People who said they went to hell

But that also meant that being buried outside the cemetery was no longer a guarantee to the contrary.

Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning. How did Norway keep track of time before it adopted the modern calendar?

The provenance of the Nag Hammadi Codices, famous for containing unorthodox texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Secret Book of John, has been a point of contention among scholars ever since they were discovered in Recent research strongly supports the hypothesis that they were manufactured and read by monks belonging to one of the earliest monastic communities in Egypt, traditionally regarded as completely orthodox. During the Middle Ages, people had a clear vision of what Hell was like.

The Church helped fuel these fears of what could happen to you in the afterlife. This picture was painted on the wall of a church in Denmark during the s. Nancy Bazilchuk. Mars - Unconsecrated ground near the gallows Sometime between and , Hakastein Church was erected in the area where the skulls were found. A picture showing Judgement Day from St. Thomas Beckett Church, in Salisbury, England. The picture is thought to be from the s. Execution burial sites are common in several places in Europe.

The dead are not usually buried east-west. In addition, body parts may have been chopped off and buried in places other than where they should be. But then a question remains: "What did it cost this kind of God to love us and embrace us? What did he endure in order to receive us? Where did this God agonize, cry out?

Where were his nails and thorns? How ironic. In our effort to make God more loving, we have made God less loving. His love, in the end, needed to take no action. It was sentimentality, not love at all. The worship of a God like this will be impersonal, cognitive, ethical.

There will be no joyful self-abandonment, no humble boldness, no constant sense of wonder. We would not sing to such a being, "Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. The postmodern "sensitive" approach to the subject of hell is actually quite impersonal. It says, "It doesn't matter if you believe in the person of Christ, as long as you follow his example.

But to say that is to say the essence of religion is intellectual and ethical, not personal. If any good person can find God, then the essential core of religion is understanding and following the rules. When preaching about hell, I try to show how impersonal this view is:. Hell is the freely chosen, eternal skid row of the universe. The essence of salvation is knowing a Person John As with knowing any person, there is repenting and weeping and rejoicing and encountering.

The gospel calls us to a wildly passionate, intimate love relationship with Jesus Christ, and calls that 'the core of true salvation. There is no love without wrath. What rankles people is the idea of judgment and the wrath of God: "I can't believe in a God who sends people to suffer eternally. What kind of loving God is filled with wrath? So in preaching about hell, we must explain that a wrathless God cannot be a loving God. Here's how I tried to do that in one sermon:.

In Hope Has Its Reasons , Becky Pippert writes, 'Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it. Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference. Gifford, 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.

God's wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer of sin which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being. A God like this Following a recent sermon on the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, the post-service question-and-answer session was packed with more than the usual number of attenders. The questions and comments focused on the subject of eternal judgment. My heart sank when a young college student said, "I've gone to church all my life, but I don't think I can believe in a God like this.

Usually all the questions are pitched to me, and I respond as best I can. But on this occasion people began answering one another. An older businesswoman said, "Well, I'm not much of a churchgoer, and I'm in some shock now. I always disliked the very idea of hell, but I never thought about it as a measure of what God was willing to endure in order to love me. Then a mature Christian made a connection with a sermon a month ago on Jesus at Lazarus' tomb in John That's helped me.

He doesn't only judge evil, but he also takes the hell and judgment himself for us on the cross. People who ignore the suffering of others in life must go to Hell. These Christians do not think that God would punish people for eternity. Instead, they believe that people will have the opportunity to atone for their sin. Some Christians believe that everyone in Hell will eventually repent , be forgiven and reach Heaven.

The Roman Catholic Church teaches that there is a place where sins are punished and a soul is purified before it can go to Heaven.

This is called Purgatory. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that Purgatory is purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven Catechism of the Catholic Church Catholics believe that most people are not so evil that God would condemn them forever to Hell, but also that most people are not pure and good enough to go to Heaven straight away.

For them, Purgatory is the state of waiting where a person can make up for their sins after death. Catholics often pray for the souls of loved ones to be released from Purgatory and to enter Heaven.