Her Gates Will Never Be Shut Quotes

“[I]f my faith depends on fear of punishment, what will happen to my faith when perfect love (Jesus) comes to cast it out? (1 John 4: 18) If God thinks that fear of punishment is something to be “cast out” like a demon, then our Gospel and our preaching better not rest on that foundation! Fear-based faith (a paradox) is the ultimate deception. We need to examine closely whether the devil has been hiding in plain sight - squatting within the very message that we’ve preached. Parasite and deceiver that he is, he found the ultimate host to help disseminate his terror campaign - the Church! If our faith message begins in fear, as it did for many evangelicals like me, it’s in trouble. I am reminded of Jesus’ warning, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are” (Matt 23:15). The negation of negation. Does preaching on hell produce converts? Oh yes! But if in the process it also saddles someone with fear of punishment, then it has simultaneously reproduced a “son of hell.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope, and the New Jerusalem

“God is not angry with you and never has been. He loves you with an everlasting love. Salvation is not a question of “turn or burn.” We’re burning already, but we don’t have to be! Redemption! The life and death of Christ showed us how far God would go to extend forgiveness and invitation. His resurrection marked the death of death and the evacuation of Hades. My hope is in Christ, who rightfully earned his judgment seat and whose verdict is restorative justice, that is to say, mercy. Hope. That is my bias, and I believe that Scripture, tradition, and experience confirm it. I”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“In modern street-English, we use “hell” as a catchall term to describe the bad place (usually red hot) where sinful people are condemned to punishment and torment after they die. This simplistic, selective, and horrifying perception of hell is due in large part to nearly 400 years of the King James Version’s monopoly in English-speaking congregations (not to mention centuries of imaginative religious art). Rather than acknowledge the variety of terms, images, and concepts that the Bible uses for divine judgment, the KJV translators opted to combine them all under the single term “hell.” In truth, the array of biblical pictures and meanings that this one word is expected to convey is so vast that they appear contradictory. For example, is hell a lake of fire or a place of utter darkness? Is it a purifying forge or a torture chamber? Is it exclusion from God’s presence or the consuming fire of God’s glory?

While modern scholarship acknowledges the mis- or over-translation of Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna as “hell” - especially if by “hell” we refer automatically to the eternal punishment of the wicked in conscious torment in a lake of fire - the thoroughly discussed limitations of hell language and imagery have been slow to permeate the theology of pulpits and pews in much of the church. Why the reluctance? Do we resist out of ignorance? Or are we afraid that abandoning infernalism implies abandoning faithfulness to Scripture and sound doctrine? After all, for so long we were taught that to be a Christian - especially an evangelical - is to be an infernalist. And yet, not a few of my friends have confessed that they have given up on being “good Christians” because they can no longer assent to the kind of God that creates and sends people to hell as they imagine it.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hell, Hope, and the New Jerusalem

“Somehow, the early church was able to balance the dire warnings of its preaching with the passionate prayers of its liturgy, embracing hope for God’s mercy even if it required posthumous rescue from judgment.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“We ought to also note the irony and incongruence of the Church utilizing the very place where God became violently offended by the literal burning of children as our primary metaphor for a final and eternal burning of God’s wayward people in literal flames. Thus, God becomes the very Molech who decrees that the angels must deliver his children to the flames, even though this was the very reason he ordered Hinnom to be desecrated in the first place!”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“Therefore, if we restrict our studies of apocalyptic to the canon of Scripture (Daniel, Zechariah, the Gospels, 22 and Revelation), we can make a case for drawing a sharp distinction between apocalyptic (symbolic imagery for this-worldly events 23 ) and eschatology (theology of last things, the parousia , and heaven and hell 24 ). We run into difficulty when we conflate and literalize the two, which is precisely what happened as the apocalyptic-Talmudic-infernalist stream developed. Their authors progressively converted imagery of God’s furnace from a metaphor for historic destruction, which acts to judge and refine his people, into actual ovens of material flames into which damned souls are tossed in the afterlife or on Judgment Day.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“But we give last word to von Balthasar: “From now on, even hell belongs to Christ.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“Finally, in their mature love for Jesus, the Moravians’ highest stated motive for evangelism was so that the “Lamb would receive the full reward of his suffering.” They were deeply convinced that we were the joy Christ anticipated when he endured the Cross! What does that say about the value he has placed on us? And on how much he deserves to receive that joy? Is there any greater gift that we could give him than to present him with the pearls of great price for which gave his life?”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“We need to become even more biblical than that, allowing Scripture to trump our inherited ideologies even when we’ve invested so much of our hearts in those systems. Dare we let Scripture say what it says without reinterpreting what it “really means” into the margins of our Study Bibles?”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“The text is not the problem; it simply resists propositional systems of eschatology in favor of narrative development”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“as a futurist in my college days, the pretense of consistent literalism was challenged by Revelation’s wild imagery. In any given verse, we might pivot from literal to figurative interpretations and back again. Using the Church in Revelation again as our example, it was easy to discern that the collective billions who constitute the Bride of Christ are not one literal female colossus in a humongous wedding dress waiting to consummate union with Jesus in actual lovemaking. We knew this was symbolic. Yet in the very same verse, we stumbled over our literalism into the New Jerusalem. Some of the popular futurist commentaries of the day quibbled over the Holy City’s dimensions—whether it will be a pyramid or a cube and what the rooms, streets, and transportation will be like.4 I tried to picture a city that was fifteen hundred miles tall and wondered what that would do to the earth’s rotation. I also wondered what kind of oysters could produce pearls large enough to become the city’s twelve gates (Rev 21:21).”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“Sometimes we miss the immediacy of Jesus’ warnings because we project his parousia74 into the eschatological distance. When we read his parables that refer to a returning bridegroom, landlord, or king,75 we usually assume that Jesus was foretelling his second coming and the judgments of hellfire. In fact, the surprise visit/return in most of these parables probably refers initially to Jesus’ incarnation, his resurrection, or once he is rejected, to the resulting chain of events that bring down Jerusalem in AD 70. In other words, if the parousia refers to Jesus’ own generation, rather than to the end of time, then Jesus’ use of the historic destruction in Gehenna circa 587 BC is not a metaphor for John’s eschatological lake of fire. Exactly the opposite. John’s apocalyptic lake of fire is a visionary picture of Gehenna’s historic pyres, prophesied by Jesus (reiterating Jeremiah) and fulfilled in AD 70. More simply, Jerusalem’s destruction does not direct us to apocalyptic visions of fire; the heavenly visions indicate the earthly reality.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“God is not angry with you and never has been. He loves you with an everlasting love. Salvation is not a question of “turn or burn.” We’re burning already, but we don’t have to be! Redemption! The life and death of Christ showed us how far God would go to extend forgiveness and invitation. His resurrection marked the death of death and the evacuation of Hades. My hope is in Christ, who rightfully earned his judgment seat and whose verdict is restorative justice, that is to say, mercy.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“the universalism of the Cross invites us to dare hope—hope with conviction—in the effective power of the Cross to eradicate hell; in the faithfulness of God be all in all for the restoration of all; and in the mercy of God whose just judgments will put things to rights. We don’t merely hope: we hope in Christ and the power of his resurrection for a universal liberation from evil unto life.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“Our obsessive attempts to harmonize the Scriptures into artificially coherent, stackable propositions—as if they required us to contend for their reliability or authority—actually do violence to their richness.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem

“Notice that whenever the Abyss is opened in Revelation and “all hell breaks loose,” the results recorded or foreseen are destructive “woes” on the earth: war, famine, disease, and death are on earth, as it is in hell , so to speak. The wrath of the Lamb is that he honors our demands to release humanity’s chaotic will to self-destruct.”
― Bradley Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem