On the whole, we have been slow to notice how God grows more and more nonviolent through the Scriptures—or even how this evolution becomes completely obvious in Jesus. Infinite love, mercy, and forgiveness are hard for the human mind to even imagine, so most people seem to need a notion of hell to maintain their logic of retribution, just punishment, and a just world, as they understand it. God does not need hell, but we sure seem to. As both Jon Sweeney and Julie Ferwerda*12 demonstrate rather convincingly in their respective books, our common image of hell has much more to do with
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