To Hell and Back with Dr. David Tatum

[00:00:05] Speaker A: This is the Return, a podcast about religious reconstruction in a world of deconstruction. I'm Jordan Maddox. [00:00:13] Speaker B: And I'm Dustin Maddox. [00:00:14] Speaker A: We are not related. [00:00:16] Speaker B: Different spell. So today we are joined by my friend and your soon to be friend, Dr. David Tatum. David is an expert on many things, mostly triathlons. He is a world champion Ironman triathlete, so he's well acquainted with topic of the day. [00:00:54] Speaker C: I've competed in the world championship. I am not the world champion, let's be clear about that. [00:00:58] Speaker B: Fair enough. He's also humble, but it means he's familiar with our topic today, which is hell. [00:01:04] Speaker C: Pain and suffering. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Pain and suffering, weeping and gnashing of teeth. But hell is a part of the main kind of big idea of David's doctoral dissertation, which is I. I haven't finished it all yet, but it's my goal this summer to get all the way through it. So sorry about that. [00:01:25] Speaker C: When I see it. [00:01:26] Speaker B: Confession time. [00:01:27] Speaker A: Are there footnotes? [00:01:28] Speaker B: There are. It is a proper academic treatise. [00:01:32] Speaker A: I only read things with footnotes. Yeah, that's all I do. Yeah. So hell's an interesting thing because it lives in us. Like I. I have a hell that lives in me that I was taught, and it's like my own little hell. What are your guys's Hell. Hell is like what lives in you from your upbringing. [00:01:49] Speaker B: So as I've mentioned, I didn't grow up in church, but one time I went, my grandmother took me to a VBS at her like, Baptist church, Like small. I don't even know what flavor Baptist it was. [00:02:03] Speaker A: But where did hell come up in vbs? [00:02:06] Speaker B: Day one, like from the jump. They like saw me walk in. They're like, we're hitting. He got fresh meat. And even at 8 years old, or 7 or 8, something like that, I was really young, but as this concept of hell was presented to me and the particular formula was, at least in my brain was like, God is love, you are evil, and so God is going to punish you forever in a fiery furnace called hell. And I was like, wait, what? How does this make any sense? And why. Why would God send people to hell? And the like, probably very well meaning old lady who was teaching me or was evangelizing me at that point in time was like, people who ask questions like that end up going to hell. Exactly. Yeah. Then it took me a long time to. [00:03:11] Speaker A: Did that live rent free in your mind or did it go away? [00:03:13] Speaker B: No, it. It just felt so absurd even to my. And maybe it's just my personality, my temperament, Whatever, it didn't land. But when I became a Christian, now it comes back on the scene. And the majority view, that was around where I was one we'll get into eventually. So I. I then had to think through it again in a new way. But how about you? [00:03:44] Speaker C: I did grow up in the church, and you may have experienced this as well. But my. So probably my earliest memory was probably, like, junior high school at some point experienced, like, the play Heaven's Gates, Hell's Flames. And it was like on the church stage and there was this vivid, like, simulation of a car crash and people die. And it was this whole deal of if you died today, like, where would you go? Type of thing, which is a whole nother view of humanity that I disagree with now. Anyways, we can get into that. But it was like this. It was this gospel of fear, of if you die and you haven't settled your accounts, you're going someplace horrible forever. [00:04:22] Speaker A: It's like that. There's this Christian, I guess you'd call him a pop star called Carmen. And he had this. He was big in the early 90s. And there was a music video put out where you're in a courtroom. Jesus is your advocate, God is the Father passing judgment, and you have to win the court case, otherwise you're confined to hell. Yeah. And hell was. I grew up Baptist, so Hell was like. That's a central trade. That's the motif of Baptist churches. A lot of time it always just felt weaponized to me. Like it was. It always felt like a. I didn't understand it as a tool, but now I see it that way. But when I look back, I see that hell was a tool. But what's interesting to me is the obsession with punishment. [00:05:05] Speaker B: Yes. [00:05:05] Speaker A: I don't know what that is exactly. And there's part of me that thinks, and we're going to dig into this as we go along, part of me thinks that there is FOMO by people that are living Christian life, that there's a jealousy of a friend, freedom of a secular person to do whatever the hell intended they want. And hell is their weapon in some ways. But then it's also refuting the lifestyle of a Christian because you shouldn't have to threaten someone to do a thing that's good. So then that it raises all sorts of questions about the Christian life. And that's what I started to think about as I got older. I'm like, why do we need to threaten people to do something that's inherently good for them? But then that does that Challenge the idea that the Christian life is good for you. You guys know what I'm saying? [00:05:51] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:05:52] Speaker A: It opens up a bunch of questions that I have. [00:05:54] Speaker C: The thing that strikes me like in retrospect too was there didn't seem to be like any sadness from people that were preaching that. At best there was apathy, but there was never like, and maybe even like some joy out of preaching that kind of gospel. But there was never like this, oh, we're really sad that this is going to happen and so we, we don't want it to happen type of thing. Yeah, that makes sense. [00:06:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I, yeah, I had a lot of those, especially hell at church. Camp was critical because you got all. [00:06:23] Speaker B: These kids rolling through the last night. [00:06:25] Speaker A: You gotta scare the hell out of them to get them to stay so they can repent on the final day and ring the bell. And so that, that started to bother me, I think in adolescence, like, why are we using this to, to scare people? But I agree with what you're saying. It's, it is a strange kind of, kind of sadism sometimes in the way people use hell as like a tool. [00:06:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:06:44] Speaker A: And I don't know, I don't know. I guess I'd be curious to like understand someone that does that, like how they think about what a person's worth. You know what I'm saying? [00:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah. I think if I'm trying to empathize my way into the mindset of somebody who's thinking that way, it's probably a, it's probably similar to like how I interact with my 5 year old son at some point sometimes where I'm trying to motivate him to move in a particular direction. And when that's not happening, you're then, okay, if you don't do that, then here are the natural consequences of what will happen. But that's as far as I can get empathetically because then on the other side it's like, because I don't enjoy the punishment at all when that happens because it's, it sucks for him and it sucks for me. [00:07:42] Speaker C: So yeah, for me, like fatherhood changes had changed my theology in all sorts of ways. And this is one, I think that it helped as well. I, I can't, I don't enjoy punishing my kids and I can't fathom a world in which like my kids did anything. And I was like, oh, here's a good idea, let me lock you in your room and torture you for a week, let alone like for forever. [00:08:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you think it's there's that quote, I think, I don't think it's attributed to Stalin, but I don't think he said it. Where it's, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Do you think? It's just, there's just all these people that exist out there, and so it's easier to confine a group of people to damnation versus telling your sister who stopped going to church, I don't know what's going to happen when you go on. You know, God's going to be waiting, asking where you were. And so I wonder if that's part of it as well. [00:08:33] Speaker B: I think there's an implicit. I mean, you can think of the stereotypical, like, bullhorn guy on the corner, right, Like Turner Byrne. And, and it's, it's. This message is just being broadcast to a faceless crowd who's probably not even listening. And that's a very different experience than saying, jordan, I'm concerned that you are going to burn in hell forever, and I don't want that to happen to you. So therefore going to walk with you down this path towards salvation or whatever. Sometimes that happens. And there's a lot of different approaches and different ways that people think about this and engage in it, and so we'll get into some of that. [00:09:15] Speaker A: But, yeah, it's easier to talk at a crowd than a person, and it's also objectifying people, too. [00:09:20] Speaker B: But I think on the inverse, people who have walked away, many of them have either had that type of experience like I described, where somebody directly confronts you with this threat of divine violence, or it produces such a moral and ethical quandary in your minds, if you actually think through, okay, what does this mean? And more importantly, what does this mean about who God is? And like you were saying, is the Christian life even worth living at that? [00:09:55] Speaker A: Yeah, if it requires that threat worth living. And I think you're right, because if you accept as a premise consigning a majority of humans that have existed on Earth to inescapable damnation, what does that do to your theology? I think we'll dig into that a little bit more, but I think it creates an interesting type of God figure in my mind. [00:10:15] Speaker C: That's the key question is what does it say about God? What portrait of God does it paint? And is God really like that? [00:10:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you think people are thinking through that kind of step of like, okay, if I believe this, then that means this? Or do you think those things are compartmentalized? [00:10:32] Speaker C: I think, I think we have A we probably compartmentalize it. And most people, to be honest, are probably rehearsing much of what they've either heard or what they've gotten from tradition. I don't think most people have really done a deep dive into this topic, both on the history and what the Bible has to say about it. So it's more like people mimicking behavior or what they've been told than anything else. [00:10:58] Speaker A: I remember I brought a friend from high school to church and. And the church I grew up in, there's all the kind of traditional floral dresses and donuts in the front and coffee and sweet greeters at the door. And hell was the topic that day. And he was just confused by the discordance between very sweet ladies passing the tithe baskets and then, like, fiery lakes where you will spend, like, eternity just suffering and boiling and burning. And I remember him asking me after he's, do they really believe that stuff? And I said, I don't know, because there's part of me that thinks that people don't actually believe this. Like you're saying, like, they're just parroting stuff. Because I generally think most people care about other people and couldn't fathom that actually manifesting. There's part of me that just doesn't believe that they actually believe it. Do you think people actually believe that? [00:11:54] Speaker B: Oh, I know people who actually believe it. But I think what you're describing is there can be a sort of performative dynamic that happens in churches, right, where it's, okay, that's. This is how it goes. Like, the preacher gets up and does the thing. It provokes an emotional response that gets people to consider the stakes, pun intended, and then turn away. It's like this formulaic approach. But David has this metaphor of theology as a spider web. Like, you touch one part of it and it connects to all these other things. And so if you do that, it then. And if you have a friend who does what you did and you, like, really start to step back and think about, has this effect of saying, okay, if I really think through this thing, it connects to all of these other pieces that I haven't really thought through. So that can be overwhelming to people to be like, okay, if I have to think through this, and I have to think through everything, and so they don't do it and just continue to run the play. But if you do think through it, then. And David's somebody who's done that really well and thoughtfully and come out on the other side with something that's good and true. And beautiful. And so that's a cool thing to try and think through because there are. There. Yeah, there's just a weird both and ness to it. [00:13:19] Speaker A: Maybe, maybe that's a good point to bring up fairness, because I think that's comes up for a lot of people. Like, I'm making these sacrifices to be a Christian because a Christian life is a hard life. It's not. You can live a pretty relaxed, hedonistic existence and not sacrifice for people. So it's almost not going to hell is kind of part of the reward that people feel. And so there's this sense that it's deeply unfair to someone sacrificing in that way. And so I think fairness is this variable that works in people's brains. But then I. Yeah, and it works. [00:13:52] Speaker B: In the other way too, in terms of fairness or justice being like, when, like bad moral actors are around. The classic is, where's Hitler? What's happening to Hitler? [00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:14:07] Speaker B: And so it evokes a sense of. Yeah. God at its core. It's a question of what. How is God going to make the world? And then there's different routes you can travel to an answer. [00:14:20] Speaker C: I think part of it too is we create systems in where. Which people are encouraged not to ask questions. And so I talk about this in terms of what I call like a castle theology. So you build the castle of the correct theology, and then the moat is built around the community, and then you're not allowed to ask questions outside of the castle. And if you do, then you get kicked out of the castle and you're not allowed back in. And so when you have doctrinal statements that set the boundaries for what you are and are not allowed to talk about, then it leaves no room for questioning or doubt and really exploring the topic. It's like you. You have to take this and believe it and don't question it. [00:15:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll just share my personal experience. So I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. Hell was a central part of Baptist theology. And then I started to doubt some things. It seemed a little absurd that people before Christianity were consigned to this place by accident of when they were born or where they were born. And then I went away to college and I moved to San Francisco, where it's a very cosmopolitan city living different kinds of lives. And in particular, I started volunteering at an AIDS hospice. And so I. And it was a Buddhist AIDS hospice. Still it's in operation. It's called My Tree. It's in the Castro. So it's gay. Men dying from aids, and a lot of them were Christians. And, like, in the back of my head, like, there was this thing, like, I wasn't doing this, but there was, like, an impulse, gotta save them. Gotta save them, because the hell was still living in my mind. And I remember having a conversation with one of them, and he died a week later after we talked, and just asking him about, like, where he was at spiritually. And he said something like, it doesn't matter what I believe. It doesn't matter. Those are just, like, you know, electrical signals in my brain. How should that dictate what happens to me beyond my physical body? And that just stuck with me. And then I just started meeting more people outside of that environment that were living beautiful lives, but outside of any church context. And there's a broader deconstruction of religion that was happening there, but specifically with hell. And it was like, I don't want to believe something that would consign some of these beautiful people that I had developed relationships and lives with to a place where they're just suffering in perpetuity. And so that was just so deeply troubling to me. And that was part of my deconstruction process. But I think, yeah, that cosmopolitan element, when you interact with a lot of different kinds of people and you're not in uniform environments, it just. It starts to break down your head that any of this makes sense. And so that was my process. That was also the time when Rob Bell published that book. And that all started the discussion. That happened right when I was entering seminary. And so it was. All that kind of world was colliding. And so then there was a lot of interesting things that happened when I was in seminary around those topics. But, yeah, I think that was, for me, my breaking point with the concept of hell. And when you. And we'll talk about the history in a second, but when you dig into the history, you realize how complicated it is and how some of the ideas that people. People have today are just so new. Yes, they're so new. And you talk to. I've had conversations with my dad, who's a Southern Baptist minister, about these topics. And it's always. Christians have always believed in hell. I'm like, yeah, but in different ways, right? And. Yeah, and for different means and for different purposes. [00:17:45] Speaker C: But on the. The determinist factor is like one of those pieces where you talk about the spiderweb, right? Like, you. You start to. You add that layer onto it, and then that affects all sorts of ways in which you're Viewing people's eternity when you add in the determinist belief. [00:18:02] Speaker A: Free will is another great topic on this line. There's. I don't know, I recently read some kind of. More kind of. They might be a little reductive, but some scientific books that challenge the idea of free will. And I think if you start to unpack that a little bit, it gets even more troubling. We could talk about Calvin in a second, but I think there's just a lot there. And so if I would. Dustin, what would you point to? Do you think hell is a big point of deconstruction for people that you see today? And what do you think of. What is it about it that causes them to pull back? Is it what I experienced? Do you think there's other reasons that lead people to deconstruct? [00:18:39] Speaker B: I think you're hitting one of the, like, primary reasons, right? You meet good people and it blows the category because hell, categorically, you don't. You're not thinking this consciously but implicitly. Okay, that's the show, right? The good place and the bad place. Good people go to the good place, bad people go to the bad place. But what happens when you meet a good person who's not the moral quandary of. Or the theological problem of the good atheist? You're like, shoot, I thought Christianity made you a good person. That's a good person. They have it without it. What do I do? How do I solve that problem? [00:19:17] Speaker A: So that's one famous Mark Twain quote. Which one? For the climate. You go to hell for the company. [00:19:23] Speaker B: I love that guy. I'm reading his biography right now. Fantastic. Ron Chernow, man. I don't know how he does it. [00:19:28] Speaker A: Page 500 of 10,000. [00:19:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But the other is, I think, the moral or ethical dimension that people begin to think through, like how. And the portraits of God that it creates or. Or the personality formation that happens in people who are like hardcore fire and brimstone preachers. Like, they don't tend to be people that you would describe as sitting under the easy yoke of Jesus. And so those are probably the, I think, two most common experiences that I've had with people, I think. [00:20:07] Speaker A: What are you seeing? [00:20:08] Speaker B: What do you think? [00:20:08] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say hell is definitely one of the top, like five in the deconstruction. [00:20:13] Speaker A: And do you think it's them worried about themselves or them worried about other people? [00:20:19] Speaker C: I think it's Christians struggling with it being the predominant belief within Christianity and struggling with, like, how to process that belief within community. So there is. So, for instance, there's a whole ministry you may have heard of called Rethinking Hell, that's got. They publish books, they've got podcasts, they've got a Facebook page, all that kind of stuff. But that's kind of like a safe place for people to. To process a lot of that stuff. And what you like on a lot of the. Those in those communities is they're like, hey, this is a safe place for me to talk about. I can't really talk about it in my community. [00:20:55] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you guys have people in your church that come up to you and want to talk about hell? Do you experience that or is it not discussed as much? I don't know what it looks like in, like, a Mennonite environment. [00:21:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I think occasionally it'll come up, at least for me, maybe for you more so. But I think when hell is the front runner in terms of this is the problem that Christianity is trying to solve is like providing fire insurance effectively, then that becomes problematic because if you remove that piece, then all sorts of. You run afoul of all sorts of things. But I think we come from a different way of thinking where that's not the problem to be solved. It gets in there. It's later on down the road, like it's a terminal consequence at the end of the line, but it's not the main thing that we're trying to figure out or put forward. And there's different ways of thinking about it. And. And that's. I think that's where we're gonna go next. Because, like, when we're talking about hell. Which one? Whose version? What, According to whom? [00:22:16] Speaker A: Yeah, let me ask you this. I have a friend that was asking me, could Christianity exist without a concept of hell? Would it make sense? I didn't know how to answer that exactly. [00:22:26] Speaker B: That's a good question. [00:22:27] Speaker A: If that concept was erased, like, how. Like, how would that change Christianity? [00:22:33] Speaker C: I think it did pre. Maybe first couple of centuries in the early church, I think early church history. [00:22:42] Speaker A: Let's just jump in the history. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna take us through and Dustin and David are gonna explain things as we go. But I want listeners to understand that while the church has talked about hell, probably since, I don't know, Roman times, the concept has evolved and it's changed. And so saying that the church has always believed X is just not true. I don't think it's true really for anything. Even describing what Jesus Christ is has evolved over time. [00:23:46] Speaker B: There is a Core that's remained. But most things have been in dialogue from the beginning. [00:23:52] Speaker A: Start with Judaism. [00:23:53] Speaker B: Yep. [00:23:53] Speaker A: Judaism doesn't really have a concept of hell. Like we understand it. How would you describe Jesus on the street? Like, what are the people he's talking to? Do they have any concept of some kind of punishment? Afterlife? [00:24:05] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question. So it depends on ancient Israel or early Judaism. Pre Jesus's time had real. No real conception of afterlife. Sheol just meant the grave. Everybody went there. Every everybody dies. And so what happens is in the second Temple time, pre Jesus, there becomes this wide spectrum of belief about life, death, and the afterlife. [00:24:28] Speaker A: Okay, so before this, people thought when they died, that was it. Yeah, early Jews were super bummer. They're just like, oh, there's no party. [00:24:35] Speaker B: Lights out of this. [00:24:36] Speaker A: Let's lights out. Okay. [00:24:37] Speaker C: Yeah, so live while you can. And. And so you see like very early inklings, like maybe within Isaiah, maybe within Daniel, of ideas of afterlife, but really isn't till the second tem. And then you see this broad spectrum of belief about life and life and death. And to more easily boil it down, the two groups that Jesus encountered, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, had polar opposite beliefs. So the Sadducees believed that you died and that was it. Lights out. And this, there were other Greek camps that would have been the same way, like the Stoics, Aristotle, Epicurus would have been the same. And then the Pharisees took a Platonic model, which was they believed in body, soul, dualism, you know, existed in some sort of disembodied state in the afterlife, and then they believed in resurrection. And so he would have been encountering a spectrum of people as he taught. [00:25:32] Speaker A: Okay, so early church, let's Acts times or whatever you want to call it. What did early Christian. I use Christian in quotation marks because it was evolving as well. What did they think post? Post Jesus death. What were some of the early Christian ideas around afterlife? [00:25:48] Speaker B: For the most part, they just talked about resurrection. That was the focus. [00:25:54] Speaker A: So I do remember when I read Surprise by Hope in high school and I was like, what the hell, dad? [00:25:59] Speaker B: Where was this? [00:26:00] Speaker A: Yeah, come on, bro. Like, tell me this stuff, right? [00:26:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:04] Speaker A: A New Testament or bad parenting? Jeez. [00:26:09] Speaker B: And so Anti Wright, a New Testament scholar, has a famous line, like, the early Christians believed not in the afterlife, but. Or life after death, but more so in life after death. And we'll do another episode on how David's dissertation deconstructs that. But that was like the afterlife Wasn't the main focus. That's his just quip to say there's something beyond death that the earliest Christians were looking towards. But church fathers like Origen, Gregory of Nyssa would believe more. They were more inclined toward, and this is pre Augustine, more inclined towards a universalism or annihilationist view that we would get into. So those two would be the speculative God will work it all out in the end on the one hand, or. Yeah, like all evil, injustice, consequence will have a final point. And then after that, the new Jerusalem, heaven, etcetera, will be fully formed and established. [00:27:18] Speaker A: Okay. So then the next stage we get, we meet this guy named Augustine. [00:27:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:22] Speaker A: Who really loves sin. What did he do to our understanding of afterlife? [00:27:27] Speaker C: Yeah. Augustine was a Platonist body, soul dualism. And that. And plays a large factor into this because if you believe you have an immortal soul, then that immortal soul has to go somewhere. And so that really forces you into one of two camps, a universalism or eternal conscious torment. And so I would say, like in part, that the early church changed the anthropology, which changed the trajectory of some of the afterlife beliefs. [00:27:52] Speaker A: So what do you mean by changing the anthropology? [00:27:54] Speaker C: So what does that mean? So the ancient Israelites were like physicalists. They didn't believe in a body and soul. They believed you were a physical being. And so the way they used the word soul is the way it was. It was a Hebrew word, nefesh, in the Greek psyche. But you are a physical person. It's not like you have two parts, and that one part's immaterial and gets separated when you die. [00:28:16] Speaker B: Just as God is one, humans are one. [00:28:18] Speaker C: And so the primary way that it's articulated in Scripture is the hope is for resurrection of that physical body. And that that hell, in a sense, or punishment, was destruction or annihilation. So we have that in John 3:16, that you have eternal life or you perish. And so the opposite of that gift of embodied, physical, resurrected life is perishing, destruction, death. And there's, I think there's over 70 different metaphors of annihilation and destruction in the Old Testament, and then those are carried on to the New Testament. [00:28:52] Speaker A: Augustin introduced this concept that there's this whole, like, other realm where there's all this action going on, and it's not just in the physical here and now. Is that an accurate way to describe it? [00:29:03] Speaker C: Yeah, I wouldn't say he. So I would say he picked up the Platonic model so that those beliefs existed in Plato. And then you could argue that those went even Back into Egyptian mythology and that kind of stuff. So he Christianizes it and says because people live on after death without their body, then there has to be like this good and this bad place. [00:29:25] Speaker A: So it's like that famous painting where you've got Plato and Aristotle's pointing at the ground and Plato's pointing up at the sky. And so we have as Augustine, like kind of a marker in that transition where we're not looking at the ground as much and we're pointing up. [00:29:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And one of the things that Augustine is trying to solve for is he popularly, people would probably know him as the father of original sin. Like he's the one who really bangs that drum. But a more nuanced way of thinking about it is he's trying to solve for original guilt. Like we are born guilty into the world and that needs to be rectified in some way or another. And so just as God is eternal, therefore that has to get mapped on to like the punishment then has to be eternal because we've the, we've sinned against an eternal God, therefore the concept, the stakes are higher, which is always. [00:30:26] Speaker C: A weird way to math the thing like with this sense of justice. We think of justice as like eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, that sort of thing. But like in the eternal conscious torment model, justice is never satisfied. [00:30:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Because you're continually paying. [00:30:40] Speaker C: Right. [00:30:41] Speaker A: And pay forever. [00:30:42] Speaker C: Yeah. And it's an eternal punishment for a temporal sin. [00:30:45] Speaker B: Exactly. It's a like categorical. What? How does that. It doesn't. It seems disproportionate. [00:30:54] Speaker A: I remember there was this thing at church camp where it was like, there was like a boys session and the camp counselor was talking about masturbation and he was like, do you want to burn in hell forever for masturbating? And I was like, that seems extreme. [00:31:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:08] Speaker A: For 30 seconds. [00:31:09] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Because how effective is that actually to that group of boys? No, thank you. [00:31:15] Speaker A: All right, let's fast forward to medieval times, my favorite restaurant. So we get this guy Dante and. But we also get this whole kind of world of these like almost sci fi kind of creations. It's. I've read, I think I read most of the Divine Comedy in college. I think a very brave professor assigned it. And what's interesting about it is that it felt familiar in some ways. That was the one that was most interesting to me. Not how crazy it was, but how familiar it was. And I actually picked it up. There's a new translation that came out a few years ago. I picked it up again. And it was more interesting to me just in terms of his view of anthropology. Right. [00:31:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:57] Speaker A: Like people and how people work in human nature. But in a larger sense, it definitely created a lot of people's images of what hell looks like, what was going on in medieval Europe, that they were creating all this stuff. [00:32:11] Speaker B: Lots of different things by this point in time, like, we are in full Christendom mode. And so lots of things development. But I think the thing that Dante was trying to solve for is this concept of purgatory. And so it's this intermediate state between life and afterlife. And that's the journey through which that's happening. You're going through these different forms of purgation. But a nuance there is that the hope is that this intermediate state cleanse it is a cleansing one. Right. [00:32:55] Speaker A: But a lot of those people in the first book in Inferno, they're just trapped there forever. [00:32:59] Speaker C: I mean, like, the topic is like an artist's dream just to imagine. Yeah. Like, you can just let your imagination run wild of all of this, especially if you're mildly sadistic. Like, you just. You can think of all of these sorts of things. In some sense, there's. [00:33:14] Speaker B: There's loose connections to scripture, but it's. Yeah, it's totally imaginable, but there really, There's. [00:33:18] Speaker C: There's nothing new under the sun. If you look all the way back to the Egyptian stuff, the whole idea of an Egyptian afterlife was that, like, they walk through the underworld and they tried to escape all these different demigods, and there were different spells that they get through and all this kind of stuff. And then like at the end. [00:33:33] Speaker A: A video game. [00:33:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it's like you different level up. And then at the end, like, you. You use this secret, like, cheat code to lie to the God at the end. And like, that lie makes your heart lighter than a feather, and then you get to go off into like, eternal bliss type of thing. [00:33:49] Speaker A: So is that what Dante's doing in that book is like, here's what could happen in order to make it not happen. Like Old Testament prophets, they're in some ways they're trying to change behavior, not describe behavior. [00:34:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the descriptiveness of that is not necessarily describing the reality, but it is a theoretical prescription to fundamentally try and help people through that. Because the. Remember these, at least theoretically, these are all Christians that he's writing to. So that's an important distinction. I think that in terms of its. [00:34:28] Speaker A: Application, this wasn't in the New York Times. This is not the New York Times, Church. [00:34:32] Speaker C: Yeah, we do the same type of stuff with movies like Saw and like all those other different horror movies type of thing. We imagine these crazy ways that people can be tortured and die. We just put it in cinema now and can actually watch it, whereas he was writing about it in literature. [00:34:48] Speaker A: So if, if I got Bill and Ted and we went and got Dante, like, picked him up, brought him back to today, and then we showed him. Oh, all these ideas that you mapped out now people take them, like as a belief system. [00:35:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:00] Speaker A: What do you think Dante would say? It would be just like, and in. [00:35:04] Speaker B: All hope ye who enter here subscribe. [00:35:06] Speaker A: To these things now. [00:35:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sure most artists would probably have that. [00:35:13] Speaker A: Oh, gosh, shouldn't wrote that book. [00:35:15] Speaker B: Yeah, the. And that's a core feature, not a bug of human nature, is that we tend to literalize the imaginative. And because we want clarity, we want certainty. And that's something we've talked a lot about together, is this notion of certitude. And there's a progressive structure outline. It's easy to follow when you work through that. But it does create all sorts of problems because it's not really connected to the core of the. At least the narrative of the scriptures. And yeah, there's more challenges to it, but. [00:35:57] Speaker A: So Dante seems fun in some ways, at least. He has some interesting ideas and some concepts. Someone that seems like a super bummer is John Calvin. Calvin introduces some concepts, one that probably a lot of people are familiar with, but maybe don't understand, which is predestination, which is this idea that it's already been decided. [00:36:14] Speaker B: Yep. [00:36:15] Speaker A: Is that how. How ubiquitous was that idea? Is that a common idea in that times, or was that just specific. Specific to his, like, crew. But it seems like it's infected a lot of our brains and how we think about it. [00:36:29] Speaker C: You can find. I like the idea of determinism within the Old Testament scriptures, if you want to. I think there were like, there were people like in Jesus's day, when they come, they say who sinned, that like, this guy is sick, like his parents or someone else. And Jesus goes, look, you don't understand what's going. That's not how it works. [00:36:49] Speaker A: So what's his idea at the core? Right. Related to hell? What's his. How is it related to the concept that we're discussing? [00:36:55] Speaker B: What he's trying to do is. And I, Johnny C. Gets a hard time and very fair. What he was trying to do is get people to this. Predestination was a pastoral Move to say, calm down, chill out. Like it's already been decided. Now, where. That's where people took that, like Dante, where people took that and ran with it, is now to build a whole theological system out of it in which hell becomes the. Effectively, like the purpose of predestination. Like some people were just born to suffer in the sulfuric lake forever. God created people to. To suffer eternally, consciously, because. Because God loves you and doesn't want you to. And that's a trite way of how it got applied. At least my understanding it seems pretty motivational. [00:38:00] Speaker A: Get me going. Yeah, gotta get to work. [00:38:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. [00:38:03] Speaker A: Gotta get those memory verses down. Let's just jump to modern Christianity because I feel like it's bifurcated a little bit. It feels like on one side you have some people trying to cling to the concept. Right. But then you have the Enlightenment. Right. And people start to quest, question supernatural beliefs. And then we get hell as a metaphor in some ways, or hell as a state of mind, or hell as like a description of what it looks like when we live in a way that's not healthy or not following a kind of a Christian walk. So what happened? How did hell become a metaphor? [00:38:36] Speaker B: That's the movement of enlightenment rationalism assumed within Christianity is to say is to just spiritualize. Everything is. Oh, it's just a metaphor. It's. Jesus was a teacher of spiritual truths and insights. And so then you just apply that across the board. But then within. Within that frame of mind, I think we can even see or even outside of it, just within the assumptions that we all live in, within the modern world, we can start to see how hell begins to coalesce within Christianity around these three kind of like major buckets. And the one that we've been talking the most about and are not fans of, to not to bury the lead is eternal conscious torment. [00:39:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Do you think it was part of the world expanding? Like, you have the age of exploration. We have a globalized world. So like a macrocosm of what I experienced in a microcosm when I moved to totally. And so we've got trading. People are seeing other ways of life. And then they're like, how do we. How do we square the circle? And like, how do we exist with these other people? Was that. Was that happening in a globalized way? Is that part of the story here? [00:39:54] Speaker C: I think the Protestant Reformation did a lot to open the can of worms and create this sense of exploration where people started being able to read scripture for themselves and challenge traditional beliefs. And so at least within, like Protestant realm, outside of Catholicism, that created the freedom to question the Catholic teaching. I would say that even people who point to or suggest that it's a metaphor, like metaphors still have some type of ground in reality. Right. And so then it becomes a question of, are we talking about like, hell is something that somebody is experiencing now or in the future? Because people do live, like very hellish lives. There are still, like, I did a missions trip to Swaziland and watched little orphan kids whose parents had died of AIDS and their 3 year old kids having to walk several miles to get water and maybe get water if the king decides to turn the water on for that day. And I go, that's hell on earth. Yeah, like these kids should not be doing this. And then you have all sorts of different. We could talk about all sorts of different things. That is hell on earth. But I think the idea of hell exists now and potentially in the future, depending on how you look at it. [00:41:10] Speaker A: That's a good transition point to talk about our contemporary situation, but we're going to take a small break. We're going to continue talking about our contemporary situation and we're going to break down. So there's this book called Four Views on Hell. We're going to skip one of them because purgatory is just a joke that Catholics play on each other. No, just kidding. [00:41:55] Speaker B: It's just not something shouts out to the new Pope. [00:41:57] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a lot of churches that got built off of the idea of purgatory, though. [00:42:00] Speaker A: Really? Okay, the circus. So let's start with the one we've been talking about the most, which is eternal conscious torment. So I just want to. Because I don't. I want to avoid value judgment at the moment. I want to give people like a clean description of what this is, because I think to believe something, you have to have the opportunity to choose it. And to choose it, you have to understand it. And to understand it, you really have to unpack it. So let's just unpack. So, David, start us out. Just give us what is eternal conscious torment in its, like, most literal sense, like as a belief system. [00:42:34] Speaker C: Yeah. So I think the best way to think about this that I've metaphor that I've heard is like rock, paper, scissors. And eternal conscious torment is the idea of humans are rocks, and so the fire will burn the rock forever, but the rock will never be destroyed. And so it's this idea that someone is sinful, they're unrepentant, and they're going to spend eternity in hell, they'll be tortured forever. And there's within the view there's all sorts of different variability for degrees of punishment. Like maybe Hitler will be punished more than your mom who just cheated on our taxes. Yeah. [00:43:10] Speaker A: Made hamburger helper too many times. [00:43:12] Speaker C: Yeah. But the idea is you're tortured forever. And so there's, and there's different degrees of how that plays out. [00:43:20] Speaker A: Okay. Like, how is it a good idea? [00:43:23] Speaker C: Yeah. So, like, how can you best sell it? I think maybe the best way to do that would be like, God is just and sin deserves punishment and God. [00:43:34] Speaker B: Is holy, so sin must be eradicated. [00:43:37] Speaker A: So it's the most anti sin, anti evil, like world that you could have in theory. Or is that an inaccurate way of saying it? Like, it's one that really emphasizes that sin is the problem. [00:43:52] Speaker C: I think you. That's hard to say because you could say that all three see that sin is. Yeah. The outcome. [00:43:58] Speaker A: Okay. [00:43:58] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:43:59] Speaker A: Okay, that makes sense. Let's jump to the next one. Universalism. And this one, I, this was my solution in a lot of ways when I was struggling with the things that I described. [00:44:09] Speaker B: And so I think this goes. This is where people tend to land because. And I think it does answer or is an attempted answer at your earlier question of can Christianity exist coherently without hell? And universalism in many ways is the offering in that. [00:44:29] Speaker A: Let's give the flavors then. So we've got the Rob Bell flavor, We've got some. We've got the Bentley Hart flavor. We've got all these different versions of universalism. So maybe, Dustin, if you want to give like a big thesis statement as to what it is and then like, how different kinds of versions of like, nuances between them. Oh, people have to choose their way out or, oh, everyone, let's predetermine that we're all just going to be chilling together at a certain point. [00:44:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that is. Essentially those are the two categories, at least as I understand them. David, you could flesh it out a little bit more, but for a universalist, it's an attempt to solve for, again, how's God going to make everything right in the end? And in the end everyone will be saved. And it's built on the universal restoration idea. And the two categories are, one is the determinist. You don't get a choice. You're going to heaven whether you like it or not. And the other is the sense of choice. And like, God's just going to win you over in the end. And so you'll choose that. [00:45:39] Speaker A: I've heard people push back against the choice thing because they're like, sure, if I'm touching a hot pan in the kitchen, taking my hand off the pan is an obvious choice. So it's a choice under coercion, because the coercion. [00:45:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:45:50] Speaker A: With a gun to your head, is it really a choice or is it just a human reaction to want to move? [00:45:55] Speaker C: I would say most. I would be willing to guess that most universalists also believe in free will. [00:46:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:46:02] Speaker C: I would say it's probably a very small minority of people that are determinists that believe in universalism. I've always said that if I was a determinist, I would have to be a universalist because I think that God wants all to be saved. And so that's where again, in the spider web, where it's like, if God wants all to be saved and then he gets what he wants because he's a determinist, then all obviously are saved. So it's. [00:46:28] Speaker A: Let me push you on some, David. So let me kick you a scenario. So let's say I love Vegas and, like, I'm just going to live my best hedonist life. And this is like a scenario that's been pitched to me by people. [00:46:39] Speaker C: Sure. [00:46:40] Speaker A: So I just live. I live at the strip club in Vegas my whole life. I'm making bad choices after another. I constantly committing crimes, taking advantage of people, and then I die and I go to hell and I stick one my baby toe in that burning lake and I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm out. So that's. I think that's what people picture in their mind is it's an easy. It's the get out of jail free card. [00:47:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:47:02] Speaker A: Is what Rob Bell was describing in Love when. [00:47:04] Speaker C: Yeah. I think he gets a bad rap with that book. I think he's probably more an annihilationist than a universalist. He's probably a hopeful universalist. [00:47:14] Speaker A: Yeah. But the scenario. But again, respond to the scenario in. [00:47:18] Speaker C: Part that you talk about the spiderweb. Again, like, depends on. There's a lot of people that don't believe there's any type of second choice post mortem or after death. And so that would. It would depend on whether you got a second choice or not. But I think most universalists would say that, like, in order for that to. For them to believe in universalism, there's some type of second choice. [00:47:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:37] Speaker C: And. Or that purgatory we talked about, like a fire that is never put out. So A lot of, A lot of universalists will use this idea of a fire that, that cleanses. If you think of like rock, paper, scissors. Eternal conscious torment is the rock. The universalism is the scissors. And so you use fire to purify or to cleanse the disease that's on the scissors. [00:47:59] Speaker A: So I have to just. If going back to my Vegas metaphor, I've just got to burn off all that glitter, right, and get to a place where I am ready to make that choice. I can't just live a life of total depravity and then show up through whatever. I know there's heaven's gates, whatever. Dante's hell skates too. But yeah, like, I just, I can't just show up there and be like, bloop. And then I'm out. [00:48:22] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say, yeah. Most universalists probably aren't going to take the olliolly oxen for you. Just kidding. [00:48:27] Speaker A: Okay. [00:48:28] Speaker C: They're gonna, they're gonna take. There is still some type of hell, but it's a sanctification process, it's a purifying process. [00:48:36] Speaker B: And that. [00:48:37] Speaker A: So they believe hell exists for a different reason? [00:48:39] Speaker C: Yes. [00:48:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:48:40] Speaker A: Okay. [00:48:41] Speaker B: And I think a more philosophical answer to your hypothetical scenario is if that's the way, like it's built on the concept that eternity is continuity. So you wouldn't even be able to choose the good at that point because you've built your life in such a way that you've eliminated the possibility of choosing good. And so that's just going to continue on forever. And so there has to be some mechanism that would reinvigorate your capacity to choose the good. [00:49:15] Speaker A: I see. Okay, now let's jump to annihilationism, which I don't fully understand is. It just. Is annihilationism just the concept that if I choose God, then I continue going, and if I don't, game over. [00:49:29] Speaker C: I think annihilationism is maybe the easiest one for us to understand just from a basic, like, biological standpoint. Like the wages of sin is death. The gift of God is eternal life. So you either live or you die. It's very similar to like the Garden of Eden, where if you want to choose to stay in Eden, then you can. And you can eat from the tree of life and live, but absent that, then you'll eventually die. And then within annihilationism, there's different. There's a spectrum of like, how the unrighteous will die. So on one side there is like, God's gonna come in and just burn them all up. There's another view that would be more like a CS Lewis type of deal where it's like God presents you with the choice in the afterlife to follow him, but those that choose not to slowly distance themselves away from God and the farther you get, the more you become this like non being and you just fade into existence type of thing. Okay, so it's really. Annihilationism is really like a life and death thing. [00:50:23] Speaker A: Okay. Sad. How ubiquitous is that belief? Because I, I didn't really. That wasn't something that obviously got presented to me when I went to seminary. But like, I didn't hear that. Like, are there major Christian denominations that believe this or is it something like a niche idea? Like, where does that come from? [00:50:42] Speaker B: I, I could answer more exists more most commonly as the minority report. I mean universalism and eternal conscious torment are like, that's the front Bill. Like those are the polls that people are debating over. [00:50:58] Speaker A: Republicans, Democrats. That's the kind of. [00:51:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And then this is just a small, considered to be very historically orthodox view that avoids the pitfalls, no pun intended, on either side, while maintaining integrity around the character of God. I think it has the most promise around like this question of could you even choose to be that type of person or not? If you couldn't, then there's a. There's an end. If you could, then yes, that will continue on forever. [00:51:37] Speaker C: It's always been around in some sense it's been suppressed. But you also have to understand that for. With the Catholic Church and then moving forward, it's, it's. That goes back to the spiderweb deal where if you believe you have an immortal soul, then like a night, this is not a possibility to be completely destroyed. And so if you believe in that kind of anthropology, you only have the option of universalism and eternal conscious torment. There's. Because we live forever and everybody has. And that's part of where the conversation shifts is if that's the case, everybody gets eternal life. It's a matter of quality versus quantity. And so it shifts. Like the biblical discussion is over quantity, the amount of time. Right. And these two shift that, that conversation from quantity to quality. Because you have to live forever. It's just a matter of what are you gonna live. [00:52:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about today. Is hell going away? Is that something that's gonna dissipate over time? It seems. I talked to them Gen Z kids. It doesn't seem like they're all that interested in hell anymore. Is this something that's going to dissipate as an idea or do you think it's always going to be kind of a feature of Christianity? [00:52:46] Speaker B: I can't imagine it going away. I think history shows that different doctrines jockey for position in terms of what, which one is the most confrontational to a culture. And I think we've just happened to be in the midst of one where hell is pretty prominent and. But yeah, we're in the midst of what Phyllis Tickle, great name called the Great rummage sale. Every 500 years, the church just shakes things up and things get reconfigured and rearranged and so where that one lands in the sort of configuration 2000 years on is to be determined. But Gen Z, as far as we can tell, doesn't seem to be as obsessed with hell as previous generations have been. [00:53:46] Speaker C: Yeah, it. I don't think it can ever go away because one of the primary problems, questions, things we ponder theologically is the Odyssey, the problem of evil. And that's like at the tail end of that problem. And so I don't see the conversation of hell ever going away. It'll just be a matter of like, how is the conflict resolved in the. [00:54:07] Speaker A: End, like in that movie Ex Machina. Even if it's. Even if AI takes over the world, they're still gonna do some messed up stuff. So a lot of people deconstruct though, to kind of return to the purpose of this podcast, which is to help people that are thinking about reconstruction. Is this just another case of choose the church that fits your beliefs kind of thing, where if you, if you deconstruct it because this whole concept of eternal conscious torment is tormenting you, then just find a place that kind of fits your priors. Is that kind of what we're describing? And it sounds like a little cynical, like a la carte Christianity, but like when we were talking about in our politics episode, if you tend to be a more kind of left wing person, going to a mainline church is probably going to feel more comfortable to you. Is this just like a similar kind of. It rhymes or it's a similar situation. [00:54:56] Speaker B: For me it comes down to a sort of case of theological triage, like which one is the most urgent. You're like bleeding out, so to speak, because of this or this is like the most urgent thing for you to solve in one way or another. I think you're just by inertia going to land in one of the categories that you're most drawn towards. And I would argue that there's probably, it's worth asking the question, what's Making it so urgent, is it? [00:55:32] Speaker A: That is a great question because I think that is part of the problem too that we've talked about before, which is we spend so much time determining what will happen to people after they die. And maybe that's just the wrong emphasis. And so maybe there needs to be a bigger discussion about that. [00:55:47] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And I think there's an invitation in this one that may be more unique than others, but I think holds for other conversations that we've had is this is an invitation to an exploration around the character of God. And one thing that David and I talk a lot about is God. We're convinced that God looks like Jesus and Jesus does talk about hell, but not in the way that most people talk about hell. And so is the portrait of God that's created by either one of these theologies. Which one of those most looks like the God that Jesus reveals? And that's the one that I think I have my conviction, but that's the one that at the end of the day, good people come to different conclusions about that. But that's what should guide your decision. [00:56:42] Speaker A: Yeah. How would you talk to someone, David, if you had a friend that deconstructed left religion because they grew up in a fundamentalist environment that was really focused on Turner Byrne? How would you talk to them if they were like thinking about reintegrating? [00:56:58] Speaker C: Yeah, I think I would encourage them, you know, to do their own, like, deep dive research. I think one of the best books I found is a book called the Fire that Consumes by Edward Fudge. If you just want to look at the raw biblical, his historical data, like, that's a great place to start. And I have, and I've gone farther. And part of what you, especially with this topic, is like, there's so many different nuances within the conversation that like you can find a way to debunk or use scriptural support for all three of these. And that's part of why the conversation is so tough. I was listening to a pastor talk about these three views and he presented them as the quote unquote, literal view and the universalist view and the annihilationist view. And it's like, if you want to, there are ways you can. If you want to take death literal, then there's annihilationism. Right. If you want to say God loves all, then there's little. So there's. Using that word literal doesn't help. So my encouragement would be to find a community that doesn't create a barrier around this topic that, that will welcome you in and allow you to take any of those three positions and still allow you to be in community. [00:58:13] Speaker A: I think this is like a bigger discussion and there'll be future episodes about this, which I think this is the hardest thing, especially for, I feel like millennials like me, Gen Z, some Gen X. How do you exist in an environment with people you don't agree with? How do you survive Thanksgiving? That's the real discussion here because you're. I don't think there, there will ever be a uniform environment where everyone. And I don't think you want that. That's called fascism. Don't want that tends to not go well. But at the same time, it can be hard if you're sitting next to someone in the pew who thinks your Buddhist mother in law is going to burn in a fiery lake. That's tough to sit there. But I think that's part of the process. Right. And so I think that's a bigger discussion. But I think what I'm taking from this is someone that, you know, it's not a practicing Christian is that there's a lot of hope in the discussion and it's a lot more nuanced if you actually look at the history. And so I think research is a good idea, but also just flexibility. I don't know, I'm taking a few different things from this, but I think in large part there's a lot of interesting ideas out there and different ways to approach it that are more nuanced than you just sitting in church or going to church camp or whatever you got. [00:59:24] Speaker C: Yeah. In the, the, in the interesting thing too, is there hell was not preached in the book of Acts. And if we have a evangelical like gospel book about how the gospel was spread, it was the book of Acts. [00:59:38] Speaker A: And it's called the good news. [00:59:39] Speaker C: Right. Not the bad news. Yeah. So there's hope there. Right. The gospel can be preached without preaching. Hell yeah. [00:59:46] Speaker B: Amen. [00:59:47] Speaker A: Cool. [00:59:47] Speaker B: Thanks for being with us, David. [00:59:48] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for having us. [00:59:49] Speaker B: Me.