Religious people are boring. We take pleasure in attaching to a religious social structure that provides some significant level of cultural security. We self identify with a particular group expecting to be blanketed with that groups supposed acceptableness. One would hope that this is not the only motivation but in most cases it is the principal factor as some folk relate to the church or to religions in general. There is no more arrogant an assumption than the Christian small business person who advertises their trustworthiness by claiming to be Christian.
Assumptions are just as dangerous when seeking to understand the ways of God as outlined in the Bible. As children, we learn the “spiritual truth” from preachers and teachers appointed by a church to give instruction as to what the Bible says. These leaders, from a wide variety of religious and theological spectrums, already assume they know the ways of God. The game is to pick out those scriptures that prove their assumptions, knowing full well that it is possible to proof text almost anything somewhere in scripture. One can be a highly educated and an adult person to live their lives playing this game.
These learned assumptions, to some degree, depose and supplant the ways of God as the intended spiritual food for the church and the individual. It is laughable that the modern church of the 21st century has no clue as to why we are losing credibility with our culture. In short, we teach mental assumptions about God not the Bible. The modern critical mind recognizes the charade and compensates by rejecting all that comes from the church, including a lot of good stuff.
A variety of theological assumptions not directly supported by a consensus of Scripture, have always been with the church. There are old assumptions and faddish new assumptions that pop up from time to time that feed our desire for perceived exclusivity. Some can hold sway for centuries and some loose traction in a few short years. One assumption that has always been with the church, is hell as a God appointed place of eternal punishment and banishment for the many. Three mental assumptions dictate our understanding of the hell scenario.
Assumption # 1 Physical earthly death seals our eternal fate.
Assumption # 2 God is the sadistic ruler of eternity for most of humanity.
Assumption # 3 The love of God is meant only for the few right living persons.
At the time of death, so these assumptions state, God is obligated to deal with those of us unworthy of eternity, as the sadistic ruler God of the torture chamber called hell. This warlike God has been preached right along side the good news of God’s forgiveness, grace and compassion. After growing weary of both sides talking past each other with supposed scriptural backup, I would like to say how I have settled the issue.
The following biblical passages clearly convey the hell scenario. To qualify as a relevant scripture, it must teach that there is a place, a place that God has designed, a place of unending torment and that God will choose or judge those of us who will be banished to this place. There are those theologians who want us to believe that our eternal souls are merely snuffed out if we fail to qualify for paradise but this is the most offensive of all assumptions.
Daniel 12.2 (Old Testament prophet Daniel)
Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake; some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.
St. Matthew 25.46 (Jesus)
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
2 Thessalonians 1: 5-10 (St. Paul)
All of this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering. God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you.
Rev. 14. 9- 12 (St. John)
A third angel followed them and said in aloud voice: “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink of the wine of God’s fury, which he has poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever.
Rev. 20: 11 to 15 (St. John)
Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and the books were opened. Another book is opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and everyone was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. All whose names were not written in the book of life were thrown into the lake of fire.
Are you startled, there are only five? The entire Bible has 31,103 verses, minus these five, leaving 31,098 verses which do not speak directly to this point. The hell scenario would seem to be a minority opinion. I am not a biblical expert so I may have missed a couple, but would you not concede that this minority assumption has minimal merit? Of course there are hundreds of others that give us pieces of the puzzle, still, the five are not the overwhelming biblical evidence claimed by those who believe the hell doctrine. One may ask, with such limited biblical foundation, how did such a hellish doctrine come to be the norm in the Christian Church? Why has the Church so tragically defined biblical orthodoxy on such skimpy biblical clarity?
In my opinion the simplest and best answer is that this doctrine was and is intended to frighten the folk into submission to the Church. The damnation motive, through the centuries of Church history, was front and center because this doctrine enabled the reign of the institutional church. The doctrine is institutionalized fear mongering. There are plenty of reasons to discount my largely personal opinion but the qualified are strangely yet understandably silent.
May I suggest the following post death scenario? We all die, we all will be judged by God, all of us, except Jesus. We all will experience temporary discomfort until we wake up, accept and surrender unconditionally by asking for the control of God. The severity and duration of the discomfort is the only question that this life may influence. The invitations are out for all of humanity but until we ask to be included, on this side of death or the other side, death will be an unpleasant yet glorious experience.
This scenario is in sync with the hundreds of scriptures that allude to our eternal destiny. Biblical words such as sin, the judgment of God, the wrath of God, righteousness, the lake of fire, the mercy of God and eternal life need not ignite our human assumptions of the hell scenario. Just the mention of such words is not enough evidence for anyone to construct a hell theology.
In an attempt to be fair, the Old testament prophet Daniel, Jesus himself, St. John and St. Paul made the above five statements that clearly state the hell scenario. The Bible reader and thinker must make a choice to ask of these verses, are they intended to fully describe eternity? Rather, are they not true statements spoken in the context of this earthly life and using the language very recognizable in New testament times. The hell scenario was popularized by the theology of the self righteous Pharisees.
The fear factor alone has never given birth to true disciples. Modern man is even less motivated to make positive change when threatened by the damnation doctrine because we are not so easily frightened. Our place in nature without a faith in God is as tenable as it has always been but there are fewer obvious threats that breed insecurity in the short term. Five centuries ago a theologian, scientist, mathematician and inventor, on the fringes of the church, recognized the limits of fear as a religious (spiritual) motivation.
“The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instil religion into our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace, but attempting to instil it into hearts and minds with force and threats is to instil not religion but terror.” Pascal, F 172 “Three Outsiders”, Diogenes Allen, Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon, 2006, p. 34.
Since there is an eternal divine party, the loving, forgiving God, being who He is, will always open the door to those who ask. The celebration will be ours to enjoy forever! Joining the party in this life is it’s own reward.
G.Goslaw
Landers, CA
