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.
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.
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).
> 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."