Below is my transcript of this interview excerpt:

Eric Metaxas: Hey there folks, it’s The Eric Metaxas Show. This is “Hell Week” on the Eric Metaxas show. This is my second show with my old friend George Sarris—fellow Greek, fellow born again Jesus freak who believes in the inerrancy of the Bible. George welcome to the program.

George Sarris: Thank you very much.

Eric: Your book, as we said earlier, is titled Heaven’s Doors, and you said in a last program that most Christians believed the view that you believe, for the first five hundred years of the Church. So what happened so that we have this current view that hell is a place of conscious, eternal, never-ending punishment?

George: That’s a good question. The simple answer is that politics entered the picture. You’ve got to remember the first three centuries of the church, Christians were persecuted. So if you’re going to be a Christian, you had to be pretty serious about your faith. Then Constantine made Christianity the preferred religion of the Empire, and from that point on, what you had are people that get into positions of leadership who have mixed motives: some of them are sincere, for sure, some of them are not quite as sincere.

You come to the 6th century with a man by the name of Justinian the first. Justinian’s was the Roman Emperor. He wanted to restore the glory of the Roman Empire and he felt that it was important to have no resistance to what he believed, and so therefore he wanted power. And Eric, in all seriousness, if you have the power to kill somebody on this earth, and to torture them, and do all kinds of mean things to them, that’s a great amount of power. But if you not only have power to do that on earth but you also have the power to tell them if they will be suffering, like that, consciously forever, that is phenomenal power!

As the church moved into the Middle Ages in the West (not so much in the East, by the way. The East never lost view of this particular understanding of Scripture) you have the Inquisition. If people didn’t believe what you believed, you tortured them and then some of them were put to death. But if you want to keep power, that’s a great way to keep power.

Eric: I want to give my audience a sense of what you’ve been through, just by bringing up this this topic. Since I know you, I got to hear about this, and you write about it in the book. What happened?

George: Yeah, it was kind of intense there for a while. When Rob Bell came out with his book in 2011, I’d been working on [my book] for a while (I’d actually completed an initial draft) but it was an issue nobody even thought about, nobody even talked about. He brought it into the forefront. I was working with a Christian ministry (had been working with them for 10 years) and I felt, well, I’d better let the leadership of the ministry know what I’m thinking. I was starting to write a couple of blog articles to try to correct misinformation so I sent the the manuscript out to the man in charge of the ministry and within three days I was terminated because of “doctrinal aberrations”.

My church—my wife and I (and our family) had been actively involved in our church for 20 years—when a person within the church wrote to the elders, saying, “How can George Sarris continue to be a member of this church when he obviously doesn’t believe the statement of faith?” And so one of the elders took me out and we talked for a while and decided that it would be best for my wife and I to leave that church.

I was part of a Bible study—a couples Bible study with my wife and I—when they found out what I believe they asked us not to return. We were involved in a ministry to international students at the University of Bridgeport, when I explained to the person in charge that this is what I thought, I was asked not to return again.

I have a pastor friend of mine in the Denver area who had been, I think, pastor of one of the largest churches in his denomination, and he made people aware that he believed that God was good and he was going to ultimately restore all. He was brought up on charges, tried, and defrocked. One of the biggest questions that comes up is, “George, if this is true, why have I never heard that before?”

Eric: Yeah.

George: My answer is intimidation led to fear, which resulted in ignorance in future generations.

Eric: Okay, we’re out of time. We’re going to be right back talking to George Sarris about Heaven’s Doors and hell.