I do however recommend “Hell on Trial” and “Two Views of Hell” by Robert A. Peterson.

I read ‘Two Views of Hell’ several years ago. It assumes the reader already believes in hell and just debates annilhilist vs eternal hell theories. Presenting universalist theories in there may have been nice too, but ultimately I don’t think a non-believer in hell is going to find much convincing or useful in it either way.

Something just doesn’t add up. There is a serious disconnect between the Jewish scriptures and the Christian scriptures when it comes to the afterlife, sin, and human nature. Methinks the Paulinistas needed to create a problem in order for their cult of Jesus to solve; just in case people didn’t take to their far-fetched Hellenistic Jewish cult, a condemnation to hell should scare them into submission, right? Maybe that’s all too much speculation. However, my point stands: Yahweh was a jealous and often wrathful God, so where is all the fire and brimstone in the afterlife in the Tanakh? Why is it that when we want to make God our buddy by anthropomorphizing him into cult figure that we then need to have this idea of eternal punishment? It’s almost like, “it’s too good to be true, since accepting Christianity is so easy, so we have to throw in something that makes it seem believable – like hell.”

1. What would we expect from a text come down to us across 30 centuries, cobbled together from various sources, written by different people in different languages with different agendas at various stages of a culture’s evolution and development?

We would expect a text that contains many different concepts that seem to evolve. Ideas, like an afterlife, would reasonably be expected to stay static for a while then, potentially, be altered when, centuries later, the culture comes in contact with other ideas that shape their thought. Given the distance and cultural barriers that separate us from the writers of this text, it would probably be hard to trace with precision just what changed, why, and what was meant by the new and old terms, though we could make reasonable guesses at it.

2. What would we expect of an omnipotent God who loved us infinitely, and deeply wished to spare us from eternal torture?

We would expect a text to come down to us unaltered, written in simple, clear, declarative sentences telling us precisely what the facts were and what they were not, omnisciently anticipating objections and misconceptions, and clearing up all contingencies.

Which one better describes our situation?

More specifically….
The issue is that the Tanakh simply does not say that the wicked are tormented after death in Sheol. It does not say that. Period. If thats what God meant, then why did he not just write that into the text? If we must infer from the mere mention of fire in the Tanakh, kinda-sorta having something to do with sacrifice and destruction, to the clear and distinct idea that non-Christians will be tortured forever — you think this isnt a leap? If you start your investigation determined to find evidence of hell in the Jewish Bible, then yeah, I guess you can do it. But isnt it a simpler hypothesis to say that it doesnt mention hell because that concept did not exist in that culture? And after they came in contact with a culture that *did* have such a concept, lo-and-behold it shows up among the Jews?

Youre right, its not proof. But it is, as philosophers of science might say, the inference to the best explanation.

Whether Hell involves fire or not is a moot (or at least less significant) point. It sucks either way.

I don’t think it is moot. This is not merely a matter of academics. You see, the Bible says many different things concerning the afterlife. I think myself and several others here have convincingly shown that the OT conception of Sheol is not the same as Matthew’s conception of Hell. But that is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the Bible’s inconsistant stance on the afterlife goes. So, just what happens in the afterlife? Paul never mentions hell, and seems to think that unbelievers just wind up in the grave when they die. What happens to God’s favored when they die? Do they go to Sheol as some writers of the Psalms think? Do they immediately go to paradise as Jesus sometimes seems to think? Do they return to the Earth with Christ when he judges the nations like Revelations teaches? Will they stay in the grave and be resurrected at some future point as Paul seems to think?

I suppose you can try what many Christians do, and mash all these conflicting ideas together into a complicated harmonization. But such harmonizations render the apologetic claims that the Bible shows signs of Divine inspiration due to its internal consistancy to be ludicrous. The Bible is anything but consistant on this, or nearly any other matter.

Bottom line: We either spend eternity with God or we spend eternity apart from God. There is no middle ground.

And that is the bottom line, isn’t it? But as inconsistant as the Bible is on the subject, it is just impossible to be certain what it says about our afterlife. The very fact we both have convincing arguments to be made on either side of this debate prove that the doctrinal inconsistancies and ambiguities are real.

But I am the one with real freedom here. Seriously. I don’t believe in a God who will Damn me simply for being convinced by the wrong side of this trivial debate.

You may or may not respond to this, givne your time constraints.

still fail to understand how the usage of contextualization must equal helenistic influence, and thus nonexistence. That is the kind of assumption-based reasoning that typifies the Jesus Seminar crowd, and makes academicians

Because the concept of eternal destruction was something that came into play after the introduction. Regardless of an insistence on being seperate, if one country is occupied by another, the dominant culture is going to affect the minority culture to some degree. It’s inevitable. What we are saying is that the idea of hell as a place of torment/fire did not exist prior to that. It was simply a shadowy underworld. No one is saying that Sheol didn’t exist. But as HIS says, why say that fire is equal to hell, when there were many other ways God punished? We don’t see the contexulization fitting what was there before.

We either spend eternity with God or we spend eternity apart from God. There is no middle ground

But this might be the core problem, which is another thing that I think many of us have touched on briefly. The concept of eternal life, and how it evolved throughout the Bible. When the concept of salvation is applied in the Tanakh, how often is it associated with an afterlife? Was an afterlife even the primary focus for most of the Tanakh?

The reason why many are focusing on this is because the concept of hell is a prime focus for much of evangelical Christianity — Jesus came to save sinners from hell. But if hell is that primary, why does it not appear until late in the Tanakh? Why only in the minority section of the Bible at that? Why didn’t it dominate from the very beginning of the Bible?

To say a statement above is, in my mind, to assume that the Bible always had the message of eternal life, and I would say no. Not just because Sheol was a place where the righteous and unrighteous went, but because of the ramifications of Adam/Eve, and how their punishment was a physical death, with no mention of an eternal seperation.

The bottom line isn’t even of where one spends eternity. The Bible can be read that the ultimate end of those who God punishes is simply non-existent, and there are a multitude of verses to support that. As HIS says, it depends where in the BIble you look, and what is used to interpret other things. As it is, Psalms 139 mentions that if the writer descends to Sheol, God is there, and he can’t go anywhere to escape God’s presence.