:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

I’ve been deeply engaged in Christianity since the age of twelve when I first started reading the Bible. Ever since I first understood the bridge to life story of the Gospel, I’ve had some nagging notions that some things I had learned weren’t quite right.

I’d read the Bible and pray, and there was something about the God I met in the Bible and in my prayer time that didn’t quite square with how I’d been told to read the Bible and understand salvation. Comedian Mike Birbiglia sums up my confusion pretty well if you don’t mind my paraphrase of his comedy routine:

“Jesus loves you, but if you don’t love him back he’s going to come and kill you.”

There’s some version of this story that many atheists and agnostics find tough to handle about Christianity. To be honest, I both embraced and held loosely to the tension of a loving God who also punished those who rejected him—it all depended on the day it seems. I was grateful to know that Jesus had saved me, but I didn’t understand how so many people could be outside of the Christian faith and suffer eternal punishment in hell.

I don’t think it’s anything all that new to struggle with God’s justice and love, but it seems that doubt, uncertainty, and new answers are taking hold in some evangelical circles of late. The success of several Christian books lately suggest there are many Christians who have gone through similar struggles about God, hell, and the point of Christianity.

Is there more to Jesus than just escaping hell?

I can’t say why I’ve sat on some of these things for quite so long, but I think part of it has to do with the complexity of rethinking Christianity and proposing a different take on something that seemed solid and set in stone for so long. There’s so much baggage, so many personal experiences, and so many diverse perspectives to take into account.

This week I want to look at how we rethink Christianity and particularly focus on the matter of God’s love and justice in relation to the mission of God and what to make of hell. Whenever we express doubts over a Christian belief and consider changing it, we sometimes slip into a rhetoric of “biblical integrity” vs. “error.”

In the case of Protestants, and especially evangelicals, we have created our own monster here. Every good evangelical is taught commitment to biblical integrity over tradition. If a sincere follower of Jesus reads the Bible and comes to a conclusion other than a tradition that has been passed down, that person is supposedly duty-bound to break with the past in pursuit of that new understanding of the Bible because biblical integrity trumps tradition.

There are good and bad aspects to this. On one hand, we no longer have to worry about ridiculous things like the sale of indulgences, but on the down side we have an army mini-Martin Luthers declaring to one another, “Here I stand, I can nothing else” as we split again and again. Over time we have lost sight of our traditions, both the good ones that ground us and the bad ones that will prevent us from repeating past mistakes.

I thought it would be helpful to look at how we can rethink Christianity this week in terms of a rather high-stakes issue such as the doctrine of hell so that we can both ground ourselves in some solid principles that we can use in similar situations, while also creating a healthy place to rethink hell in terms of Christian tradition and the biblical witness.

Rethinking aspects of the Christian faith can be a healthy practice for committed disciples, but we can also mess things up. This week we’ll try to figure out some steps forward.

Posts This Week

I’ll be taking tomorrow (Tuesday) off for an end-of-semester celebration with my wife, so I’m currently planning to  pick up the rest of this series on Wednesday and Friday with the following posts:

Wednesday: In times of questioning and transition, we need to avoid swinging too far in one direction over another and leaving the past behind.

Friday: I think we have made too much of hell in relation to the Gospel message, but let’s be careful that we don’t make too little of God’s justice, judgment, and the reality that anyone can reject God’s love and forgiveness.