By way of an addendum to the previous piece on Jesus’ subversion of the Jewish Gehenna, I want to look briefly at James 3:5b-6, which is the only place in the New Testament outside the Synoptic Gospels where the word geenna occurs. The verse reads (my translation):

A major part of my argument against the traditional doctrine of “hell” is that in Jesus’ teaching “Gehenna” is not a place of unending conscious torment after death but a symbol for the devastation and loss of life that Israel would suffer as a consequence of the war against Rome. I think that Jesus has basically reworked Jeremiah’s prediction that Jews who died during the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians would be thrown into the Valley of the Son of Hinnom because there would be no place left to bury the dead in the city (Jer. 7:32; 19:6-7).

Steve Jacob found my post on annihilationism very interesting and wants to know whether I think “Tim Keller is on the mark in his recent article on hell”. The short answer is no. A longer answer follows. Readers might also be interested in my post “Tim Keller gets a lot right but gets hell badly wrong”.

Actually, Keller’s “The Importance of Hell” is not a recent article; it was first published in 2009 on the Redeemer website. In it he puts forward four reasons why the church needs to preach hell. All make some appeal to scripture, but only the first amounts to anything like a biblical justification of the doctrine. The other three arguments are attempts to mount a defence of hell on ethical and theological grounds.

Zondervan Academic has just put out a blog post on the resurrection adapted from some online teaching material from Scott Oliphint. Oliphint is professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. I want to consider the piece, first, because it’s Easter, and secondly, because it provides an opportunity to highlight the divergence between two hermeneutical methods: on the one hand, the theological ransacking of scripture in defence of dogma; on the other, the reconstruction of a compelling and sufficient prophetic narrative about the historical experience of the people of God.

In an article on “Evangelical Annihilationism” published twenty years ago J.I. Packer respectfully rebutted the arguments made by the likes of E.W. Fudge, John Wenham and John Stott in favour of a more benign understanding of “hell” not as a place of eternal conscious torment but as eternal annihilation or non-existence. The first part of the article is a brief overview of the debate up to that point. In the second part Packer puts forward a theological and exegetical defence of the traditional doctrine.

A decent sermon at a well known central London Anglican church Sunday night was spoilt, in my view, by the excited closing announcement that Jesus is coming back soon. Apart from the fact that the dogma is questionable on biblical grounds, which I’ll come to, I don’t understand how or why such a reputable church would think it necessary or plausible or wise to proclaim so confidently that finally, at this point in history, after centuries of us getting it wrong, Jesus is about to come back. It seems to me that we would have to be pretty sure—on some sort of collective ecclesial basis—that we’ve got it right this time before raising false hopes yet again and subverting our long term missional commitment to creation-as-we-know-it. Otherwise, this sort of fitful eschatological guesswork strikes me as plain irresponsible.

On top of that, I chanced upon this short and unhelpful video by Michael Kruger addressing the question “Did Jesus promise to return within the lifetime of his disciples?” Here we get to the matter of the biblical grounds for the belief that the church is still waiting for Jesus to return any time soon.

I have written rather a lot about the doctrine of “hell” on this site, for several reasons. It bothers people. It is one of the least pleasant aspects of conservative-fundamentalist expressions of Christianity. It continues to be misunderstood by its detractors and defenders alike. It draws on narratives and concepts that are not marginal to the argument of the New Testament but lie at its core. And addressing the texts is a simple and effective way of illustrating the point of the narrative-historical hermeneutic.

Essentially, I maintain that most of those narratives and concepts pertain not to what happens to people in some sort of conscious existence after death but to the hardships and horrors of historical calamities experienced—as divine judgment—by communities, cities and nations. I have adopted a policy of narrative-historical containment.