I recently returned from Missoula, Montana where I participated in a conference with the oxymoronic title "The Good News About Hell." Glen Moyer, who writes a weekly column in the Missoulian under the heading "The Adventures of Clothman" (http://www.clothman.com/) was the host. I shared in two of the sessions. The stated purpose of the conference was to expand the dialogue about the hell doctrine which assigns to eternal conscious torment all nonbelievers in Christ when they die.
In preparation for this conference, I learned some facinating things:
1. The Old Testament contains no references to the traditional Christian hell. A fact which most modern Bible translations acknowledge.
2. Most of Jesus' teaching about what some older English Bibles translate as "hell" was really about an actual place outside of Jerusalem known as Gehenna in the Greek. It was the city dump where once King Ahaz had led Israel in human sacrifice to the idol Molech and was regarded as a cursed place. There the fire never stopped burning and the maggots (worms) never died.
3. Only one of six schools of theology that rose to prominence in the first centuries after Christ taught any kind of eternal torment in the afterlife. The majority taught the doctrine of the restoration of all things as did the apostles of Jesus as indicated in Acts 3:21 and Colossians 1:19-20.
4. No sermon recorded in Acts (the first sermons of Christianity) mentions or threatens eternal damnation.
5. Neither the Apostles' Creed nor the Nicaean Creed, two of the earliest known formal creeds of Christianity, mention eternal damnation as the destiny of unbelievers.
6. The literal hell of eternal conscious torment did not appear as the "official" doctrine of the church until the 6th Century--500 years after Jesus sent his followers to spread the gospel or good news of his living example, teaching, death on the cross and resurrection.
Given the fact that hellfire and damnation preaching has gone the way of the 8 track in most churches today--because most pastors instinctively sense there is something wrong with the notion that a loving God would doom the majority of the human race to eternal hell--I, and many others, believe it is time we revisit this horrible doctrine and assign it to the trash heap of history with other church dogmas that have been discarded such as justified slavery, inferiority of women, the earth is the center of the universe, and many others.
