Q & R: Hell

Here’s the Q:

I am deeply drawn to the understanding of the Way of Jesus you describe, and am currently reading for the second time both A New Kind of Christian and A New Kind of Christianity.
I have already decided that the picture of the New Heavens and New Earth cannot contain any “hell” of “eternal, conscious torment.”
But how am i to understand so many sayings of Jesus on this score?

R: Here are several suggestions for you on this important question:
1. If you search this blog on keyword “hell,” you’ll find a number of places where I address this question.
2. My book (conclusion to the trilogy) The Last Word and the Word After That grapples with this question in depth.
3. Several new books also grapple with this issue, including …
– A Gentler God by Doug Frank
– Razing Hell by Sharon Baker
4. On Jesus’ violent imagery in the parables, I’d also recommend …
– Parables as Subversive Speech by William Herzog
5. As you’ll know from A New Kind of Christianity, I think much if not most of what we have traditionally applied to “eternal conscious torment in the afterlife” and “the end of the space-time universe” was actually intended by Jesus to address “the end of the world as they knew it” – meaning the violence that occurred from AD 67-70 and that resulted in the end of the temple, animal sacrifice, the priesthood, etc.