Do you know the least effective way to help someone?

Try to immediately solve their problems.

Tell them all the cliches for why bad things happen. Tell them why they’re wrong. Tell them about how their past decisions led to this moment of crisis. Argue with them about why you’re right, and they’re wrong.

How often do we try to fix other people when what they really need is to be heard?

I’m guilty of it, I know.

Our knee-jerk reaction when someone shows their struggle is to offer our insight. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, but it needs to be near the end of a very crucial series of events.

In my lowest season, it wasn’t an argument that helped me get back up and press onward. It was something else entirely.

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What do you “really” believe?

I live quite near the white cliffs of Dover in England. With its rich green grass, gleaming white cliffs and deep blue, or battleship grey sea, depending on the highly changeable weather, it’s a beautiful place to walk, and I love to walk my dog, Bailey.

But frankly, it’s really not a great place to take Bailey.

The problem is that the cliffs are high, this thing called gravity exists, and Bailey really, REALLY loves his ball. There are no fences on these cliffs so you can walk to the very edge of the beautiful but surprisingly unstable precipice.

Now I believe in gravity. Someone at school must have told me about it once. I can’t see it or prove it theoretically. In fact, I don’t think I could even find a book in the library that can tell me what it is, though one helpful bumper sticker I saw, stated, “Gravity is a myth, the earth sucks!”

Whatever, I just know it exists.

That means that getting near the crumbly windswept edge, or worse, throwing Baileys ball in that direction, is at best unwise and at worst, downright stupid.

So I don’t do it.

I have a good degree of confidence that should I lose my footing or get swept off the edge by a gargantuan gust of wind, I would plummet dramatically and at high speed to my sure demise on the wave worn rocks below. I can’t prove to you that would happen, I just kind of know.

Unlike me, Bailey doesn’t really believe in gravity… or at least he doesn’t much care. Bailey cares only for the ball.

And that’s why we spend our walks in the woods.

Do You Really Believe It?

Cool story, Geoff. Why are you telling us about walking your dog?

Well, I’m trying to illustrate something. Because I believe in gravity, I change where I walk Bailey. In fact I change a number of my life decisions and opinions based on my “gravitationist” belief system.

For example, I typically refrain from popping outside for a breath of fresh air while on a commercial flight. I also tend to avoid spitting directly upwards into the air above my head.

Because I believe in gravity, I make certain decisions when it comes to my actions.

After 25 years of being a Christian, my world was rocked when I was finally confronted with something that happens all across the world every day.

Death.

My Dad died. I loved my Dad, but my Dad didn’t love God, or if he did, he didn’t let on to anyone that this was the case. His death hit me hard, and so I turned to my evangelical faith, which was supposed to be my source of comfort.

I had so many well-meaning friends say they don’t know how unbelievers can deal with death without their faith. The problem is that my faith told me that dying without acknowledging, loving and believing in God sent you to Hell to be tortured without relief, forever. I was bereft, and my faith wasn’t helping me much at all. As I looked at my Dad’s now lifeless face in the hospice, I came to a very real and very painful question: if my faith system mandated that my dad was currently experiencing fiery torment, did I really believe it?

I had friends come up to me and say, “Well we can’t know his relationship with God.” Others clutched at theological straws, saying stuff like, “His faith expressed many years ago would surely save him,” but ultimately, none of these platitudes seemed to get to the heart of the issue.

The question that gnawed at my soul was what did I truly believe? More specifically did I believe that God was punishing him right now with eternal torture?

I realized with immediate and shocking certainty that I did not. I had a moment of truth, where I looked square in the face of eternal conscious torment and said, “I don’t believe you.”

That set off a long chain of events as I plunged into deconstructing my faith and all that went with it, but what it has left me with is a litany of questions about what we say we believe and what we really believe.

If we truly believe something, it can’t help but influence how we act.

So when the majority of evangelical churches say in their statements of faith that they believe in eternal conscious torment for the unbelievers, how are they demonstrating that faith?

Where do they walk Bailey, metaphorically speaking?

If we’re honest, we tend to treat Hell like a sort of guilty secret which we know about but don’t like to bring out in public. It’s not so much a case of being ashamed of Christ. I get the feeling that the modern evangelical church is subconsciously ashamed of the story, which is why it’s so rarely discussed outside of extremely fundamentalist settings. I completely understand their reticence to preach everlasting torment and why grace and love are quite rightly given the spotlight.

And that’s the problem. That’s where we see the disconnect between stated belief and true belief.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

As I have discussed my problems with the doctrine of hell, I have been astounded by how many people will confide in hushed tones from the side of their mouth that they are not sure about Hell. In fact I would guess that if I sat down, one by one, with a typical church congregation, that the majority do not in fact believe that God holds individuals who don’t know him in torture forever.

Their problem is that to admit this goes against what they think everyone else believes. This is a classic example of Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes being played out in our churches every day. We leave the nakedness of the emperor unchallenged because it would require us being brave enough to stand up and say, “Hold on a minute…” [1]

It’s perhaps no mistake that a child calls out the emperor’s nakedness in the famous story.

Of course this is just one doctrine among many and we can discuss the various opinions and theories that are out there, but the point is, if people really believe that hell is real, why don’t they act like it? If we really thought that every man, woman and child were destined for an eternity of agony, would we not be out on the streets screaming in the face of everyone to “please, please, listen!”

But we don’t. Why? Because, I suspect we don’t really believe it. The preachers I hear deliver the harshest sermons usually come from a long line of Christians and maintain an exclusively Christian community. It’s very easy to dissociate themselves from anyone who might be in danger of experiencing this tortuous afterlife.

Hell was my turning point, but it’s far from the only one. Our faith is replete with examples:

• We say we believe that God speaks through the Bible, but it’s a well-documented fact that very few Christians spend any substantial time reading it.
• We say that God heals but largely leave it until the end of the service, between the last song and after-service coffee, to pray for anyone… if we do at all.
• We say we believe that we should love our enemies, yet our nations wage nationalistic wars and we justify killing in our societies.
• We say we believe that we should care for the poor and the outcast, yet we fear and reject refugees and vote for those who pass laws in the opposite spirit of Christ.

The point here isn’t that we need to “pull our socks up” and get on with what we say we believe. That is mere compliance, and our churches are already quite proficient in guilt trips. The real challenge is to find out what we really believe, and then do it.

That takes honesty, perhaps honestly that can only be found in the heartache and pain of loss and death and sickness, when our empty pseudo beliefs get revealed as the sham they are.

Richard Rohr call this “necessary suffering” – suffering that brings with it a maturity and realism which church dogma so often lacks – an authenticity that results in action [2].

I Don’t Believe You

When we really believe something, we act on it. It influences our behavior.

God can be trusted with our questions and he will not reject us for asking them. He wants not our intellectual assent but our genuine selves. That’s where belief becomes transformational.

So let’s live by what we believe. Let’s care for the poor and feed the hungry and love our enemies, even when it’s so very difficult to do.

And when we find ourselves living in opposition with our supposed beliefs, let’s have the courage to ask ourselves, “Is this really what I believe?” and when we realize we don’t, let’s have the boldness to look at those ideas and say…

I don’t believe you.

 

 

Sources

[1] Fairy Tales Told for Children. First Collection. Third Booklet. 1837. (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Tredie Hefte. 1837.

[2] Richard Rohr; Falling Upward, Ch 6.

In the 3 months leading up to this last election, 4 out of the 5 most circulated news stories on Facebook were hoax stories.

Think about that for a second.

These stories weren’t simply biased, twisted, or distorted. They were completely made up. They were 100% fake.

And they were passed around as actual news by hundreds of thousands of people.

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(Republished with permission from Clarion Journal)

Back in the day, when the early Church first came to faith in Jesus as Messiah but still relied entirely on the Hebrew Scriptures as their only ‘Bible,’ gospel preaching focused on the myriad of texts fulfilled in Christ. They saw Jesus everywhere in what would become the Christian ‘Old Testament.’ Indeed, we read how Jesus himself perceived His life as woven across the whole fabric of Jewish narrative, hymnology, and prophecy (Luke 24:13-35). For decades, the continuity between the Jewish narrative and the Christian revelation was a continuous wonder of discoveries.

But by the end of the first century, believers were also noticing some disturbing discontinuities as well. They noted the disparity between the image of the Father revealed in Christ with the violent images, actions, laws and judgments associated with Yahweh on display throughout the Law, the Writings and the Prophets. It seemed impossible that the God whom Jesus called Father could be responsible for the pattern of hatred and atrocity often described in the text and ascribed to His name.

The issue was so acute that potential solutions triggered schism. Believers attempted three major contrary approaches. The Gnostics preserved the perfection of the Creator God by assigning OT destruction and retribution to lesser gods and demiurges— distortions of God’s will. They included Yahweh among this secondary, violent company. Others, like the Marcionites, could not bear the discontinuity and ultimately abandoned the OT altogether as sub-Christian and unfit for continued use as authoritative Scripture in the Church.

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Modern “prophecy” can be scary.

On the one hand, it can be a great tool for mobilizing your audience. Need books sold? Need a detractor harassed? Need a politician elected? By selecting your preferred outcome and predicting it in a “prophetic” manner, you can manipulate people into helping you make it happen!

But on the other hand, what if your prediction is wrong? Won’t that undermine your standing as a “prophet of God”.

Fortunately, the answer is “No”!

Believe it or not, you can get as much as 75% of your “prophetic” predictions completely wrong and remain a “prophet of God” in great standing! Even better, many “prophets” today are able to substantially increase their product revenue through recurring failed “prophecies”.

How?

Well that’s what we’re here to share with you today! We’re bringing you the complete how-to guide for prophesying future results, just in time for one of this year’s biggest events:

The U.S. Presidential election!

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Editor’s Note: There is an absolute narrative often forced upon Evangelical Christians today – one that says eternal torment is the only possible afterlife for any who fail to believe in Jesus as God. This narrative is usually presented with the assumption that it has always been the sole belief of the church throughout history and that any deviations from this view are simply modern, liberal perversions of historic truth.

While we have already taken a thorough look at hell in the Bible, there is a lot more to this story, and that’s why today, we’re republishing a thorough discussion from Brad Jersak on the topic of hopeful inclusivism. Brad has a unique aptitude for making advanced scholarship accessible to the average reader, and he brings a refreshing honesty to theological discussion, happily presenting both the strengths and weaknesses in his arguments while simultaneously acknowledging viable alternatives. These exceptional qualities make him uniquely suited for a discussion of the afterlife as it relates to scripture, doctrine, and orthodoxy, and he has graciously allowed us to share his work with you today.

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“That is all I ask of Orthodoxy—to permit me to hope.” — Fr. Aiden Kimel

After a decade of catechesis and struggle under the guidance of my spiritual father, Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, and godfather, David Goa, I was chrismated into the Orthodox Church in 2013. To some, the tutelage of these sages already disqualifies me, the rhetoric of unity of the Church notwithstanding. But I knew this. I proceeded with eyes wide open into the Orthodox Church despite her conflicts and dysfunctions. I proceeded because I felt drawn from my Evangelical foxhole into the harbor of Christian Orthodoxy, where I was exposed to a more Christlike God.

A key factor in the move was the assurance of some key Scriptures, catechisms and liturgies, along with a number of significant Orthodox saints, hierarchs and theologians, that Orthodoxy permits me to hope—that I could believe and teach my basic conviction (published in Her Gates Will Never Be Shut) of a humble eschatological hope, the possibility in principle of universal salvation—without being branded a heretic.

Not that I make the bold claims of St Gregory of Nyssa or St Isaac of Syria (their revised apokatastasis have never been anathematized). Nor do I insist on teaching the daring universalism of Fr. Sergius Bulgakov or David Bentley Hart as doctrine (although their arguments seem airtight).

My own project is far more modest. I ask and now assert that Christian Orthodoxy permits me to hope—permits a position elsewhere called “hopeful inclusivism.” Hopeful inclusivism says that we cannot presume that all will be saved or that even one will be damned. Rather, we put our hope in the final victory and verdict of Jesus Christ, whose mercy endures forever and whose lovingkindness is everlasting.

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