A Debate About Hell

I just finished listening to a very interesting debate on the subject and nature of Hell. This debate was held by the Evangelical Theological Debate Society and can be downloaded from The Narrow Mind Aftermath website.

On one side of the aisle were 3 men who were all of the common biblical persuasion that Hell is a literal and eternal place prepared for those who do not know Christ after they die. On the other side of the aisle were 3 men who had varying views ranging from a more "liberal" form of Christianity to one who was probably more of a soft atheist.

The biblical apologists came to the table with only about 9 key biblical references to espouse their view; most of which were solely from the New Testament. The opponents came to the table with a whole list of references that ranged throughout both the Old and New Testament. My personal persuasion from this debate was definitely in the corner to those who opposed what is now the "common" understanding of a literal and eternal Hell. Their arguments were very well laid out and were overall more consistent in their presentation and congruity of ideas.

Items from those in favour of the idea of a literal and eternal Hell seemed to me to be very interesting

• The neglecting of Old Testament passages on the grounds that Jesus did away with the Old Covenant by providing what is now a superior covenant- by this, I take it that we could do well to only use the Old Testament as a backward reference point, but not glean anything from it pertaining to doctrine. If that is the case then I think that a fair application should also follow by means of not looking to the Old Testament to also try and define any theological definition of God.
• The citation that those who held the opposing view were not able to rightly interpret the passages that they quoted because "the natural man is unable to understand the things of God."- Now, when I was still calling myself a Christian [assuming that I really did have the Spirit of God in me] I was making the same opposing observations that these "non-believers" were as well. So from their line of logic they are probably opposing themselves on this issue. So it is almost like they are saying that salvation comes about by God using the the Spirit and the Bible to open our eyes to understand salvation and our need of it by reading the Bible, but if we end up using more rational means to interpret things that don't seemingly need any additional supernatural revelation then we will most likely be wrong. I understand that human logic and rational is flawed by certain words and concepts but isn't God supposed to be logical enough to at least be generally understood by us on the surface? I am just uneasy with the whole card trick being pulled that says "you guys would otherwise make sense in your argument, but the Bible isn't really saying what is actually written there."
• The ignorance of the parabolic usage of the New Testament Gehenna- Gehenna was a real place outside of Jerusalem that served a specific purpose. It was a dump. It was the place where all of the trash, leftovers of animal sacrifices, and criminals were dumped. The fire there burned for an "infinite" amount of time, but the things that burned there only burned until they were consumed. So with that in mind, how does the idea of eternal torment comport to this picture?

All in all, I think that the "evangelical" side really lost this debate. I do feel that a lot of their ideas were consistent with their theology, but I have also come to learn that building a theological system is really tricky. There are so many variables that are at play here. They lost because they violated their own rules of interpretational criticism. They were not examining the texts from the context that they were in.

It is a very interesting debate so if you have time I would recommend listening to it.