Indeed, but I wonder how they deal with passages like Revelation 14:11, Matthew 25:41, or Mark 9:43.
If you really want to know, you could try asking them. Or reading their books, if you don’t know any. You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.
I have no book recommendations. My point is that flaunting Biblical quotations and going “nyah! nyah!” does not make a good argument, even if the conclusion is correct.
Zombie-hunting requires better instruments than that.
I have. You point out the verses to them and they say things like “Well all I know is that God is just.” Or they just say “Hmm.” What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Or reading their books
Since this is essentially a heretical position, I’m not sure how heavily it’s defended in the literature. Still, I do have in my bookshelf an anthology containing a universalist essay by Marilyn McCord Adams, where she states that “I do not regard Scripture as infallible [… but …] I do not regard my universalist theology as un-Scriptural, because I believe the theme of definitive divine triumph is central to the Bible”. She seems to want to reject the Bible and accept it too.
You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.
I think the most coherent Christian position would be: There is a God. Various interesting things happened at God’s doing, including Jesus and his miracles. The people who witnessed all these events wrote about them, but invariably these accounts are half fiction or worse. Paul is clearly a charlatan.
But nobody seems to believe this: Christians who think the Bible is fallible nevertheless act as if it is mostly right.
flaunting Biblical quotations [...] does not make a good argument
It’s necessary when dealing with the doublethink of people who want to take the Bible as divine yet reject key parts of it.
going “nyah! nyah!”
Note that this sort of comment provokes an automatic reaction to fight back, rather than to consider whether you might be correct.
What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Many doctrines are collected here. Not all have the damned eternally waterboarded with boiling lead. For example, the Orthodox churches teach that hell is the response to the direct presence of God by the soul which has rejected Him. It is no more a punishment than the pain you feel if you cut a finger.
And then, whatever hell is, who goes there, and do they stay there for eternity? Doctrines differ on this as well—the issue of works vs. faith, or the issue of those who have never encountered the Word and have not been in a position to accept or reject it.
How do they explain Biblical passages? By interpreting them (as they would say) correctly. Unless you look to extreme fringe groups who think that the King James Bible was a new revelation whose every letter is to be as meticulously preserved and revered as Moslems do the Koran, every Christian doctrine allows that the text needs interpretation. As well, the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not regard the Bible as the sole source of the Word, regarding the settled doctrine of the church as another source of divine revelation.
There is also the Book of Nature, which God also wrote.
With multiple sources of divine revelation, but an axiomatic unity of that revelation, any conflicts must result from imperfect human understanding. Given the axiom, it is really not difficult to come up with resolutions of apparent conflicts. Confabulating stories in order to maintain an immovable idea is something the brain is very good at. Watch me confabulate a Bayesian justification of confabulation! Strong evidence can always defeat strong priors, and vice versa. So if the unity of God’s Word is as unshakeable as 2+2=4, a mere difficult passage is less than a feather on the scales.
I say this not to teach Christian doctrines (I’m as atheist as anyone, and my Church of Scotland upbringing was as unzealous as it could possibly be and still be called a religion), but to point out that Christians do actually have answers to these questions. Ok, bad answers if you like, but if you want to argue against them you need to either tackle those answers, or find a weapon so awesome it blows the entire religious enterprise out of the water. (I’m sure there’s a perfect LW link for the latter, but I can’t at the moment recall where. This is rather diffuse.) Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man. It’s an exercise in pouring scorn on Them. You know, those Others, over There.
Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man.
It’s not like that at all. Many Bible passages dealing with Hell are perfectly clear, whereas it takes a great distortion of evolutionary theory to get to “a monkey gave birth to a man”.
It would be easier to accept texts as mere teaching stories if they were clearly intended as such. A few are, like the Book of Job, and possibly, Jonah. Parts of Genesis, maybe (though I doubt it). But it can’t be right to dismiss as a mere story everything that doesn’t seem likely or decent. Much of it is surely intended literally.
If you really want to know, you could try asking them. Or reading their books, if you don’t know any. You could even think up good arguments yourself for reconciling the belief with the verses.
I have no book recommendations. My point is that flaunting Biblical quotations and going “nyah! nyah!” does not make a good argument, even if the conclusion is correct. Zombie-hunting requires better instruments than that.
I have. You point out the verses to them and they say things like “Well all I know is that God is just.” Or they just say “Hmm.” What I want to know is what a thinking sort of hell-denying Christian says.
Since this is essentially a heretical position, I’m not sure how heavily it’s defended in the literature. Still, I do have in my bookshelf an anthology containing a universalist essay by Marilyn McCord Adams, where she states that “I do not regard Scripture as infallible [… but …] I do not regard my universalist theology as un-Scriptural, because I believe the theme of definitive divine triumph is central to the Bible”. She seems to want to reject the Bible and accept it too.
I think the most coherent Christian position would be: There is a God. Various interesting things happened at God’s doing, including Jesus and his miracles. The people who witnessed all these events wrote about them, but invariably these accounts are half fiction or worse. Paul is clearly a charlatan.
But nobody seems to believe this: Christians who think the Bible is fallible nevertheless act as if it is mostly right.
It’s necessary when dealing with the doublethink of people who want to take the Bible as divine yet reject key parts of it.
Note that this sort of comment provokes an automatic reaction to fight back, rather than to consider whether you might be correct.
Many doctrines are collected here. Not all have the damned eternally waterboarded with boiling lead. For example, the Orthodox churches teach that hell is the response to the direct presence of God by the soul which has rejected Him. It is no more a punishment than the pain you feel if you cut a finger.
And then, whatever hell is, who goes there, and do they stay there for eternity? Doctrines differ on this as well—the issue of works vs. faith, or the issue of those who have never encountered the Word and have not been in a position to accept or reject it.
How do they explain Biblical passages? By interpreting them (as they would say) correctly. Unless you look to extreme fringe groups who think that the King James Bible was a new revelation whose every letter is to be as meticulously preserved and revered as Moslems do the Koran, every Christian doctrine allows that the text needs interpretation. As well, the Catholic and Orthodox churches do not regard the Bible as the sole source of the Word, regarding the settled doctrine of the church as another source of divine revelation. There is also the Book of Nature, which God also wrote.
With multiple sources of divine revelation, but an axiomatic unity of that revelation, any conflicts must result from imperfect human understanding. Given the axiom, it is really not difficult to come up with resolutions of apparent conflicts. Confabulating stories in order to maintain an immovable idea is something the brain is very good at. Watch me confabulate a Bayesian justification of confabulation! Strong evidence can always defeat strong priors, and vice versa. So if the unity of God’s Word is as unshakeable as 2+2=4, a mere difficult passage is less than a feather on the scales.
I say this not to teach Christian doctrines (I’m as atheist as anyone, and my Church of Scotland upbringing was as unzealous as it could possibly be and still be called a religion), but to point out that Christians do actually have answers to these questions. Ok, bad answers if you like, but if you want to argue against them you need to either tackle those answers, or find a weapon so awesome it blows the entire religious enterprise out of the water. (I’m sure there’s a perfect LW link for the latter, but I can’t at the moment recall where. This is rather diffuse.) Just quoting the Bible is like creationists smugly telling each other that evolutionists think a monkey gave birth to a man. It’s an exercise in pouring scorn on Them. You know, those Others, over There.
As Nick Tarleton warned, upthread.
It’s not like that at all. Many Bible passages dealing with Hell are perfectly clear, whereas it takes a great distortion of evolutionary theory to get to “a monkey gave birth to a man”.
Speaking of thinking Christians makes me think of Fred Clark: some clue might be found in his interpretation of Genesis 6-9.
It would be easier to accept texts as mere teaching stories if they were clearly intended as such. A few are, like the Book of Job, and possibly, Jonah. Parts of Genesis, maybe (though I doubt it). But it can’t be right to dismiss as a mere story everything that doesn’t seem likely or decent. Much of it is surely intended literally.
I would agree, which is part of why I found the linked post so strange.