There’s been a great deal of discussion on the topic of “hell” over the last few months. Books have been written, magazine articles are debating it, people are asking me for my opinion on it everywhere I go – basically it seems a very ‘hot’ topic right now (pardon the pun!)
One thing I find fascinating, is that so many Christians don’t really know what the Bible says. I mean, they don’t know what the Biblical text does and does not contain. Or the difference between what is actually IN the Biblical text, and what emerged during post-Biblical times, as these doctrines were pieced together.
I put myself in that category too, in case you thought the paragraph above sounded judgemental!!
Studying theology at Oxford helped me get my head around a fair amount of it. But there are still things I discover, that I THOUGHT were Biblical ‘fact’, which turn out to be non-specifically in Scripture and the product of Church history. And that’s an important distinction to know. Read the rest of this entry »
