Yesterday I had a very intense conversation with a good friend about hell.  Not the location but the state.  You see my friend had fallen into hell, grasping to the last shred of evidence that she was worth it, yet just as willing to give in to the reality that she wasn’t.  She could understand the idea that God loved her, but she couldn’t grasp the idea of loving herself.  There was just too much evidence swirling in her brain, reminding her of her failures.  It was one of the hard conversations that reminded me how self-destructive we can be.  But it also reminded me that much of our conversations regarding hell are just so off the mark.

I firmly hold that the problem we’re all wrestling with is very simple.  How could God love me when I’ve done that?  But yesterday reminded me that we’re also wrestling with the idea of, “How could I love myself when I’ve done that?” It’s so easy to keep a ledger on ourselves, keeping track of each little tit and tittle that we’ve done, always ready to pull the book out and say, “Yep, you really blew that one!”  We’re the judge, jury and executioner with relentless punity.

The problem I have with our historical understanding of hell is that although the verses exists on it, and Jesus does talk about it, the very idea of it seems to contradict the intent of God throughout the story.  In other words, from a macro level, hell (in our current evangelical construct) contradicts the establishment of grace (both before time and at the cross).  God spends thousands of years setting up the nation of Israel in order to reveal the validity of grace as how things operate.  Why would God suddenly forget that grace at the moment of divine judgment?

In other words,  could the problem be our doubt about grace?  We just don’t buy it.  Because if God actually acted in accordance with grace, everyone would get in. Not because there isn’t justice in grace, but because justice is defined by it.  Real love is the capacity to overcome the negative judgment we make in the midst of the worst.  Real love is the capacity to embody the belief of the true worth even to the enemy.  And if grace is true, the heaven (or the Kingdom of God) would be filled with all the people we don’t really like.  And from this side of life that could easily be seen as hell.

So what if the final judgment is not Jesus condemning the sheep and the goats to eternal separation, but instead Jesus giving humanity it’s wish.  Jesus never judges the two.  He simply separates them based on who they think they already are.  And he uses their own evidence they’re holding onto.  And in doing so, they miss what really defines them, which is God. They’re unwilling to let go of their ledger.

I’ve come to really believe that the problem isn’t an angry God, bent on establishing a punitive justice.  That God is dead to me.  I’ve come to see a God that is bent on establishing a deep sense of grace that makes me wildly uncomfortable.  Because if grace is really true, if it’s really the defining structure of the universe, then I’ve got to let go of my own ledger.

“Ignorance is bliss.” English poet Thomas Gray

Yesterday I tweeted an old thought that came to mind a couple of years ago.  It said, “Which is better, to be happily deceived or disillusioned, yet aware?” So much of my life over the last 10 years has been about wrestling with my own disillusions, yet aware that they exist.

And as I was driving this morning I was thinking there are essentially three approaches to dealing with pain and suffering.  We can simply ignore the pain and suffering, moving through life as happily deceived, yet still suffering under the weight of circumstance.  We can acknowledge it’s existence as though we have no capacity or power to deal with it.  Or we choose to move in through and beyond it by addressing it.

The first option I think is the most common.  It’s just easier to ignore reality, even when it our ignorance is the very thing that fuels that reality’s existence.  The second option is depressive.  To see the problem and resolve the self to the idea that nothing can change is despairing, if not nihilistic.  The third option is to confront the problem causing the pain and suffering.  Yet to do that we have to assume we have the capacity to overcome it.  And unless we see who we really are, as beloved children of God, we likely won’t.

When Jesus said, “Come follow me,” I can’t ignore that it led him to the cross.  But the cross was a waystation.  It wasn’t the final destination.  What if Jesus knew that to get to the other side of pain and suffering we had to go through it.

I’m learning that my ignorance is not bliss.  It’s destructive and painful in all the wrong ways.  It compels me to infinitely poor choices that usually lead to regret.  But when I confront my ignorance and set down my pride, I can usually find my way through.

I was also thinking, “So much of pain and suffering feels like hell.  It feels like walking through the fire.  It feels like separation from God.  Because in the midst of pain and suffering, when I’m ridiculously honest with myself, my heart is crying out, “Where are you God!”  Is it really possible that God could actually forget me.

“When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” Isa 43:2

The only way I can discover the other side of the cross is to keep walking towards it.

So I’m watching LOST with my kids. We’re starting from the beginning and we’re going to watch all the episodes together.

In the early episodes, the main characters encounter the monster.  It’s always in the shadows and is rarely seen.  And it led to a great conversation about fear. My kids didn’t even see it, yet they were afraid.  Their imaginations ran to the possibilities as opposed to what was actually happening.

In the first episode, Jack recounts a moment in surgery when he was overtaken by terror.  It was interesting to hear his experience.  For five seconds, he simply allowed himself to experience fear.  He allowed the fear to do it’s work.  It had arrived and so he gave into it.  But then after five seconds he confronted it, and it went away.

I’ve been asking myself how I deal with fear.  How often do I allow the fear to do it’s work? What I’ve observed about myself is that for the most part, my first reaction is to avoid fear.  And in trying to avoid it, I give it more power.  By avoiding it, I actually empower it with my resistance.  My initial thought is that if I give into it, I’ll be agreeing to it, as thought fear’s message were true.  But what I’m learning is that fear has value.  It has work to do.  Jack’s words remind me that there is a way through fear, but it usually begins with confronting it and allowing it do it’s work.

How do you experience fear?

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.

What is your?

I wrote the following post almost three years ago in the midst of some heated conversations.  Lately it feels like I need to restate this again. Although my writing has broadened a little beyond just theology, it is still a central focus of this blog.

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If you read my blog on a regular basis, you are gonna want to read this.

I love blogging but it can sometimes be hazardous to my health.  I say that in jest but in some ways it is true.  I take every word I say here extremely seriously.  I often deeply feel the weight of the stuff I write because it pushes boundaries, and provokes tension.  I read my posts over and over for clarity, hopefully making my point clear.  But alas, this doesn’t always happen.  Some people jump to conclusions that simply aren’t true.  So I feel it is necessary to make a disclaimer about this blog.

The purpose of this blog is to share my theological and missional explorations of what it means to follow Jesus.  This is me working out my faith in a public sphere.  I started this blog because I am a writer and my posts are my practice of writing.  And what I have found is that a lot of people are exploring the same questions that I am exploring.  Part of this is to connect in thought and conversation to those people, which I have.  I love these relationships, even those that don’t agree with me, because they are not always easy to find.  The Internet has become that relational connection in some ways for me.

And yet to share my thoughts with the world means that I am up for scrutiny.  I’m okay with that.  As a writer, I recognize that and I have chosen to accept that part of it.  I will not always be right.  And this is the tension in what I do.  If I fall, will you be the person who reminds me that I have, or the person who helps me get back up.  The first is the critic looking to put me down.  The second is the brother, looking to pick me up.  Which one do you want to be in life?

You see I truly believe in grace.  I believe that the cross provides us with tremendous room to explore and question and grapple with the realities of relationship with our Creator, our Daddy.  And I choose to do that in a public forum.  But my question is, do you believe in grace?  Do you believe that if I get some theological question wrong that God is big enough to get over it?  Is God big enough to steer me back in the right directions?

It is not my responsibility to police how you think or to prove my point to you.  There is vast amounts of information that go into a lot of my posts, a lot of which I don’t have the space to explain to you.  My posts are culminations of thousands of hours of thought and journey experience.  I’m comfortable with what I say.  But again, it’s not my responsibility to reveal to you the fullest extent of what I am saying.  It is your responsibility to get what I am saying.  If you don’t…ask.

The bulk of my writing points to what it means to participate by engaging love. And I realize that when I say the word love, there are six million different versions of what people think I’m saying.  I’m not talking about the ooey-gooey, sticky, sweet kind we think we find in seventh grade, but the kind that leads us to the cross, so we can find what the other side of chaos looks like.  This is the Great Commandment.  I’m not interested in engaging love because I think it will then earn God’s love.  I choose to love because He first loved me. It is also to me the fullest expression of what it means to be humans created in the image of God.  To participate with God is to restore myself and the world around me.

Much of what I hope this blog does is get you to think AND act.  Missio Dei My blog is about participating, not just talking about participating.  I want to be in the game, discovering what it means to be following Jesus.  I don’t want to be the guy on the hill who says, “I love what Jesus said,” and then goes home never to integrate it into his life.

I also want to be the guy who asks the questions nobody is willing to ask.  I want to explore and grapple with the hard stuff about the journey of faith and following Jesus, some of which is theological.  And if you have a hard time seeing those questions exposed, this is likely not the right place for you.  But if you need someone else to expose the questions so that you too can wrestle with them too, then this is likely the place for you.  I encourage you to comment and share your thought, even if you don’t agree.

I will not spend my time managing what you think about me.  This is your responsibility.  But ask yourself if you are okay with your conclusion if you get it wrong.  Again, if you have a problem or disagreement…ask.  I am always open for a good conversation.  Sometimes we do need to talk and this is also a forum for exploring ideas and engaging generative conversation.  Oooh, there’s that sticky emerging buzzword.  But it’s true.  I don’t need arguments in my life.  I need conversations, people to explore with, to understand with, and to practice what it means to follow Jesus with.  Are you one of those people?  I hope so.  If you’ve chosen to read my blog, I value that time.  But generative conversation is when two people communicate in a way that both are heard, not spoken to.

When you come here you chose to do so.  But with that choice comes a responsibility.

Your responsibility as a reader and a commenter.

• If you come looking for something in my writing and I don’t say it, It doesn’t mean that I haven’t said it.  It means that I haven’t said it in that post.  My posts are to express my thoughts and grapple with its meaning, not answer all your questions.  Look deeper that simply your first conclusion about something.
• Take responsibility for your words as you comment.  Think before you write them and consider how they sound, not just what you are saying. Be gracious in your questions and comments.  We all have feelings.  Nobody hears what you say if you first make them feel like crap.
• If what I write makes you mad, FIRST ask why it makes you mad.  Chances are its not only what I said but that I have come to a conclusion that is different than yours.  This often creates tension that is hard to deal with.  This is a place for me to expose my questions and conclusions.  But don’t get mad at me for coming to my blog.
• If you don’t understand, ask clarifying questions that help you understand what I am saying.

Let me conclude by saying that I truly appreciate all of you for your engagement and time.  It means A LOT to me. Much love to you all.

So this weekend I came very close to the threat of human violence, and it really hit me.

A friend of mine emailed me two weeks ago and said, “I have a free ticket to Game 5 of the Sharks/Red Wings series.  Want to go?” Lets see.  “Free.  The Sharks. My best friend. Road trip.” I’m in.  We drove down on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, enjoying the tunes, the conversation, the sounds, the thrill of hockey playoffs. It was all good.

The game started and everything settled in. The Sharks scored first and it looked like the outcome we had hoped for.  Everyone around us was happy, cheering, enjoying a beer, and the sounds of the game.

At the start of the third period a kid showed up with tickets to a couple of seats behind us.  A man and his wife were sitting in the wrong seats.  It was awkward because it was late in the game and the couple had gotten used to the seats.  After a minute or two of figuring it out, they had to move down five seats. No big deal.

But this is playoff hockey.

The man quickly moved down five seats, but his wife sat on the arm rest, waiting for the action to stop.  The kid felt sat awkwardly in his chair with this older woman sitting halfway on him, biding her time. She felt awkward as well.  So she got up in the middle of the play and moved down.  And this is where things got ugly.

A big burly dude that was sitting right behind me didn’t want to miss a play.  As the woman attempted to pass in front of him, he said, “Just wait until the play is over.  This is the playoffs.” She attempted to pass in front of him again, and he leaned forward to block her way, and catch the action.  Everyone around her was shouting, “Sit down!” With no real seat, she attempted to pass one more time, where the burly man put up his arm and blocked her from passing.  Yes, he was drunk.

At this point the husband proceeded to shout, “Don’t touch my f*cking wife,” which is kind of an strange way of talking about the one you love. He reached out and pushed the burly dude, who proceeded to punch the husband.

This is all happening right behind me in section 228, row 15.

The husband instantly erupted and proceeded to grab the burly dude, punching him repeatedly in the face five or six times. Beer went flying (mostly on me), and everyone in the crowd turned to see what was happening.  The wife attempted to break it up, but the two men were now in full battle.  The burly dudes face was covered in blood.  He pushed the wife off and she fell into my arms.  Then the burly dude fell into the row I was sitting in, so I back up a row.  It was all surreal.  The burly dude finally came to his senses and realized that the husband was beating the crap out of him, so he stopped.

As I stood there, watching this happen right next to me, something hit me in the pit of the stomach.  When violence erupts, it is brutal.  We humans are capable of so much beauty and pain in the same breath. My heart broke for both the husband and the burly dude, neither of which probably came expecting to fight.  It just happened.  But when it does, there is a something that gets lost in the moment.

When it was all over, the burly dude just stood there, literally covered in his own blood, looking lost.  I could see the loneliness in his eyes, half drunk, and half sober from the adrenaline.  Everyone had backed away from him, and he was a social outcast.  He had broken the rules, and now everyone wanted him gone.  I was acutely aware in that moment of his pain.  There was no restoration.  Everyone just wanted him gone.

And I get that.  At that moment, the best thing was probably for him to be escorted into the security office, where they medics could take care of him.  The husband and his wife were fine.  We ended up seeing them out on the street and they had no scratches or wounds.  I just remember walking away with this deep desire for a world that could find a way to love.

“Osama Bin Laden is dead.”

The words ran across the screen and within minutes the social stratosphere burst into exuberant expression of both joy and sadness. Scores of people outside the White House cheered, allowing ten years of pen up frustration, madness, and anger to pour out. Beach balls flew in the air as if justice had been served.  The tweets burst like chatter as people celebrated the end of an era, the era of terrorism.

As I sat watching the melee occur on television, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the many images I had seen so many times on television before. When ever the radical Muslim world had scored some sort of infliction on Democratic idealism, they would celebrate in much the same way.  They would cheer in the streets as they burned the American flag.  Had we suddenly become our enemy? Were our cheers of exuberance learned on so many nightly lessons of CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC?

I was reminded of Jesus’ words, “love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.”  Was this an exception?  Had God blessed the U.S. troops in the moment to put an end to the terror?  Had God exacted justice, or vengeance?  Or had we?  Was there an exception to love, some exception to the idea that each person has dignity.  My thoughts ran to the cross.  Perhaps not.  Why do we cheer at the murder of someone, when ten years ago we weeped over it?

My friend Mike Morrell reminded me that sometimes we need a scapegoat.  Sometimes the cross serves to remind us that Jesus was willing to go that far to take on our suffering, to let us exact our vengeance onto the only one who can handle it.  God.

Tonight I weep.  I weep for those who suffered in 9/11.  And I weep for those who can’t let go of their vengeance without death. As much as we want to forget that Osama Bin Laden was not a human being, to forget is to lose site of our own humanity.

But as the world begins to read and process the book, something interesting has occurred. The reaction is to throw out an accusation and then instead of dealing with the text, the audience is left wondering about the accusation.  My case in point is the ABC News interview.  The title says, Pastor Claims Hell Does Not Exist, which is a remarkably inflammatory statement, yet Rob Bell doesn’t say that. Rob has an entire chapter on hell in the book.

In fact in the interview with Lisa Miller, he specifically acknowledge the reality of hell, but he redefines it in a way that most people don’t like, because it doesn’t fit with our historic orthodoxy assumptions, which locate hell specifically in the afterlife and with a closed door policy.

The  second MSNBC interview is actually the more inflammatory one.  Martin Bashir, who is normally an exceptional journalist, frames his question in a way that leaves Rob with two options.  Disagree with his book or look like he’s trying argue.  Martin asks him the same question twice, “Is it relevant to how you respond to Christ in this life?”  Rob answers yes…twice. And then Martin Bashir quotes a critic who says, “The use of Scripture is indefensible…That’s true isn’t it?” I was a journalist in college and that’s a terrible way to open a line of questioning.  What’s Rob supposed to do?  Bashir does it again when he says, “You’re creating a Christian message that is warm, kind and popular, for contemporary culture, but it’s frankly, according to this critic, unbiblical and historically unreliable.  That’s true, isn’t it?  You’re amending the Gospel message so it’s palatable.”  How do you answer that?

I like Rob’s answer, which is that our choices matter. And this is Rob Bell’s talent.  He takes our historic understanding and filters it through love and the framework of God’s mission, which is based on the restoration of all things. So what comes out is a restorative approach to the Gospel. And because he operates this way, people accuse him of double speak, or not answering the question.  But what he’s doing is reframing it in new way, and it doesn’t look like what people are expecting.

Tim Chailles states this perfectly when he says in his Amazon review: “Does Rob Bell deny the existence of hell? He would say no. We would say yes. He affirms, but only after redefining. And that’s just a clever form of denial.”

Several times on Twitter I’ve had people say they don’t like him because he denies the Gospel, doesn’t believe in hell, and doesn’t answer the hard questions.  None of which are really accurate.  When I press for examples, I get no response.  The truth is Rob doesn’t answer the questions in a way we like.

The reality is that it’s easier to suggest he’s saying something he’s not, than to deal with what he is saying.  Embracing new ideas is not easy.  Our logic gets deeply embedded into our brains and it actually is biased towards supporting what is already there.  So I get that.

I’m just glad we’re having the conversation that God’s love is bigger than we can imagine.