Interesting that. More so in that Jesus, meek and mild, talked about hell more than anyone before him. In fact, there are very few mentions of it in the old testament and traditionally, Jews didn’t, and still do not, believe in hell and eternal punishment. Christianity, however, seems to have been particularly fond of it since Jesus brought it up.
This bit about “Hell” meaning just a separation from God, or just oblivion in general?
Definitely a minority opinion among Christians. Most believe that Hell is a place where people are sent to be punished.
Depends on where you land on the evangelical spectrum, seems to me.
The Catholics seem to be coming around to a less scary version of it - avoid scaring the natives, I suppose. The more evangelical sects still love them some fire and brimstone.
Either way, at least in the old testament, you were mostly spared the wrath of god once you were dead. In the new testament, it seems that dead is when all the fun begins.
Also, simster’s quotes strongly suggest that anyone can become saved…just by believing. But there are other verses suggesting that salvation is chosen by God, not by the individual sinner…and a handful of verses saying that God had already made up his mind who was to be saved and who was not, before the beginning.
Quotemining the Bible is a mug’s game, because (like the Elves!) it says both yea and nay.
According to the Bible Psalm 81 in RC version or 82 in KJ version The psalmist says:" said you are gods and sons of God" Jesus is quoted in John 10;" Why do you say I blaspheme because I call God my father, when you fathers did?" Doesn’t sound like he meant he was divine but just like all the Jewish men before him. The word God didn’t mean creator of earth or all things just someone or some thing that inspired awe or power, hence The god of thunder the sun god etc.
I question why would an all knowing being , who knew ahead of time that a being like Satan would rebel and cause his other beings that were his children punish them because they wanted to have knowledge and why was it necessary for God to argue about if a human would be different and deny God when God knew ahead of time he would stay steadfast. I am not a perfect parent but I would not give my child anything I knew would harm them or keep anything from them I knew was for their own good, nor would I allow a beast I had created allow them to be killed by such a thing. I would expect an all knowing all loving being to be better than me.
Why didn’t Jesus close relatives, friends or followers believe he would resurrect? Their actions as told in the NT show they didn’t believe him. If my son came to me and said ;" I am going to suffer for about 3 hours on Friday, then resurrect early Sunday Morning, I would just say: " will you be home for breakfast?" Plus In Matthew ( I believe it was Ch. 16 )It was also in Mark) quoting Jesus as saying;" I will return in my father’s glory with his angles before some of you standing here see death. Why wasn’t it recorded? and no it wasn’t the Transfiguration or the asscention as some say, that was not a resurrection either.
This is what makes Christianity, as it exists today, impossible for me to have any belief in at all.
WTF? Father a child, sacrifice him, dump all the world’s sins on him, then resurrect him… Why not just say, with the voice of omnipotence, “Okay, sins are paid for.” Why the absurd drama, the over-the-top theatrical hogwash? Just issue a decree. God, right? All powerful, right?
In Islam, there’s a bit where pilgrims throw stones at an icon representing Satan. Why couldn’t God have sacrificed an icon, or a ram or lamb, instead of his living son? A ram was enough to substitute for Isaac.
It would have had the same effect…because he says so…because he’s all-powerful God.
Why does sacrificing a goat ensure a better harvest? It’s blood magic. It was written at a time when it was considered possible to load up a goat with the ‘sins’ of the village, and then kill that goat in order to remove those sins. The idea with Jesus is that it’s one mega-sacrifice which lasts for all time. Thus continual animal sacrifice is no longer required and everyone’s off the hook for all the terrible things they’ve done if only they abandon reason and follow him…
God-man sacrifice > human sacrifice > animal sacrifice.
Of course none of that makes sense. If you want sense, you have to look elsewhere.
None of that is even slightly relevant to <I>did Jesus die for all men, or only for the elect</I>. What they indicate is that hell exists, and that some people will be damned, and that the distinction between the saved and the damned revolves largely around belief.
There are ways you could even square that with annihilationist or conditional universalist understandings of the afterlife, and a lot of Christians (including a great many prior to the fifth century, and some figures in the ultra-conservative Orthodox church, so these aren’t liberal or modern innovations). Without even getting into the question of whether ‘eternal damnation’ really means ‘eternal’ though, the distinction here is that belief is a matter of free will. Jesus may have died for all people, and only might some might choose to accept his gift. That doesn’t take away from the universality of his death. It just means that we can make a free choice to accept it, or not.
The quotation that most directly addresses “who did Jesus die for” is the one from First John about “not for our sins only but for the sins of the whole world”, and that one’s unambiguous.
I’d disagree with you about ‘abandoning reason’ or ‘none of it making sense’, but that is at least a fair representation of one common understanding of the atonement.
I’m not sure who has said otherwise, but certainly not me. I question whether hell is necessarily eternal (for everyone in it), but I don’t question that it’s a physical place with physical torment.
Quogdop, I have only read the first few posts, so perhaps this has already been said. But I believe the original interpretation of the value of Jesus’s sacrifice was not that he suffered, but simply that he was a perfect sacrifice. At the time, Jews sacrificed animals for a variety of reasons, including as a form of apologizing for sins. (Look for “guilt offering” in the old Testament.) It was important that these offerings, be they grain or pigeons or bullocks, be physically perfect. Jesus was a perfect offering, and as such, his sacrifice paid for a whole lot of sin.
Note that the sacrificial animal is not supposed to suffer. It’s better if the animal goes willingly, dies immediately, and is not observed to suffer in any way. So I think the whole suffering thing was a later addition.
Note: I am writing this as a Jew who grew up in Christendom, not as a Christian.
My claim wasn’t just that it was one possible interpretation, rather that it was probably the original meaning of the story. It’s a deliberate echo of Abraham’s willingness to perform a human sacrifice. Granted, interpretations have proliferated since.
Given that you don’t think it’s unreasonable, would you therefore say that, prior to Jesus’s death, those people practicing animal/human sacrifices, were potentially doing something sensible and effective? That God really demanded innocent blood be spilled in his name?