Freedom Friends Forum

This is a question that stems from the reading of the Freedom Friends Faith and Practice and George Fox's Letter to the Barbados regarding the topic of hell.

George Fox is utilizing Matthew 25 to say that there is a place of everlasting fire and punishment, Freedom Friends is stating that hell is simply a choice and a place where God is not.

I looked up the references provided for the faith and practice and discovered that the Romans and Matthew references talk about God always seeking us and nothing being able to separate us from God.

However, the Luke reference referred to the rich man in agony in the fire and a chasm between so that noone can cross between. He was talking with Abraham and not God.

So is there an eternal flame of hell that is torment and punishment, or is it a place where God is not here on earth? Is there a reconciliation between the two philosphies?

This is the $64 million dollar question!  A lot of careful insight, to notice how different biblical writers give different answers to the question.  The heart of the matter, as my friend/Friend, Daniel Smith-Christopher has written, "To put the matter bluntly:  the Bible does not always speak with one voice on all issues of interest to modern readers." (Jonah, Jesus, and Other Good Coyotes, page 2) So what are we to do?  How do we go about interpreting the Bible, in the face of these confusing statements in the Bible?  An excellent book that can get us into this issue is The Good Book:  Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, by Peter J. Gomes.  The first two chapters raise this issue, and discuss it, head on. 

If we want to be biblical literalists, and try to take every sentence as equally authoritative ("fundamentalism"), then we have one set of questions.  My own approach (along with Gomes) is to look at the Bible as a whole and try to figure out what the main thrust of the Bible is; then read the details in light of this main thrust.  Without going into all the reasons, my own conclusion is that the Bible is mainly telling us who God is -- God is completely, totally, radically LOVE or loving -- and absolutely loving of ALL people -- and ultimately, of the whole universe!
God loves not only Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama but also Adolf Hitler and Osama bin-Laden.  I do not see how one who absolutely loves can condemn anyone to eternal pain and suffering.  And so . . . draw the conclusion.

Vail

Last edited by tvailp (2009-06-03 20:37:44)

1. I can reject God, but even so God does not reject me.
2. My guess is that God never stops letting us change our mind about rejecting God.
3. If I reject God, certainly I am missing out on the highest joy.  Beyond that, I like your phrase about "choosing our own punishment."  I am simply choosing how happy or miserable I want to be -- and even that can change.

(this is all speculating, of course -- but I relish playing the game of speculating!)
Vail

Yes, Vail, thanks for taking a first crack at this,
It really is an important question for many people.
There are multiple facets to this issue. lets take on a few.

1.

You are right to start with the basics, our presumptions about what the Bible is and how we use it.

We do not take the Bible as a monolith. We do not consider it to be a self-consistent rule book. The major reason for not doing this is that it just doesn't work.  You can make yourself crazy trying to reconcile all the confusing bit. You have to do some fancy footwork and throw in heaps of denial and it also helps to check your brain at the door.  WE have enough mental health issues without trying to make ourselves crazy a whole nother way.

It is a useful anthology. A collection of writings by namy people and many witnesses. It is prefectly OK to take different parts of it differently.
I really love Vail's way of looking for the over-arching or maybe even underlying principles and interpreting the details in light of those guidelines


more topics I want to try and address.

Death as a ending point for God's grace.
the case for eternal conscious torment.
The Parable of the Chasm.
Ancient views of the afterlife.
Jesus on judgment and Hell.


more later
Pp

Eternal Conscious Torment as the definition of Hell is not ancient.  The Hebrew culture had Sheol - a place a shades, much like the ancient Greek Hades. Where the dead just sort of 'hung out'

Punishment, eternal and creative, was largely an invention of the Church, and given a huge bump by Mr Dante.  Purgatory and Limbo ( a place for unbaptized babies) were inventions of the Catholic Church. The CC has recently done away with Limbo, showing that even they do some continuing revelation.

I am sympathetic to the idea of purgatory, a place where you are purged of your leftover baggage and sin residue. It does seem unfair that a deathbed conversion should get somebody into paradise scott free. But it is basically an anti-grace invention. It is not Biblical at all, and I don;t subscribe to it.

Radical grace, even when it bugs me, seems to best match the God I experience on a regular basis.

that's not trivia, that's information, Thanks Vail!

Ok, I am one of those that when my mind gets triggered it just keeps going and going and going..... so you probably figured that this is where I would take this next.  Thessalonians and Revelations. This post may seem to skip around some as I try to put larger doncepts in my mind into words.

I understand the grace after death in that John speaks of being asleep and one day we will awaken. John also speaks about the day of judgment and an unquenchable fire. I personally relate this writing to Revelations, particularly chapters 21-22. This book speaks of the Wrath of God, Satan's throne, and the making of all things new and a new heaven and earth that has no more pain or suffering. Also Revelations talks about returning to the tree of life as mentioned in Genesis.

So relating all this back to the previous questions - there seem to be four different interpretations of the book of revelations from Pre reffering to Revelations being only related to the time in which it was written all the way to Revelations being applicable all the time and today. How does Quakerism and Freedom Friends view this Second coming as it related to the christian concept of hell and God's grace before and after death?

Or I suppose another way of asking, in relation to the previous questions, was the cross God's judgment and we all have the tree of life available to us now? Is that what our afterlife already is?

Please feel free to ask for clarification of my questions, I'm not sure I even understand them. :-) deb

Friends have traditionally had what is called a "realizing eschatology"
We think the kingdom is Come AND Coming. So both Heaven and Hell, whatever they might be like in the afterlife are continuations of the present.  At Freedom Friends we emphasis the present hell that some live in and the present kingdom that is available to us. If you are working for and in the Kingdom now, you have nothing to fear o the hereafter.

Don't stop asking questions! goodness no! However, maybe you meant THAT question?
Questions are good. We all have them, and we forget or don't ask them enough.
Quakers do like questions & queries. 

I think that is a good bumpersticker.

I would like to add some thoughts to the concept of heaven and hell.  Judaic cosmology was limited to a pre-judgment place of rest known as the Bosom of Abraham - a place of sustenance and comfort.  After Hellenization we hear there were two sides of the Bosom of Abraham, separated by a chasm, where one was sustaining and the other was not -- the latter -- a place of absence from God. This is found in the New Testiment story of the Rich Man and Lazerus (Luke 16:19-31).  There is no counterpart for this story in the Old Testament (Tanakh); no language establishing the dichotomy shown in Luke.  Though the Deuteronomist writers were largely citizens of Babylon and then Persia, they wrote before Alexander of Macedonia made his mark on the political world.  Once Judaism was immersed in the ideas, language and literature of Greece, it is amazing it only adopted the concept of heaven (Mt. Olympus territory) and Hell (hades).  How much the Zoroastrian concepts influenced the Greek religions is up for debate, though Manichaenism, developed in the third century C.E. following the teachings of some Christian Gnostic writers, radically explored and developed a complex cosmology about the force of good and the force of evil.  Zoroaster, as attested by many scholors, was probably a contemporary of King Saul of Israel though they did not travel in the same circles.  However, the Deuteronomist writers of the Tanakh would have a good working knowledge of Zoroastrian dichotomies since the earliest days of captivity.  Certainly, Daniel would have understood them since he was raised and educated in the palace of the king of Babylon.  He would also be aware of all Jewish efforts to reconstruct the writings lost when the temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E.  Yet these concepts did not find their way into the Tanakh or the Septuagint.  The European development of Draconian justice was merely lip service to egoism and domination.  Our sense of the great mystery, develops out of our own mythologies.  So, what good does it do to devote a lot of time to figuring it out?  God tells Job that the nature of heaven, among other things, is none of his business.  Works for me.  Who is more awed by Paris, he who encounters it without foreknowledge, or he who is a doctor of the subject visiting the first time?

Last edited by morningbear (2010-02-11 13:03:14)