Is God a Malevolent Serial Torturer?

I had a feeling I was heading for a bit of trouble when the question read as follows:  “Melchizadek was, like Christ, an eternal priest.”  True or False?   I answered “false” and got it wrong.   I made a mild protest over that one.  I lost. It turns out the Professor in charge of the New Testament Bible Studies curriculum and the test writer was the same one who attempted to have me expelled from seminary during a class on how to interpret the Bible. Interpret literally, whenever possible, was what he taught us.  The reason for his attempt to have me expelled was for not acknowledging that God would send any of his children to eternal torment, with no hope for escape ever, as a “just” payment for sins.  I argued in a forum designed for debating issues that eternal torment was not justice, not for anything done in a short lifetime and backed it up with scriptures, logic and plenty of real life examples and scenarios. 

  

Now this Professor knew all about Melchizadek; he was an “expert” on the book of Hebrews and took it all literally.  Advice:  watch out for people who can tell you all about Melchizadek!  Anyway, if you were to put hard questions to this Professor on anything, even politely, he would become somewhat belligerent, acting as if the person questioning needed to be quiet and learn the material.  But if he perceived that you had bested him in any exchange, then he would put you up for disciplinary action for disrespect.  One wasn't allowed to best the big man in any debate or exchange!  I wasn’t the only one, that’s for sure.  A lot of those students were a tad smarter than me, and better debaters.  Some would buckle a little easier though, on occasion, and apologize.  Others would just stop debating.  And others would continue, fearlessly, and some did pay the price for “crossing the line.”  But it’s not about that.  In any case, I believe God saw to it that the dean saw things my way when he refused to expel me.  From his personal response to me it seemed he was a closet Christian Universalist even!  But, alas, his job was at stake and to admit that would leave him unemployed.  Months later, the Professor was still seething with rage that I wasn’t expelled.  I have his email response to a question I put to him about an upcoming class and it’s nasty.  It seems this man resembles the god that he serves.  Now I’m not judging him.  Judging means condemning someone to eternal torment and that’s exactly what millions of church folks implicitly do when they let that doctrine go unchallenged or outright support it, especially.  

I suppose me not letting this New Testament Professor walk all over me with all his 350 pounds of doctorate bulk might have had something to do with his failed attempt to expel me.  Would the Christian thing to do have been to silently let him fill our heads with nonsense?  No, I don’t think so.  There is a time to speak up without fear of the consequences a human can deal to us, even if the hammer is going to potentially seriously drop.  It is my belief that the time to speak up is when people attempt to brainwash you with a view of God as cruel, vicious, vindictive and so bloodthirsty that his wrath will never be satisfied forever and ever.   In any case, this Professor attempted to force me acknowledge the Bible taught eternal torment.  He asked me to substitute the word “hell” for “death” in Romans 6:23, meaning eternal torment.  The reason being was, in his mind, that if God sentences a human to eternal torment then it must be just.  Whether it said death or hell or torture or anything didn’t matter to him.  Why?  Because he is God, that’s why.  If God says something is just, it must be just.  Just like that.  I refused.

Didn’t Paul tell us to “test everything” and “hold onto what is good?”  What is good about everlasting torment?  Dump the doctrine, I say, and rejoice in the merciful arms of the Lord as we know he welcomes all his children home – sooner or later.  Sometimes it might be a lot later!  That’s up to God.  Punishments all must have a purpose or they are cruelty.  That purpose cannot be revenge either.  I think even my dog understands this.

 

Isn’t God more merciful than human beings?  Isn’t it actually human beings who have done relatively merciless things (maybe not approaching the horror of everlasting torture) and then on occasion attributed them to God?  “Kill them all!”  (said God)  But did God really say this?  “Save the virgins for yourselves,” saith the Lord.   Did God really say that?  Or did humans say that God told them to do it.  I wasn’t there, but that sounds like human sinfulness in war and brings to mind more recent events such as the rape of Nanking.  Did God tell the Japanese troops to do that to the Chinese civilians of Nanking?  If you are brave and have a strong stomach, just google that one for a seriously bloodcurdling account of human evil.  I’ve had people in church tell me of the genocides in the Old Testament:  “yep, that was a brutal time…brutal!”  And some of them have a little twinkle in their eye, a knowing security that they are the chosen and will never be on the receiving end of any stripes or any fire like the non-elect.     

Anyway, just because something happened 3000 years ago in a brutal time period doesn’t lessen the horror of it at all.  Thanks be to God I don’t have to believe the accounts of slaughter in Numbers, Joshua, and Judges were commanded by God.  If someone else wants to believe this then that’s fine, but we’re talking about the God of the universe here, commanding puny humans to stab and slaughter each other and demanding all kinds of things be killed.  Let the blood flow!!  What insanity is that!  It leads to our view of God though.  Is God benevolent?  Is God love, as the Bible testifies?  Did Jesus show us what God is like?  Did he go around telling the Jews to slaughter every Roman in sight?  Couldn’t he have?  Maybe that would be a little more justified than the slaughter of the Canaanites who had never lifted a finger against the invading Hebrew hordes, wouldn’t it?  If God wanted to give them the land, why couldn’t he take the mighty hand of God and thrust them out of the land to live in peace instead of all that gore?  Slay them!!   What a load we’ve been fed to imagine that the Lord Jesus was behind any of this slaughter and killing.    

And now let’s return to consider the even worse fate of eternal torment.  Let’s try to think of one man who might sentence his children to everlasting torture to no purpose.  Imagine this man is invisible.  One day, he appears to his children who didn’t believe in him because they couldn’t see him so he impales each one with a pitchfork.  But you see, this man is an immortal, powerful magician and has the power to keep his children alive so they can suffer and not die.  For not believing in him, this man allows his children to writhe on the pitchforks for days.  Days turn into months.  Months into years.  The pain never ends and the man is never satisfied that the punishment is enough, that justice has been fulfilled.  Since he is smarter and more powerful, this action of his must be correct and it must be accepted.  

This is pretty similar to the satanic doctrine of eternal torment.  Maybe someone who would actually do this, if he had the power would be an insane serial killer?  Perhaps someone like John Wayne Gacy or Ted Bundy.  Or the Green River Killer.  But what’s striking there is even these evil murderers eventually put their victims out of their misery.  The Green River Killer even said “I didn’t torture ‘em.”  The BTK killer talked of “putting his victims down” after he had punished them for a time.  

Terrible, terrible, heinously evil acts these men did.  But their victims are suffering no more.  The Nazis put the Jews in ovens, experimented on them and so forth, often in agonizing ways.  But their suffering is thankfully over.  Or…is it?   According to the doctrine of eternal torment, the victims may have never believed in Jesus for some reason or another.  The Jews horribly massacred by the millions in the holocaust certainly didn’t – at least, the vast majority.  Maybe other people who were victims of killers were abused, weren’t born in the right neighborhood or any number of understandable reasons.  If that was the case, those victims of the killers are looking forward to a much worse fate:  torture that NEVER ENDS!!  No rest, day or night – Revelation is taken literally.  Tossed alive into a lake where they can burn and experience the anguish of burning, but not ever have it relieved, ever!  Can anyone really, truly believe this without putting up a huge wall in their brain blocking out how horrific this insane doctrine really is?  And people go and sing praises to this being on Sunday?  What’s wrong with this picture?   

What is wrong is the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.  It's wrong because it maligns the nature of God and prevents people from coming to him.  This prevents them from doing good works and following Jesus because they hate God.  They reject the eternal torturer, understandably!  Marx, Lenin, and Friedrich Nietzsche all said that they rejected the Christian God because of the doctrine of hell.  Think of the horrific influence these men have had on millions of people.  Even if not directly responsible, Lenin led to Stalin and Stalin bears responsibility for the deaths of millions of people.  The doctrine is satanic and the fruit it has borne, for one, was Joseph Stalin.

Thank God that he is not a malevolent divine serial torturer.  If he were, we would ALL be in big trouble!  God is not a demon from the pits of “hell.”  That is utterly unthinkable.  And thank God, it is not true.  God is LOVE.  Believe it!  Therefore, we’re ALL in for a royal, wonderful surprise because our God is benevolent and he is awesome, all-powerful and all-loving.  It is true that we sometimes create our own bit of hell on earth sometimes and this is designed to strengthen us spiritually.  It may also serve to make us all the more appreciative of the infinite mercy of God and the eternal life that he has in store for ALL his creatures after a life of sickness, turmoil or other heavy burden is ended.  God will have all men be saved, Paul says to Timothy.  Romans 5 uses an exact parallel to describe how what “Adam” (that is, sin) does is reversed by Christ.  And to a much greater degree!   

 For those of us who think of persons who have done great evil in this life, God does promise justice will be meted out, but the punishment will fit the crime.  I can think of no crime that would warrant eternal conscious torment.  Maybe tormenting someone for all eternity.  That might warrant eternal conscious torment, in which case that god would go off the high dive (picture that in a Chick tract) into the lake of fire himself.  One last thought – if the punishment for sin is eternal conscious torment, and Jesus had to suffer the due punishment – why is Jesus not writhing about in the flames even as we speak?  He would have to, if that were the just penalty.  Of course, there’s nothing just about eternal conscious torment.  We need not fear any of our loved ones are being tormented by God.  Instead, they are in his care and we can trust him because he is merciful and kind. 

Be not afraid, says Jesus, it is I – I am always with you!!  We can all rest in this knowledge.  This is one reason to share this truly good news.  It can remove all that horrible anxiety and depression people might have, thinking about the fate of “lost” loved ones.  Remember, God loves those people and he is going to take care of them and do what is best for them because they are his children.  God, being the perfect parent, will see to it that they receive fair and merciful treatment designed for their benefit until they come back home and he comes running to them with arms wide open like the Father in the prodigal son parable.  May we not be like the eldest son in that parable, annoyed that God is merciful and infinitely forgiving!  Even with the eldest son sulking, the Father said to him:  “everything I have is yours!”  

God bless!

David     

Hope for All, Even for Those Without Hope!

Greetings Everyone!

Today what has been on my mind is the word “hope.”  Specifically, what has been going over in my mind are verses like 1 Thessalonians 4:13, where Paul writes:  “…we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” (New Revised Standard Version/NRSV)

Verses like this can be incredibly misleading.  The difference is between objective hope and subjective hope.  Let’s imagine people who do not believe something wonderful is going to come to pass (e.g. they don’t believe God will have mercy on all people, as he has promised in Romans 11:32; their loved ones, they believe, who have passed away are just ‘no more’) or let’s imagine people who believe something terrible is looming (e.g. eternal torment) – in both these cases these people do not have subjective hope (at least for others…they may have it for themselves).  In light of this example, Paul wanted the believers to not grieve about those who died (surely not all of their relatives were believers)…he wanted them to have subjective hope in objective reality:  that is, Jesus is going to take care of those folks, being the Savior of the world.  That’s why he came!    

As for those “others,” (the unbelievers) let’s go on to see that the very wonderful thing that they never had even hoped for (“they had no hope”), did, in fact happen.  God did (and he will) have mercy on all, as he has promised.  In this case, all along they had objective hope, but grieved because they didn’t have subjective hope.  So to sum it up, Paul is saying that for those that do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world--those that do not believe that he will, in fact, take care of a person’s loved one, how can they possibly have that hope within themselves?  And yet, when God does treat the loved one fairly and with mercy, this shows that there was hope for that person all along and for the loved one, but the one who did not believe simply did not have that hope.  So to say “they had no hope” is NOT the same as saying “there is no hope for them” or “there is no hope for their loved ones who have passed.”    

As an example, before Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus, he was Saul, and did not have subjective hope.  But destiny would have it that all along, even when he had no subjective hope, he did, in fact, have objective hope!  And so it is for all of God’s creatures.  This may be one valid explanation for the conclusion of 1 Timothy 4:10:  “…we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.”  I cannot even express how supporters of the doctrine of a God who eternally torments his own creatures either dodge this verse entirely or desperately wish it wasn’t in their Bibles.  But it is!  And it ruins their theology of eternal torment when it says so clearly that God is the Savior of all people.  What makes sense is that the word “hope” is right in the verse, and so those who have this subjective (and objective!) hope are spared from subjective despair (NOT objective if God is the Savior of all people!) at the loss of loved ones.  God saves the believer in his amazing grace from despair and other anxieties, due to the believer’s possession of this hope NOW.  This would warrant the word “especially,” I believe.  The word “exclusively” is not an option in any translation.  The King James goes with “specially.”  Ask eternal torment folks about 1 Timothy 4:10, not in a mocking way, but really ask them to explain what it means to them.      

In passages like 1 Thessalonians 4:13, you may have someone point to this and try to rob you of you hope for the salvation of all mankind.  They may say something like:  “oh, you see there!  There’s no hope for those people,” and sincerely mourn this fact.  We’ve already shown that not having hope is not the same as there not being hope.  I know very few Christians (they are out there though!) who actually say this with a sort of glee.  This is a terrible sickness of the spirit, that one day will be purged by a metaphorical fire.  As Mark 9:49 tells us, we ALL get some fire!  I can’t stress that enough.  I mentioned this to an eternal hell believer and he just shrugged and said basically “I don’t know what that fire is, but I know it’s not hellfire.”  This is right after those verses in Mark 9 about immortal worms and unquenchable fire!  That, said the man I was debating, definitely was hellfire.   I don’t believe this man was cruel or gleeful, but brainwashed.  The good news just couldn’t possibly be THAT good, could it?    Yes, my friends, it can, because our God is THAT awesome!  He is, indeed, the Savior of the entire world.

  When people realize that God will exact perfect justice but ultimately reconcile all his creatures to himself (Colossians 1:20 reads: “and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”), including “lost” loved ones, then we really and truly are filled with an unspeakable joy.  It’s a little ironic then, that believers in eternal torment today (which was not anywhere close to being the majority doctrine of the early church), have been robbed of this hope that Paul says that they are supposed to have in 1 Thessalonians 4:13…that is, unless ALL of their loved ones believed or “got saved” in their short life. 

What a destructive doctrine – eternal torment in hell.  No hope, no mercy.  Is that justice?  I had a wonderful man at my former church who told me with tears in his eyes how his family was not saved, but he still accepted the doctrine of eternal torment and said that we would not care after death because we would be so close to God after death!  Now, if I believed God was going to eternally torture any of my relatives, he wouldn’t be a being worthy of worship.  I don’t think I’d want to get very close to him at all!  Rather, he would be a malevolent being, a sadistic rejected loser taking out his wrath, forever and ever, on his own creatures, his own children – many of our loved ones. (Acts 17:28-29 clearly tells us who God’s children are: ALL of humankind…this is Paul giving a sermon to the Greeks in Athens).  He is trying to convince them that there IS hope.  That’s the message for everyone:  even if we have no hope, there is still hope for us!  Why?  Because God is not a monster, God is love, and God is the Savior of all people.  We all have a lot to look forward to.  There is hope for all because His mercy endures forever!

God bless,

David

UNMC Visit and a "Parking Ticket" from Family Radio

Well, better late than never!  I hope you all had a wonderful Easter, wherever you were at.  As planned, I went to the historic Universalist National Memorial Service in Washington D.C.  The whole experience was just fantastic.  The greeter at the door was a kind man with whom I enjoyed speaking for a few minutes before the service.  Soon there entered a very nice lady who seemed genuinely interested in talking to me and welcomed me heartily to the service as well.  I had the chance to speak with a couple other nice folks before and after the service as well.  The service itself was really pleasant and I felt completely at ease, something I can’t say for every church I visit!  I never got the slightest feeling that I was being pressured or scrutinized.  It was the pastor’s final sermon there and I felt privileged to be able to attend this church with the wonderful people there and hear her final message to this group of folks.    

Then, as I was driving home, I noticed a leaflet tucked snugly into my wiper blade.  At first I thought it was a ticket for parking in a questionable area.  When I arrived home I plucked it out of my windshield wiper and was intrigued and slightly amused to read that the end of the world was going to happen very soon, apparently.  The title said “Holy God will bring judgment day on May 21, 2011.”  I read the back and saw that the leaflet was produced by Family Radio!  Anyone scared yet?  I began to read.  In one short paragraph, I read the words “Holy God” three times. 

Throughout the leaflet, God was consistently called “Holy God” over and over again.   The Great Flood, “by careful study” happened, per the pamphlet, in 4990 B.C.  Then, some numbers that people might be likely to ignore out of sheer boredom are manipulated to come up with a date for Judgment Day!  This is really unconscionable.  The leaflet struck me as actually bordering on being venomous; it reminded me just a little bit of Chick tracts (truly venomous!), minus the comic illustration of a huge angel tossing live human beings into a burning pit to suffer forever. 

Anyway, the bottom line message was: “Holy God hates you!”  I crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.  Then I retrieved it just to serve as an example of how why our image of God matters so much.  I can’t ever imagine myself loving “Holy God” as described in this leaflet.  He’s waiting to torment his own creatures for all eternity!  As Ellen White says somewhere about eternal torment:  “O, dreadful blasphemy!”  I’m no Seventh Day Adventist, but their stock went up considerably when I read that quote from their beloved founder and leader. 

In any case, this pamphlet was playing upon people’s fears: upon our realization that none of us are perfect before our Creator, an all-knowing being that has never made a mistake, knows everything about us, and (implied by this pamphlet) is VERY ANGRY with all of us!!  But let’s take a step back into the wonderful reality for a moment and see how Jesus, the perfect manifestation of God here on earth treated imperfect people like us when he was on earth…prostitutes, lepers, outcasts.  I’m repeating here, but this is so important that we strive to follow his example as best we can.  He ate with hated people, drank with them, healed the sick and paralyzed people and liberally forgave them – even when they did not ask for it!  And, we read of a good many religious leaders who scowled and seethed with hatred at him.   

Therefore, when we want to know what “Holy God” is really like, let us look to Jesus and read about how he treated people.  Let us meditate on the parable of the lost sheep and those like it – how we are all God’s children (per Paul’s speech to the Greeks in Acts 17, and elsewhere) – and how the Shepherd will not rest until all his sheep come home.  I believe the New Testament does clearly teach true justice.  But the punishment must fit the crime!  In Deuteronomy (25:1-3) even, the number of lashes a person could receive was limited to 40 and it was to be “according to his guilt!”  This was a brutal period, and even here we see justice tempered with mercy.  

Nowhere in the leaflet is there anything said about how God is Love or how Jesus treated people.  In fact, there’s virtually nothing at all in there about Jesus’ example and teachings to love one another and God (because he first loved us!).  Rather, the leaflet is designed to scare the living daylights out of people with a guilty conscience or the gullible, perhaps, who have yet to subscribe to some formula that Family Radio has cooked up that you and I need to believe in in order to escape this judgment.    

We know that God will have all people to be saved (1 Tim 2:4 – efforts to water down this verse don’t change the tremendous strength of the Greek verb there – see Gerry Beauchemin’s book Hope Beyond Hell or ask me for it and I’ll send you a free copy that details this); God is in charge of who gets saved of course; and we are told over and again that he will have mercy on ALL (Romans 11:32).  1 Tim 4:10?  Believe it! He really is the Savior of the whole world, not just the religious elite; and when he was on earth, he acted like it, by hanging around those who would be deemed by churches today to be “lost” or “damned forever”! 

Clearly there may be some pain to come, more or less.  Mark 9:49 tells us EVERYONE will get some fire.  We are all imperfect.  But as we know, God’s mercy endures forever, mercy triumphs over judgment and his wrath lasts but a moment!! (Psalm 136, James 2:13,  Lamentations 3:31-33)  What a change this makes in our lives in how we look and treat others when we realize this truth.  And thank God, this is the kind of God we serve – a God of mercy and love.  Yes, God is Love! (1 John 4:8; 1 John 4:16) And I’ll end it with 1 John 4:18 – “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.” Again, none of us are perfect, so there is bound to be some unhealthy fear and problems of all kinds in life associated with fears of all kinds.  But we know that God is going to take care of us all, wipe away every tear and fear will be no more!! 

God bless!

-David

April 23 Update

Greetings Friends!

Well, after a three-week bout with either a very bad cold or the flu I have that feeling of major gratitude for feeling healthy and motivated once again.  This is just a short update to say I'm back (I was also in my home state of Oregon for a couple weeks with limited internet access) and ready to go!  One thing that I am going to do is visit the Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington D.C. tomorrow.  I will give an update of the service and my impressions sometime tomorrow evening most likely. 

Next, I wanted to just make some comments on our attitudes and how we should strive to love others.  I have said that I love a good debate, and I do.  But sometimes these things just turn nasty and accomplish nothing.  Sometimes the comments I see by Christian Universalists actually resemble those of Fundamentalists in the sense of:  "we have the truth and you don't" as we then proceed to hammer people with why Christian Universalism is true.  Now there is surely mixed motivation behind this.  We want to be right.  Everybody does.  But if people looking in on these debates see things get mean-spirited or a lack of forgiveness and grace on our parts then they are likely just to chalk the truly good news up as "religion" and may tune out this wonderful truth:  God is not a monster who will torture all who have not done, said, or believe certain things about him forever without mercy; rather, God is love and the Savior of the entire world and he wants the best for us!    

What wonderful news that is!  I just hope we maintain a spirit of understanding when dealing with all people, even those fundamentalists who may really irritate us.  The majority of such folks are likely not going to change their minds - they are utterly convinced that they are right, they have the monopoly on the truth, and we (as well as most of the rest of the human race, all God's children) are heretical and dangerous, deceiving people into spending eternity in hell with no hope of escape.  So, they have a terrible, warped view of God - I have said before that I believe it to be "satanic," in that only the most evil being imaginable would do something like that to his own creatures.  And, there is the old saying that people tend to resemble the gods they serve.  It's surprising how accurate that statement turns out to be oftentimes.  We do not want to resemble that God by being unmerciful and downright mean.

The point of this is that in many cases we need to strive not to defeat this warped view of God by behaving as the fundamentalists do, but by actively striving to resemble the God that we serve, seen most perfectly in the life of Christ, healing people and helping people.  We can do this not with the goal of getting them "saved" or to coerce a "sinner's prayer" out of them or any other kind of ulterior motive, but out of love. 

It is true the fundamentalists are back on the attack.  They have been put on the defensive by a wonderful book such as Rob Bell's Love Wins.  We see brainwashed religious leaders such as John Piper effectively excommunicating Rob Bell and consigning him to the realm of apostates.  Piper represents many people with hardened hearts to the true good news.  That true good news is not Piper's bad news which is:  "accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior or burn in hell for all of eternity," but that all people will receive the mercy of God, who loves each person he has created and wants us to grow in this love by practicing this love to our fellow creatures!   So we don't necessarily have to sit back and let the fundamentalists beat us up, but let us not be unnecessarily argumentative and instead go out and DO acts of kindness and love.  Think of the hours we might be spending online (I include myself here) debating with fundamentalists.  Couldn't we take a few of those hours and go perform some acts of service to needy people?     

You see, the battle has already been won.  We don't have to convert the world to save them from the pit of an eternal hell.  God is going to save all people ultimately.  But it is wonderful to see people released from this view of God as a monster to be feared.  Whether they admit it or not, people with this view of God as a being who created an eternal hell especially for sinful people to torment them - a God who is waiting for them to screw up and then to punish them instead of welcoming them with open arms - will generally spend an awful lot of time trying to make sure they are in the clear with him and it is awfully hard to genuinely love such a being or have a relationship to him like a brother or Father.

For those of us who have come to believe the truly news that God loves all people and not just the elect or chosen few it causes us to look at all people differently and not put us a spiritual cut above the "lost" or "sinners."  Remember who Jesus spent the time with was sinners and that he generally lambasted religious fundamentalists more than anyone else.  But this didn't keep him from healing, serving and loving his children.  May we strive to do the same to people who need our help! 

Thanks everyone, and I will have more information on upcoming meetings soon.  There was a mention of this in the latest newsletter available at http://www.christianuniversalist.org  and I will keep you posted! 

Happy Easter!

David

Phony Math: One Minute Equals Infinity?

Greetings Friends,

I love a good, healthy congenial debate as much as anyone.  I think debate is vital to arriving at the truth.  Sometimes it is difficult and we can come across as know-it-alls or as argumentative.  I think I succeeded somewhat in doing this in the debate I'm about to describe, but it wasn't all bad.  It was a learning experience.  In my former church, I was asked the following question (after being lectured and then given a litany of King James passages by a lady who had been taught from a young age that eternal torture awaited all unbelievers) -- "Do you believe that Hell exists? If so then why debate if it is a minute or eternity. Either one is too long." 

Notice the tactic here.  It's pretty common.  She actually wants to debate, but really her side only.  That's not the way it works!  We need to listen to each other, and I think, ultimately, we did for the most part.  She asked the question "why debate?" after having me listen to her make her case for eternal torment for a fairly good amount of time. This well-meaning (I think) lady proceeded to quote another Psalm or two with "hell" in it and a fear-based passage out of Deuteronomy, no less, striving to put a little fear into me, it would seem!

It became very clear that she did not interpret "fear" as it should be interpreted in the Bible, which is a "reverence for" or something along those lines.  I truly feel sorry for people who have this actual fear in the sense of dread, which is really a deep mistrust of God, as if he is just waiting to torture 99 percent of the human beings he created forever, without mercy!  Can someone really love or trust a being such as that?  Does seeing this preached on the TV followed by a plea for money attract people to the faith? 

Oh, what a different picture the Bible gives us in Jesus!!  This is well-known, and I'm repeating, but it can hardly be said too many times that the harshest words Jesus had were for religious people, those who believed they were right and everyone else was wrong with God and doomed!  I had a fellow tell me once that the Samaritan woman at the well in John Chapter 4 was "convicted."  He repeated this four or five times as if that was all there was to it.  I tried to get in a word or two.  He said "she was convicted."  This was my good friend who I did not want to argue with and so I changed the subject.  But somehow he had crafted in his mind that Jesus just went around convicting people and condemning them.  No, Jesus healed and treated people with kindness and mercy.  That's what God is like and we can trust him!  The Samaritan woman was, in those days, basically an "untouchable."  Not only was she a hated Samaritan, but a woman, and for Jesus to speak to her was unthinkable!  But that's what he did.  He didn't rake her over the coals or judge her.  Jesus brought joy to that Samaritan village!  Just check out John 4 sometime if you don't believe me :)  They partied it up with Jesus in town. The disciples were no doubt astounded, if not appalled, but this was Jesus here.
 
Now let's go back to that the lady from my former church and her statement here:  one minute in "hell" is being essentially equated to of an infinite amount of time!  Forever!  This, my friends, is clearly irrational and demanded a response.  Here is basically what I told her, and I do look back and think about how I could have maybe said things differently, but here it is:

I suppose I do not believe fear should be the factor or the attractor to the faith.  The motivation should be out of love and not fear.   Perfect love cast out fear!  Certainly I believe in a judgment, but I obviously object to something being infinite in duration when neither the Hebrew nor the Greek manuscripts support it. One minute in hell is, by the law of common sense, far more merciful than infinity!  I just don't think some of us (i.e. her) have thought about it enough and we are set in our ways. (note: again, maybe I should have refrained from this veiled attack or put it differently somehow)  There are clearly gradations of rewards and punishment in the Bible and to say all people - for example, Hitler and the Jews he had killed are all going to suffer equal infinite punishment is unthinkable by any reasonable standard of justice and we know God is more just and merciful than any man.  

So, yes, I believe there is a state in the afterlife where some will experience varying degrees of corrective punishment and if people want to use the English word "hell," then so be it.  But the punishment, in order to be based on love, is a purifying judgment, like the hot coal that touched Isaiah's lips in Chapter 6.  (Note: in this passage Isaiah has a vision where he is transported to the very throne of God and feels bad about himself.  He sees an angel bring a BURNING COAL which PURIFIES his "unclean lips," as it is translated).

If punishment has no purpose, I think we need to reflect on the reasons why God would do such a thing and make up our minds while taking a hard look at the original languages behind what has become translated into English.  The Hebrew of Psalm 9:17 is "sheol," the abode of the dead.  This is not the place where only the wicked go in the Old Testament, it is where everyone goes!  Maybe you will not be convinced by this, but it needs to be said for the sake of the truth.  Even my most fundamentalist of Professors in seminary would flat out admit that "hell" (as commonly thought of) is not a word in the Hebrew, nor was it even a concept held by the Jews of that time.  To go back and translate it that way was one way the Roman Church maintained control over the masses.  Thanks be to God for courageous men who stood up to the church, without fear, and helped change things.  Otherwise, you might not have any option but the Roman Catholic Church even to this day!   Thus, destructive doctrines must be opposed wherever they are found and at whatever cost.  We owe it to God, whom we are to love also with all our minds to seek the truth and defend it!

I think my mention of the Reformation and a couple other statements in there may have hit a little harder than I wanted to, looking back, with her being a Baptist.  But sometimes things need to be said when people engage us in debates, or the other way around.  I look back on this and do not believe I did a particularly good job of being like Jesus there, but I'm a fallible human being and can learn from mistakes and some of the veiled attacks I made there to maybe be a little nicer.  It depends on the person we're dealing with, of course.  In any case, I thank God there are people who are standing up to the malicious doctrine of eternal conscious torment in hell.

For an example of a man who has stood up to this doctrine of a malevolent God for years with great courage, please check out Gary Amirault's Tentmaker website if you haven't already.  I know many of you have.  Here it is anyway:


http://www.tentmaker.org/

And, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask me and engage me at any time!  I also invite you to check out more about the Christian Universalist Association to do more searching at:


http://www.christianuniversalist.org/

God bless!
David

Discoveries!

Greetings Friends!

First I wanted to share this link to Eric Stetson's article that addresses so well some of what has been on my mind recently:


http://www.ericstetson.com/2011/03/the-unsung-heroes-of-christian-universalism/

I am truly grateful for Rob Bell's book, although as Eric points out, this has been written about a great deal recently and, in fact, was the predominant view of the early church.  John Wesley Hanson has thoroughly documented this, for one, back in 1899.  The book can be ordered or read for free at the following link:


http://books.google.com/books?id=fzARAAAAYAAJ

I'm also very grateful to Scott Wells for posting a link to my blog on his very resource-rich and interesting blog at:

http://boyinthebands.com/

Also Naomi King's "The Wonderment," and "City of Refuge" blog (and others!) have been a blessing to me:

http://thewonderment.typepad.com/the_wonderment/
http://www.cityofrefugefl.com/

Last but not least, thanks again my friend Chuck for sharing this blog on Facebook!  What a discovery of honest writing and a story that hit me very close to home.  I wrote to friends that reading Elizabeth here caused me a momentary twinge of unholy envy at her writing ability :) I would encourage you to go back into the archives and check out what else she has written.  Prolific!!  Thank you all.  Here is the link to Elizabeth's story:


http://ellisabethe.wordpress.com/about/

Thank you all, and God bless!

Study Bibles?

Greetings Friends!

Back quite a few years ago, before I became a convinced universalist, I amassed quite a number of Bibles. I would say it was somewhat of an addiction.  This included the Study Bibles.  I picked up everything from the Harper-Collins Study Bible to the MacArthur Study Bible and just about everything in between!  I joke, although it's pretty accurate, that when I want to find out what I do not believe on a particular issue, I reach for my MacArthur Study Bible!  But what to do with it? - I'm sure not going to give that thing away to anyone with it consigning everyone to eternal conscious torment for infinity! 

A quick side note on MacArthur:  one fellow at my former church who opposed me when I was raising questions at a Bible Study on some pretty clear universalist-supporting passages loaned me a MacArthur book.  I couldn't even finish it; the thing was just filled with venom!  It was downright mean.  This same fellow at church would also show Rob Bell videos at the Mens' Breakfasts.  I hope now he reads Love Wins because I suspect deep down he was troubled by what he was essentially brainwashed into believing since he was a small boy.  He needs someone he really looks up to like Rob Bell to help free him from the likes of MacArthur.  In spite of some criticisms of Bell's book, I thought it was very welcome coming from someone with the following that Rob has.

But back to the Study Bibles, I just had to have that Cambridge NIV Study Bible in the goatskin leather.  It felt good in the hands, smelled good, holy even!  This is allegedly the most widely selling Study Bible and I had yet to really examine it.  What I found was shocking.  The Bible goes out of its way to say that verses (and there are a lot of them!) don't say what they fairly clearly say!  Just a couple examples.

1 Timothy 4:10 (NIV) states: "...we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe."   (those who believe have a wonderful, albeit subjective hope, unlike those who do not believe; this may explain the word "especially," but the point here is God is "the Savior of all men," whether they know it or have this hope currently or not.)

Here's the NIV Study Bible's note:  "Obviously this does not mean that God saves every person from eternal punishment, for such universalism would contradict the clear testimony of Scripture.  God is, however, the Savior of all in that he offers salvation to all and saves all who come to him."

WOW.  They have the "clear testimony of Scripture" right in front of their face and contradict it.  That passage does not say "exclusively" no matter how much they wish it did!  It says "especially" or "specially" in the King James. 

One more:  1 John 2:2 (NIV) states of Christ: "He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world."  Debates on the atonement, how it operated and so forth aside, the verse seems pretty clear in that it includes the sins of the whole world!  That is wonderful news! And now for our helpful study note to rain on the parade! -

NIV Study Bible note:  "...In this way the Father's wrath is satisfied....Forgiveness through Christ's atoning sacrifice is not limited to one particular group only; it has worldwide application....It must, however, be received by faith....Thus this verse does not teach universalism (that all people ultimately will be saved), but that God is an impartial God."

The Father's wrath was satisfied in this way?  Well, that's a train-wreck of a statement right there.  It portrays a cruel God satisfying his bloodthirstiness on Jesus.  I, for one, totally understand people who want nothing to do with such a God.  But even if we give them that, if the Father's wrath was satisfied, where do they find that people must DO something ("receive") in this lifetime necessarily, in order to avoid eternal conscious torment?  The study note teaches substitutionary atonement, but if the penalty for sin is eternal conscious torment, and Jesus needed to bear this to satisfy "justice," or "wrath," then by their reasoning, Jesus would still need to be in hell, suffering eternal conscious torment to "satisfy" God.  What a miserable, wretched misunderstanding of the grace and love of God.  There are no strings attached in this verse that warrant this disgraceful study note. 

Let us reject this portrait of a sadistic cosmic dictator with all of our being, and pray that the truly good news that this verse and many others (specific texts abound, but we should look to Jesus to see what God is really like! -- healing, forgiving, blessing, and loving his creatures, all of them with special attention to the outcasts) teach will resonate in the hearts and minds of people everywhere so they may be freed from fear, "religion," hatred, and other evils that abound in the notes in some of these Study Bibles and churches today. 

I think we need another Study Bible.  Perhaps another translation even.  But more important than all this is that we strive to be like Christ, that we follow him in blessing poor people, comforting people in pain and just being a friend/loving the outcasts among us today.  We are told not to judge others, or we will reap judgment ourselves.  We all fall short!  God knows this and looks at the heart; it's how we treat others that really matters! - It's absurd to think that God is waiting up there (very, very mad still) with a pencil (and an eraser) in one hand and an eternal hot poker in the other just in case people don't say the sinner's prayer in this lifetime.

Imagine that, Jesus with a hot poker, tormenting someone who never heard of him or for some reason or another didn't "receive"  him in this lifetime, over and over again forever without mercy.  Unthinkable!!  The holocaust is over!  Prolonging the torment for infinity to satisfy retributive wrath??  God forbid!  Of course, this is what many churches today actually, in effect, are propagating about our merciful God!  They have made God into a monster!  I would go so far as to call this doctrine of eternal conscious torture "satanic." 

Let's pray that God motivate more people to get together, stand up and demonstrate, write about, preach and teach what God is really like and bring glory to his name, instead of the shame and, frankly, evil that is being attributed to him so widely today.  And then let us live out what we know to be true to the best of our abilities, with God's help!  Let's strive to have mercy and be kind towards all God's children.

God bless,
David