Big Daddy's Belt

"Love Jesus or Burn Forever in Hell." I first saw this wonderfully encouraging statement emblazoned on the roof of a barn in rural South Carolina. Actually just about where I would expect to find it.

Boy does this little bit of encouragement say reams about the either/or mentality that goes with many fundamentalist teachings...

What part of eternal punishment in a lake of fire is the Good News? The Good News is what we are commanded to preach, not eternal torment. The Good News is reason people are to come to God. Paul preached the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and how to apply it to our lives. Not the eternal torment we incorporated from the pagan folks.

For instance, the apostle Paul never mentioned hell in either his speeches in Acts or his letters. And there is more just about everywhere you look on the subject: tentmaker.org, bible-truths.com and so on.

Christians have been sold a bill of goods for so long that we've come to believe in it more than the most wonderful news we've ever had in 6000 years. It's time to do away with this concept and preach the real Gospel.

Pollution

If it can be shown that an incorporeal and reasonable being has life in itself independently of the body and that it is worse off in the body than out of it, then beyond a doubt bodies are only of secondary importance and arise from time to time to meet the varying conditions of reasonable creatures. Those who require bodies are clothed with them, and contrawise, when fallen souls have lifted themselves up to better things their bodies are once more annihilated. They are thus ever vanishing and ever reappearing.
~Origen

A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, P. Schaff and H. Wace editors

What a messed up period in time. One of the most frequently quoted church "fathers" believed in reincarnation. Is there anyone we can trust from the 2nd century? My guess is no. About the best we can surmise is what the prevailing beliefs of the period were and try to match them against what's in the Bible.

Difficult to say the least. Who can say what effect these guys had on modern Christianity and what heresies of theirs are still incorporated within our own churches?