One of the things that I am looking forward to beginning next Wednesday is the opportunity to be in an office again. Call me weird but I love being in an office. I love study time and digging deeper into the text.

Shortly after I announced my resignation in Waco my office computer died. The cost for it to be repaired would approach the cost for a new machine. Rather than expect a new computer as a lame duck I just spent the last two months of my tenure there working at home. That amounts to 3 months that I have not had regular office hours. I miss it greatly.

I also look forward to getting back into some more substantial blogging. While looking for a new work I stayed away from some of the more sensitive issues that I have dealt with in the past. When I get back to a regular grind here are some things that you can expect in this place:

–More on Moltmann’s Theology of Hope
–How militant atheism is a good thing for the church
–A series on soteriology
–More on nonviolence
–The 10 best and worst song-writers
–What’s the Deal? An opportunity for readers to plug their own political candidates
–A return to C.S. Lewis
–The greatest living theologians
–The role of women
–Good science as a backbone of good theology

These are just a few of the things that I’m looking forward to talking about. Thoughts?

1. Does Hell exist?

2. If so, is it eternal?

3. What, exactly, would condemn one to hell?

4. How do we reconcile a loving and compassionate Parent condemning a child to everlasting torment without hope of “rehabilitation?”

5. Do we miss something by focusing salvation in a purely legal context?

6. Who is Anselm and why is he saying all these terrible things about me?

7. How do we reconcile passages that direct us to forgive 7X70 and then excuse God from the same standard?

8. Do we really believe that God is a God of love? And how is that reconciled with our cries for justice? If we believe that 85% or more of people living today will suffer forever and ever and ever how do we preach a loving God?

9. Is it possible to elevate our “free will” to a place of idolatry?

10. Can there be a different view that incorporates God’s Sovereignty, man’s free will and God’s tender and compassionate love that continues to hold a high regard for scripture?

11. What did the early church believe?

12. If hell is an eternal reality why am I not more serious about it?

13. Can people hold varying views and remain in fellowship?

These are just a few of the questions that I have grappled (and still!) with over the last few months. Ultimately, I believe that there is a more fleshed-out, nuanced understanding of the matter of God’s love (which justice is a part of, not a separate reality) that holds out far more hope than I ever realized.
It goes beyond the Augustinian notion of hell and posits God as the source of our hope. A hope that goes beyond eternal torment.

I know that these are difficult questions and I intend them to be. I’ve stopped and started this series many times in my head because I know the potential volatility of the subject matter might even outstrip that of non-violence.
But I know the participants in this community and we can wrestle with these questions in the spirit of brotherhood. Let’s do that.

What are your thoughts on these initial questions? What would you add to that?

Here is something to chew on as well from Thomas Allin:

It is wholly inconceivable that the definite plan of an Almighty
Being should end in failure—that this should be the
result of the agony of the eternal Son. God has, in the face
of angels and of men, before the universe and its gaze of
wonder, entered Himself into the arena, become Himself a
combatant, has wrestled with the foe, and has been defeated.
I can bring myself to imagine those, who reject the
Deity of Christ, as believing in His defeat; but it is passing
strange that those who believe Him to be “very God Almighty,”
are loudest in asserting His failure.

In coming entries we will look at concepts such as Aion, Hades, Sheol and Apollumi.

But now let us turn our sights onto the most commonly used Greek word that is translated as hell by some interpreters: Gehenna. The word Gehenna appears 12 times in Scripture.

William Barclay said this about the word:

Gehenna…means the Valley of Hinnom, a valley to the south-west of Jerusalem. It was notorious as the place where Ahaz had introduced the fire worship of the heathen God Molech, to whom little children were burned.…2 Chronicles 28:2-4. Josiah had stamped out that worship and ordered that the valley should be forever after an accursed place…it became the place where the refuse of Jerusalem was cast out and destroyed. It was a kind of public incinerator. Always the fire smoldered in it, and a pall of thick smoke lay over it, and bred a loathsome kind of worm which was hard to kill (Mark 9:44-48). So Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, became identified in people’s minds with all that was accursed and filthy, the place where useless and evil things were destroyed.

The first time Jesus utters the word is in the midst of His sermon on the mount in Matthew 5:22 “…and whoever says, ‘You fool! will be liable to the hell (Gehenna) of fire.”

It is important to note that the initial hearers of this message, the Jews, would automatically think of specific and literal place. It is a mistake to translate this as hell. Later in this sermon Jesus will discount the Mosaic code’s emphasis on an “eye for an eye.” The translation of uttering the word fool condemning one to the fires of hell would belie the context.

In addition, this is the first time the word is uttered. What first-century listener is gonna think that Jesus is talking about hell? He didn’t have to tell them what He was saying because they knew.

And not only that, Jesus tells us in verse 26 that it is for a limited duration!

The other passages that use the term bear this out. For sake of brevity, I will just list the passages for you to look up on your own:

Matthew 5:29, 30
Matthew 10:28
Luke 12:4, 5
Matthew 18:9
Mark 9:43–45
Matthew 23:15
Matthew 23:33
James 3:6

None of these passages suggest a never-ending, eternal punishment. Look at Matthew 5:29, 30 if Jesus is referring to an everlasting torment than He is guilty of the greatest understatement in history when he says that it is better to lose one of your members than to be cast into hell.

I have to cut this shorter than I would like because I have to leave the office for a while. However, I want to get something up now so we can begin the discussion. I will leave you with some quotes from others:

The whole Bible is Oriental. Every line breathes the spirit of the East, with its hyperboles and metaphors, and what to us seem utter exaggerations. If such language be taken literally,
its whole meaning is lost. When the sacred writers want to describe the dusky redness of a lunar eclipse, they say the moon is “turned into blood.” He who perverts Scripture is not the man who reduces this sacred poetry to its true meaning. Nay, that man perverts the Bible who
hardens into dogmas the glowing metaphors of Eastern poetry—such conduct LANGE calls “a moral scandal.” So with our Lord’s words. Am I to hate my father and mother or pluck out my right eye literally? Or take a case by Farrar. Egypt is said to have been an iron furnace to the Jews (De.4:20; Jer. 11:4), and yet they said, “it was well with us there,” and sighed for its enjoyments (Nu. 11:18). Therefore I maintain that no doctrine of endless pain can be based on
Eastern imagery, on metaphors mistranslated very often, and always misinterpreted.

–Thomas Allin

The valley bore this name at least as early as the writing of Joshua (Josh. 15:8; 18:16), though nothing is known of its origin. It was the site of child-sacrifices to Moloch in the days of Ahaz and Manasseh (apparently in 2 Kings 16:3; 21:6). This earned it the name “Topheth,” a place to be spit on or abhorred. This “Topheth” may have become a gigantic pyre for burning corpses in the days of Hezekiah after God slew 185,000 Assyrian soldiers in a night and saved Jerusalem (Isa. 30:31-33; 37:26). Jeremiah predicted that it would be filled to overflowing with Israelite corpses when God judged them for their sins (Jer. 7:31-33; 19:2-13). Josephus indicates that the same valley was heaped with dead bodies of the Jews following the Roman siege of Jerusalem about A.D. 69-70…Josiah desecrated the repugnant valley as part of his godly reform (2 Kings 23:10). Long before the time of Jesus, the Valley of Hinnom had become crusted over with connotations of whatever is “condemned, useless, corrupt, and forever discarded.” (Ed Fudge, The Fire That Consumes

And from Thomas Thayer in 1855:

The first time Christ uses the word Gehenna is in Matt. V 22, 29, 30. But not a word of preparation or notice that now, for the first time, the terrible dogma is announced on divine authority. He speaks as calmly as if He were wholly unconscious of the burthen of such a revelation; and the people seem equally unmoved under the awful declaration. And what is singular, it is not presented by itself, in a positive form, unmixed with anything else, as its importance most surely demanded; but is slipped in merely as a comparative illustration, among other judgments, of the greater moral demands of the Gospel, and the strictness with which it enforced obedience.

They, the Jews, had said, “Whosoever shall kill, shall be in danger of the judgment;” but Christ says, whosoever is angry with his brother without cause, is in danger of a punishment equal to that of the judgment (the inferior court of seven judges); and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca (a term of contempt, shallow-brain or blockhead), shall be in danger of a punishment equal to that inflicted by the council (the superior court of seventy judges, which took cognizance of capital crimes); but whosoever shall say, “Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire,” or of a punishment equal in severity to the fire of Gehenna.

Now, if Christ used the term Gehenna to reveal endless woe, and that for the first time, would He not have said this, and fixed forever the meaning of the word? And yet not the slightest intimation do we have of any such new and awful meaning. The Jews were familiar with it, and used it constantly to symbolize any great punishment or judgment coming on the earth; and they must of course suppose He used it as they did, since He gave them no notice to the contrary. If, therefore, He did give it the new signification of endless punishment after death, they could not understand Him, and He failed of His purpose for want of such explanation as they, and we, had a right to expect.

But there is another consideration deserving notice. The difference between the sinfulness of saying Raca or Blockhead, and Fool, is hardly great enough to warrant such a difference in punishment as is involved in the supposition. Townsend justly says, to imagine that Christ, for such a slight distinction as Raca and Thou fool, “would instantly pass from such a sentence as the Jewish Sanhedrim would pronounce, to the awful doom of eternal punishment in hell-fire, is what cannot be reconciled to any rational rule of faith, or known measure of justice.” There is no proportion between the slight difference in guilt and the tremendous, infinite difference in punishment. But if the comparison is between penalties symbolized by stoning to death, inflicted by the Sanhedrim council, and burning alive in Gehenna, then there is proportion, some relation of parts; because the difference between death by stoning and death by burning is not certainly very great; but the difference between death by stoning and endless torment is infinite.

It is impossible, therefore, to believe that Christ, in this first use of Gehenna, intended to reveal the doctrine, without an accusation against His fidelity and justice.

My goal in this series is to think through some fairly esoteric issues for me and reword them in ways that my mind can wrap around them. I’m not plowing any ground that far loftier minds than mine have not paved the way for. When time permits I will create a bibliography page that will point you to more salient and dense works.

I hope next week to begin to get into the sayings of Christ that have been attributed to the existence of an eternal punishment in hell. But as we progress it’s important to talk briefly about the concept of salvation and what it means for us. As more time has elapsed since the creation and the subsequent “fall” I believe that we have developed a much more self-absorbed focus to salvation than originally intended.

God created us to be in relationship with Him. But for the majority of my life I’ve held an unshakable opinion that He wasn’t really committed to that relationship initially. It took one transgression, in my understanding, to screw the whole thing up. It seems that that one transgression moved us from waking hand in hand with God to that Holy Hand picking us up by the collar and dangling us over the fires of hell.

As a result of this view I have lived my life viewing salvation as this personal crusade on my part to win back God’s good graces. Even being “grace-oriented” I still lived out a somewhat myopic self-obsessed view of God’s Salvation. Salvation was my “get out of hell” card, because although hell is not mentioned as part of the punishment in Genesis 3 we all knew that was the end game.

However, as I have progressed in my understanding of the character and nature of God the less I see salvation as been “saved from” but “save to.” It’s not simply God moving that hand away from the fiery pit and placing me back down on some solid ground.
Instead it is about God making things right, acting in good faith toward that humanity that He created to be in relationship with.

It is about us finding meaning and purpose in this world through being the imagio dei. Salvation is not just a forgiveness of sins, though I believe that is a part of God reconciling us to Himself.
Salvation is also God setting this world to rights, so that we might live in relationship with Him and our fellow man. It is God claiming the relationship with us that He intended us to have and that He expects us to have with others.
Salvation is not about escaping from hell but following after Christ, to learn how to live and love and act like He did. It’s about relationship.
Relationship in the here and now, not just in some world to come. Salvation is lived out through our love, care and concern for others.
Salvation is not about hell and what we are saved from. It’s all about Jesus and us being brought into complete relationship with Him. The only way to true salvation is following in the steps of the Risen Lord. To experience and embrace the person of Christ.
It’s about the redemption and reconciliation of all things. About coming into a full fellowship with God. Walking hand in hand with Him as He has always intended us to do.

And as a result, we must view salvation as not simply being saved from punishment, although that is a part of it. Instead we must view salvation on a much grander scale of the God of all creation bringing that creation into harmony, redeeming and reconciling that which is His so that His creation might have the relationship to which it was intended to have.
Hence, why I am a redemptive reconciliationist.

To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?”
John Stuart Mill

But as we have already unearthed in the previous entries comments, the term “good” can be somewhat ambiguous.
However, I stake my entire life and my belief system on that one simple proposition: that God is good. That despite whatever evils, suffering and ills this world might throw our way, He is a good God. Great and greatly to be praised.
But the belief that God is good, however we in our finite minds might translate goodness, begs a whole litany of uncomfortable questions. Questions of theodicy, free-will and God’s Sovereignty abound. And just waving our hand and dismissing them or trotting out pat answers is theologically irresponsible.

When I first was confronted with the Epicurean Trilemma back in college I was nonplussed. I was ill-prepared for such an assault on my belief system. Over the years I dismissed it with the apologetic de rigueur. “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” “He doesn’t cause suffering, He just permits it.” And any other line of reasoning akin to disproving evolution by using peanut butter. Any answer was acceptable, no matter how flawed the reasoning, as long as it validated my preferred explanation.

But that trilemma always nagged at the back of my mind. The trilemma is essentially this:

If God could stop evil but will not, He is malevolent.
If God would stop evil but can not, He is impotent.
If God could not and would not, why call Him God?

In the 19 years since I first encountered that line of reasoning I have always countered it with the unshaken belief that God is good. If He is not good then…

It became easy for me to blindly embrace the Augustinian notions of reconciling evil and the existence of God. However, the more I study Augustine, the more I view him as the worst thing to ever happen to the western church (more on that later). Ultimately, Augustine’s theodicy is intellectually weak.

At the heart of this is still that contention that, based upon the sayings of Christ, that God is not only good, but intelligible. He does not operate in a way that is contradictory to His character and nature. Therefore, His ends, means and methods are ultimately good and He has placed within His creation the capacity to achieve, recognize and comprehend goodness.

With that understanding, though admittedly nowhere near fully-fleshed out, I began to look at the trilemma a little differently:

If God could save everybody but will not…
If God would save everybody but could not…
If God would not and could not…

Typically our views have fallen into one of those first two. The first argues for God’s Sovereignty and is the linchpin of Calvinism. The second argues for man’s free will.

It’s always been so easy for me to reject Calvinism. If honest, I know that part of that reason is because I wasn’t raised that way. But no matter how I look at option one all I see is a somewhat arbitrary God, choosing who He will cavalierly. There is no goodness or love there.
I have always argued from the free will side of things. But I must consider the possibility that I have made man’s free will the prime mover and elevated it to an idol status in my life. As if my free choice can dictate the power and sovereignty of God.

Is there another way to read this while staying true to the claims of Scripture? Is there a more fleshed-out biblical method of looking at issues of salvation that refuses to kowtow to all things Augustine? Is there a conservative interpretation that seeks a clearer path than the cruelty of Calvinism and humanism of free will?

I believe there might be.

Again, let me emphasize that I do not have this anywhere close to fleshed out in my mind. I know God, but not fully. I see something in the life, person and example of Christ that gives me far greater hope than I traditionally have.
I know that we will be wrestling with tough questions that kick against strongly held beliefs. I ask mercy and grace throughout this discussion. And, understand, I have not staked out a clear position, yet. That’s largely cause I don’t yet know where I will land.

If our foundations are unshakable, and I believe they are, then they can surely bear someone trying to shake them. Exposition coming up.

1. God created us to be in relationship with Him
2. God is love
3. God is knowable

From the very beginning God desired to have intimacy and fellowship with His creation. He did not create us so that we might be separated from Him, nor did He create us simply to ultimately condemn most of us.
No, Scripture is clear that we have a God who loves us passionately and completely. As the late Rich Mullins once sang the love of God is a “reckless raging fury.”

Few people would argue with either of those points. But, for some reason or another, many have arrived at the conclusion that God is, ultimately, unknowable to us. That there is just too much to His character and nature that escape our finite minds.
As a result, it is easy to gloss over seeming inconsistencies with slogans such as “He’s God and I’m not” or “God moves in mysterious ways” or even “who can know the mind of God?”
Prooftexts about “his ways are higher than our ways” are trotted out to make the claim that God does what God does and, even if it seems diametrically opposed to what we are to understand of God, we can’t question it.

That’s a bunch of hooey. I believe that God can be known and wants to be known. If we believe that Jesus was Immanuel, God in the flesh, then we must believe that we can draw nearer to the heart of God and understand who He is, up to and including His character and nature.
Through the person of Jesus is how we come to know God more clearly and more fully. This Jesus who loved the oppressed and cared for the marginalized is the knowledge of God. Through His kenosis, His humility, His sacrifice, His teachings, His love and His example we are able to know God.
And any view of God that does not align with the person of Christ must be re-addressed.
Because this same Jesus is the one who said:

“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me. Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father…I and the Father are one.”

and:

“…believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

and:

“You know neither me nor my Father. If you knew me, you would know my Father also.”

“and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

“If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

I could go on, but you get the point. God is knowable and He is knowable through the person, example and live of Jesus Christ.
So when we bump up against traditions, interpretations and understandings that conflict with the person of Christ then it behooves us to explore, wrestle and ask these questions anew. And the way to do that is to dig deeper into the heart of Christ.
He is the avenue through which we can greater understand the character and nature of God which is so bound up in His Love.

As a side note: I often hear people proof-text Isaiah 55:9 where God tells us that “my ways (are)higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” as proof that God can act contrary to what our perception of His character and nature is. However, it is important to note that the context of Isaiah 55 is the compassion of God. If we are faithful to that passage we can understand that God is far more capable of realizing what is consistent within Himself than we are. That is the mystery: How God can love and be so compassionate.

Next I want us to look at what Christ Himself has to say about issues of salvation. For He is the only way for us to truly know God.

Although there is more that I want to say on non-violence, I believe that my position is fairly well staked out. I am opposed to war and the idea that violence can be redemptive. Again, I realize I may be among the minority but I can argue and defend my position from a conservative and scholarly approach to Scripture.

However, that discussion led me further in my study on entrenched doctrines. For years I had questioned the nature of hell, salvation and God’s love. But I resisted any serious wrestling because I wasn’t ready to understand that maybe I was wrong. That maybe what we have taught and believed about salvation and hell relied on misinterpretations. But now, although I know there is a great amount of risk involved, I want to look at the nature of salvation, or soteriology.

I believe that now is a great time for a discussion such as this as I am encountering more and more people in the evangelical world wrestling with these issues.

Let me begin this study by using a paraphrase of the beginning of my nonviolence study. I am not a universalist. At least I don’t fall in the camp of what people traditionally view as universalism. My views and understandings are far more nuanced than that. Just as pacifism conveys a meaning that is misleading, so does universalism. Allow me to coin my own term: I am a Redemptive Reconciliationist.

Leading into this discussion let me make several clarifying comments as both a disclaimer and an establishment of common ground:

1. I believe in hell.
2. I believe that unrepented sins produce dire consequences.
3. I believe that God’s Sovereignty, His desire that no one should perish, and our free will are not incompatible.
4. I believe many passages that describe the horrors of hell are for believers who will be held accountable for how they engage the lost, the marginalized and the least of these.
5. I believe that God’s justice is bound up in His love.
6. I believe that a Redemptive Reconciliation approach is consistent with a conservative view of Scripture.

In the coming weeks I want us to look anew at the passages in scripture that deal with ideas such as eternity, heaven, hell, punishment, salvation, God’s love, and God’s justice. I will probably reserve this to Monday’s post. I ask several things of you in return:

1. Be civil as always. These are controversial ideas. But I am convinced that we can provide an atmosphere that we can discuss these with brotherly love.
2. Be open-minded to differing opinions. If you can’t handle a discussion on these matters then please skip over these entries.
3. Agree to disagree. Godly men and women can draw different conclusions.
4. Don’t mistake my posts as statements of certainty. I am working through this myself.
5. Please participate in the discussion. But limit it to the topic at hand. If we are discussing God’s love don’t jump ahead to a singular passage about hell.
6. Be patient with me as the moderator. I am on shaky ground.

I am not an academician. I hope that this will be an accessible discussion for us as we wrestle with some weighty topics. There are far loftier minds than mine that I will rely on including Gregory MacDonald, Thomas Talbott, Gerry Beauchemin, and Richard Beck. I also hope my long-time friend Jeff Richardson will be a leading voice in this discussion.