https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iCWBufHFVWU
Why was hell created and how? So this is a really problematic question because hell, okay, so what do you mean by hell? So hell means death. So hell is Hades, right? So hell means death and there’s a difference between death and the river of fire, you could call it, you know, the lake of fire that’s described in Revelations or that’s described by Christ at some point, Gehenna, you could call it. And so death itself is a product of sin. It wasn’t created so much as a side effect of missing the mark. When you miss the mark, things start to break apart and you decompose and that’s death. That’s why it’s represented in the ground. You know, that’s why the idea that hell is below, you know, it’s down there. All this imagery is to show you that hell has to do with decomposition. It has to do with breaking apart, losing cohesion, losing memory, losing connection to your body, between the body and the soul, something like that. And so it’s not that it was created, it’s just that it is a side effect of sin. It’s a side effect of missing the mark. So I hope that answers that question. So the idea then of the fire or the fire of Gehenna or the river of fire that comes from the throne of God, that’s more complicated. Because to some extent there is an idea that that fire is God or is the presence of God. And it’s the presence of God which is burning. And I talked about this before. It’s that if you let yourself be transformed, you know, if you let go of your animosity, if you let go of your resentment, if you let go and you turn yourself towards love, then the fire that comes from the throne of God will be a deifying fire. That that fire will bring you closer, will consume you in a positive way, will consume you like the love between two lovers, like that type of consuming. But the fire can also burn you if you refuse to be changed, then that fire is acting like coals on your head. It’s burning you. It’s burning you because you don’t want God to, you don’t want to be transparent to reality. You don’t want to be transparent to God, to the infinite. You want to hold on. You want to hold on to your thing, to your pride, to your whatever, to your little idiosyncrasies. You want to hold on to them. And so then here comes this fire that is absolute and is there to open up everything and to show everything. And you don’t want to. So that’s going to burn you. It’s going to hurt. And so that that is a different that seems to be the vision of hell, which which the Orthodox are adopting mostly. So how does hell then how does hell then function in the system in orthodoxy? There there are different there are different obviously there’s different theories, there’s different ways to look at it. Sometimes hell is definitely represented as a kind of eternal like eternal punishment, that kind of manner in which it is. But the most popular, I would say, at least in my circles, at least in the circles of people I read and the people that I that I engage with, the most popular manner of in which we understand hell is that the fire of hell is the fire of Pentecost. Those two fires are the same. And so the the the the hell is the is the fullness of the presence of God in all things. That’s what hell is. The difference is that for those who who have opened themselves up right for those who have opened themselves up to the grace of God, then that grace becomes transfigured, transfigured. Whereas for those who have closed themselves off, have attached themselves to their resentments, to their passions, to the to those things that decompose them, then that fire burns them. I always use the example of I always use the example of how if I you know if I do something horrible to you, you know, I do something really, really despicable to you and I and I do it, you know, with all the spite that I can do it with. And your answer to me is this pure love, just pure unadulterated love and forgiveness and openness. Now, when I encounter that, I can do two things, right? I can repent and kind of enter into your love and be transformed by it. Or I can just close myself off even more. And then that love that you’re showing to me becomes it burns me, right? It’s fire burning coals, coals on my head like St. Paul says. And so that’s really the manner in which it’s usually talked about. So that so that is this kind of if you look at the eschatological reality like a total reality, it represents it represents all that in us right now, even all that in us right now that is resisting to be transformed by grace. It’s burned by the presence of God. That’s what burns us. Even our guilt, all that stuff inside us. It’s actually God. It’s actually the love of God that is burning us. And so that’s really the way that it’s presented. And then there is there is in your representation of it there a fairly strong necessity of agency there because there is there is a center. There is an agent with choice who is who is deciding do I do I give up CS Lewis lay down your arms. Do I do I give up my hostility and my bitterness and my resentment or do I give that up and open myself up to this love and therefore accepting and receiving the embrace of this of this other agent of this other of this other agent whose whose will and capacity to be will and capacity and resources are far beyond mine who yet in it’s even in a sense an expression of his mercy that he allows my agency to to exist apart from his own.