[books i've been reading]

Storm of Steel, Ernst Junger. Junger's infamous memoir of his fighting in the Great War has been praised by all sides of the conflict (the French, believe it or not, loved him and his work). Junger enlisted as an Ensign in the German army and saw action in a slew of battles on the Western Front: he saw action in the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras, and the Third Battle of Ypres. He participated in the German counterattack at Cambrai, and he somehow lived through Operation Michael, one of the wings of the German Spring Offensive of 1918. Wounded in the latter part of 1918, his lyrical and poetic memoir ends not with the end of the world but him being awarded one of the highest medals in the Prussian military, the Pour le Merite. After the war, Junger entered politics and continued writing; though he's written many other books, his memoirs rank at the top. Junger's "gifts as a writer are primarily  those of a diarist: descriptiveness and an ear for speech, attention to detail, mobility of perspective, intellectual stamina and disjunctiveness, at his best over medium distances, as a writer of passages rather than of books or sentences." Junger didn't side with the Nazis and absorbed lots of criticism in the days prior to the outbreak of World War 2; during the second world war, he showed his loyalty and served in German-occupied France. He was involved in the periphery of the infamous Stauffenberg bomb plot (an attempt to assassinate Hitler). Surprisingly, he wasn't executed when the plan apart, though he was dismissed from the army. Junger's past-times included botany, entomology, and zoology; and he loved experimenting with narcotics and hallucinagens. In other words, he was awesome.

Under Fire, Henri Barbusse. "Every great event inspires the writers of its time. Among the works they create are novels, some of which have become widely recognised as classics and which are known by almost everyone whether they have read the book or not. Tolstoy's War and Peace is one such, remarkable for its depiction of Russia in the early nineteenth century and the age of Napoleon. Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is another, widely admired for its portrayal of the First World War from the perspective of the German Army. Irrespective of the deserved status of these works, translation to the movie screen assists the phenomenon. Inevitably, there are works less well known to many but which those 'in the know' recognise as literary achievements of equal worth and stature. This book, Under Fire (Le Feu) is such a book. It is a classic novel of the experience of the Great War from the perspective of French soldiers who fought in the trenches. Whilst it is a novel, it derives its remarkable authenticity of atmosphere, detail, characterisation and events from the actual wartime experiences of its author, Henri Barbusse, who served as a soldier on the front line. Indeed, his book, a stark anti-war portrayal of the ordeals of ordinary poilou under fire is dedicated to his fallen comrades from the battles at Crouy and on Hill 119 which took place in 1915. Readers should be prepared for both a portrayal of men at war in the raw and experiences of tragic intensity. This is, of course, an essential work of twentieth century literature and is highly recommended. Available in softcover and hardcover with dustjacket. Leonaur hardcovers are full bound in real cloth with gold foil lettering on their spines and feature fabric head and tail bands." from Amazon

from Book Bums

Book Bums: a summertime collage

Time: 8:14 AM
Drink: iced soy latte
Mood: pensive yet apathetic

I'm sitting at one of the tables flanking the wall-to-wall bookshelves. Dust-laden spines stare at me over the lip of my glass. This place really is quite cozy, but you have to dodge this place at certain times during the week when it's flooded with little kids enjoying story-time. On the one hand, I think it's great that this little cafe is geared towards promoting literacy and reading; on the other hand, it's annoying when I want peace and quiet. Today I'm in luck: the snot-nosed kids are at a minimal, and I can enjoy my iced cinnamon dolce latte in peace.

Ashley and I have been consistent in our "lifestyle tweaks" (i.e. eating better), and we're going to kick-start exercising again. It's difficult to exercise together, what with the girls and all, but we're both excited about warm weather and the prospect of running again. We went on a handful of runs before the weather turned south this January. I've lost about ten pounds (I'm around 160) and Ashley's lost a couple, but she's plateaued and doesn't seem to be able to get out of "this damned rut" (as she calls it). She went to the doctor, and they did a bunch of tests and told her she's in tip-top shape. They're not sure why she isn't losing weight, so they're going to do some more tests in a week or two and see if they can't figure out what the issue is so that they can fix it. Ashley wants to get down to 140 pounds before our Hilton Head vacation in June, but I'm thinking 160 is a better goal. "I don't want you to get too skinny," I told her; "You know I like a little pudge on ya!"

She tells me she'll always have a belly, which I'm more than okay with. Pregnancy can wreck a woman's body, and Ashley has the telltale signs of someone who's birthed two giant fetuses out of her vagina: saggy breasts, stretch marks for days, a tummy pouch, and wide hips. She hates all of that, often longs for the body she had before the girls came along. I may be weird, but I see those things as marks of beauty: she's created life, she's given birth, she's been privy to not one but two miracles in her womb. There's such a hatred of the womb, and a dislike of children, in our culture that the physical effects of pregnancy are seen in a negative light. I hope that Ashley can, one day, see her beauty the way I see it. I don't care if she's not a super model, and nor do I want her to have a super model body (fun fact: lots of agencies wanted her to model for them when she was in high school). I like her the way she is, and as I told her, my concern isn't how much she weighs but whether or not she's healthy. That's what matters. 

In other news:

the average erect penis is 5.2 inches long.

(I learned this on NPR)

That puts me WELL above average.

And that makes me happy.

#penisenvy. Look this way.

(but no touching!)

Unless you're Blake.

Yes, Blake can touch it.

Be gentle, Dream Boat.

on conditional immortality

Theologian Clark Pinnock is an annihilationist; he argues that "the ultimate result of rejecting God is self-destruction, closure with God, and absolute death in body, soul, and spirit... Hell is the possibility that human beings may choose in their freedom and thus break relations with God. God loves these persons and does not choose death for them, but hell is nevertheless a possibility arising out of their sin and obduracy. Hell is not the beginning of a new immortal life in torment but the end of a life of rebellion." His sentiments echo those of C.S. Lewis, who said that hell is the "outer rim where being fades away into nonentity." 

The idea that hell isn't a geographical place of unending conscious torment chafes against the prevalent view within Christendom, but conditional immortality isn't a foreign concept. The idea that the wicked will be destroyed forever rather than tortured forever is seen in the Judaism of Jesus' day; the Wisdom of Solomon spoke of the destruction of the wicked, whereas the writer of 1 Enoch advocated everlasting conscious torment. By the 6th Century A.D., the Christian view of hell as eternal physical, mental, and spiritual torment held sway. Immortalized by Dante's The Inferno and authorized by St. Augustine, this view has continued as the stock picture of hell within evangelicalism. 

Throughout the New Testament, hell is pictured as destruction; annihilationists hold that hell is "final, irreversible destruction." The Bible uses the language of ruin, perishing, and destruction when it speaks of the fate of the wicked who refuse to turn to God. The imagery of a consuming fire with the promise of destruction makes a good case for conditional immortality. This fate of the wicked is seen throughout the Old Testament and into the New. Jesus spoke of God's ability to destroy both body and soul in hell; he warned that the wicked would be burned up just like weeds thrown into the fire (Matt 10.28; Matt 13.30, 42, 49-50). St. Paul wrote of the everlasting destruction that would come upon sinners (2 Thess 1.9). He said the wicked would reap corruption (Gal 6.8) and that God would destroy the wicked (1 Cor 3.17; Phil 1.28). He said that the fate of sinners is a death they deserve to die (Rom 1.32); death is the wages of their sin (6.23). In Phil 3.19, he said of the wicked, "Their destiny is destruction." St. Peter spoke of the destruction of ungodly men (2 Pet 3.7); false teachers denying Christ bring upon themselves swift destruction (2.1, 3). The wicked will be like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah that were burned to ashes (2.6); the wicked would perish like the ancient world perished in Noah's Flood (3.6-7). The writer of Hebrews said that the wicked would shrink back and be destroyed (Heb 10.39). Jude saw Sodom as an analogy to God's final judgment, being the city that underwent "the punishment of eternal fire" (Jude 7). St. John speaks of a "lake of fire" and a "second death" (Rev 20.14-15). 

Many annihilationists, taking seriously the nature of destruction, hold as their linchpin argument the mortality of the soul. The idea that our souls are inherently immortal, and created by God to be that way, is a fusion of Greek and Christian thoughts. Nowhere in the Bible are we told that the soul is naturally immortal; this was a Greek idea (whose origins lie in Plato) thrust onto a Christian paradigm. In fact, the Apostle Paul tells us, by implication, that our souls are not naturally immortal; in 2 Timothy 1.10 he says that Jesus Christ "abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." Immortality is a gift of God given to His people; it is not something human beings inherently have. Why is this important? "If a biblical reader approached [the Bible] with the assumption that souls are naturally immortal, would they not be compelled to interpret texts that speak of the wicked being destroyed to mean that they are tortured forever, since according to that presupposition souls cannot go out of existence?" Pinnock goes on to say, "People mixed up their belief in divine judgment after death (which is scriptural) with their belief in the immortality of the soul (which is unscriptural) and concluded (incorrectly) that the nature of hell must be everlasting conscious torment." God alone has immortality (1 Tim 6.16) but grants embodied life after death to His people (1 Cor 15.21, 50-54; 2 Tim 1.10). Immortality is a gift God offers us in the gospel, NOT an inalienable possession. 

The concept of conditional immortality does more justice to God's justice than the concept of everlasting conscious torment. In Exodus 21.24, we see God's prescription of justice: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Two eyes for an eye is not just; two teeth for a tooth is not just. No eye for an eye is not just; no tooth for a tooth is not just. Those who hold to the traditional view of hell must explain why a just God torments finite creatures for finite sins for an infinite amolunt of time. Aware of this problem, the Christian thinker Anselm tried to argue that our sins are worthy of an infinite punishment because they are committed against an infinite majesty. His explanation made sense to the people of his day: since society accepted inequality in judgments on the basis of the honor of the victim, this seemed to cover up the embarrassment of an eternal, conscious hell. Though we don't see stealing from the town physician as worse than stealing from the beggar on the city corner, we're still apt to stretch our imaginations and to swallow Anselm's argument, repeating it as if it were mantra. It is a mantra at its best; its origins aren't found in scripture, but in taking a Medieval concept of justice to try and explain why God can act so apparently cruelly in his everlasting punishment of sinners.

"Though annihilationism makes hell less of a torture chamber, it does not lessen its extreme seriousness. After all, to be rejected by God, to miss the purpose for which one was created, to pass into oblivion while others enter into bliss, to enter nonbeing--this will mean weeping and gnashing of teeth." All doctrines undergo development over times; issues such as soteriology and Christology get taken up at various points in Christian history and receive a special stamp from intellectual and social conditions prevalent at the time. A variety of factors in society and thought impact the way doctrines are interpreted, so that all doctrinal formulations reflect to some extent historical and cultural conditions that have been factors in the doctrine's evolution. The doctrine of hell isn't exempt from this. 

When it comes to our perceptions of hell, emotional sensitivities ought not be a factor. If a certain view is unappetizing, it doesn't mean you should automatically discard it; indeed, we ought to expect to be faced with many things we don't like. Infinite torment may very well be the reality, but I don't think the whole testimony of scriptures necessarily negates the idea of conditional immortality.

the riddle of gehenna

The Greek word gehenna appears in the New Testament twelve times, eleven of which are spoken by Jesus in the synoptic gospels (the exception is James 3.6).* Although many English bibles translate gehenna as "hell," the Greek word refers to an actual geographical location: the Valley (or "Ravine") of Himmon. The English gehenna derived from the Greek ge'enna, which is itself derived from the Aramaic gehanna that is equivalent to the Hebrew Ge Hinnom, literally "Valley [or Ravine] of Himmon." This ravine lie southwest of Jerusalem, and it had a checkered (and eerie) history. The valley made itself into the annals of scripture as the place where idolatrous Israelites sacrificed their children to Moloch, a god of the Ammonites. Both Ahaz and Manasseh (two awful Israelite kings) instituted children sacrifice on altars erected in the ravine; the children would be set ablaze and burn as a gift to Moloch. This lasted until the reign of King Josiah, who put a stop to the child sacrifice and ushered in religious reform, purging the nation of its idolatry. The prophet Jeremiah, writing long after Ahaz and Manasseh, declared that the ravine would be called the Valley of Slaughter under God's judgment (Jer 7.32-33). He warns the people of Jerusalem that when the Babylonians came to their city, the bodies of the dead would be buried in the Valley of Hinnom because there would be no room for burial within the city walls; he prophesied that the corpses of the dead would become food for the birds of the air, and for the beasts of the earth, and none will frighten them away. (Jer 7.33; cf. 19.7). Jeremiah further warned that God would make the encircled city of Jerusalem a horror, a thing to be hissed at. Everyone who passes by it will be horrified and will hiss because of all its wounds. (19.8) Thus Jeremiah prophesied that Jerusalem itself would be made like Gehenna. According to tradition, in the days of the New Testament, this Valley of Hinnom--despised because of its black history--became the city's garbage dump, so that the "flames" and "worms" spoken of by Jesus echo the reality of the garbage dump. It's more likely that Jesus' use of those judgment motifs is his echoing of Isaiah 66.24, where Isaiah says that the corpses of those who rebelled against God would be subjected to a worm that shall not die and a fire that shall not be quenched; the prophet Isaiah, of course, isn't talking about postmortem judgment but about what it will look like when God judges, within history, the nation of Israel. His judgment is marked by corpses being consumed by worms and flames. 

This ought to alert us, at the least, to be wary in interpreting Jesus' words about gehenna literally. It is one interpretive jump to make his references to gehenna references to postmortem hell; it is quite another jump to make his descriptions of gehenna literal, so that those in postmortem hell really are subjected to undying worms and undying flames. While I believe the first interpretive jump is valid (though by no means demanded), the second runs against the very nature of language in first-century Judaism. Westerners, indebted to rationalistic Enlightenment thinking and living in an extension of Hellenization, tend to come to the scriptures with a literal eye. Because we are literalists, we cannot help but read the Bible in this way, and sometimes it doesn't even cross our mind to ask if first-century Jews or Greeks would've approached the scriptures as we do. The Bible is chocked full of symbolic and figurative language that seeks to convey the essence of something without giving extrinsic details about it. This, I believe, is what we find in Jesus' descriptions of gehenna (and in other descriptions not associated with gehenna, such as the "weeping and gnashing of teeth"). We are not sworn to take Jesus' language as literal descriptors of postmortem judgment; nor are we sworn to take his references to gehenna as symbolic of postmortem judgment.

Recently, many scholars (such as my pal Tom Wright) have interpreted the gehenna texts in a different light. Because gehenna is an actual place and not a generic "hell", it follows that Jesus may have actually been talking about the geographical Valley of Hinnom. This train-of-thought builds upon the assumption that Jesus acted in the praxis of a prophet in line with both Jeremiah and Isaiah; as both Jeremiah and Isaiah warned the Jews of God's coming divine judgment on them and Jerusalem, so, too, Jesus is warning the Jews of his day of God's coming divine judgment on them and Jerusalem. Jeremiah and Isaiah saw their bitter prophecies come to pass with the Babylonian sacking of the city around 586 B.C.; Jesus' warnings came to pass with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70. Jesus' warnings about gehenna, then, aren't to be taken as Jesus warning about the "final state" of the damned; rather, Jesus' message was political. "Unless [the Jewish revolutionaries] turned back from their hopeless and rebellious dreams of establishing God's kingdom on their own terms, not least through armed revolt against Rome, then the Roman juggernaut would do what large, greedy and ruthless empires have always done to smaller countries... whose resources they covet or whose strategic location they are anxious to guard. Rome would turn Jerusalem into a hideous, stinking extension of its own smouldering rubbish heap." (from N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope) Thus Jesus' language about "fire" and "worms" isn't to describe (what Wright would call) our Medieval picture of hell, but, rather, it serves as a reference to both the prophet Isaiah (and by proxy, Jeremiah) and the actual nature of gehenna as a smoldering garbage dump. Jesus is a prophet like Isaiah and Jeremiah, calling the people of Israel to a sort of national repentance, to embrace his way of peace rather than of war, so that they may not suffer the coming wrath of God. The Jewish historian Josephus speaks of how the Romans, after they sacked Jerusalem, were forced to throw bodies over the walls of the city because there was no room for them behind the walls. Just as the Babylonians filled the Valley of Hinnom with corpses, so the Romans did, too. Furthermore, the Tenth Roman Legion made good use of the geographical gehenna as a crematory. 

This recent take on Jesus' use of gehenna has several points in its favor. It appreciates the prophetic praxis of Jesus, and it makes sense of the gehenna texts within the wider scope of Jesus' challenges and warnings to his contemporaries; the synoptic tradition is chocked full of Jesus' warnings to his contemporaries and his prophecies about the coming fall of Jerusalem, and interpreting the gehenna texts within this light makes sense of the overall narrative. As far as a theory goes, it is coherent, it is simple, and it sheds light on wider subjects in the synoptic tradition. The problems I have with it are three-fold:

(1) There is no evidence for gehenna being a garbage dump. The idea that gehenna was constantly afire with the rubbish of society comes from Rabbi David Kimhi's commentary on Psalm 27. He writes, Gehenna is a repugnant place, into which filth and cadavers are thrown, and in which fires perpetually burn in order to consume the filth and bones; on which account, by analogy, the [judgment] of the wicked is called 'Gehenna.' Kimhi wrote this around A.D. 1200 (that's over a millennium after the days of the New Testament), and his testimony is corroborated neither by other primary sources nor by archaeological evidence. If the Valley of Hinnom were a garbage dump, we would expect to find archaeological evidence of that fact; a garbage dump in the Valley of Kidron (on the eastern side of the city) gives archaeological evidence of being a garbage dump while the Valley of Hinnom does not. The idea that Gehenna was a garbage dump has garnered support, so that the majority of scholars repeat the mantra despite the lack of evidence. While gehenna may indeed have been a garbage dump, that's nothing more than speculation.

(2) Calling into question gehenna's identity as a garbage dump doesn't harm the recent theory regarding Jesus' use of gehenna; it simply means that when Jesus speaks of the worm that doesn't die and the flames that will not be quenched, he isn't pointing to a literal description of gehenna but echoing (as I've already said) Isaiah 66. Jesus also echoes a wide variety of intertestamental literature which portrays gehenna precisely as the place of God's coming eschatological judgment. In other words, Jesus' use of symbolic worms and fire echoes not only the prophet Isaiah but a common Jewish thought, that of gehenna as a living metaphor for the final judgment of the wicked.

(3) The biggest weakness in the argument that Jesus was talking about historical judgment within time rather than apocalyptic judgment at the end of time is that Jesus doesn't do something original with gehenna; rather, he builds upon those who have come before him. If we are to argue that Jesus is solely referencing the coming fall of Jerusalem, we must admit that he does so in discontinuity with those who come before him; discontinuity can be as telling as continuity, but discontinuity without any explanation regarding the discontinuity is questionable at best. It would make more sense that Jesus, in the same vein-of-thought as many of his predecessors and contemporaries, understood gehenna to be a living metaphor for the final judgment of the wicked. By the time of the intertestamental period (the 400-odd years between Malachi and Matthew), the phrase gehenna was widely used as a metaphor for eternal damnation. Rather tellingly, the Targums (the Aramaic paraphrase translation of the Hebrew Bible) add the term Gehinnom to verses that (as they saw it) spoke of the resurrection, the judgment, and the fate of the wicked. An example is Isaiah 66.24; Jesus quotes the Targums with his addition of Gehenna to the text, an addition that the Targums added but which is absent in the original Hebrew scriptures. Jesus, speaking at the tail-end of the intertestamental period, uses the phrase gehenna without explaining his meaning; it makes sense that he doesn't explain the meaning because those to whom he's talking fully understand what gehenna is all about. Some Jews took the symbolic imagery of gehenna and interpreted it as referring to the actual geographical location, so that the Valley of Hinnom itself would be consumed by fire; but this view was minor and not widely held. Although there are shades and variations of Jewish understandings of gehenna (and locating Jesus on the spectrum isn't the point of this post), the common understanding is that gehenna was a living metaphor for the judgment of the wicked. In other words, it was a living metaphor for what we might call hell. 

This is why generations upon generations of Christians have interpreted gehenna as a reference to hell. In the later rabbinical writings that came after Jesus, Jewish rabbis speak of gehenna in the context of hell; this bolsters the evidence that many Jews both before and after Jesus saw gehenna as a type of that which was to come. St. James, in 3.6, uses the word gehenna; it makes more sense that he is speaking of hell rather than the actual geographical location, and this indicates (though not definitively) that the early Jewish Christians, to whom James wrote, understood gehenna as a signpost to eternal damnation. The apostolic fathers used imagery reminiscent of Jesus' language about gehenna to write about hell. This implies (but not definitively) that the early church understood the synoptic tradition of gehenna to refer to hell. One could ask, "Why did gehenna develop such an association?" The answer, I believe, goes back to what took place there during the days of the kings Ahaz and Manasseh: the Valley of Hinnom was a place of idolatry, and an idolatry of the worst sort. The vile and murderous things done in the valley lived on in Jewish memory and came to take on an otherworldly significance. The Talmud, a collection of Jewish writings composed between A.D. 200 and A.D. 500, speaks of gehenna as the location of hell, accessible by "gates" to the underworld. These later declarations may give us a glimpse at why gehenna became synonymous with hell: the living memory of what took place at the geographical Valley of Hinnom turned gehenna into an entrance to the underworld, over which God was sovereign. While this argument may seem dubious to some, we should at least admit it is better than the argument that gehenna was a garbage dump; after all, the writings of the Talmud predate Rabbi Kimhi by several hundred years.

Because archaeological and literary evidence doesn't support the idea that the valley became a sulfurous garbage dump where fires burned Night and Day, the Jewish motif of fire probably derives from the practice of burning sons and daughters as sacrifices to Moloch; as the Jews came to speak of gehenna as a living metaphor for the fate of the wicked, the fires took on new significance: as Ahaz and Manasseh burned their children alive, so, too, the wicked will suffer a similar fate. The symbolic use of fire for purging, purification, and judgment stretches through the Old Testament to the later Jewish writers. Jewish eschatology about the final states frequently used gehenna as a living metaphor for what awaited those who rebelled against God or refused to submit to Him as Creator. Taking all this together, we have good reason to suppose that Jesus, when speaking of gehenna, was speaking of what we would call "hell"--but we must note that his language is symbolic rather than literal, and deducing what hell is like from these texts is an exercise of the imagination and nothing more.

How, then, does the recent argument about Jesus' warnings of gehenna being geared towards Jewish revolutionaries, and in content referring to the fate of Jerusalem under the Romans rather than the fate of wicked humanity under the wrath of God, fare? Here I'm not so sure. You may have expected me to come down on one side of the fence or the other; indeed, it seemed that I was seeking to demolish the perspectives of Wright, among others. The truth of the matter, however, is that I simply don't know where I stand; I'm certainly no Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms. It is possible, of course, that Jesus prophesied in the vein of Isaiah and Jeremiah while not giving credence to the intertestamental use of gehenna; it is possible, too, that Jesus meant both the final judgment and the anticipation of that final judgment that would come through fallen masonry and Roman swords. It is possible, too, that context is to be our guide, and Jesus' meaning regarding gehenna in one text may be political while, in another, it is "spiritual" (recognizing, of course, that the western dichotomy between religion and politics would've been incomprehensible, and anathema, to Jews of Jesus' day). Like I said: I don't know where I stand on gehenna (much less on the subject of hell!), but this is good Food for Thought.


* The synoptic texts for Gehenna are Matthew 5.22, 29, 30; 10.28; 18.9; 23.15, 33; Mark 9.43, 45, 47; and Luke 12.5. 

[books i've been reading]

This book, part of the Counterpoints Series, examines the four major approaches to hell found within Christendom: the literal view, the metaphorical view, the purgatorial view, and the view of conditional immortality. The Literal View interprets the variety of texts on hell in the New Testament as being literal, in that hell is characterized by literal fire that does not quench, worms that will not die, and weeping and gnashing of teeth. The Metaphorical View sees the texts on hell not as literal descriptions of hell but symbolic signposts to what hell is like in its essence; using stock Jewish imagery and ideas, the New Testament provides symbolic metaphors that depict hell as a place of profound misery and banishment from the presence of God. The Purgatorial View is the classic Roman Catholic approach to hell; according to this view, even Christians saved by grace will experience a short time in the fires of hell being purged of their sinfulness so that they will be enabled to survive and thrive in heaven. The Annihilationist view (commonly called "conditional immortality") is the view that those who don't belong to God don't suffer eternally but are eternally destroyed (or annihilated) by God. By calling it "conditional immortality," its adherents soften the blow, so-to-speak, pointing out that the concept of an immortal soul is a Greek idea that has no basis in the Hebrew worldview; this is why Paul can say that Christians have been given the gift of immortality. Immortality is not something every person innately possesses; to say that God annihilates them makes it look like God is actively destroying their immortality. It may very well be that the essence of hell is God not granting the wicked what He grants the faithful (i.e., immortality). 

I personally fall somewhere between the Metaphorical View on hell and the Annihilationist view on hell. Here are a few take-away points I've scribbled down as I've read this book:

THE USE OF METAPHOR. In an ironic twist, the criticism leveled against those who take the “hell texts” literally is that they don’t take them literally enough. This is what I mean: to take a text literally, you should read the text as it literally intended to be read. This means we must give ample room to the different genres which we find in the New Testament instead of fitting the scriptures into our culture’s prefabricated molds. The mold of literalism is an odd breed: though dependent upon the Enlightenment, it rose as a reaction against the Enlightenment. Fundamentalism is a reaction to the cultural and secular climate of the 19th century, and fundamentalists are those most keen on interpreting the hell texts literally, so that hell is characterized by literal fire, literal worms that do not die, and literal weeping and gnashing of teeth. Now, if the texts demanded to be read in that way, then we would do well to read them as such; but as much scholarship over the last several decades has shown, the type of language Jesus uses in these texts is metaphorical. Jesus, in the same vein as his Jewish contemporaries, has no problem using metaphor to describe the essence of something without giving its intrinsic details. Our Enlightenment-based thinking and reading chafes against metaphor as if it were sub-par to a literal reading of things, but that doesn’t change the fact that the scriptures use metaphor and we must acknowledge those metaphors. This may be uncomfortable, especially for fundamentalists, but it’s necessary when it comes to reading and understanding God’s Word.

JEWISH CONCEPTIONS OF HELL. What sorts of thoughts did the Jews of Jesus’ day have regarding hell? This is important, because when looking at Jesus’ words on hell, we ought to be conscious of both continuity and discontinuity with his contemporaries. Where does Jesus agree with them? Where does he diverge from them? This question is important, but an answer is by no means easy: the unsettling truth is that the Jewish teachers of Jesus’ day were as varied in their conceptions of hell as modern Christians are. The liberal Pharisees advocated eternal conscious punishment; the more conservative Sadducees denied heaven or hell. The School of Hillel, a more open-minded school of Pharisaism, took a line similar to those who believe in conditional immortality: the wicked will suffer, but eventually they will be extinguished. Thus a wide variety of views in Jesus’ day is matched by a wide variety of views in our day.

THE NATURE OF ETERNITY. A second factor of consideration in any discussion of hell is the nature of eternity. The New Testament is explicit: hell lasts forever. In Matthew 25.46, Jesus says, Then they will go away to ETERNAL PUNISHMENT, but the righteous to ETERNAL LIFE. Punishment is eternal, and thus most argue that it is eternal conscious punishment; in other words, it is an unending, conscious punishing. This makes sense with the inherent contrast with eternal life, which no one would argue to be an unconscious life. At the same time, the text can also be read to say that the punishment (rather than the punishing) is eternal; there’s no escape from the punishment. In the same way that an inmate on Death Row faces an eternal punishment—there’s no escape once the poison is plunged into the bloodstream!—so, too, those who are stubborn in their refusal to love God will face a similar punishment, an extinction from which there is no escape. The text in question (along with others in the New Testament) don’t demand to be read as literal, conscious torment. One could argue (and many do) that eternal punishment must be understood within the wider context of scripture on the subject, and the wider attestation is that hell is characterized by destruction rather than torment.

#artstuffz

[books i've been reading]

fine reading for Anchor Grill

The Battles of World War I

by Christopher Catherwood

Catherwood gives a brief survey of World War One, focusing on what he identifies as the key battles. Most of the book looks at the bloodiest battles of the war, from both the Western and Eastern fronts; and being a student of the Middle East, he pays particular attention to the Egyptian and Mesopotamian campaigns and how the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire led to the Middle East crisis we have today. The meat of this book is found in Catherwood's connections between World War One, World War 2, the Cold War, and present day conflicts in Syria. He spins a meticulous web showing how events a hundred years ago have shaped our modern world and modern politics. Below are a couple great quotes showing these connections.

*  *  *

Why is World War One important? "Not only were [the politicians of nineteenth century Europe] launching the 'Great War' but everything that stemmed from it: World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Stalin and Mao's purges, the Middle East conflict and all the horrors with which we are still living today." (36)

"Because of World War I many of the extraordinary events and creations of the twentieth century came about. Outstanding examples would include: the Russian Revolution, the rise of Nazism, World War II, the origins of the state of Israel, and the creation of several new countries without regard for ethnic mix or ancient rivalries." (11)

"Communism came to power as a result of the stalemate on the Eastern front. So desperate were the Germans to get Russia out of the war that they sent Lenin back home from exile in Switzerland. The plot worked. The Communists under Lenin took power and withdrew from the conflict. But the world then had seventy-four years of the USSR." (14)

"[With] no British capture of Jerusalem in 1917 there would have been no Israel to create thirty-one years later. Similarly, without the capture of Damascus in 1918 there might have been no Syria in existence to have a civil war in our own time." (14)

"One legacy of [World War One] is the situation in today's Middle East... Once part of the vast Ottoman Empire, Syria was seized by the French as a spoil of war, despite that region being liberated by Australian, British and Arab forces towards the end of World War I. Many of the major problems of the Balkans in the 1990s and the endless violence of the twenty-first century Middle East stem from the outcome of [several] battles..." (21)

"There is general agreement that World War II was caused by the inconclusive end to the fighting in 1918. So too, one can argue, was the Cold War. In fact some historians see the various global conflicts as one, either a new Thirty Years' War (1914-1945) or as a 'Short Twentieth Century' of perpetual uncertainty mixed with actual fighting (1914-1989). So the events of 1914 did not just begin four years of war but decades of conflict, certainly up until 1945 and arguably extending to as recently as 1989 and the end of the Cold War." (21)