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Saturday, June 11, 2016

Letter to Living Waters

I love and appreciate the Living Waters ministry. Nonetheless, when they mailed me a letter kindly asking for more financial support, I took the opportunity to mail them this letter with the provided reply envelope:

Hello Fellow Saints! - I love your ministry and will continue to support. Meanwhile, I pray your hearts be humble and [spiritual] eyes opened to the simple and plain truth in God’s Word regarding the doctrine of hell. The portrayed image of the One True God weighs in the balance.


The truth is that since the very beginning, Church history has been rife with unrest, conflict, and even bloodshed—primarily over matters of establishing orthodoxy. And with today’s easy access to the annals of Church history, it’s time for us churchgoers to rethink the myth of orthodoxy, and begin re-evaluating what we’ve been taught.

For instance, many Christians insist that if you question hell, you are rejecting what has always been agreed upon by the Church, yet the doctrine of eternal torment was not a widely held view for the first five centuries after Christ, particularly in the early Eastern Church, the Church of the early apostles and Church fathers such as Paul, Clement of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and others.

What we do see during this time is the expansion and proliferation of pagan myths about the afterlife, which were then repackaged as eternal, fiery torment in the Western (Catholic) Church, primarily by Latin theologians and Church leaders from Rome. It seems this was most likely motivated by political expediency. The idea of eternal torment was a prime tool for controlling the average churchgoer with fear and was congruent with secular mythologies of the time. Later, pop culture added fuel to the fire (pun intended) through imaginative works like Dante’s Inferno
.”

From the Article:
How & When the Idea of Eternal Torment Invaded Church Doctrine
By Jacob McMillen

Recommended Movie:
Hell & Mr. Fudge
The Story of Author Edward Fudge

Recommended Sermon:
Tormented in the Flames
by Greg Boyd

Recommended YouTube Video:
#1 Cause of Death in America
by D. L. Dunnaville

Recommended Book:
Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism
by Christopher M. Date


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