Would a loving God send people to Hell?
Channel: Venaloid
Date: 2020-12-24

In concordance with Betteridge's law of headlines, my answer is no; I don't think a god that could be described as "loving" would send people to Hell (or "allow them to go there", whatever).

You may respond that God is indeed loving, just in a unique way, but this is something I addressed in my video, "God is fair, but not really." 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFZJYat6bkA 

On the topic of Hell and the Bible, there were many different views on the subject in ancient Judaism, and these differences are even greater when comparing ancient Judaism to modern Christianity, but one thing that textual critics largely agree on is that ancient Jews did not believe in an eternal punishment after death. 

In the Old Testament, the word which is translated as “Hell” is the Hebrew word “Sheol”. However, in the New Testament, the English word “Hell” is often translated from the Greek word “Gehenna”. It seems dishonest to treat these words as meaning the same thing. 

Sheol is translated as “grave”, “pit”, and “Hell” in English, but it’s the same Hebrew word in all cases, and it most basically means “grave” or “pit”. It is never stated in the Old Testament that it’s a place of either punishment or reward. It’s basically just the “black box” where all the dead go, and where nothing really happens, exemplified in Job 3:11-19 and Job 14:11-14.

As for Gehenna, the first mention of this word is in Joshua 15:8 where it is called the “valley of the son of Hinnom,” which in Hebrew is “gei ben Hinnom.", which was later said as "Gehenna". (Much like how “goodbye” was derived from the phrase “God be with ye”) The idea that Gehenna was a burning garbage dump originally came from a 13th century Rabbi named David Kimhi. There is no archaeological evidence that it was a garbage dump of any kind; archaeologists love finding garbage dumps, but this is not one of them. As far as we can tell, around the time of Jesus, Gehenna was rumored to be a place where some unnamed sect of pagans practiced child sacrifice, but that’s about it as far as the actual valley goes. 

Interestingly enough, 1 Enoch 27 describes Gehenna as a place where God’s enemies will be slaughtered in the last days: an apocalyptic killing floor. This fits with the idea of annihilation and Jewish apocalypticism. 

The closest thing I could find about Gehenna that sounds like our modern conception of hell was that it was described as a kind of “purgatory” where the wicked will only spend 1 year at most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehenna#Archaeology 

Paul's opinion about what happens to us after we die changed substantially as he got older, and as it became less likely that the apocalypse would happen during his lifetime, but it's clear that in his earliest writings, he believed the common Jewish apocalyptic view, with the caveat that Jesus was simply the first of many to be resurrected. 
1 Corinthians 15:50-57 

Bart Ehrman on Hell, skip to 3:40
https://youtu.be/y17p-TeRStQ

Would a Loving God Send People to Hell?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ALVSBVZ28

How Can A Loving God Send Someone to Hell? SeanMcDowell.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCIagUoqMvE

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0:00 - God would not send people to Hell. 
2:05 - Why can't God just forgive? 
4:09 - Responding to J. Warner Wallace
4:20 - Love and justice
7:40 - "Sending" people to Hell
10:31 - Psychological regeneration
12:11 - Can God force us to love him?
14:33 - What IS Hell? 
17:52 - Tiers of punishment
18:32 - God honors our choices
19:19 - Recap

Music is "Pure Attitude", by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) 
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/