Tentmaker Forum

I just want to know who brought the concept of everlasting punishment tertullian or augustine.

I expect the idea had been growing for some time and that these two were just important mile-posts in the history of Hell.

Last link in post #1843 in Snippets from the hard copy UR library of rodger tutt

Origin and history of eternal punishment

Very good reading

Quote from: Cristina100 on May 09, 2017, 07:16:32 PM
I just want to know who brought the concept of everlasting punishment tertullian or augustine.

AFAIK the ancient Egyptians were the ones that created the original hell myth.
Other religions picked up the ball and made some changes to make it fit in their own religion.

Tertullian or Augustine didn't invent hell, they introduced it into Christianity.


http://radical-reaction.com/MyChristianSites/ShepherdsVoice/the_prevailing_doctrine.htm
http://richardwaynegarganta.com/first500years.htm

A overly simplified summary
In the very beginning of Christianity, Christians were mainly Jews that believed the Messiah (Jesus) finally had come. They still did all sort of Jewish things and attended to sermons in synagogues with unconverted Jews.

People that are converted tend to keep their old doctrine in the back of their head. Quite obvious because it's very hard, even impossible, to totally erase all you learned before the conversion.
For the Jewish Christians that wasn't very hard. Jesus is what the OT (Jewishness) was all about. They didn't have to unlearn anything. They only had to accept the promised Jewish Messiah arrived.
Like all humans they weren't flawless but hell wasn't one of their flaws, simply because they never believed in it.

As time progressed more and more pagans got converted. They too kept using their former teaching in the back of their head. They used it as a reference to understand Christianity. As time progressed and Rome muscled in, interpretation of Scripture was more and more polluted by pagan thoughts.

To the point;
The Lake of Fire and brimstone:
- Those with pagan roots understood it as they were taught in their pagan years. That's how most Christians today understand it.
- Those with Jewish roots understood it totally different. Purifying and temporary. (the Lake was part of the Temple which was a pattern of heaven)

Quote from: WhiteWings on May 11, 2017, 02:23:25 PM

Quote from: Cristina100 on May 09, 2017, 07:16:32 PM
I just want to know who brought the concept of everlasting punishment tertullian or augustine.

AFAIK the ancient Egyptians were the ones that created the original hell myth.
Other religions picked up the ball and made some changes to make it fit in their own religion.

Tertullian or Augustine didn't invent hell, they introduced it into Christianity.


http://radical-reaction.com/MyChristianSites/ShepherdsVoice/the_prevailing_doctrine.htm
http://richardwaynegarganta.com/first500years.htm

A overly simplified summary
In the very beginning of Christianity, Christians were mainly Jews that believed the Messiah (Jesus) finally had come. They still did all sort of Jewish things and attended to sermons in synagogues with unconverted Jews.

People that are converted tend to keep their old doctrine in the back of their head. Quite obvious because it's very hard, even impossible, to totally erase all you learned before the conversion.
For the Jewish Christians that wasn't very hard. Jesus is what the OT (Jewishness) was all about. They didn't have to unlearn anything. They only had to accept the promised Jewish Messiah arrived.
Like all humans they weren't flawless but hell wasn't one of their flaws, simply because they never believed in it.

As time progressed more and more pagans got converted. They too kept using their former teaching in the back of their head. They used it as a reference to understand Christianity. As time progressed and Rome muscled in, interpretation of Scripture was more and more polluted by pagan thoughts.

To the point;
The Lake of Fire and brimstone:
- Those with pagan roots understood it as they were taught in their pagan years. That's how most Christians today understand it.
- Those with Jewish roots understood it totally different. Purifying and temporary. (the Lake was part of the Temple which was a pattern of heaven)

:iagree: :goodpost:

 :nod:

QuoteAugustine Less Severe Than Modern Orthodoxy.
Augustine, however, held the penalties of sin in a much milder form than do his degenerate theological descendants in modern times. He teaches that the lost still retain goodness,--too valuable to be destroyed, and on that account the worst are not in absolute evil, but only in a lower degree of good. "Grief for lost good in a state of punishment is a witness of a good nature. For he who grieves for the lost peace for his nature, grieves for it by means of some remains of peace, by which it is caused that nature should be friendly to itself." He taught that while unbaptized children must be damned in a Gehenna of fire, their torments would be light (levissima) compared with the torment of other sinners, and that their condition would be far preferable to non-existence, and so on the whole a blessing. In a limbus infantum they would only receive a mitissima damnatio. He also taught that death did not necessary end probation, as is quite fully shown under "Christ's Descent into Hades." Augustine's idea was reduced to rhyme in the sixteenth century by the Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, of Malden, Mass., who was the Puritan pastor of the church in that place. A curious fact in the history of the parish is this,--that the church in which these ridiculous sentiments were uttered became, in 1828, by vote of the parish, Universalist, and is now the Universalist church in Malden. The poem represents God as saying to non-elect infants: