This was probably one of the more formative books in my own spiritual development. And now Steve Taylor has made a movie about it. God I want it to be sooooo good. (ht)

I had a thought the other day.  If God’s judgment leaves someone out of the Kingdom of Heaven, which can be rationally described as hell, then I’m going to hell.

Did I get your attention?

Here’s why I’m going to hell.  The broad assumption in evangelical Christianity is that in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must speak a specific belief of Jesus.  This was called the sinner’s prayer when I was growing up.

So let’s say that is true.  It is then arguable that most of the Eastern world, Australia, Asia, and much of the Arab and Jewish world would be excluded. The primary assumption in that model is that grace is only true once it is accepted.  It becomes true in the cosmos, when we accept it.  As Rob Bell asked, “Will billions and billions of people burn forever in hell?”

I’ve said that prayer. I learned to recite it daily in college because I constantly wondered if I had said it right.  When someone speaks this prayer, they are considered in…mostly. ;-P  So I’m assuming that I’m in.  In fact, as Paul would often suggest, I must be in.  I’ve committed my entire life, my entire way of being to following this Jesus guy.  I gave up my career in business to pursue ministry.  I spent most of my life savings so I could spend time developing community based discipleship programs. I wrote a book on the Gospel.  None of that get me in heaven. It simply is.

But if I’ve learned anything from following Jesus, if I’ve learned anything from the Gospel, it is that it is relentless in its pursuit of the lost.  Jesus spoke parable after parable of the lost sheep, coin, and son. If there are people on the outside of the gates of heaven, then I’m rallying the troops inside to go find them.  I’m going to hell to remind them of who they are: children of the living God who are called very good.

Love doesn’t end.  The mission isn’t over if someone is on the outside of the gates.  There is still someone who doesn’t know the message.  Call me a dreamer, but I just can’t see Jesus going all the way to the cross and then saying, “Yep, they just didn’t get it while they were alive.  Let’s leave ‘em to rot and burn.”

Care to come with me?

Harold Camping was wrong.  And with a big THUD the world responds with a collective, “I told you so.”  But I think people like Harold Camping are good for Christianity.  And as strange as that may seem, here why.

When someone of Camping’s power (he’s very wealthy and influential) steps up and makes a prediction, people take notice.  With 5,000 billboards nationwide, you can’t help but see them.  His wealth allowed him the capacity to be heard.  And people did notice.  You probably couldn’t ignore it this weekend, not matter how much you tried. People were talking about it on the radio, in the press, in the blogsphere, and on Facebook.  I personally know of a friend who had a left behind party, recognizing that grace is for all.  So being left behind was still a possibility to share God’s love. The prediction brought out something in the collective conscience that was lying dormant.

People are still aware of God’s power, even when they don’t want to admit it.  I saw people really scared this weekend, people that wouldn’t normally even talk about God.

But Camping’s actions also allowed people to think about the validity of religious leaders words.  It required people to really think about how right he was, in the face of extraordinary faith, and then be wrong.  It humanized the problem, reminding people that no one really knows.  We’re just human wrestling with what it means to be broken.  Camping’s actions will force other leaders to really think about what it means to make statements, to really assume they (we) speak for God.  And it will force people to really take ownership of their own faith.  It will force people to let go of their own immaturity and step up to ask, “What is God really up to?”

And I think that’s a good thing.

Is God’s Word Inerrant? I don’t know but it’s an interesting question. I don’t have any issue with someone believing it is, or believing it’s not.

A friend of mine recently told me that in order to get a job with a ministry, he had to sign a statement of faith which included, among other things, the words, “All Scripture is the infallible word of God.” My friend was wrestling with some of the traditional elements of his faith and working through what it all means. He was pressed to sign it, yet at the same time acknowledging he wasn’t sure if he would be honest in signing it.

I get that.

Unfortunately the idea of inerrancy comes with a truck load of baggage.  We like to take the idea of inspired and then superimpose the idea of inerrant on top of that.  Scripture itself suggests the Bible is inspired.  This site has done a good job of culling all the passages that reinforce the idea. And I’m beginning to know my friend well enough that he wouldn’t question it’s inspiration.  Neither do I.  I  find it incredibly valuable.  The problem is that people then question the difference between inspired and inerrant.  This site did a good job of breaking down that argument.

The question for me is NOT whether Scripture in inerrant or infallible. I can’t prove it one way or another.  It seems like a labyrinth to me that can easily ensnare someone in it’s trap.  And what ends up happening is we get stuck on distinctions that then define the parameters of whether or not someone IS a christian. In other words, we have to believe in inerrancy/infallibility to BE a true Christian.

The question for me is then, “Is Scripture true?” And there’s a huge difference between the two. Infallibility is about perfection, and I’ve found (and you may have a different experience) that it’s largely about winning an argument.  True is different.  It’s largely about experience.  It’s about engaging the text and asking deeply profound questions about it’s legitimacy for life. Does it produce something of value? When I spent my time living in the space of infallibility, I felt like I had to defend my territory.  I was always managing the data that confronted the existing tensions in the Bible itself.  And it was somewhat maddening because the Bible “seems” flawed. There are tensions within the text.  Holding infallibility requires a strange tension.

But when I lived in the space of True, my framework changed.  I didn’t have to defend the idea anymore.  And this freed me up to focus on the actual story presented in the text.  It allowed me to see the story in a whole new way, one that liberated me from religion and into relationship.  It allowed me to begin experiencing what was true by engaging God in the midst of testing what is true.  Because I can’t really prove if Scripture is perfect, but I can’t live into the idea that all of creation has value.  I can’t live into the idea of taking up my cross.  I can live into the idea of practicing love.  And when I do, my experience of Scripture deepens.

Any thoughts to add?

Found this interesting.  It’s easy to base our determination of who is a Christian based on how “good” we follow, making it a religion once again. What do you think?

So I’m leading a class that explores a postmodern understanding of the Gospel.  The dialog walks through my book and looks at the tension within the Gospel.  In each of the first two classes the students have commented on the process of seeing the Gospel in a different way, the experience they encounter in their bodies, and the process of conflict it produces.  I explore this tension, which is called confirmation bias, in my book.  Our bodies naturally search for information that supports what is already there, and is biased against what does not support it.

One of the students brought the above video to my attention, sharing that this is one of the most succinct presentations of the Gospel that he grew up in.  I agreed with him, having grown up with a similar version.  Setting aside that interpretation was deeply important to my faith because it allowed me to see the story very differently.  It didn’t mean I abandoned the Gospel.  I wouldn’t write an entire book about walking away.  My desire was to restore that faith.  But it was only possible when I set it aside.

One of the arguments I make in the book is that the cross is not satisfying God’s divine judgment, but OUR need for proof of what is true (the reality established at the beginning of creation that we are good).  The Tree of Knowledge is not a test of obedience but instead a test of reality with God’s establishment of what is true. Can humanity change what is true? To sin is to get ONE single question wrong: the value of what is real. God establishes in the beginning that it’s all good.  To see it differently is to get it wrong and create an alternative reality.  This false reality creates the idea of separation from God and the assumption of wrath.  We create it by getting the question wrong.  Because if we ARE evil, how can God not remove us?  This separation is the idea of chasm.

One of the tensions we explore is how this chasm is created and solved.  The video was important because it effectively captures the old idea.The historical assumption is that God is the one who can’t overcome our sin.  But the story doesn’t reveal that.  God never leaves.  The story suggests it is US who can’t overcome. So the historical idea creates this deeply embedded idea that God is being appeased at the cross.  This idea leads to Rob Bell’s clever spin, when he says, “And what gets subtly taught is that Jesus rescues you from God?”

Mark states at 1:05 the following: “And when Jesus went to the cross, he took willingly upon him the sin of those who would come to trust in him.  That means me, as a sinner, Jesus went to the cross and took upon himself all my sin, past, present and future. And Jesus Christ, God who was a man, died in my place, for my sins, paying my debt to God, and purchasing my salvation.”

The Gospel Mark presents has an embedded tension.  Is the work on the cross true from God’s perspective, or does it only become true when we accept it?  And if it becomes true, then it presents a remarkable possibility, that we earn our salvation through condition. This is the embedded problem of grace vs works inherent to the arumgent.  If it’s true when we accept it, then it can only be conditional.  But if it’s true regardless, then it creates a very different possibility for us to consider.  That salvation is the change that happens locally in our minds about God’s judgment, not God’s actual judgment.

What I would suggest, but you’ll only discover when you read the book (;-P) is that grace has been and always been true.  Separation is a lie, but it is true for us as long as we hold it.  As my friend Josh succinctly suggested recently, “Love and grace are not linked to our obedience and disobedience but to the character of the Father.” But…and this is a huge but…our capacity to experience it IS conditional upon our acceptance.  This is what we call salvation, whch is the awareness of God’s original reality.  We don’t make it true in the cosmos with our acceptance.  We make it true in our world. So everyone is under grace, but they don’t yet know it.  We can’t earn it by accepting it.  To receive it in our lives is to experience what is, has been, and always will be true.”

This is how Love Wins in the end.  As Ben Stein said, “A lie can’t survive forever.”

Is grace true for an individual, from God’s perspective, if they haven’t consciously acknowledged it?

The Tragic Paradox of the Christian Jerk from Quest Church on Vimeo.

Preach it brother.

PS: Eugene also wrote a post on it.

Post Update: The blog posts comments got messed up so I’m posting this again.

“It also strikes me that truth is never afraid of questions, and when questions are rendered off limits, it at least creates the impression that it is not truth that is being sought, but rather a maintaining of the status-quo.” Matthew Paul Turner, Orthodoxy vs. Heresy: A Power Game?