A Brief History of Hell
Before we begin our examination of the arguments given against hell, it will be helpful to trace the development of eschatological thinking, from the earliest recorded speculations about the next world to contemporary attitudes. In this historical prelude we will chronicle the interplay of the various motifs--justice, love, punishment, and reformation--which characterize the modern debate. We will discover that both belief in and denial of hell have ancient pedigrees, and that the philosophical motivations for contemporary positions find their genesis in arguments of centuries past.
Poems of heaven and hell from Ancient Mesopotamia
This book comprises five poems dating from the height of the Babylonian civilisation in the second millennium BC. They include "The New Babylonian Creation", which was recited at the new year festival in honour of the god Marduk and his conquest of Tiamat, "Inanna's Journey to Hell", in which the goddess of fertility descends into a gloomy wasteland of devils and darkness, and "Adapa: the Man", a story of man's fall from grace, not through disobedience but through blind obedience. N.K. Sanders also translated "The Epic of Gilgamesh".
The Logic of God Incarnate
The most important recent philosophical treatment of Ghristology is that of Thomas V. Morris in The Logic of God Incarnate, defending the high-orthodox position that ‘Jesus of Nazareth was one and the same person as God the Son, the Second Person of the divine Trinity’ (p. 13) against the charge that the characteristics of deity and humanity are non-compossible in one person at one time, so that it is a contradiction to attribute both sets of qualities to the historical Jesus of Nazareth. I believe that Morris's defence, impressive though it is, does not succeed but on the contrary provides yet another illustration of the thesis that any attempt to spell out the idea of divine incarnation as a metaphysical theory, rather than as religious metaphor or myth, is bound to be unacceptable or, in traditional terminology, heretical.