Canceling Hell

[My wife] and I have to admit we don't like the idea of hell. The problem is that the word of God teaches it. Many have tried to mitigate it by redefinition, but in the Nineteenth Century, groups just eliminated or canceled it. The Second Adventist Movement was birthed out of the failure of Jesus to return, as predicted by William Miller. The Millerite movement became the Second Advent Movement and the various Adventist offshoots like the Seventh Day Adventists and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (Jehovah's Witnesses) simply eliminated hell. As How 19th-century Spiritualists ‘canceled’ the idea of hell to address social and political concerns points out, there were others:   

Spiritualists warned that the idea of hell allowed people to remain complacent: Let hell punish the brutal enslaver, the cruel prison warden, the merciless factory foreman, the abusive husband. Hell gave believers a way to escape the responsibility of addressing burning social ills in the here and now. By relinquishing the “bottomless pit, which they have been taught to believe in,” Isaac Post quoted a spirit saying, a new ethos of urgent and sweeping reform could materialize.

Even today, some spiritual activists consider hell belief an impediment to systemic social change. For example, prison abolitionist Hannah Bowman wrote in a 2023 collection on spirituality and abolition, “Insofar as hell is defined by coercion/confinement, separation, and retribution, it is to some degree related to any societal and state interventions reliant upon those practices.”

What each group shares in common if their desire to refashion God and His creation in their own image. Whatever else in involved with Hell, it is God allowing the unredeemed to have what they have demanded, life without God. Life without God also means life without all that comes from God. No light only eternal darkness. No comfort, only eternal loneliness and torment at their own hands. Declaring Hell canceled is a fool's errand. When they breath their last reality sets in and then it is too late. 

https://mailchi.mp/8aa1e1cc41ae/cultural-influences-among-some-african-word-of-faith-adherents-part-2?e=169825fd77