Last year, an interviewer asked Francis how he envisages hell. His response stayed with me: “It’s difficult to imagine it. What I would say is not a dogma of faith, but my personal thought: I like to think hell is empty; I hope it is.”
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I would argue that reading random quotes without context can be misleading. Unless of course you believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired bible - which is a fairly extreme position to take.
I've always just assumed the descriptions that work to keep people fearful of leaving the religion as whatever is used at the time (saying this as somebody who is agnostic).
Those two statements don't follow. You can believe in a univocal, consistent and divinely inspired Bible and still think taking random quotes out of context is bad exegesis.
Not my best-crafted piece of self-expression I will admit.
It's always a mistake to assume the Bible has a singular, coherent, intentional narrative. Parts of it were written before the Israelites were even monotheists. It has as many Gods as it has authors.
This is a random Bible search website to show some verses about hell. I was not implying that all of these verses are definitive treatments of hell or anything similar.
However you will notice that what is said in these verses is generally not "hell is just emptiness". So even if very little is said about hell, to me the appropriate response to that is not "it doesn't say much so I'm just gonna believe whatever I want" (if you also claim the Bible is divinely inspired and the underpinning of your entire religion).
"Hell is a place of fire and torment" is explicitly Biblical (Luke 16), even if there are also mentions of Hell without that (and some mentions of fire and torment without calling it "Hell").
Annihilationism vs Eternal Conscious Torment is the main point that isn't given a perfectly clear answer in scripture; there are verses that hint toward each.
Limbo and Purgatory are not in the Bible, but predate Dante. "Deal with the Devil" predates Dante and is only weakly founded in scripture. "Devils" (plural, as opposed to "the Devil") being distinct from "Demons" is a translation artifact, popularized by Dungeons & Dragons. There being various types of demons long precedes Dante. Variants of Universalism (including "Nobody goes to Hell" and "it's possible to escape Hell") are explicitly rejected in scripture.
Those are all the aspects of "modern concept of hell" that I can think of (let me know if you can think of more), and the connection to Dante seems pretty weak.
> Beyond that you're not really gonna get a lot of consistency on topics.
This just seems like moving the goalposts to me. There's not a lot of consistency in talking about the "kingdom of heaven / god" but there are a LOT of passages that describe it. Many more than describe hell in any form. That doesn't mean that hell couldn't be a real thing but it's not a thing that's very present in the canonical text. Christian thought goes far beyond the contents of the traditional bible, but if you want to argue for a "paradise lost" hell or somesuch, you need to cast your lot with thinkers beyond the old and new testament authors.
That said, I don't think any of my sibling comments have responded with sources that ignore the biblical text. I think Ehrman is a bit liberal to stand in for all of christendom, but he's a respected scholar and I think his analysis is not in the category of "ignoring the text and inserting his own beliefs."