<\/em>immoral cruelty.<\/p>\nSo, to sum up those postions:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s in the Bible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a winner; you\u2019re a loser.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing I can do; it\u2019s God\u2019s will.\u201d<\/p>\n
And there we have the blanket, not exactly warm but definitely fuzzy, in which so many Christians contentedly wrap around themselves at night before they go to sleep.<\/p>\n
Except that even they<\/em> don\u2019t really buy that. Have you ever noticed how no evangelical (or at least not one in anything resembling a national spotlight) will ever actually say<\/em> that Gandhi, for instance, is right now burning in hell? You can sooner get a garden snail to sing the national anthem than you can an evangelical to just once<\/em> come out and say that upon dying all Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and virtually anyone else who dies a non-Christian goes straight to hell. They simply will not say it.<\/p>\nWhat they will<\/em> say (and always with that little shrug that allows the prickly mantle of responsibility to slip from their shoulders) is, \u201cHey, what can I do? It\u2019s not me. It\u2019s in the Bible.\u201d<\/p>\nEven they<\/em> choke on the distasteful thing they\u2019ve already swallowed. The injustice of hell is so profoundly anathematic to everything humans instinctively hold dear that even those who believe<\/em> in hell invariably balk at claiming the objective final truth of hell. Even they can\u2019t force their mouths and brains to override their hearts.<\/p>\nAnd the moment following that inevitable little skip in their pre-recorded message they\u2019re right back to wondering (insofar as they care) why non-Christians persist in rejecting their theology.<\/p>\n
If it\u2019s true that by justice<\/em> God means something diametrically opposed to our understanding of that word, what, then, are we to make of Jesus when he talks about love?<\/span> About peace? About altruism? About honor, righteousness, compassion, loyalty, dignity, truth? Is what Jesus means by those words also radically different than what we mean by them?<\/p>\nAnd if it is, then where in the heck does that leave us?<\/p>\n
If we know going in that we can\u2019t make sense of God\u2019s justice, <\/em>then what grounds do we have for believing that anything about God makes any sense at all? And why do we even have<\/em> our inborn sense of right and wrong, if it\u2019s so obviously contrary to God\u2019s sense of the same thing? Aren\u2019t we built in God\u2019s image? Isn\u2019t the whole idea that we\u2019re supposed to champion out in the world God\u2019s values? But how can we do that, when we so clearly have zero comprehension of, for instance, justice, which, relative to engaging with others, is arguably the<\/em> paramount value?<\/p>\nIf hell is real, and God is just, then we know squat about justice. If God could<\/em> shut hell down, but for whatever excellent (and highly secretive) reason chooses not to, then any Christian who goes out into the world meaning to create within it more justice may as well substitute for their goal getting eels to excel at tap dancing. It simply doesn\u2019t make sense for me to fight for something that not only do I not understand, but which all available evidence indicates I have perfectly and exactly wrong.<\/p>\nAnd what are we<\/em> doing making laws? If our ideas of justice are so egregiously erroneous that, contrary to everything we think, know, and understand, it is, in fact, morally righteous and just that 95% of people who have ever lived spend eternity being tortured in hell simply for dying non-Christian\u2014even if they died never having heard<\/em> of Christ\u2014then why on earth would we bother codifying into laws our clearly dumbass ideas about justice and morality? Then we\u2019re like toddlers trying to cook a seven-course gourmet meal. Complete waste\u2014and extremely dangerous. Guaranteed regrettable results.<\/p>\nThe bottom line on the whole issue of hell is that if hell is real, then God\u2014and therefore Jesus, who (let us never forget) according to Trinitarian theology is<\/em> God\u2014must be a sadistic lunatic. And the only way to <\/em>get around that logically airtight truth is to assert that God\u2019s understanding of justice has virtually nothing in common with all of humanity\u2019s ideas about justice.<\/p>\nI don\u2019t think God is a sadistic lunatic. I think God is just, fair, compassionate, rational, and loving. The Bible\u2019s few words about hell are open to all kinds of scholastically supportable interpretations. To choose to call true the interpretation of hell being a real place, in real space and time, where real people are forever being fried alive?<\/p>\n
Talk about crazy.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Foundational to the reasoning informing Francis Chan’s videommercial for his new book about hell is that mortals can’t fathom the mysteries of God\u2019s justice. The real mystery is why it\u2019s not considered absurd and dangerous to propose that God has a sense of justice diametrically opposed to the sense of justice innate to just about every human being. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1528,"featured_media":15374,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christianissues"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n