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?
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