Did God Fail? [part 2]

In his book, Love Wins, Rob Bell can’t be mistaken as anything but an evangelical Christian, as he’s got passage after passage of Scripture references to back up his teachings. He theorizes that we make our own heaven and hell here on earth. He talks about the time he took a trip to Rwanda. As he walked down the street he saw child after child with missing limbs from the genocides. You see, the best way to humiliate someone is to cut off the limb of a loved one. That way, the victim and the victim’s family will always be reminded of the violence they endured at the perpetrator’s hand. Bell says that when he’s asked if he believes in hell, he responds with a question: “Have you sat and talked with a family who just found out their child has been molested? Repeatedly? Over a number of years? By a relative?”

He tells stories of crimes against humanity and the hell that people inflict on each other, be they genocide or simple indifference to one another, he says, “I tell these stories because it is absolutely vital that we acknowledge that love, grace, and humanity can be rejected. From the most subtle rolling of the eyes to the most violent degradation of another human, we are terrifyingly free to do as we please. God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it. We have that kind of freedom, that kind of choice. We are that free. We can use machetes if we want to.”

One the flipside, Bell talks about how we can choose heaven too, here, on earth, and it’s this absence of the idea of someplace else that seems to have his fellow evangelical Christians in an uproar. I think it’s because we want to believe in a sort of “spiritual judicial system.” We want to believe the system works, that for this life we’re on trial and then when we die, we get what we had coming—gold streets and jeweled crowns, or fire and torment. We truly want to believe that God is just and gives people what they deserve. But that’s not what the Bible teaches about love and grace, is it? The very definition of love given to us in II Corinthians is anything but fair. If God’s desire is for all mankind to come into oneness with God, and if God doesn’t accomplish what God set out to do, what does that say about God’s omnipotence? And if God is not omnipotent, then what would be the point of belief in God if God is a failure just like all the rest of us?

Bell talks about life as being dimensional and how he doesn’t believe that God is limited to this piddly little existence we call life to turn the hearts of men toward God. God’s love is that big, that perfect. It transcends dimension. It transcends everything we think we’ve got figured out about consciousness. Because if God is perfect, and if God’s love is perfect, and that in the end we believe that God wins, and if God is love, then Love Wins.

There is so much more that I’d like to write, but if I write too much, I might lose your interest. The main thing I want to leave you with is that being a Christian or having faith in God is not synonymous with the belief of a God like you’ve been told about, or the one I’ve been told about. If you simply cannot reconcile an “unconditionally loving God” with one who will torture you forever in hell because you don’t respond the right way, then you’re not alone. Not all Christians believe this and you don’t have to believe it to be a Christian (paraphrasing Rob Bell). With that said, I will end this post with another excerpt from Love Wins, because there is no way I could say it any better myself.

Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his Son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God.

Beautiful.

But there’s more. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being  to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.

If there was an earthly father who was like that, we would call the authorities. If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately.

If God can switch gears like that, switch entire modes of being that quickly, that raises a thousand questions about whether a being like this could ever be trusted, let alone be good. Loving one moment, vicious the next. Kind and compassionate, only to become cruel and relentless in the blink of an eye.

That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can.

And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.

[…]

Listen. We’re told a better story. Because the good news is better than that.

Did God Fail? [part 1]

First, I was a believer in Arminianism, then I was Calvinist. Some people are both, but now I am neither. That said, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve contemplated the afterlife. At some point along the way, the idea of it became less and less paramount in my faith until one day it wasn’t at all. When my brother Chad passed away, I used to tote cliché sentiments about how I will see him again someday and that I’m glad he’s in a better place. Sometimes, I even remarked about how I couldn’t wait for Jesus to return because I couldn’t wait to see my brother, always looking to the someplace else to experience real life, because at that point, my life didn’t cut it. The dinner table suddenly became quiet because Chad was the jokester and the rest of us were serious. Life as I knew it then had become empty.

Sometimes, though, I’d get a sense of panic that Chad wasn’t really in heaven, and that I couldn’t be certain that I’d see him again. I knew that people could lose their salvation through sin and so I wondered if those parties Chad went to in the weeks leading up to his death might have been the end of him. The Jell-O schnapps that I knew he’d consumed before he was of legal drinking age might have sent him straight to the pit of hell, to burn in torment forever. Because he’d made a choice—God or sin--and Jell-O schnapps were sinful. He swore sometimes too. And swearing was sinful.

People deified Chad after his death, as people often do when someone dies. Chad was perfect. Chad was a good person, a lover of God, and a namesake for many of the children who were born in the months that followed. But I knew the truth because Chad talked to me. I knew he looked at girls. He told me his stuff, his sins, and without any apparent remorse for any of them. A close friend of the family said that he saw Chad respond to an altar call at church where he rededicated his life to Christ, but I doubted it. I went to every service that Chad did, and I saw no such thing. I’m sure this friend meant to reassure us that Chad was where we assumed he was. But as I sat and listened to the deifying stories, I knew it was quite possible that he went to hell and I was the only one who knew it.

By the time I was college age, I began to reevaluate what I thought about God and how people are saved. I was exposed to Calvinism and its ideas of unconditional acceptance of the saints. Nothing can separate you from the love of Christ, neither height nor depth, neither heaven nor hell, nor any other created creature can separate us from the love of Christ. That once accepted, that’s it, you’re in, your problems are solved. The end. This idea freed me as a “saint.” It freed my brother too, because I knew he’d asked Jesus into his heart as a child.

But then, Calvinism presented a whole new set of problems for me. If salvation is not by our own merit, but God’s, then why must people accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior? Doesn’t that, well, count as your own merit, your action to be saved, and not God’s? So I thought that maybe it’s by my own merit that I trusted in Jesus, but after I became born again, it’s all God? I saw the inconsistency, but I ignored it because I didn’t know what else to think. For it is written, “For Jacob He loved, but Esau He hated.” Wait a minute. He hated Esau? Pardon me but, what the hell? We are all God’s children, loved by God, and desired by God to come into full repentance and oneness with Christ, but one sibling was loved, and the other was hated? Does this mean that God had fully loved and accepted me, unconditionally, by grace, and yet my brother may not have been fully loved and accepted, unconditionally and by grace, or vice versa? Yes. That’s exactly what it means.

So, with Arminianism I must accept the yoyo of falling in and out of favor with God, because my salvation is totally dependent on what I do or don’t do to earn acceptance into the Kingdom of Heaven, or that I can “resist” the free gift of grace. Then with Calvinism I must accept that, though we are all God’s children, we can’t resist the free gift of grace, yet salvation is totally dependent on God’s choosing, and that there are those God has damned and those God hasn’t, yet this “gift” is somehow by some ambiguous merit—because God said so. I felt like the plastic bag swirling in the wind in that scene from the movie, American Beauty.

I am nearly finished with a book right now that I originally said that I wouldn’t write about. “Love Wins,” by Rob Bell, is subtitled, “A Book About Heaven and Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived,” a provocative title for the religious community if I’ve ever heard one. Look up personal reviews of this book on Amazon or wherever else you chose to purchase it and you’ll find a massive amount of people crying that he’s the anti-Christ, the devil incarnate, horribly deceived. This is exactly the kind of book that will routinely get my attention.

Here’s an excerpt from the back:            

“God loves us.

God offers us everlasting life

by grace, freely, through no

merit on our part.

Unless you do not respond the right way.

Then God will torture you forever.

In hell.”

Huh?

Exactly. What, pray tell, is the good news about this…ahem…Good News? Because if God loves everyone, and extends grace freely by no merit of our own, and that God desires that we come into oneness with God, and that if in the end, when millions of people do not choose God, does that mean that God ultimately failed?