Every voice gathered here is answering one question: When Scripture warns of final punishment, does it mean conscious torment that never ends, or can faithful Christians who submit to the Bible read it another way? Jude 3 Project founder Lisa Fields once described two college friends who settled the question for themselves by walking away. In her words, “they’ve recently left the faith simply because of hell, they couldn’t wrap their mind around a loving God sending people there.” As she relayed their reasoning, they assumed Christianity only works if the traditional picture is true. They could not believe the picture, so they gave up the faith.
The scholars in the Jude 3 Project’s conversations on hell would complicate that assumption without making hell any lighter. The historic majority view, held by most theologians for well over a thousand years, is eternal conscious torment. A serious minority reads the same Bible as teaching that the lost finally perish. A smaller group hopes all people will at last be reconciled to God. None of the scholars here denies a real final judgment. They divide over what that judgment is and how long it lasts, and each side argues from the text.
A second charge runs alongside the first. Fields put it to historical theologian Dr. Kenneth Reid: Was the doctrine of hell built by Europeans to keep enslaved Africans afraid and obedient? The discussion below takes the positions in turn, lets each answer the others, and then sets out where they meet, where they part, and what evidence would settle the remaining differences. Along the way, the charge of oppression runs into an unexpected reply: some of the people most committed to justice for the oppressed insist hardest that judgment is real.