Brook Potter “When someone says that Jesus taught about Hell more than anything else in his earthly ministry, it’s obvious that person get’s their theology from Christian Television more so than from study.”
One of the most common logical fallacies used by Christians is the fallacy of Incredulity. It is sometimes called the “Lack of Imagination Fallacy,” because it basically assumes that if a person doesn’t understand, or can’t imagine a certain position, that position is automatically wrong.
Needless to say, that sort of logic is blatantly flawed. To this day, no one truly understands gravity, but it remains a very real factor in our every day lives.
When it comes to the subject of hell, there is great debate on the subject. For most believers, the doctrine of hell is an idol. It remains mostly untouched, unstudied and just accepted, for fear that they may end up there for questioning it.
But for some believers, they actually take Paul’s command of studying the Word to heart. They have actually invested a great deal of time and energy into this subject. In so doing, they have come to varying positions on one of the three major views, Infernalism, Conditionalism, and Universalism.
At this point, a person who may come to a different understanding of the topic of Hell, outside the Eternal Conscious Torment theory, is generally faced two common objections.
Firstly, it is believed that such a person has been deceived by the devil, followed by their abandonment of the truth of Scripture. With nothing more than a surface reading of Scripture, coupled with man-made traditions and teaching from the Church, most believers just cannot believe their Bible might actually teach something other than what they currently believe.
It is greatly dishonest to say that Conditionalist or the Universalist has been deceived or abandoned the truth of Scripture, when most believers in Infernalism wouldn’t even study the subject, far less read other believers’ arguments and Scriptural studies to see how they have arrived at their position.
So with that said, I’m looking at 4 common phrases used in the New Testament that are commonly believed to be related to the afterlife and Hell, to give an example of why our assumptions are not actually found in the Scriptures themselves.
For the purposes of this article, I’ll be skipping over the fact that there are four distinct words translated as Hell, and each has it’s unique uses, Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, and Gehenna. But anyone doing a further study, should look into these words more closely.
Source:
4 Misunderstood Phrases, we assume are about hell -
