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We are Alyssa and Bri, two sisters who believe God wants more for women than we've been taught. Join us as we dive into the intersection of faith and feminism, learning together as we go.
To the We Are More Pod cast. My name is Alyssa. And my
Speaker 2:name is Bree. We're two sisters passionate about all things faith and feminism. We believe
Speaker 1:that Jesus trusted, respected, and encouraged women to teach and preach his word. And apparently, that's controversial. Get comfy. Hello, world. Hello, world.
Speaker 1:How are doing today?
Speaker 2:Is it lovely? We're waiting to
Speaker 1:hear from you. Come on. It's really rude that you're not responding.
Speaker 2:Like on Dora when she goes, which way should we go?
Speaker 1:Awkward pause. And stares into your soul. Did you guys ever watch the live action version of Dora?
Speaker 2:There's two of them now.
Speaker 1:Are there really?
Speaker 2:I think one just recently came out within the last year or two.
Speaker 1:We saw one of them in theaters, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why did we do that? Because we wanted to take your daughter to a movie, and it was, like, the only appropriate one. Oh, that was a mistake. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was very uncomfortable because I don't know if
Speaker 2:you guys have watched Dora the Explorer,
Speaker 1:but it's bizarre as a cartoon. Okay? Like, it's uncomfortable as a cartoon, but with a real person and this girl is, like, at least 25. She's not a child. I don't know why they chose this.
Speaker 2:I saw a reel the other day with the girl that voiced Dora.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And she was saying they would film episode and they would play that episode over and over and over and over and over again because they thought that that would actually help kids learn Spanish Uh-huh. Through the repetition. Yeah. So on purpose, they would play the same episode over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:I mean, from an educational standpoint, I guess that makes sense. But for parents.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You wanna run-in the road.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, there's just never a way to know where the beginnings of these episodes are gonna go. Would you ever have expected we'd be talking about Dora the Explorer?
Speaker 2:No. And here's a little lore for you guys. We don't talk about this before we just hit play. Yeah. We're just like ready to go?
Speaker 2:Okay. Let's go. I'll bring up stories that I've talked about earlier with you that I wanna share with the pod, like when I got stung on my butt cheek from a bee. But most of the time, it's just
Speaker 1:whatever pops into our heads.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And today, it's Dora.
Speaker 1:And frankly, apparently, our brains are scary places.
Speaker 2:Well, we're talking about hell today.
Speaker 1:That's true. So our brains are very scary places.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're thinking, you know
Speaker 1:Hell? Hell. You know?
Speaker 2:And sometimes the thoughts don't finish, and the thoughts don't work out. You know? We start them, and they go nowhere. But today, they're
Speaker 1:going to hell. I feel like normally it would chat for longer, but there's a lot of content here. So I feel like maybe we should just jump in.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Alright. Ready? So I wanna start off with some stories.
Speaker 2:Wait. We need, like you remember the old Disney animated movies where they'd open a book? Imagine that with us. Imagine an opening book. But the book is scary.
Speaker 2:And it's about hell.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's a bad book. You found it, like, in a dungeon somewhere. It's dusty.
Speaker 2:It's the book from Hocus Pocus.
Speaker 1:You probably shouldn't be opening this book, but you are. And here we go. So I want you to close your eyes with me. Alright. Bree Bree's closing her eyes.
Speaker 1:Let's go. We're picturing hell. What's going through your head?
Speaker 2:Have you ever seen Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but the new version?
Speaker 1:Thankfully, no. Okay. I'm picturing hell from there. Okay. So what you may be picturing, if you're from western evangelical church is an underground space.
Speaker 1:It's dark, except for all the fire everywhere. There's flames crawling up the walls. It's super hot. People are screaming in agony. There's demons everywhere, like poking people with sticks and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yes. There's torture going on. There's super scary creatures roaming about. And somewhere around is Satan. Maybe he's sitting on a throne.
Speaker 1:Maybe he's also torturing people. And that's kind of how we see hell. Right? I think that's not just the secular view of hell, but, like, how most Christians would picture it. And the people that are there aren't just there for a week.
Speaker 1:They're not there for a month. They're there for eternity. They are conscious and aware of being tortured for all eternity. So that's what a lot of us believe. But that's actually not in the Bible, like, all.
Speaker 1:Fantastic news for us. The Bible absolutely does talk about hell in different forms. It actually has a bunch of different words that it uses. And the English language, when we translated and translated and translated, often took all of those different words and smooshed them together and just said hell. But they all kind of have different stories behind them.
Speaker 1:And so when we picture hell, we're often combining a bunch of stories that were never meant to be combined in the first place. So let's talk about the biblical version of hell. Yay. Now in the biblical version of hell, there are pieces of this. The bible does talk about fire, darkness, anguish, judgment, punishment.
Speaker 1:It talks about a lake of fire. It talks about Gehenna, which Brie talked about a few weeks ago, and we'll get into that too. It also weirdly talks about Hades and Tartarus, which if you're familiar with Greek mythology, is, like, kind of borrowed from that. I'm familiar with Hercules, Disney's Don't you worry. We'll link that together
Speaker 2:because we love to do that. Great.
Speaker 1:We love to pull in some Disney. Everything leads back to the mouse. Okay. So let's talk about what the picture of biblical hell is. So first, there's what they call Sheol.
Speaker 1:Now in this version of kind of an afterlife, it's dark. It's quiet. The dead are there. But there are also righteous people there. Now this one comes mostly from the Old Testament because the Old Testament didn't talk about hell or the afterlife a lot.
Speaker 1:You didn't see Noah going up to all the people and saying, hey, you're going to hell. That wasn't happening. There wasn't a big concept of it in the same way we have. Jacob expected to go to Sheol. Also, Job expected to go there.
Speaker 1:There was no torture chamber or demons or anything like that. Righteous people were gonna go there. So would this be, like, the Catholics idea of purgatory? It wasn't really, like, a separation from god. It was more just, like, general death.
Speaker 1:There wasn't a good and bad. And that was kind of that concept. So that's that version of hell or the afterlife. Right? So definitely not the fiery pits of hell.
Speaker 1:Then we have Hades, which is another word that we've translated into hell. And this was a realm of the dead. And basically, Jesus tells a story where a rich man is suffering there while he's talking about Lazarus now is comforted across a great chasm. So there's, like, a big separation between where Lazarus is and where this rich man is. And you might think, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's hell. Except that Revelation later uses this word Hades, and it says Hades is thrown into the lake of fire. So hell is then thrown into hell. That doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:Right? So now that doesn't make sense as hell. And that one comes from Jesus. Then there's Gehenna. Gehenna was a real historical place, and the Jewish people would have known it as the worst of the worst.
Speaker 1:There was idolatry. There was child sacrifice. There was slaughter. Like, bad times. Right?
Speaker 1:But we did we talked a little bit about that before. And Jesus references Gehenna as kind of a hell like place.
Speaker 2:On Earth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it was on Earth. It was something that really actually happened. And so Jesus talks about this when he's warning about judgment. He does say there's fire, and he says that there are worms that don't die, which is interesting.
Speaker 1:So, okay, maybe that's hell. Except that when Jesus is talking about fire and worms that don't die, he's actually referencing Isaiah. So flip back to Isaiah.
Speaker 2:I feel like Jesus was referencing Isaiah all the time.
Speaker 1:Jesus was referencing all sorts of things.
Speaker 2:He knew his stuff. Yeah. But I feel like he loved Isaiah. But
Speaker 1:when Jesus is talking about Isaiah, the worms there aren't torturing immortal souls that have gone to hell and are conscious forever. They're consuming dead bodies. So unconscious dead individuals. Yeah. I'm picturing the worms from Betelgeuse.
Speaker 1:I mean, that tracks. I feel like that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the desert abyss of Betelgeuse.
Speaker 1:But that doesn't follow because we've decided that it's conscious people being tortured. So this reference from Jesus doesn't make sense with that. Now, Tartarus, which if you are familiar with Greek mythology, Tartarus is where they sent the Titans. So like the the big bad guys prior to Zeus. Okay.
Speaker 1:Wait. We're gonna go back to Hercules. I promised. I promised we would.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:You're welcome. And the Zeus and his brothers took down the titans, put them down in into Tartarus, locked them away. This isn't where Hades is ruling.
Speaker 2:Yes. No. This is where when he's trying to unlock them because he wants the stars to align or the planets to align or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's been a minute since I've watched that whole movie.
Speaker 2:Think it's a very specific time that's never gonna happen again, and all the planets have to align, and then he can release the titans. But if Hercules was alive, he couldn't do it. But Hercules was alive, and Hercules defeated Hades.
Speaker 1:I wonder if this is really Greek mythology or Disney just made all this crap up.
Speaker 2:Well, this is Disney, according to Brianna. And then he saved Meg, and then they fell in love. But they didn't go up to heaven. They just chilled out on Earth.
Speaker 1:Chilled out on Earth.
Speaker 2:And then Disney created a series.
Speaker 1:They did. And it's not on Disney plus, I don't think. Anyway, so Tartarus is referenced in the Bible. Peter actually references it. So this is a place of imprisonment and punishment.
Speaker 1:Okay? So we finally have all the things put together, imprisonment, punishment. Except that the people being imprisoned in Tartarus aren't people. They are basically fallen angels, sinning angels. The devil.
Speaker 1:There is one last one. There's the lake of fire in Revelation. And the devil is thrown into it. Death is thrown into it. Hades is thrown into it.
Speaker 1:Some people are thrown into it. And Revelation then calls it the second death. But the thing about Revelation is that it's apocalyptic literature. So it's kind of funky. Like, there's a lot of real weird imagery in there.
Speaker 1:There's, like, a beast with seven heads. There's a dragon. There's all kinds of stuff. Right? So the question becomes, are we supposed to take that part literally?
Speaker 1:Because we don't take a lot of these types of things literally. We don't take all of Revelation literally. Mhmm. So do we take the lake of fire literally? Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And that's your own interpretation. You have to decide that for yourself. But that's the Bible and what the Bible actually defines hell as. So pretty solidly never do we get one big cohesive picture.
Speaker 2:And I think it's interesting how certain we are about the inevitable end. Like, each flavor of Christianity, each religion is very certain about what happens after you die. Do you remember when we were in, like, junior church? Junior church, and they gave this image of there's two escalators. And you're on the one going up, and then you're watching all these people on the one going down.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And don't you want to save those people on the elevator going down? You don't want anybody going on the elevator going down because they're going to burn up in hell forever. Mhmm. But is that really what happens?
Speaker 2:I don't know anybody who's been to hell and bad except for, like, there's hell Michigan. That's true. Or I've been to a White Castle.
Speaker 1:That's hell for your butt. Yeah. Did you know that hell Michigan is for sale?
Speaker 2:Oh, Schitt's Creek, we should buy it.
Speaker 1:No. There's major differences between the hell that we picture and what scripture says. There's the fact that there's one defined place that we picture and there's not in the Bible. There's the fact that we think Satan rules hell, but the bible says that Satan is basically a prisoner in hell. He's not
Speaker 2:some sort of king. I think we're giving Satan a lot of credit. Mhmm. He broke away from God and went and God was like, no, no, no. This is fine.
Speaker 2:You can rule your own kingdom. All the people who don't wanna be with me, fine.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:can torture my people forever.
Speaker 1:Fine. The thing you wanted to do anyway. Yeah. Okay. I think we borrow that a little bit from, like, Greek and Roman mythology.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Because you do see, like, Zeus versus Hades in Greek mythology. And Hades is the ruler of the underworld. Right.
Speaker 2:But there is no verses in our scenario. Mhmm. God is the ruler of all. Right. God has won.
Speaker 2:There is no person or being or entity that could go against God.
Speaker 1:We're just sort of waiting for that inevitability of Satan being thrown into Mhmm. The lake of fire, in theory. So let's jump back into the Old Testament because I think it's really interesting and super weird that the Old Testament doesn't really talk about hell really at all. Like, there's there are some concepts of, like I said, shale, afterlife, whatever. But there's no expectation.
Speaker 1:Like, it's not like God went to Adam Adam and and Eve Eve and and was was like, like, well, now you're going to hell. That wasn't said. And there was no defined, like, okay. Here's this fiery pit you're headed to. Hold on.
Speaker 1:Let me explain the theology. Let me give you an advanced copy of Revelation. Sorry. It hasn't been edited yet. Noah wasn't going around threatening people that they were gonna go to hell.
Speaker 1:Like, none of that was said until much later. So we're seeing a kind of developing story throughout the Bible. We watch the concept of afterlife develop over time, and then you can see it continue to develop even after the Bible ends. So you can see it develop through medieval Christianity. We'll talk a little bit about Dante's inferno and change as time goes on.
Speaker 1:And that's really interesting and kind of bizarre because we really like to pretend that what we believe here today has been static and has been what everybody believed since the beginning of Christianity.
Speaker 2:And that's not true. And it's not just Dante. It's also Augustine Mhmm. Back in the day who just really shaped the way that, like, the Western church has viewed hell Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In general. And God has a lot of laws. Right? The Old Testament is absolutely chock full of God telling people what to do, what to eat, what fabrics they can wear, what cooking implements they can use with other cooking implements.
Speaker 2:How they can do their hair.
Speaker 1:Yes. How to sacrifice. There's all sorts of laws around all these things. So the idea that god never thought it important to say, here's what hell looks like is noticeable. It is something you should notice and ask questions about.
Speaker 1:And why for so many years I mean, think back to early United States. The what do they call them? The doom and gloom pastors. The guys that would get up there and just scream hell at you to try and get you to be saved. I don't know there's Fire and brimstone.
Speaker 1:I think that's what it is. The fire and brimstone pastors, where they'll just scream at you about hell to say,
Speaker 2:wouldn't it be so much worse? Like, don't take the risk. Yeah. I think there was definitely a push. There's probably still churches out there that are similar.
Speaker 2:But rather than teaching people to live well on earth, treat each other well on earth because that's what you should do. It's to escape hell. Yeah. And then you have, like, the hell houses around Halloween time. It's like, you walk through the church and each room is a different layer of hell.
Speaker 2:Which is not it's biblical at
Speaker 1:like, see? Don't you wanna get saved now? Avoid this. Do you remember on Gilmore Girls, they're having, like, the harvest festival or something like that? And missus Kim, on the show, who's very religious, has, like, a hell.
Speaker 1:I don't like, you have to throw something in, and she gives you a packet about hell or something. I can't remember exactly, but something like that. And this isn't to say, okay. There's no eternal hell. There's no, like, obviously not.
Speaker 1:It's just to say that it's not as absolute as we might wanna think. And it's important to dig into why do
Speaker 2:you picture hell this way in relation to God. So there are some religions, I think there are universalists Mhmm. Who believe that hell is not ruled by Satan. It's about God. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And the light of God, either if you love God so much, you're gonna go towards that light, and it's not gonna burn you up. Mhmm. But if you don't love God and haven't followed God, that the light is gonna be so bright that it burns you up.
Speaker 1:It's so weird to hear of other because as we were studying this, we both kind of came across other faith traditions and what they believe about this stuff. And it's so strange to walk out of your bubble and say this isn't all that people believe.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And these are just I just looked up different flavors of Christianity, like the most popular ones. I didn't even go so far as to look at other religions and look at what they believe the inevitable end looks like. You have the Southern Baptist and the evangelicals, which believe in everlasting punishment for the unsaved people.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And like you said before, like, conscious and permanent punishment. They're aware of what's happening to them forever and ever. Mhmm. Then there's the Pentecostal people who believe in conscious punishment and separation from God for eternalness. The Seventh day Adventist people reject the eternal conscious torment.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And they believe in, like, ultimately the second death, like you talked about before. But there's like three sections of theological models of how you view hell. Mhmm. And one is eternal conscious torment.
Speaker 2:The other is conditional immortality and annihilationism. Mhmm. Allianation annihilationism.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:There you go. Which just means, like, you just
Speaker 1:die. Mhmm. You cease to exist. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because they think about it as, like, the verse, the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So why would you give people who didn't accept God into their life also eternal life?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That doesn't quite make sense to them. And then you have universal reconciliation.
Speaker 1:So, like, God working to reconcile you over time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, judgment is still real, but God ultimately doesn't wanna be separated from you forever, I That
Speaker 1:actually reminds me of a book that I read, and I feel like I've referenced it on here before, but it's called For Whom the Bell Tolls. And it is it's a really interesting book because it's written by an atheist, but about the afterlife. And I'm not necessarily going to recommend it because it's quite spicy. But the afterlife piece of it is really interesting the way that she structures everything because she talks about heaven or the heaven concept doesn't really have layers. There's not, okay, you're on layer one of heaven versus, oh, you're on layer nine.
Speaker 1:But hell does in her version. And layers one and two are more like therapy. Okay. You were not a great person. Maybe you didn't Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Hold to any particular religious belief, but you weren't awful. You weren't the worst. And so you go to essentially intense therapy and, like, community service. Yeah. Work your way.
Speaker 1:And it's you don't wanna say work your way into heaven because I don't think you can do that. Mhmm. But the idea of reconciling with God over time, of figuring that out. Yeah. Because God, your loving father, wouldn't want
Speaker 2:to be separated from you.
Speaker 1:And I think all of these weirdly have some biblical basis. Mhmm. Like, none of them are out of the realm of possibilities.
Speaker 2:I also think about The Good Place. Do you remember that
Speaker 1:show? Yes.
Speaker 2:Where each person has their own version of hell. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting to see pop culture versions of the afterlife because we hold so strongly to one idea of the afterlife. We got taught it on the flannel graph when we were six.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And we've just held to it forever. But there are people out there who did not grow up in the same faith tradition that we did and who have been more fluid in the way that they can see things like the afterlife. And it's interesting to see that maybe some of them are more right than we are. Mhmm. Or more right on different fronts than we are.
Speaker 1:Now Jesus talked about the afterlife too. It's not we're not sitting here trying to say, I know that there are some people on the Internet that are like, oh, hell doesn't exist at all. I think that takes it a little bit too far. Mhmm. Because Jesus did talk about judgment a lot.
Speaker 1:He talked about Gehenna. He talked about fire. He talked about darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, exclusion, destruction, punishment, all the things. Right? And those don't just disappear.
Speaker 1:They're still there. He does talk about Gehenna, which could certainly be seen as a version of really, really bad hell. That's probably, to some degree, how the Israelites would have understood it when he said that. But there's also things that contradict it. Jesus himself says things that don't quite fit.
Speaker 1:And so you have to take all of those things together and say, okay, well, my interpretation might be this, but I might not be right. And if I'm not right, then what? Those are big questions when we're talking about eternal damnation.
Speaker 2:Let's get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:And being wrong. Yeah. What if you're wrong?
Speaker 2:I think that's when you and I both researched this, that was my biggest question that I typed in to my research trend. Why are we all so convinced that we're right Mhmm. And not more fluid and flexible?
Speaker 1:I think it makes us more comfortable. Yeah. For sure. We talk about this all the time, about how it's it's comfortable to be certain.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's very comfortable to have boundaries and borders. Mhmm. That's why so many people in, like, the Christian faith love rules. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:If you just follow these simple rules, you can get your foot in the door of heaven.
Speaker 1:Right. You'll get an extra gem in your crown or whatever. Yeah. But that's not what Jesus ever says. Jesus never says, and you'll be richer in heaven than your neighbor because you were you gave 13% to church instead of 10.
Speaker 1:That's not what it is. And if that's your motivation in things, then I really don't think you're gonna have a bigger mansion in heaven. You know? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I saw a reel the other day that was saying the point of faith isn't to get to heaven. Mhmm. It's to bring heaven to earth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love that.
Speaker 2:I really love that. The purpose is not just to manipulate your way into eternal life. Yeah. I guess, like, what's the point of that? We should have Jesus' hands and feet still here on earth, and we should be showing God's love to his people.
Speaker 2:His, like, his favorite creation. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Us. Well, because if nothing else, we have no idea when the end is. Right? Bible talks sooner. The Bible talks about, like, Jesus coming back like a thief in the night.
Speaker 1:And Paul thought he was in the end times Mhmm. While literally writing the Bible. So we just don't know. And so to treat it as though, okay, we're just trying to run our way to heaven and figure it out from there. Like, that just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:Because God loves all of the people still here. God doesn't wanna abandon all of the people still here. And if we love God, we should love what he loves.
Speaker 2:I think that's people's reasoning for universal reconciliation is God's judgment is real, but its ultimate purpose is restorative rather than endlessly punitive. Like, when you see in the Bible all of the people going through trials, I feel like it's for a purpose.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And why send all his people to hell to be continuously tormented forever and ever with no hope of a purpose.
Speaker 1:Right. And we just don't understand what eternity means also. I mean, that's that's a long freaking time for most of humanity Mhmm. To be consciously tortured. Whereas God has a bigger lens.
Speaker 1:God is seeing eternity as literally eternity. Mhmm. And we can't really think past a few thousand years.
Speaker 2:Right. Our time frame and our our version of reality is not the same Right. As gods. And that makes us really uncomfortable to think about because we can't.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I will say the reconciliation one, as I was researching and stuff, rings the most comfortable for me. I'm using comfortable as, like, a very true word because I don't know if I would say, oh, that rings the most biblical to me or it rings the most real. To me, it makes sense because of the character of god. And that's how I try and interpret the bible.
Speaker 1:I try and interpret it through the character of god and Jesus. And if god is a loving god, and we're gonna talk more about this next week. But if God is a loving God to me, in my little human brain, reconciliation over whatever amount of time that is and through whatever processes that takes makes more sense to me. I'm not saying it's more biblical. I'm not saying you need to believe that.
Speaker 1:I'm just saying that that resonated the most with me. And it made me feel the most comfortable. Mhmm. That or
Speaker 2:just
Speaker 1:death. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Just nothingness. Dust to dust. I mean, we're assuming that humans inherently have Eternal life. Eternal souls. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And maybe that's not the case. Mhmm. Maybe that is a gift from God. That is the reason Jesus died on the cross, was to give us those eternal souls that can reach up to heaven. And if you choose not to, poof.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Well, and wouldn't it
Speaker 2:hurt God? And again, this
Speaker 1:is all our conjecture. This isn't biblical. But wouldn't it hurt our creator to constantly be the one forcing torture? Mhmm. Conscious torture on his creation.
Speaker 1:As opposed to, yeah, just saying like, okay, you're done. You're done. And that's just how it is. And that's pretty awful too. And frankly, that's really scary.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:The idea that you cease to exist. I think we all, throughout time, you can see people finding different ways to believe in an afterlife because no one wants to think the end is simply the
Speaker 2:end.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But what if it is? What if John three sixteen was very serious? Very literal. Now the question also becomes where did we get our version of hell?
Speaker 1:Where did it come from? Where did it go? And part of it, not all of it,
Speaker 2:like Brie said, some of
Speaker 1:it came from Augustine, you said. Right? Some of it came from Dante, the book Dante's Inferno. And I think all over TikTok because this is a very popular topic right now on TikTok. People will say like, oh, well, Christians just got their version of hell from Dante.
Speaker 1:And that's not entirely accurate, but there are pieces of it that we've pulled.
Speaker 2:There's pieces of it, but to say that we got our entire version of hell from Dante is just not accurate.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Augustine of Hippo. Wow. What a title.
Speaker 2:I know. Lived from 354 to four thirty CE, and he specifically influenced the Western Christianity enormously. Enormous. Enormously, but not completely. This is where we get the idea of eternal conscious torment model because it was developed through the Latin Western theological tradition.
Speaker 2:I just said a lot of words.
Speaker 1:That was a lot
Speaker 2:of words.
Speaker 1:You're
Speaker 2:welcome. So Augustine, his underlying belief was that sin deserves punishment and justice requires punishment. Hell's punishment, therefore, doesn't necessarily need to be rehabilitating anybody. It's just punishment for punishment's sake. It can simply just be deserved.
Speaker 2:The restorative view, we talked about before, God punishes in order to heal people or correct and restore them. Mhmm. But Augustine basically was like, no. Justice requires punishment. Therefore, you're gonna be punished absolutely forever.
Speaker 2:So that's where, like, the Western church got a lot of its idea of just hell and, like, the lake of fire
Speaker 1:burning eternally. Doesn't that feel so human, though? Like, you think about, does that seem like a human mindset? Or does that seem like the mindset of an eternal divine being? To me, justice requires punishment sounds very human.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:It sounds very much like, I've been hurt. Therefore, others must be hurt in order to justify what happened to me or what happened to the people around me. And I'm not saying that I totally don't understand that, but it does sound very human. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:You wronged me. Go to hell. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And that actually is also reflected in Dante's Inferno. So Dante's Inferno is a book written by a man named Dante. And basically, it gives us nine circles of hell. And in each of these circles, there's different categories of sinners, and everybody gets different punishments. So Dante it's very funny because he writes this book, and he's influenced by other people.
Speaker 1:He doesn't just come up with all these concepts on his own. The hierarchy is mostly his own, but not entirely. And he uses his book to put people he doesn't like in hell. So it's very much like a political book. It's it's influenced by a lot of other things, outside things that are not necessarily religion.
Speaker 1:But he's got so here's the nine circles. There's limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. None of this is biblical. Okay? But Dante decided that that's how hell worked.
Speaker 1:And then there's Satan, who's really interesting in Dante's hell. And that's why when people say we got our whole view of hell from Dante, this is where it really departs.
Speaker 2:Well, I think something that Dante did was he gave hell geography.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that we could picture it.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, the bible doesn't. The bible really doesn't give us a defined concept. So in hell, say for us, Satan is the king of hell. Right? Like, he's ruling.
Speaker 1:He's torturing. He's having a great time, apparently. For Dante, Satan was all the way at the bottom of hell, like, the very like, past level nine. You gotta have a key card to get down there. And Satan is frozen at the bottom of hell because the concept was there is no warmth from God left.
Speaker 1:And so full and complete separation from God would be frozenness. Satan is frozen. Satan has three faces. He has bat wings. It's like he's a monster creature.
Speaker 1:Like bats. I know. And he is torturing Judas, Brutus, and Cassius because Dante was really pissed about betrayers, like people who had betrayed others. So those were the three people that he threw down there with Satan. So there's some things that we definitely borrowed from Dante that we don't even realize we did.
Speaker 1:And there's some things we didn't. Because I don't think anybody in the modern evangelical church is like, yeah. You remember that Satan with the three faces and bat wings?
Speaker 2:Casually. He's really cold all the time.
Speaker 1:That's just not part of our general belief system. I don't think. Maybe I don't know. Maybe it is for somebody.
Speaker 2:After him, it's the medieval Christianity. So Dante gave hell geography. Mhmm. The medieval church gave hell a body. Is what chat says.
Speaker 2:Because they were really obsessed with showing it in the church. When you walked into church, you would see all kind of imagery about hell to scare your pants off. Nobody wants that. They would show darkness, the worm that doesn't die. Gehenna, Hades, a lake of fire, weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Speaker 2:Art historians have said that a lot of the imagery that came out of the medieval times that they would put in the churches, etcetera, really had no, like, biblical base.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It was just whatever they felt. What's gonna scare you the most?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's so interesting because for a long time and even often now, it's how can I scare you into heaven?
Speaker 2:Well, also something that's of note is that the society at that time was mostly illiterate.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So everything that they knew about their religion and their faith came from going into that church and listening to the priest or, you know, the religious leader at that time tell them what was in scripture or what was important and what wasn't important. And so this imagery that's making stuff up
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:That created a tradition that trickled down to us now that wasn't ever actually in the Bible. And
Speaker 1:why do we care so much True. About hell? Why is it so important to us? Because we have no control over it. We don't know who's going there.
Speaker 1:We, in theory, don't want anybody to go there, in theory. But it's this big concern for us. It's this big, like, alright, we gotta talk about it. We gotta tell people about it. We gotta talk about the fiery pits of hell, you know, whatever.
Speaker 1:Throughout the whole of our history, it's been a big part of our faith traditions. And yet it's really not a big part of
Speaker 2:the Bible. I also feel like it's interesting what they choose to make you scared.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, fire is gonna make you scared.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Worms are gonna make you scared. Torment is gonna make you some medieval torture would make me scared.
Speaker 1:That would make you scared.
Speaker 2:But the real crux of it is separation from God.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And that in and of itself should be scary. But I guess they're trying to catch at people who don't believe in God or don't see the importance So of they're like, what else can we scare you with? Fire. Torture. Do you like your thumbs?
Speaker 2:We're gonna rip them off.
Speaker 1:Someone doing a lot of really good work on this type of stuff is Reverend Lizzie McManus Dale. And Brie has talked about her before. She wrote a really great book. I will be reading it in the next week. Brie has already read it, called God Didn't Make Us to Hate Us.
Speaker 1:And the reason that I think she's doing an amazing job I mean, just look at that title in and of itself. I've watched her on TikTok for a long time. She's just very cool. She's super fun to watch. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So I would recommend following her on any of your social medias. But her big thesis is that Christianity often sounds like God made you. You disappointed him. He can't deal with you. He can't tolerate you.
Speaker 1:You deserve to be punished. And then Jesus stepped in and said, no, no, no, dad. They're okay. They're okay. It's alright.
Speaker 1:Calm down. And so if you believed properly, God will tolerate you. And that's kind of the idea that we often walk around with, even if it's not conscious. Even if we walk around saying, no. God loves you.
Speaker 1:God loves you. There is a part of us that sees ourselves as inherently Unworthy. Yeah. Crappy. And we're told it all the time in church.
Speaker 1:Oh, you grow up
Speaker 2:singing A Wretch Like Me, you know? I was born a sinner. I deserve to be in hell. I don't deserve the gift that Jesus gave me, access to heaven, eternal life. And you learn that at a very young age, and she talks a lot about what that does to you mentally.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. To start out your life thinking, I am not enough. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:My in my own life, my daughter, we always joke, is the most confident human alive. Yeah. I mean, like, legitimately, the most confident person in the world. And I love that. I don't know where it comes from.
Speaker 1:It's certainly not me. But I think it's amazing because she's gonna go into life knowing that she can do whatever she wants. But there was a part of me when she started saying like, I would say, oh, you're so beautiful. You're so smart. You're so amazing.
Speaker 1:You're so kind. And she'd say, I know. And there was a part of me that reeled back from that because as a little Christian kid, you're not supposed to think any of those things of yourself. You are a wretch. Don't speak to me that way.
Speaker 1:You're a sinner, and God barely tolerates your existence. You should have no confidence in yourself because that's pride. You should have no love for yourself because you're a sinner. And yet you look at what Reverend Lizzie is doing and what a lot of other really great scholars are doing and stepping out of that religious trauma and saying, God
Speaker 2:loves you. God made you to love you. He loves you so much that that's why he sent Jesus. Mhmm. To say, in a human voice, I love you Mhmm.
Speaker 1:With everything I've got. And so her idea is that God loves creation as opposed to what we often see as God barely restraining himself from destroying everything. And so her position isn't God doesn't judge people. It's not there is no hell. There is no everybody's going straight to heaven.
Speaker 1:Because you will see that. There are certainly theologians out there saying that. But hers is more that God is angered by oppression and violence and abuse and injustice and evil as opposed to God is angered by you being human. Because let's remember, God created us as humans. She talks about in her book, her daughter,
Speaker 2:and giving birth to her daughter, and looking down at her and being like, you haven't done anything yet. Mhmm. How can I look at you and be like, you're a sinner? Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You haven't done anything. And yet, most of us walked into Sunday school, if you grew up in church, at four years old and were told we were sinners.
Speaker 2:At the moment of your conception.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The minute that you cried, you were a sinner.
Speaker 2:Which you will see some religious traditions who do kind of teach that. Mhmm. You look at the religious tradition that the Duggars are a part of. Mhmm. If you watch the is it Amazon Prime or Netflix documentary?
Speaker 1:I think it's Amazon Prime. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:There's an there's a documentary about kind of their faith and what they believed. But there's something called blanket training. Mhmm. And you put a baby as young as they possibly could be on a blanket and put a toy out of their reach. And if they reach for the toy, you punish them.
Speaker 2:Or if they cry, you punish them. Because apparently crying is a sin. Is a sin. Even though it's essential to a baby. Right.
Speaker 2:It's how they communicate. It's how they communicate. If your baby's not crying, there's a problem.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. There's a very big difference between looking at God and seeing the judge up on the stand, who's ready to say heaven or hell, who's ticking off all of the little things you did right and wrong throughout your life, Versus seeing God as your father who's sitting with you holding your hand and saying, I love you. I adore you. I created you as you are, and I want to be with you. Let's figure this out together.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Well, there's been so much study I short circuited. Wow. There's been studies on positive versus negative reinforcement Mhmm. Throughout time.
Speaker 2:And how much better positive reinforcement is to a person.
Speaker 1:Right. Right. Right. Which is something God would know. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because God created us. He created our minds and how they function.
Speaker 2:So if our greatest commandment is to love God and love others, then for heaven's sakes
Speaker 1:Mhmm. For heaven's sakes.
Speaker 2:For heaven's sakes. Love them. Don't try to manipulate people into believing in God out of fear. Right. That's not a lasting faith.
Speaker 1:Right. Now, let's let's end on another story. Ready? Oh, okay. I want you to close your eyes again.
Speaker 1:Alright. They're I'm going to fall asleep. She's closed them, but she'll open them in about forty two seconds. So imagine a parent. And they have a child who's done something really, really bad.
Speaker 1:Not something simple. Not they're not breaking curfew. They're, like, something real bad.
Speaker 2:Murder.
Speaker 1:Okay. Maybe not that bad. Oh, let's back it up a little bit. They stole something. You know, whatever.
Speaker 2:Loitering. Yes.
Speaker 1:Loitering. Jaywalking.
Speaker 2:No. Now a good
Speaker 1:parent doesn't say, it doesn't matter. I love you. Who cares? You keep that toy you stole. You keep jaywalking.
Speaker 1:No. Because love doesn't erase the need for justice. It doesn't erase the need for learning from what you've done wrong. But a good parent also does not say, Because you did a bad thing, now I'm going to make you suffer. I'm going to intentionally make you suffer for as long as I can until the end of time.
Speaker 1:We'd call that abuse. Right?
Speaker 2:A good parent Oh, so sorry.
Speaker 1:A good parent wants accountability and repentance. And maybe sometimes they want consequences to happen so that change can happen, but they also want restoration. They also want things to be good again because of the love that they have for their child. And so if you go back to what Reverend Lizzie says, God didn't accidentally make humanity. He created it because he wanted it.
Speaker 1:He calls himself our father. And we sit here and we say, god is love. If god is love, then what does hell look like? If god is love, what is the afterlife? And I think that's just an important question to ask.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna give you a conclusion. Okay. This is absolutely what hell is because I don't know. No way. I've not been there yet.
Speaker 1:No way. But
Speaker 2:I'll say I've it been to a white castle. So true.
Speaker 1:But it's important to sit with. It's important to ask. It's important to interpret the Bible through the lens of God is love. And if God is love, then what? If we have a good, good father Mhmm.
Speaker 2:What would he do at the end of
Speaker 1:us? Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Why would he just
Speaker 1:That was some fun sounds.
Speaker 2:That's why I love her book. It's Mhmm. God didn't make us to hate us, and it really stretches my little Baptist brain.
Speaker 1:Oh, that Baptist brain. So next week, we're gonna dive a little bit more into this topic. We're gonna talk about do we believe that God is love? Do we really believe that we say it, but do we really believe that God is love? And we'll talk about reverend Lizzie.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about some other stuff because we've been talking about some spooky stuff lately. It's time to lighten it up. Yeah. We're gonna lighten it up. We're gonna encourage you for once.
Speaker 1:Are you excited? Are you For once.
Speaker 2:For once. And then we'll go back to, you know, regularly scheduled Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this time we'll talk about ghosts.
Speaker 1:We do love a good ghost. Boo. Hey, we should watch Casper together as a group.
Speaker 2:I don't actually love Casper.
Speaker 1:Well, hush up.
Speaker 2:Casper's a classic. I like the idea of Casper. But the actual movie?
Speaker 1:Who's the main girl in it?
Speaker 2:I loved her. Hillary Duff was in one, and then Christina Ricci. Christina Ricci. That's the
Speaker 1:one I'm thinking of. Alright. So join in next week for happiness, and then the next week maybe for Casper, if I can convince Brie,
Speaker 2:the friendly ghost. Alright. We love you. Bye. Bye.