Hell

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

As a current Universalist, yes, but only if their spiritual journey requires them to. One thing that many Universalists fail to truly comprehend is that many people think they are unworthy of Heaven, Nirvana, whatever their preferred afterlife may be.  As such, they personally require some form of propitiation to take place before they can accept grace.  In the Christian tradition, Christ provides that propitiation for us thru his crucifixion.  Personally, as a Christian Universalist, I think the crucifixion was necessary because there are those who would not be willing to accept grace save by such a demonstration of God being willing to do whatever it takes to convince us stiff-necked sinners that our sins are not so great as to deprive us of God's love.  Yet, I don't deny that there may be those who cannot be convinced save by experiencing Hell as a form of personal propitiation.

I do realize my conception of Hell, more closely resembles the classic version of Purgatory, but my view of the afterlife is such that it occurs outside linear time, so even an infinity of time spent in Hell is not boundless.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

As a current Universalist, yes, but only if their spiritual journey requires them to. One thing that many Universalists fail to truly comprehend is that many people think they are unworthy of Heaven, Nirvana, whatever their preferred afterlife may be.  As such, they personally require some form of propitiation to take place before they can accept grace.  In the Christian tradition, Christ provides that propitiation for us thru his crucifixion.  Personally, as a Christian Universalist, I think the crucifixion was necessary because there are those who would not be willing to accept grace save by such a demonstration of God being willing to do whatever it takes to convince us stiff-necked sinners that our sins are not so great as to deprive us of God's love.  Yet, I don't deny that there may be those who cannot be convinced save by experiencing Hell as a form of personal propitiation.

I do realize my conception of Hell, more closely resembles the classic version of Purgatory, but my view of the afterlife is such that it occurs outside linear time, so even an infinity of time spent in Hell is not boundless.

First, I answered NO, but by no I mean am talking about eternal suffering. Hell exists but I don't think that anyone should spend eternity suffering, nor would most people want to. As to the quotation, I would point out that 19th Universalists were divided into two camps, one that believed in ultra-universalism, meaning that all go directly to heaven and don't have to spend any time in hell and the restorationists who believed in a period of appropriate punishment in a temporary kind of purgatory for the harm that they had commited.

As should be clear already, I fall more in the restorationist camp.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Annihilationism compared to eternal torment is both far more in keeping with the concept of a benevolent god and doesn't require importing a Greco-Roman view of the afterlife into Christianity.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Those passages from Revelation you cite clearly support annihilationism rather than eternal torment.
The others you cite are ambivalent. As the adventists put it, the results of hellfire will be eternal, not the process of being subjected to it.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Those passages from Revelation you cite clearly support annihilationism rather than eternal torment.
The others you cite are ambivalent. As the adventists put it, the results of hellfire will be eternal, not the process of being subjected to it.

I suppose that's a possibility, but Mark 9:48 hardly sounds ambiguous to me.

Jesus there is quoting from Isaiah 66:24. From the context there, it is clear that those who are consigned there are dead and insensate, not living and able to experience the effects of the worms and fires of Gehenna. The metaphor of the trash heaps of the Valley of Hinnom has been much used in both the Old and New Testaments, but it has also been much misapplied by those who - unlike God - find comfort in the idea of a literal Hell of eternal torment.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Revelation is highly symbolic and metaphorical, but even if one interprets it as literally as possible, Rev 19:20 indicates that the Beast and the Pseudoprophet mentioned in Rev 20:10 are to be singled out for special treatment. Rev 20:13-14 has Thanatos and Hades giving up their dead and then being tossed into the lake of fire, indicating that those two are personifications of concepts rather than literal beings or places, so I think it most likely the case is also true of the Beast and the Pseudoprophet.  Moreover, the lake of fire is identified as the second death in Rev 20:14, yet Rev 21:4 states that when the new heaven and earth come to be, there will be no death, hence at that point there can be no lake of fire.  Hence the term "for eons of eons" in Rev 20:10 can't be interpreted as a literal "forever and ever" but as a figurative one.

Revelation is a difficult book to interpret, and I'll admit to areas where I'm uncertain of my interpretation of the text, which is why I restricted my reply to using passages from Revelation itself in this response. I think it best to show where taking Revelation on its own terms there are places where two passages cannot be both interpreted literally without causing contradictions. As I think I've shown, the case against annihilationism requires having the text contradict itself when treated as fully literal. That still leaves up to interpretation which passage or passages should be treated figuratively.

Also I share the doubts of Martin Luther as to whether it should have been included in the canon.  Still if apocalyptic literature be included in the New Testament, Revelation is one of the better examples.  It doesn't exult over the doom that awaits those who transgress as many examples of this form did.