Just saying…

All the nations you have made will come and worship before you, O Lord; they will bring glory to your name. (Ps 86:9)

Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever. (1 Ch 16:34)

“And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people.” (Joel 2:28)

The LORD will lay bare his holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God. (Is 52:10)

And the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it. For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” (Is 40:5)

You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing. (Ps 145:16)

“I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me; I was found by those who did not seek me. To a nation that did not call on my name, I said, ‘Here am I, here am I.’” (Is 65:1)

Gather together and come! Approach together, you refugees from the nations! Those who carry wooden idols know nothing, those who pray to a god that cannot deliver. (Is 45:20)

O you who hear prayer, to you all men will come. (Ps 65:2)

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.

A Buddhist, a Muslim, an Atheist, a Homosexual, and a Christian all die on the same day.  They stand before God on judgment day.  God reveals the truth of His love to each, giving them the fullest awareness of what Jesus did on the cross. Each one chooses to accept that reality seeing it as the love of God.

Which one goes to heaven?

I love that we are talking about hell.  It’s time it was brought out of the closet (the dark ages) and looked at very deeply. Before you read this post I would suggest reading the post that inspired it.  John Shore asks, “Is God’s Justice Different Than Ours? Hell, No!“

John asks a remarkably good question in his post.  He ask, “To me the real mystery is why it’s not considered at best absurd and at worst dangerous to suggest that God has a sense of justice diametrically opposed to the sense of justice that is innate to just about every human being.“

Much of the debate regarding hell centers on the few passages that are in the Bible.  And to be fair and honest, all arguments about hell must include the rational acknowledgement of their presence.  The problem then becomes trying to understand their meaning.  The problem as I see it, is they rarely are talked about in context of all Scripture.  We base our understanding of it on just the passages, as though they exist in a vacuum and trump everything else.  The traditional arguments ignore God’s consistent call for mercy, God’s system of justice that is decidedly restorative, not exclusively punitive, and most importantly, the cross.  Most of our approaches to hell ignore the grace that God re-established at the cross. So when Jesus talks about hell, it must be in light of the mission he’s engaged in, not opposed to it.

It’s fair to ask a question when trying to determine the meaning of the passages.  “Do our understand of those passages jibe with the intent and purpose of the cross, which is to re-establish the awareness of grace that has existed before time?” In other words, does God simply ignore the cross at the final judgment (separating the sheep and the goats) or does the passages regarding hell have a different meaning?

In debate, when an argument reaches absurd proportions, it’s usually time to re-examine the underlying assumptions about the argument.  And this is the problem of hell.  The current theological framework of hell is patently absurd.  It makes God out to be a monster.

On Facebook, David Chapman responded to John’s post by saying,

“He would be a sadistic monster. God would be infinitely worse than Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, or any other mass murderer because at least those people got released from the pain…well not according to Fundi’s because most of them conceivably did not accept Christ because they were a different religion so they were tortured in this life, then died and get to be tortured in the next for eternity for the crime of not being born in a part of the world where Christianity is prevalent. God would be torturing people for ETERNITY for a finite crime…I wouldnt want to worship that monster.“

Could it be that the image of God who creates our current understanding of hell, is actually us?

What say you?

“Regarding hell, what Chan and others must do is show how the traditional view of hell is in any way “just,” and philosophically speaking I have not seen this done well in either academic or popular Christian literature.” Jeff Cook on Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed

I don’t know about you but that is one of most intriguing things I’ve heard in a loooooooooong time.

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.

If you followed McKnight’s reviews of Bell’s book, the argument that comes up most frequently is the kind of justice that would act decisively against the oppressors on behalf of the oppressed. The idea then is not personal satisfaction (as in enjoying the suffering of the enemy) but the need to address evil in such a way that it not only stops hurting the victims but also experiences the depth of its own intrinsic darkness. Up to this point I don’t really have an objection to this argument. Problem is: once punishment loses any restorative trajectory, the one punishing becomes the very thing he’s punishing, i.e. an oppressor, torturer, or executioner.

Josh Mueller, in response to A Question To Ponder

Author, Brené Brown

ht: Jeromy

I wrote the following post for Emergent Village.

The other night I got together with my pub group, which is an extension of my house church. The pub group is four guys that talk about anything.  We laugh more than we should because nothing is off limits.  We’re irreverent and sarcastic about everything, because we’ve established a culture that allows us to talk about anything.  We don’t take ourselves too seriously because at the end of the day we all recognize we could likely be wrong.

But this week we all talked about how different our lives were. We had become the people we used to talk about ten years ago.  We had become the people we would have considered to be reprobates, and no longer Christians because we didn’t hold to a strict understanding of orthodoxy.  We laughed about the reality that the slippery slope had given us a strange freedom to live in the tension of faith.  We no longer trusted our own capacity to construct a strict belief system.  Instead, we were living in the reality of Jesus being faith for us.

And then the conversation turned to Rob Bell’s Love Wins.  What had it meant to let go of hell as a future reality and see it very differently.  Could love actually win in the end.  And then one of my friends said:

“You know what I don’t understand. I have a lot of friends who are strict fundamentalists, and I’m okay with that.  It’s what they want to believe and I don’t want to change that.  But what gets me is that none of them say, ‘I may be right, but I hope I’m wrong.’“

The entire table just sat silent for a couple of seconds.  He had called out the primary tension embedded in the conflict.  It’s not that hell didn’t exist, or that someone could go there.  We had all met a LOT of people who had experienced hell.  It was that orthodoxy had defined this narrow structure of belief that precluded anyone from ever questioning it’s legitimacy. No one had spoken up and said, “I hope I’m wrong.” And when Rob Bell finally stood up publicly and asked the question, his critics discounted it before anyone could read it, suggesting it wasn’t even on the table.

Are we so afraid of hell that it’s banned from conversation and questioning?

Why are we so quick to throw people in hell?  Why are we so quick to defend a proposition that sends the majority of God’s creation to eternal torment?  Why don’t we hope we’re wrong?

I long for these types of conversations, not because they are fun (conversations about hell usually aren’t), but because they are restorative.  They require me to step into faith and work it out.  To engage the possibility that love wins in the end gives me hope in a God that is bigger than anything we can imagine.  It doesn’t mean hell goes away, or that it is no longer a possibility.  It means that my definition of God expands.  And if that gets me sent to hell, well then I guess I’ll just have to live with that.