Hell, it's only Hell!!

Every first Wednesday in the month, we abandon our small/house groups and all meet up in church for our appropriately entitled "Wednesday In The Word", which is basically where we invite a speaker to talk on a broad subject and then open the evning out to questions and discussion.

I'm quite looking forward to this one, because it's on the subject of "What does the Bible say about Hell?!".

Ever since I read Brian W McLaren's Theology Trilogy - "A New Kind Of Christian", "The Story We Find Ourselves In" and "The Last Word & The Word After That", I've been struggling with the whole traditional evangelical stance on the idea of hell and what/when/where it is...

Brian got me intrigued and disturbed as he seemed to be taking apart and deconstructing everything I had previously believed about the subject, as he has an annoying habit of doing!! I decided to look into it myself, by doing some study on the words "Gehennah" and "Sheol", the first being used by Jesus for the word that we translate as "hell", and the second being used in the Psalms and most of the Jewish Scriptures to refer to the place of the dead, and the state of being dead.

What I found out was interesting and again provoking, and when it comes to the question part of wednesday evening, I have some questions for the speaker that he may not like!!

My church is a good, Bible-believing Baptist church, but I've become increasingly frustrated that they have some very very traditional views. Their whole teaching structure is based round the fact that Jesus came to save us from hell, and although this is not strange for a baptist church to teach, I think it is not neccesarily the whole Gospel, and not actually what Jesus came to do at all.

Anyway, I'm going to be late for work, so I have to stop here and carry on this line of thought tonight when I have more time....

Any comments so far?!