ARTICLES
THE ORIGIN OF CHRISTIAN 'ETERNAL
DAMNATION'
By
Fr. Johannes Greber - receiving information from
an highly evolved teacher from the afterlife. Judge and
check these facts for yourselves:
“A doctrine to which you cling with astonishing tenacity
although it
was unknown to the early Christians is that of an ‘eternal
hell’.. This is a
specter that you seem unwilling to surrender. Do
you perhaps imagine that you can accomplish more with poor
humanity by preaching a barbarous
untruth than by preaching love and mercy? To what trouble
you go to find
support for this untruth! You say that a so-called ‘mortal
sin’ must entail
eternal punishment, seeing that it is an unforgivable affront
to God.
Those are wholly mistaken, manmade concepts. No creature
can affront God
unforgivably and thereby incur unending punishment. The
lower the
standing of him who affronts you, the less attention you
will pay to his
insults. What is a miserable creature as compared with its
Creator? A mere
speck of dust! Your insults do not even touch God; they
hurt not Him, but
yourselves. Again, if a mortal sin were an unpardonable
affront to God, it
could not be forgiven during your lives on earth.
On the other hand, if, as your doctrine claims, it can be
forgiven in men, why should it not be forgiven the spirits
in the Beyond? They are, after all, the same spirits, whether
they inhabit a mortal body or have become separated from
it by human death. It is the same ‘I’ with all
its spiritual attributes in the Here and in the Beyond.
Hence a change of heart may occur in spirits in the Beyond
as well as while they reside on earth.
“Proof that the tortures of hell are everlasting is
sought by invoking
the Bible, by citing the word ‘eternal’ used
in your translations of the New
Testament in connection with punishment in the Beyond. But
what is the
word in the original Greek texts that your translators have
rendered as
‘eternal’? What matters are not your translations,
but the sense of the word
as it occurs in the original text. It so happens that wherever
your translators
of the Scriptures use the words ‘eternity’ or
‘eternal’, the Greek text has
‘eon’. You, too, have adopted this word and
speak of ‘eons’ to designate
long periods of time. That is correct; for also in Greek
the word ‘eon’ never
signifies ‘eternity’ or the idea of anything
everlasting, but merely an
indefinite period of time. Antiquity was an ‘eon’,
the Middle Ages were an
‘eon’, the Modern Age is an ‘eon’.
The Romans regarded an ‘eon’ as the
equivalent of a hundred years.
“An ‘eon’ is therefore a period of time,
the limits of which are
sometimes seen to be closer together, sometimes further
apart. Even a
human lifetime is sometimes so designated. Never, however,
can ‘eon’ be
used to describe a never-ending period of time. So you may
never translate
‘eon’ as ‘eternity’, or the adjective
derived therefrom as ‘eternal’. The
correct equivalents are ‘time’ and ‘temporal’.
“First I want to call your attention to the interesting
circumstance that
in many passages of the Bible the word ‘eon’
and the corresponding
adjective have been correctly translated as ‘time’
and ‘temporal’, because in
those particular places the word ‘eternal’ would
be nonsensical. Only when
punishment in the Beyond is involved have the translators
used that word,
indicating clearly that they were influenced by the Christian
religions that
preach eternal damnation.
“Let us consider a few of the numerous passages in
the Bible in which
the word ‘eon’ can be translated only as ‘time’
or ‘pertaining to time.’ Thus
it is said that blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be
forgiven, either in this
‘eon’ or in that which is to come, that is,
neither in this age nor in the next,
or neither in this life nor in the next. Inasmuch as there
is only one eternity,
you cannot rationally translate that it will not be forgiven
in ‘this eternity’ or
in the ‘eternity that is to come.’ For there
is no such thing as two eternities.
In the parable of the sower, it is said that some of the
seeds were choked by
the cares of this ‘eon’, which again has been
correctly translated as ‘by the
cares of this “life”’. Here also the rendering
of the word as ‘eternity’ would
obviously be inappropriate. The same is true of the parable
of the weeds
among the wheat, in which Christ explains that the harvest
will be the end of
this ‘eon’, that is, the ‘end of this
age or this world.’ Here, too, it cannot
mean ‘eternity’. In this passage the word ‘eon’
occurs twice more, both
times in a limitative sense. Finally, I shall quote a few
passages from Paul’s
epistles: ‘Do not conduct your lives in the manner
of this “eon” (these
times).’ ‘We speak a wisdom not of this “eon”,
or of the rulers of this “eon”,
but we speak God’s mysterious wisdom, which He foreordained
before all
“eons”.’
“From these passages, which could be multiplied many
times, you
may see that the word ‘eon’ does not mean ‘eternity’,
but a time period of
limited duration. Now, this same word ‘eon’
occurs where a punishment in
the Beyond is mentioned. Whence do you derive the right
to translate a
word as ‘eternal’ when referring to damnation,
when you have rendered it as
‘time’ and ‘temporal’ in countless
other passages? It would almost seem as
though you took a particular delight in the thought of an
everlasting hell.
Greber – Communication with the Spirit World
“According to the translation you have, Christ said:
‘It is better for
you to enter into life maimed or lame than to have two hands
and two feet
and be cast into the “eternal” fire.’
What you here designate as the ‘eternal’
fire is also only a fire that will last throughout an ‘eon’
and hence last only
for a time. Strangely enough, the original text did not
even contain the word
‘eon’ in this passage; it was added as a falsification.
The original text read:
‘into the fire of hell’ and not ‘into
the eternal fire’.. Similar spurious
alterations have been made elsewhere. Thus your present
Bible translations
say: ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal
fire’, whereas the authentic
version was: ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into the
outer darkness.’ I believe
these explanations will suffice to convince you that there
is no basis in the
Bible to support your inhuman and untrue doctrine of an
‘everlasting hell’.
“The duration of the punishment meted out to the different
spirits
depends above all upon the spirits themselves. The longer
they persist in
their rebellious attitude, the longer their exile and the
punishment of
separation. Not even God knows when the individual spirits
will come back
to Him, since their return depends upon their own free will,
and, as I have
told you, all future decisions that spirits are free to
make lie outside the
scope of God’s foreknowledge of events.
“Also, what has been incorrectly translated as ‘eternal
life’ by a
mistaken rendering of the word ‘eon’ is merely
a life in the ‘eons’ or ‘ages’
to come. How long this life with God may last depends upon
you
yourselves. If you remain faithful to God, that life will
be, in truth, eternal.
But who can tell whether in the future there may not be
another rebellion of
the spirits, in which you will again take part, as you did
in the first revolt
under Lucifer? Spirits in heaven have the same freedom of
choice now as
before, and the possibility of a misuse of that freedom
is as much a fact
today as it was at the time of the first revolt. Whether
or not there will ever
be another is something that even God does not know, for
the reason I have
already indicated to you.
“You cannot, therefore, speak of an ‘eternal’
reward, any more than
you can speak of an ‘eternal’ punishment.
“Wherever the Bible refers to the ‘fires’
of hell, this is symbolic of the
excessive pain suffered by those who must endure hell’s
punishments. You,
too, speak of a burning pain without meaning actual fire.
The torments of
hell are so great that they are beyond human conception.
Christ says: ‘The
damned shall be salted with fire,’ for as salt permeates
everything, so does
agony permeate the spirits of the damned; but he adds: ‘Salt
is good.’ So,
too, the torments the spirits must endure are in reality
good for their
Greber – Communication with the Spirit World.
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