Critique of The Final End of The Wicked by Edward Fudge
The Final End of The Wicked written by Edward Fudge tries to give us the contrasting side of the argument between the wicked’s final destruction and the never-ending conscious torture. The author talks about the ever feared eternal punishment that is bequeathed with the wicked. He presents his article with a very simple understanding to the readers which position he is supporting. He restates his opinion which says the idea of unending torture is merely an irreligious view based on assumption and not in scripture. The subject matter Fudge brings about is a very unique one that requires lots of valor in order to think out of the box and fight against the old belief. He contrasts between the Old Testament and the New Testament in order to prove his theory. As the process goes on, he argues that there was no such idea as ‘eternal punishment’ mentioned in the Old Testament, whereas, the New Testament calls for it. He says this misinterpretation was due to the inter-testamental years which played a major role in the enhancement of t...
Foreboding and dreadful describe the tone of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. Edwards makes the tone very clear by saying “The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire” (154). He tries to convey the wrath of god that will come upon them if they do not devoted themselves to Christ by saying “Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon souls, all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God.” (154).
On July 8th 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Enfield, Connecticut. Edwards states to his listeners that God does not lack in power, and that people have yet not fallen to destruction because his mercy. God is so forgiving that he gives his people an opportunity to repent and change their ways before it was too late. Edwards urges that the possibility of damnation is immanent. Also that it urgently requires the considerations of the sinner before time runs out. He does not only preach about the ways that make God so omnipotent, but the ways that he is more superior to us. In his sermon, Edwards uses strong, powerful, and influential words to clearly point out his message that we must amend our ways or else destruction invincible. Edwards appeals to the spectators though the various usages of rhetorical devices. This includes diction, imagery, language/tone and syntax. Through the use of these rhetoric devices, Edwards‘s purpose is to remind the speculators that life is given by God and so they must live according to him. This include...
In the 1950 novel Fahrenheit 451, AUTHOR Ray Bradbury presents the now familiar images of mind controlING worlds. People now live in a world where they are blinded from the truth of the present and the past. The novel is set in the, perhaps near, future where the world is AT war, and firemen set fires instead of putting them out. Books and written knowledge ARE banned from the people, and it is the firemen's job to burn books. Firemen are the policemen of THE FUTURE. Some people have rebelled by hiding books, but have not been very successful. Most people have conformed to THE FUTURE world. Guy Montag, a fireman, is a part of the majority who have conformed. BUT throughout the novel Montag goes through a transformation, where he changes from a Conformist to a Revolutionary.
It is easy to place the blame on fate or God when one is encumbered by suffering. It is much harder to find meaning in that pain, and harvest it into motivation to move forward and grow from the grief. It is imperative for one to understand one’s suffering as a gateway to new wisdom and development; for without suffering, people cannot find true value in happiness nor can they find actual meaning to their lives. In both Antigone and The Holy Bible there are a plethora of instances that give light to the quintessential role suffering plays in defining life across cultures. The Holy Bible and Sophocles’ Antigone both mirror the dichotomous reality in which society is situated, underlining the necessity of both joy and suffering in the world.
“Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death” (Conrad 1). From the beginning of the novel, Night, by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist Eliezer is portrayed as a very religious person, and his belief in God is absolute, but as the novels proceeds this sense of faith ends because of the circumstances Eliezer has to go through. One can infer that the changes in Eliezer’s belief were due to several reasons. This essay will be focusing on how Eliezer’s journey of the holocaust causes drastic changes of his views and beliefs in the benevolent God. Some of the reasons why Eliezer loses faith and belief in God include: the cruelty and evil that Eliezer has to witness at the German concentration camps, the selfishness that he sees from people on his journey, and the loses faces due to the war. Therefore, Elie Wiesel has attempted to portray the holocaust as the driving force for the protagonist’s disbelief in God, and has also pointed out how cruelty and evil affects Eliezer’s faith and his belief in the Benevolent.
A crucial concept developed throughout Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved is the process of “the demolition of a man” through useless acts of violence. In order for the Nazis to control and murder without regard or guilt, they had to diminish men into subhumans. Those who entered the camps were stripped of their dignity and humanity, devoid of any personal identity. Men and women were reduced to numbers in a system that required absolute submission, which placed them in an environment where they had to struggle to survive and were pitted against their fellow prisoners. The purpose of the camps were not merely a place for physical extermination, but a mental one as well. Primo Levi exposes these small and large acts of deprivation and destruction within his two texts in order for readers to become aware of the affects such a system has on human beings, as well as the danger unleashed by a totalitarian system.
After the atrocious genocide that occurred in Germany, called the Holocaust, many came to ask, “How can a supposedly loving God sit back and let such a horrible thing happen?” Even during the event, Jews may have thought, “Where is our God” Why is he doing this to us?” When such an awful matter occurs,it is very much challenging to believe in God, let alone mankind. After seeing many of his fellow Jewish companions being beaten, cremated, murdered, and treated like animals, survivor and author of Night, Elie Wiesel, still did not lose hope. He quotes, “After the Holocaust, I did not lose faith in God. I lost faith in mankind.” It seems as if only good suffer and wicked prosper; perhaps God is not all-powerful, and is bound by the rules of physics
In the fourteenth century a renowned Italian rhymester or poet called Dante emerged. He used this book six as a journey through hell in the poem inferno. In the same technique as Virgilis, Dante was able to come up with different designs of hell in which greater and severe punishment and sentences were beheld on those individuals who committed greater seasons. In this passage it is evident that Dante exercised his imagination and invention to come up with stri...
The North Korean government is known as authoritarian socialist; one-man dictatorship. North Korea could be considered a start of a dystopia. Dystopia is a community or society where people are unhappy and usually not treated fairly. This relates how Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 shows the readers how a lost of connections with people and think for themselves can lead to a corrupt and violent society known as a dystopia.
Dante Alighieri presents a vivid and awakening view of the depths of Hell in the first book of his Divine Comedy, the Inferno. The reader is allowed to contemplate the state of his own soul as Dante "visits" and views the state of the souls of those eternally assigned to Hell's hallows. While any one of the cantos written in Inferno will offer an excellent description of the suffering and justice of hell, Canto V offers a poignant view of the assignment of punishment based on the committed sin. Through this close reading, we will examine three distinct areas of Dante's hell: the geography and punishment the sinner is restricted to, the character of the sinner, and the "fairness" or justice of the punishment in relation to the sin. Dante's Inferno is an ordered and descriptive journey that allows the reader the chance to see his own shortcomings in the sinners presented in the text.
In conclusion, Amery’s book is a testimony of him accepting what has befallen to him. He brings light to what torture was and is now in a world that can be distrustful. That losing one’s faith in the world and humankind is not an easy understanding. He wants the world to know that torture is not just physical; it is also mental and verbal. It is the “first blow” whether that is a word in meanness or punch to the face, torture is the evil that comes from someone who knows nothing good. Torture for the Jews is a way of life now, because it will never leave their memory, it has become a part of them in every way.
What I detected, rightly or wrongly, was an animus against punishment as such. When I gingerly introduced the subject of Hell, those who had spontaneously rejected capital punishment and then had some second thoughts about life imprisonment when looked at in itself and not as an alternative to the death penalty seemed inclined toward a creative interpretation of eternal punishment. And of course there have been eminent theologians who have wondered aloud about the doctrine of Hell. Even Jacques Maritain, late in his life had written equivocally on the subject.
Eichmann is the important executor of the Nazi massacre of the Jews. However, this concept is also not originally raised by Arendt, it comes from her husband Heinrich Blücher as an ironic statement for evil (Ulrich, paragraph 11). However, it idea becomes the key words for her subheading for her work “Eichmann in Jerusalem A Report on the Banality of Evil” which published in 1965. In this book, Arendt indicates that when we are facing this specific criminal, we are not facing the collective crime from totalitarianism any more, but an individual crime of an official from the totalitarian government. Therefore, the “radical evil” and “the banality of evil” are not two contradictory ideas logically. They are two different conclusions that are made by Arendt with two different angles to consider what is “evil”. The “radical evil” considers more about the society and “the banality of evil” concerns more about the
In conceiving the punishments of Hell, Dante employs mythical material and elements of popular faith; they are enormously imaginative, but each single one of them is based on strict and precise reflection, on the rank and degree of the sin in question, on a thorough knowledge of rational systems of ethics; and each one, as a concrete realization of the idea of divine order, is calculated to provoke rational thought concerning the nature of this sin, that is, the way in which it deviates from the divine order. (111)
Dante’s Inferno presents the reader with many questions and thought provoking dialogue to interpret. These crossroads provide points of contemplation and thought. Dante’s graphic depiction of hell and its eternal punishment is filled with imagery and allegorical meanings. Examining one of these cruxes of why there is a rift in the pits of hell, can lead the reader to interpret why Dante used the language he did to relate the Idea of a Just and perfect punishment by God.