions
directly connected in any way to the teachings of any specific
denominational group. Thus they should not be taken as an
endorsement of the teachings on other topics of any group which
may happen to have similar perspectives on some of the issues
covered in the articles on this site.
This site does
not exist to "proselyte" readers to any denomination or group.
It exists to encourage each individual Christian
to be
responsible to "prove all things,
hold fast to that which is
good" (2 Timothy 2:15)
rather than just blindly accept teachings
because
some religious leader or group has dictated what one
"must" believe.
But What About ... ?
(Questions on Specific Bible
Passages that seem to support the ever-burning Hell doctrine)
Q
7. What about Jesus'
story of
Lazarus and the Rich Man in Luke 16?
A
Since this story in the King James Version uses the term
Hell to describe the location of the Rich Man after death and
makes reference to a flame, some jump to the conclusion that
this is a description of an ever-burning Hell, and the eternal
torture of the soul of the Rich Man there. There are two primary
ways to approach this story. One is to assume that it is Jesus'
attempt to depict the sufferings of an ever-burning Hell so that
listeners can heed and avoid it. The other is to assume that
this story is a parable, has metaphorical purposes to teach a
much different lesson, and was not intended to address the
specific issue of the nature of Hell at all.
See the article on
Lazarus and the Rich Man for a
detailed explanation of these two perspectives.
Q
8. What about the passage in
Revelation 14 that speaks of the "smoke of their torment that
ascends up forever and ever"?
A
The Book of Revelation is
self-described by the author, John, as containing a "vision" of
the future. This does not mean that he was transported into the
future and saw what would amount to a CNN-style newscast of
exactly what was going to happen, in totally physical terms. It
means he saw a series of dream-like scenes, full of strange
symbolism, that represented a poetic metaphor of that future.
The fate of those who "received the Mark of the Beast" needs to
be seen in that context. See the article on
Revelation's Hell for a
detailed explanation of the logical implications of this
passage.
Q
9. What about the passage in Mark 9
in which Jesus talks about those cast into Gehenna whose "worm dies not"?
A
This comment by Jesus is
a direct quote from the book of Isaiah. In its context in Isaiah
it was part of a prophecy about physical dead bodies that were
to be exposed in a giant garbage dump for all to see rather than
given a dignified burial. They were subject to the swarms of
flies and maggots (KJV "worms") that inhabit such a scene, and
those maggots would continue to feed on them and those whose
bodies might be added to the pile in the future. It is not that
these maggots were themselves "immortal supernatural maggots,"
somewhere in an unseen ever-burning Hell feeding on souls. It is
that this physical breeding ground for flies would continue to
perpetually do its job as long as there were wicked people's
bodies to be added to the dump. See the article on
Immortal Worms for a detailed
explanation of these passages in Mark and Isaiah.
Q
10. What about the passage in Mark 9
in which Jesus talks about "fire that will not be quenched"?
A
The term unquenched does
not indicate that a fire "can never" go out. It means that
nothing interferes with the fire to deliberately extinguish it.
Once such a fire consumes all available combustibles in its
path, it will die out on its own without anyone quenching it.
See the article on Unquenchable Fire
for a detailed explanation on this topic.
Q
If someone never had a chance to
hear a clear presentation of the Gospel in their life, what
happens to them? They can't get to Heaven without choosing to
accept Jesus, yet you say that they won't be tortured in Hell.
A.
One solution to this dilemma is
offered by an increasing number of evangelical thinkers. Just as
Mary and Martha's brother Lazarus was resurrected after four
days to a continuation of his physical life, it may be possible
that God intends to provide that kind of resurrection--just much
later--to many others. They would then have an opportunity to
hear the Gospel in a way that they were unable before their
death. This wouldn't be a "second chance" for them--it would be
their first real chance to make an informed choice for or
against Jesus. (For more exploration of this possibility,
see the article Resurrection.)
This site contains a collection
of articles, on the topic of Hell and the Afterlife, that may
each be used independently for research purposes. But it also is
designed as a systematic, sequential overview of the whole
topic, which can be read like a book.
For those who would like to take
advantage of this perspective of the content, the articles are
arranged in the
Reading Guide as they would appear as chapters in a book, along
with a few reference chapters at the end such as would appear in
a book Appendix.
Use the
links below to go to the next article, previous article, or
first article
in the Reading Guide sequence.
←
→
Previous
Next
←←
Back to Beginning
All of the articles on this
Is it true what they say about Hell? website were written by Pam Dewey, with
the support and sponsorship of Common Ground Christian
Ministries. For more of Pam's inspirational and educational
writings, visit her Oasis
website.
All website content
© 2007, Pam
Dewey and Common Ground Christian Ministries
All rights reserved. Material may
be copied for personal use of the site visitor. For permission
to copy for any other purposes, please contact the author at
oasis7@gmail.com
