A message from Anonymous
Hello! Do you believe in "Toll Houses"? Can you explain what is it? Thanks.

toll houses

Hello my friend!

Honestly, I had never heard the english word. I knew it in Greek, but not in English. But I searched for it, and I found two interesting links about Toll Houses:

Toll Houses: After Death Reality or Heresy?

Aerial Toll-Houses (Orthodoxwiki)

To say a few words, just as Fr. Thomas Hopko mentions, it is a very classical, traditional, orthodox, allegorical teaching that began to be too literalistically interpreted, and therefore got deviated in various ways.

To close my reply, I would like to admit that I am not an Orthodox theologian. Eschatology is a part that I haven’t study much (yet) so please feel free to ask your question at AskOrthodox, and you will receive a much more convenient answer.

Thank you very much!

God bless you always!

Our Hell and our Paradise are prepared by us, here.

Sun

“….No, God does not condemn; it is Man who makes a choice. Man goes off to eternity together with his sins. If you have been a fornicator or a drunkard or had no love in you, that is how you will go there.

Here on earth you can satisfy your passions, and you can even commit murder in order to satisfy yourself.

Man retains every sinful tendency, even in the other world. Except that he will no longer be able to satisfy it there. For the sinner, these will be the “tortures of Hell”. It is not a case of “punishment”; Man is tortured, by his very own choice.

God does not provide us with a “Hell”. God says to us:  “Come and inherit the Kingdom of Heaven”; it is Man who carries Hell itself inside him. This means that our hell and our Paradise are both prepared by us, here…”

Martyrs

Children Martyrs of Prebilovci

“I say that martyrs of that time excel all martyrs, for martyrs hither to have wrestled with men only, but in the time of antichrist they shall battle with satan in his own person.”

-St Cyril of Jerusalem (5th c.)