This past semester I spent a lot of time thinking about heaven and hell, as I took a philosophy class that delved into these often talked about, but rarely understood ides. I've been left contemplating how much our perception of God's nature affects both how we think salvation "works" and what we think we are saved from. In the next few days, I'll be posting adaptations from my final paper on the blog. Please join the conversation in the comments section!
"A
society that tolerates misery, a religion that tolerates Hell, a humanity that
tolerates war, is to me an inferior one. With all of the strength of my being I
want to destroy this human depravation. I damn the slavery, I chase away the
misery, I heal the sickness, I brighten the darkness, I hate the hatred."[1]
An Introduction
The doctrines of hell and atonement have
been a source of much debate over the past 2,000 years of church history.
Differences of opinion have always existed, but at different points in time,
certain theories have been normative within the broader tradition. Today in
evangelical America, the predominant atonement theory is the penal substitution formulation of the satisfaction theory, while the predominant
doctrine of hell involves some notion of a real, literal place, in which conscious
eternal torment takes place. This has not always been the case, though.
I would argue that there is a
relationship between our perception of hell and the theory of atonement that we
accept. Behind these two doctrines lies our conception of God’s nature.
Different views of God’s nature lead us to varying ways of looking at the atonement,
and they in turn shape our perception of what, exactly, we are saved from. Hell
has many connotations in the evangelical landscape today, but I will define
hell in a more abstract fashion. In the metaconversation of this series of posts, hell
broadly refers to that which we are saved from by God.
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