A recent trend, has been to play down the teaching that the fire and torment of hell are literal and to explain them as indicating the possibility of one’s being lost and eternally apart from God—a mental anguish. However, a Vatican letter published in 1979 with the approval of Pope John Paul II, restated the belief that unrepentant sinners will go to a burning hell and warned against spreading doubts about it.
Both Calvin and Luther accepted the Catholic idea of hell. Today, the doctrine of hellfire is still upheld. “The chief characteristic of hell,” states the New Catholic Encyclopedia, “is its fire that is unquenchable . . . and everlasting . . . Whatever may be implied by the terms ‘unquenchable fire’ and ‘everlasting fire,’ they should not be explained away as meaningless.”
After mentioning that those who conducted the infamous Inquisition felt that their heretical victims “might be saved by temporal fire from eternal flame,” historian Henry C. Lea writes in A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages: “If a just and omnipotent God wreaked divine vengeance on those of his creatures who offended him, it was not for man to question the righteousness of his ways, but humbly to imitate his example and rejoice when the opportunity to do so was vouchsafed to him.”
The doctrine of eternal torment has turned many churchgoers into atheists.
Revelation chapter 20, verse 15 (King James Version), says: “Whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” But verse 14 says: “And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire.” Strange! Is hell itself to be tormented?
And how can death, a condition, be thrown into a literal fire? The rest of verse 14 reads: “This [the lake of fire] is the second death.” Revelation 21, verse 8, repeats this point. What is this “second death”? The Catholic Jerusalem Bible adds this footnote concerning “the second death”: “Eternal death. The fire . . . is symbolic.” Very true, for it signifies complete destruction, or annihilation.
Obviously the problem rests not with what the Bible teaches, but with how it is interpreted by religious organizations that merely masquerade as being Christian.
(Matthew 7:21) “Not everyone saying to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the Kingdom of the heavens, but only the one doing the will of my Father who is in the heavens will.
The call is urgent: ": “Get out of her [ false religion ], my people, if you do not want to share with her in her sins, and if you do not want to receive part of her plagues." - Rev 18:4.
Expand
