![]() ![]() If he means the references to the Valley of the Sons of Hinnom in Jeremiah, the battle foreseen was one that would destroy Jerusalem. I’m mystified by his reference to “the battle to liberate Jerusalem”. Their exclusion would be their non-existence. They would not be buried in good kosher graveyards, their bones would ever be unkosher and unclean, and that would exclude them from the final resurrection of the Jewish nation, and exclude them from Kingdom of God and from the life of the world to come. Gehenna was symbolic for the prophets, who wrote that after the battle to liberate Jerusalem, the bodies of their enemies would be cast into Gehenna, instead of buried, which meant great shame, and so would the bodies of the unrighteous Jews. The garbage dump of Jerusalem was a valley called Gehenna. Yes, but why not make the connection with the razing of the city by the Romans? Meeter develops the argument further on his blog. Jesus uses the metaphor of “Gehenna” to speak of the “shame of Jerusalem for rejecting him, and the shame of the people for ignoring God”.Good souls could go to heaven, but where would the bad souls go? They couldn’t die, so a suitably unpleasant alternative to heaven had to be devised. Hell. But in that case, Meeter asks, why do so many people think that hell exists? Answer: Greek-minded Gentiles came to believe in hell because they had inherited from their culture unbiblical ideas about the immortality of the soul.(I’ve said that often enough.) “The God of the Hebrew Bible… would be horrified at the thought of keeping somebody alive a long time in confinement just to torture him.” That’s well put. The wages of sin is death, nothing more, nothing less. There’s eternal life for some, but no eternal living in hell.Here are some of the theological points that stood out for me…. ![]() Some good unpretentious stories are told. The book is non-judgmental, but it knows where it stands. Lines are carefully drawn between the Christian faith and other religions. Why be a Christian? Because being a Christian offers a way to be spiritual, to pray, to save your soul, to be a human being, to know God… and finally, to go to heaven, sort of. In fact, most of the book is about those other reasons. The basic argument of Why Be A Christian (If No One Goes to Hell)? ( Shook Foil Books, 2012) is that the “Bible does not teach that anyone spends eternity in hell” but that doesn’t matter because there are plenty of other much better reasons to be a Christian. Daniel Meeter has written an elegant, lucid, sensible, and humane book about hell and, as far as I am concerned, gets most of it right. ![]()
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