Hell

Growing up I was told that when you die you either go to heaven or you go to hell. It’s very black and white and there isn’t anything else you need to know - believe the right things about Jesus and his death and resurrection and your sinful nature and need for a savior or go to hell to be separated from God forever.

Simple.

I remember asking if there was any other possibility only to met with a firm “NO” and a rather quick explanation that of course throughout history other people proposed various other ideas, but those other people were heretics and their ideas were unBiblical and their writings were burned.

Ooooook then. And so … I stopped asking questions.

Right?

I grew up in this bubble where we were told what to believe and how to think and were given very firm boundaries. It was a fundamentalist world where certain topics were never to be questioned and certain questions were never to be asked.

Hell was one of those topics and “is there another way to think about it?” was one of those questions - it is what it is, don’t you dare think about pushing back on it.

Once I left high school and got into college the topic was still off limits. The school I went to was part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and on more than one occasion I heard that if hell wasn’t a thing and eternal separation from God wasn’t a thing … then the whole basis for missions is kind of weak.

Right?

Makes sense, I guess. Because what’s the point of going across the world to tell tribes about Jesus if their eternal destinations aren’t at stake? Why waste the time? The effort? The money?

Of course I was taught various ways to think about hell and understand hell and some of those ways were more palatable than others, but at the end of the day no matter what sugary language we used, the end result was the same - hell involved eternal separation from God or a full annihilation of the soul and was the unfortunate consequence of not accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

Some get in.

And some don’t.

… That’s the bottom line.

As I’ve grown in my faith I’ve become more and more drawn to the off limit topics and have become more comfortable asking the forbidden questions and so for the last 10 years or so I’ve been exploring the topic of hell and have come to (what I’ve been told are) some fairly unorthodox conclusions.

BUT.

They’re really not all that unorthodox at all.

“Orthodox” refers to a tradition that is accepted as right or true and, really, none of the conclusions I’ve come to concerning hell fall outside of that definition. In fact, the ideas that I have about hell are much more orthodox and much more grounded in tradition than the idea of hell being a place of separation from God or eternal torment because of believing the wrong things about Jesus.

These days I hold to an idea of “Universal Reconciliation” where I believe that everyone will be reconciled with God.

Yes, everyone.

Christians.

Jews.

Atheists.

… Everyone.

Why do I believe this? Because I take the Bible seriously when it says things like …

“In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their sins against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

… And beyond other verses like that, I also wonder if Jesus’ work on the cross is really all that amazing if only a select group of people have a good experience in the next life and if all it takes to have that good experience is to align with a certain theological idea and live a somewhat decent life.

Seems boring to me and I wonder why God would go to all of the effort to put in place a mission that does’t benefit everyone … that seems mean.

Anyways, what I was amazed to find out in my own studying is that a lot of different early and prominent figures in the church believed along these same lines and held to the idea that everyone would be reconciled with God …

Clement of Alexandria (150-215AD)

Origen (185-254AD)

Gregory of Nysa (335-395AD)

… And lots more.

Of course their ideas varied, but they didn’t believe that people would be separated from God because they didn’t accept Christ as their Lord and Savior, nor did they think that people would be tortured or anything sadistic like that. Instead, they believed that God desires for everyone to be saved and that in the work of Christ God came to reconcile the whole world to himself and that any sort of judgment or consequence or whatever you want to call it in the afterlife wasn’t meant to punish or condemn, but to correct and purify and restore and ready for Kingdom living.

For them any fire that one encountered on the other side of this life was meant to restore and renew, not punish and condemn and destroy … which makes Jesus’ words in Mark that “everyone will be salted with fire” make much, much more sense.

Right?

I think so.

Anyways, we’re going to tackle a lot more of these ideas this Fall in our series called “To Hell With Hell”. In that 8-part series we’ll be talking to people like NT Wright, Brian McLaren, Matthew Korpman, William Paul Young, and Keith Giles. Oh. And go check out Keith’s book “Jesus Undefeated: Condemning the False Doctrine of Eternal Torment”, it’s a game changer and really helped me realize that my views on hell aren’t as crazy as they haters say they are.

Peace.