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In the thirtieth disputation of the Leiden Synopsis (1622), Johannes Polyander elucidates what he considers to be the Reformed doctrine of vocatio. In his explanation of this doctrine, Polyander makes surprising statements concerning the internal call. He teaches that not only the external call, but also the internal call can come to the reprobate. It does not do so all the time, but it does so sometimes, especially in the sphere of the covenant. Yet, when it does, that internal call is ineffectual. This doctrine of an ineffectual internal call is not found in the Canons of Dordt (1618–19), nor in disputations held before the cycle of disputations that became the Leiden Synopsis. Was Polyander's view a compromise with Arminianism? Or was Polyander actually defending Dordt's doctrine? This article builds on Henk van Den Belt's cursory conclusion to this question by providing proof that Polyander was in fact defending Dordt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is generally treated as a soteriological riddle: is Faustus damned, and if so, when, and why? This essay argues that such approaches miss the overwhelming emphasis (in both surviving versions of the play) on Faustus's reprobation. Faustus, instead of presenting a puzzle waiting to be solved, is better appreciated as an incomparable portrait of the experience of reprobate living. Even more, via its textual and performance history, Faustus sheds light on the collective and collaborative practices of real Renaissance actors and theatregoers coming to terms with the post-Reformation religious trauma they shared with the lonely doctor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articler informs about the life and works of Lexicographer Alain Rey, and absence of myths of resurrection or transmigration. Topics include word appears in Christian vocabulary to designate the abode of eternal punishment; and works of Alain Rey, the Cultural Dictionary in the French language, the Dictionary of the Devil's love and the Historical Dictionary of the French language.

A little over a decade after Edward Fudge invited critical readers of The Fire That Consumes to 'measure this work by every proper standard', Robert Peterson responded in a paper presented at the 1994 ETS Convention entitled 'The Hermeneutics of Annihilationism: The Theological Method of Edward Fudge'. In his paper Peterson alleges to 'have pointed out deficiencies in [Fudge's] methodological approach' and concludes that 'evaluated in terms of hermeneutics and theological method, [Fudge's] case appears to be weak'. This paper presents a case for conditional immortality and the annihilation of the finally impenitent, arguing that they-and not the traditional view-result from exegesis done according to accepted hermeneutical principles, responding to Peterson's critique along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the claim that the traditional Christian (Augustinian, Thomistic, Anselmian) idea of hell as a form of eternal punishment (damnation and torment) for human sin cannot be made consistent with the idea of proportionate punishment, and it raises concerns with the notion that divine justice requires divine forgiveness and mercy. It argues that divine justice entails or at least permits retribution as the meting out of punishment by God to those who deserve it in proportion to the degree and amount of harm unduly and responsibly caused by sinners to others. For God to fail to punish those who deserve it in proportion to their harmful wrongdoings would imply God's failure to be both just and omnibenevolent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars emphasize Julian of Norwich's serenity, contrasting her work and its confidence that "all shall be well" with medieval writing more interested in Hell's torments. This serenity distinguishes her, scholars note, from her contemporaries Chaucer and Langland and their fascination with the world's confusion. Julian's confrontation with an unintelligible, muttering fiend near the end of her book, however, reveals similar anxieties in her own writing. Julian indeed avoids dwelling on eternal punishment, but this incoherent attacker jeopardizes her efforts to interpret her revelations and make sense of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the problem of Hell, Buckareff and Plug (Relig Stud 41:39-54, ; Relig Stud 45:63-72, ) have recently proposed and defended an 'escapist' conception of Hell. In short, they propose that the problem of Hell does not arise because God places an open-door policy on Hell. In this paper, I expose a fundamental problem with this conception of Hell-namely, that if there's an open door policy on Hell, then there should be one on Heaven too. I argue that a coherent conception of Heaven cannot have such a policy. Hence, escapism is not an adequate response to the problem of Hell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article provides a description of a 2009 Daoist ritual known as the Ritual for Deliverance, performed in Hong Kong, and intended to free women's souls from xuehu, or the Lake of Blood, in which an early or unnatural death had sent them to within the realm of the netherworld. The rite was performed at the Daoist temple of Yunquan xianguan by female lay Daoists. Also discussed is a comparison of similar rites of Daoists and Buddhists.

The present article intends to analyze the visual representations of the Hell, which are part of the Last Judgment compositions to be found in the historical county of Maramureş. These images - wooden icons and wall paintings - were produced for the wooden churches situated in villages belonging to the Eastern Rite Romanian and Ruthenian communities. The temporal focus of this study is the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries. Seeing as the doctrine of Eternal Punishment is based on the idea of sin, the images of Hell make for a valuable source, able to provide ethical and moral values communicated by the Church through visual speech. The representations of Hell to be found in Maramureş can therefore offer important information about the perception on various sins, manifested throughout these centuries. But this article will carry out a multifaceted analysis, focusing also on various secular aspects and social relationships, aiming to study the depiction of numerous members of the village communities and the inclusion of some local aspects. One of the most important features of iconography of the Last Judgment in Maramureş is the large amount of space taken up by the depictions of Hell. The quantitative analysis of the sins depicted in the scenes of Hell of the Maramureş compositions, highlights an impressive diversity, including no fewer than 49 figures of various damned. The most frequent depictions of sinners are of those who are guilty of sexual sins and those who sleep on Sundays. The large depictions of the Hell, the impressive diversity of the sinners and sometimes the violent punishment inflicted on the damned, demonstrate the emphasis of the moralizing and disciplinary functions which characterize the images of the Last Judgment in Maramureş. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Committed, conservative Christians and Muslims are often characterised by a perceived sense of the absolute certainty of their beliefs. This certainty and the seemingly rigid nature of what they believe (including notions such as judgement and eternal punishment) often bring them into a degree of conflict and competition with other worldviews. This situation can make attempts at mutually stimulating engagement and co-existence outside of evangelisation or debate difficult. However, I will argue that this sense of certainty is primarily located in the implicit presuppositions beneath inherently fluid action and relationship language that can often be expressed through metaphors of movement and proximity. This article analyses such metaphors in testimonials produced by Muslim and Christian converts and argues that they exhibit varying patterns of emphasis. These include a focus on a relationship with God derived from the language of intimate human relationships in the Christian testimonials, as compared to a focus on a personal journey of research and reflection in the Muslim testimonials. I will conclude by arguing that an awareness of particular individual or community patterns of emphasis in the action and relationship language of conservative believers may help those outside these communities establish points of personal connection. These points of connection may in turn contribute to the possibility of successful, mutually stimulating co-existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The details of St. Thomas Aquinas's anthropological view are subject to debate. Some philosophers believe he held that human persons survive their deaths. Other philosophers think he held that human persons cease to exist at their death, but come back into being at the general resurrection. In this paper, I defend the latter view against one of the most significant objections it faces, namely, that it entails that God punishes and rewards separated souls for the sins or merits of something else: the (non-existent) persons to whom those souls once belonged. The objector takes this entailment to be problematic. I argue that it fits in well with St. Thomas's views about punishment and about persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary secular societies, ideas of an afterlife have become quite diverse, ranging from secular to religious and spiritual conceptions. In this article, an experimental study is reported in which the postself, a person's imagination of an after-death reputation, is tested as a protective buffer against mortality salience effects within a largely secular sample of participants. Before inducing mortality salience, the postself was affirmed or not affirmed. Results show that this reflection on personal continuity after death eliminates the effects of mortality salience on the accessibility of death-related thoughts. The discussion focuses on how the postself (the self will succeed death) relates to the more general concept of symbolic immortality (the self is part of a cultural worldview that will succeed death). Moreover, the relation between the postself and religiosity is discussed, and suggestions for future research are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article consists of a critical discussion of the debate between Thomas Talbott and Oliver Crisp on the philosophical justification for the traditional Augustinian concept of everlasting punishment in hell. First, I outline the debate, describing Talbott's challenges to the Augustinian retributivist understanding of everlasting punishment and Crisp's responses to them. Next, I analyse their main points of disagreement, indicating the strengths and weaknesses of their arguments. Finally, I present conclusions arising from analysis of the debate in the framework of Christian theology, and I discuss possible implications for the thesis of everlasting punishment in monotheistic religious thought in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author comments on the theory of author Frtiz Kemmler concerning the medieval vision of life and death. He examines how Kemmler refers three different visions from England in which the protagonist have undergone some sort of transformation and painful restoration before the salvation of the soul can be achieved. He investigates how Kemmler's medieval vision attempts to move his audience to actively pursue a better life. The author commends Kemmler's vision story, which has varying styles with different protagonists and resolutions to reach specific audience that even the lower class are convinced to do an act of penitence.

The author comments on the article "Transformations of Life and Death in Medieval visions of the Other World," by Fritz Kemmler. He examines how Kemmler encourages people to revise the concept of life and death to properly understand medieval vision texts. He also mentions Kemmler's concise description of the principal characteristics of the eschatological vision text, which helps him remind of the partial paralysis that preceded the 14-century Julian of Norwich's revelations. However, the author argues Kemmler's theory of life and death by referring to the comic entitled "The Apocalypse of Golias the Bishop" that rather tells other story.

The purpose of this study was to conduct a descriptive analysis of multiple dimensions of religious belief and practice among older people in Japan with data from a nationwide sample. Six dimensions were evaluated: religious affiliation, involvement in formal religious organisations, private religious practices, the functions of prayer, belief in punishment by supernatural forces, and beliefs about the afterlife. In addition to describing these dimensions for the sample as a whole, tests were performed to see if they varied by age, sex, marital status, education and for those living in rural or urban areas. The findings suggest that even though older people in Japan are not highly involved in formal religious institutions, they engage frequently in private religious practices, and that while many older people in Japan do not endorse some religious beliefs (e.g. about the quality of the afterlife), there is strong adherence to others (e.g. beliefs about punishment by supernatural forces). It was found that older women are more deeply involved in religion than older men, and that levels of religious involvement appear to be higher in rural than in urban areas. Less pronounced differences were found with respect to age, but compared to the 'young-old', the ' oldest-old ' aged 75 or more years were more deeply involved in those aspects of religion that take place outside formal institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the social history of death, there has been little scholarly examination of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on perceptions of and discourses about hell. Scholars who have addressed the issue tend to conclude that Protestant and Catholic hells differed little from each other in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of printed English-language sources, and finds significant disparities on questions such as the location of hell and the nature of hell-fire. It argues that such divergences were polemically driven, but none the less contributed to the so-called 'decline of hell'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dinbilimleri Journal is the property of Dinbilimleri Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Hell is traditionally understood as a theological and eschatological matter concerned with the destiny of the dead in an otherworld even until eternity. Although the beliefs and characteristics of the various hells in the world religions share many similarities, there are nevertheless some striking differences. In a comparative perspective the Christian hell is the worst, but the belief that hell is solely an eternal abyss of fire torturing the damned is a late construct. Apart from theological explanations, in order to understand how these beliefs have developed a perspective emphasizing historical processes and the role of materiality in religion may add new knowledge to why the different hells have various characteristics. With regards to the Christian hell, it became physically manifest on earth in several ways. The burning of witches alive on pyres illuminated the gruesome pains the sinners faced and thus visualized the suffering in hell. Various places were also ascribed the characteristics of hell and purgatory creating a "topography of hell" in this world. Hence, as will be argued, these visualizations and materializations of hell on earth had an important role in the process of developing ideas of hell as an eternal and torturing abyss of fire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which focuses on the two large segments of American lawyer jokes, the jokes which deal with lawyers' extermination and the place where lawyers go after they die. The study attempts to analyze jokes in which lawyers are subject for removal from society or even more frequently, extermination. It also examines the joke in which lawyer generally go to hell after their death. It cites that all the jokes quoted and discussed were collected from hundred of websites and Internet sources.

If the ideal of justice includes effective punishment of offenders, an extension into afterlife must be postulated. This still involves all the questionable aspects and paradoxes of punishment that make rational and enlightened argumentation difficult. A historical survey of ancient tentatives at hell lore shows diverse starting points and interests. There is just a germ of such speculations in Sumerian. When hell fire first appears in Egypt, it goes together with the fear of magic from the dead; in Zoroastrianism and Judaism it is partisan interest which makes the adherents of the wrong religion destined for hell. In Greece we find various ethical and poetical motifs interfering, from the powerful yet enigmatic images in the Odyssey to a general proclamation of punishments in the Hymn to Demeter. The most graphic and horrible descriptions of something like hell are finally found in Plato, whose sources — besides Homer — can be postulated but not identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It will be argued in this paper that Odysseus does not descend into Hades even though he witnesses the punishment of certain sinners and that the latter are envisaged in the sky as constellations. This hypothesis explains the phrase “meadow of asphodels” and the repetitive action of the sinners. It will also be argued that the origin of this cosmology is Egyptian. The Homeric cosmos is divided into a diurnal and nocturnal world: a human habitation and one which lies beyond the sun's orbit and contains the heroes and the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, the earliest extant example of ancient Menippean satire, tells of Emperor Claudius' death and ascent to heaven, where his request for deification is rejected by the council of the gods, and his subsequent descent to the underworld, where he is condemned of mass murder of Roman noblemen. Claudius is not an observer of things in heaven and the underworld or a character involved in a quest for knowledge and truth, but a dead character who undergoes judgment. He is also a dead character who behaves as if he were still alive. Seneca suggests that Claudius' afterlife is a mere continuation of his earthly life and vice-versa that he had always been living in an isolated and “fantastic” world. The Apocolocyntosis parodies epic descents and historiographical topoi as well as the mythological otherworld of punishment and reward, ideas of afterlife, and imperial deification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article surveys some relevant developments of conceptualizations of hell in the Rg-Veda, the Avestan corpus and the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) literature of the Zoroastrians, where hell is more extensively discussed. The article concludes by looking at the belief in heaven and hell among the world-wide Zoroastrian diaspora communities, urban laity in Mumbai, and professional priests in Westen India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the aspects of eternal punishment as viewed by philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It discusses that a debate came out in Germany around fifty years after the death of Leibniz concerning his views on the Christian doctrine of eternal punishment of the wicked. It notes that theologian Johann August Eberhard argued that Leibniz secretly rejected the doctrine and viewed that all humans would eventually be saved. It also notes that philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing considered Leibniz an adherent of the doctrine of eternal punishment. It mentions different views and positions which Leibniz might have considered. It examines Leibniz's writings to reveal which of the views he accepted.

Among one of the important matters on which Psychology of Religion studies is religious imaginations. Among them, the imaginations of heaven and hell also have an important place in this field. The imaginations of heaven and hell and mental development may be influenced by various social environmental factors, before all by family, and religious beliefs. However, children's imaginations of heaven and hell show certain differences from adult's imaginations in this matter. In this study, the imaginations of heaven and hell of primary school students who constitute suitable samples to determine their imaginations of heaven and hell in both concrete and abstract levels have been tried to identify based on their expressions in this matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines Damascene theologian Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's discussions on the duration of punishment or Hell-Fire under classical SunnE eschatology. It details the influence of Ibn Taymiyya, teacher of al-Jawziyya on the views of al-Jawziyya regarding the duration of Hell-Fire. It discusses the role of the SalafE in the al-Jawziyya's concept regarding the duration of the chastisement in Hell-Fire. It explains how al-Jawziyya adopted the theodicy of optimism of his teacher Ibn Taymiyya in exploring the Hell-Fire in various discussions.

The purgatory doctrine, which has played a vital role in Christian culture, states that most believers must experience afterlife punishment in order to be cleansed of their sins before entering Heaven. Traditional Islamic theology rejects the notion of purgatory (Al-Motahher) through the Balance doctrine (Mizan), which states that if the good deeds performed during a Muslim's life outweigh their bad deeds, the person will enter heaven without suffering or punishment. This study hypothesizes that folk intuitions and cognitive biases (tendency to proportionality) explain, in part, the emergence and spread of the purgatory doctrine in the Islamic world. Drawing on a cognitive science of religion lens, the current study examines this hypothesis in an Islamic cultural context. Quantitative surveys (three studies) conducted in Jordan (n = 605, and n = 239) and Malaysia (n = 303) indicate that the doctrine of purgatory is prevalent (36% in Jordan and 69% in Malaysia) despite its contradiction with the Balance doctrine as defined by Islamic theology. To our knowledge, this is the first study documenting the phenomenon of theological incorrectness in Muslim afterlife beliefs by using empirical research. Implementation of the findings and suggestions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults (N = 48) listened to stories featuring characters that experienced one of four types of thoughts after deciding to transgress or comply with a rule: thoughts about desires, rules, future negative outcomes, or future punishment. Participants predicted and explained the characters’ emotions. Results showed that young children, as with adults, predicted positive emotions for willpower and negative emotions for transgression at low rates for the think-desire trials, and at high rates for the think-rule and think-future trials. They also modified their emotion explanations in line with the focus of characters’ thoughts. These data provide unprecedented evidence that young children can reason flexibly about emotions in rule situations when provided explicit, salient information about people's thoughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the theological views of the Unitarian Universalist minister Orestes A. Brownson during the final years of his ministry before becoming a Roman Catholic convert and their context within the history of the Universalist movement in the 19th-century. Commentary is given criticizing how Brownson described his own early views in his autobiography "The Convert." Further analysis is offered highlighting the theological issues such as soteriology, the person of Jesus Christ, and future punishment seen in Brownson's writings and comparing them to the larger debates of the denomination at the time.

The article focuses on evaluating risk preference as an explanation of sex differences in religiousness. It is posed that risk preference theory adheres to the tenet that females are more religious than males because they are more motivated by the threat of punishment in the afterlife. The authors evaluated the theory empirically and formally. Empirically, they established that sex differences in religiosity are no smaller among those who do not believe in the concept of hell. Formally, they maintained that the rational choice reasoning forwarded by the theory leads to various conclusions if one considers belief in eternal rewards as well as eternal punishment. They have concluded that psychological characteristics are almost crucial to understanding sex difference.

The author discusses the theory of escapism, where God has a relationship with those in Hell. The theories of luck and the theory of Hell as they relate to religion are also discussed. The author feels that the problem of religious luck is problematic for the theory of Hell. The author poses a hybrid solution where there is a compromise between the two ideologies.

Few studies have examined beliefs about hell--a place of punishment in the afterlife. We compared the afterlife beliefs of Catholics, nonevangelical Protestants, and evangelical Protestants in two samples of undergraduates. In Study 1, Catholic and Protestant students diverged in their beliefs about the nature of hell and their ideas about why a person would go to hell. Catholic students tended to focus on specific sins such as murder as predictors of hell, whereas Protestants were more likely to emphasize unbelief and a rejecting attitude toward God. Catholics estimated that less than ¼ of people would go to hell, whereas Protestant estimates were twice as high. Study 2 demonstrated that Catholic students were more likely than Protestants to believe in purgatory, a place of temporary punishment. Study 2 also demonstrated that relative to nonevangelicals, evangelicals reported greater belief in heaven and hell and estimated that a larger percentage of people would end up in hell. Psychological implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Epicureans, anticipating one's own annihilation ought not to be a frightening experience. Non-existence precludes the possibility of sensation, and hence annihilation can be neither pleasant nor unpleasant. And that which cannot be felt is unworthy of fear. Certain objectors to this claim have asserted that one's own annihilation really is a terrifying prospect. Against this assertion, I argue that those who make it are guilty of precisely the kind of confusion that Epicurus and his disciples alert us to, namely that of projecting ourselves into the thought of our own non-existence. A further objection to Epicureanism involves the claim that, since the fear of death is merely the converse of the love of life, the one cannot be extinguished without inevitably extinguishing the other (to inevitably disastrous effect). I argue that this objection relies upon an exaggeration of thanatological fear's power and an unduly pessimistic assessment of human reason's capacity to positively modify emotional states and dispositions. I conclude that neither of the objections considered here has vindicated the fear and anxiety commonly associated with anticipating one's annihilation, and that the Epicurean attempt to deflate these debilitating emotions remains valid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a causal theory of verdicts that condemns the actual prepunishment of people for their future crimes. In the book "The Minority Report," a science fiction story about pre-crime, Precrime Commissioner, John T. Anderton, is himself accused of the future murder of a man unknown to him. He struggles to prove his innocence. A verdict is a finding of guilt. The defendant's legal status only changes when the verdict is incorporated in a judgment of conviction.

This article focuses on the life after death. According to Bertrand Russell, a person is simply a set of experiences and that these are bound up with the structure of the brain, which of course dissolves at death. Belief in the afterlife is purely emotional, some people believe they are very good and the world is very good, so they must survive. But, Russell argues, most people are so bad and the world so awful, it is better to think the world is malevolently created and to hope that our lives are transient. Belief in the afterlife is threaded into common thought and everyday practice. The possibility of afterlife haunts contemporary healthcare, medical research, family life and love lives, religion, bioethics, art, and people's ordinary responses to loss, need and suffering.