Lorrie Spinney

Tag: Christianity

  • Merciful God (or Hell #3)

    Merciful God (or Hell #3)

    This is my third and probably final post about hell. (See What no one talks about – Christian musings on hell and Mortality (or Hell #2)

    As I said at start, it was my daughter Ellyanne who challenged me on this topic with her question, “How can I love a God who says, ‘Love me or burn forever’?”

    Then she died, and ‘what comes after’ became a compelling subject for me.

    I’m not trying to make a scholarly argument; no painstaking, verse by verse defense. I’m just showing my own process. It’s meant to start someone else’s journey, be an invitation to read scripture with a mind open to a new possibility and see where God takes you.

    With that said, it’s time for some disclaimers and clarifying of terms.

    Jesus talks about hell a lot, so no, I’m not arguing that it doesn’t exist.

    But he also uses a lot of “death” and “destruction” language.

    Why both?

    Maybe, because both are true?

    I’ve been reading arguments that there are two parts to life-after-death: the part that happens immediately, and then the final judgement, resurrection, and new heaven and earth.

    In the first part, right after death, we either go to heaven (“Today, you will be with me in Paradise”) or hell (as in Jesus’ parable of the rich man in ‘torment’ seeing Lazerus with Abraham).

    At the end of time will come the judgement and then – for the saved – resurrection and new heaven and earth.

    For the unsaved – death, because they never received eternal life.

    It makes sense to me based on my reading of scripture. God did not give us a clear outline of what to expect. He could have. But he chose not to. Instead he gave us parables, dreams, visions, and a scattering of images and references.

    We’ve taken Jesus’s references to “eternal punishment” to mean conscious eternal torment. But it really doesn’t have to mean that, and in fact I don’t think that’s what any of his contemporaries thought. Peter seems pretty clear, claiming that the ‘ungodly’ will ‘burn to ashes’ like Sodom and Gomorrah (2Pe 2:6). The sense is of finality, not ongoing burning.

    “Eternal Punishment” can easily mean death, which is eternal and is punishment – especially when the alternative is a glorious, glad, resurrected life with God.

    I think when the unsaved are thrown into the lake of fire, they are consumed – exactly the way anyone would be if thrown into a raging hot fire while mortal. Or, if the fire is not literal, it’s meant to be a picture of death, rather than ongoing torment.

    I think it is safe – and preferable – to assume that heaven (Paradise) and hell are both temporary, and that only the saved have eternal life.

    It seems to me to make the most logical sense out of the seeming contradictory verses, and fits much better with the character of Jesus and the God who is his father.

    I started these posts on hell because of Ellyanne. Because I hate that she had so much fear, and that I had no good answers.

    I did get a chance to talk to her about what I was learning. I was all excited, as if I was giving her some sort of gift.

    But she just shrugged, “Well, I mean, it makes sense.”

    For all her struggles with God, she had beat me to a better view of hell. Logically, she just couldn’t accept any other option.

    Not from a Father God.

  • What no one talks about – Christian musings on hell

    The sun was hot on us there on the patio off the side of the hospital, high up on the sixth floor. We had our backs against the building, looking out past the tables and through the tall glass wall to the brown hills and valley that was Kamloops. We both had big tubs of water softly clinking with small ice squares, compliments of the ward. We’d stopped talking, our efforts having dwindled down to nothing, when my daughter turned to me and said, “When I was six years old, you told me that if I didn’t love God, I would go to hell.”

    Reader, I did not.

    Or.

    I don’t think I did. I hope I didn’t.

    But she clearly thought I did which meant that, really, I may as well have.

    I slumped, turned so I could looked her in the eye, and said, “Oh, Ellyanne, that’s terrible. I am SO sorry!”

    I wish now that I could remember her response.

    I wish a lot of things.

    I wish neither of us had ever spent any time on that patio off GT6 – the pysch ward – instead of the hours and hours that we did.

    And I was just the visitor, she lived in the ward for weeks and months at a time.

    I wish she hadn’t been haunted by the fear of hell. I wish God had answered our prayers by giving her an experience of his love – one that lasted. I wish she hadn’t publicly called herself a ‘former Christian’.

    I wish I knew for sure, now, that she is with him.

    There doesn’t seem to be much to say, in the Christian circles I know, to parents whose kids die while resisting God. Oh, people will say, “Well, she had mental illness. God knows where her heart really was. We can’t know.” And it’s true. Or they’ll say, “We don’t know what happened in the last seconds before death – remember the thief on the cross.” Also true.

    But if the fear is that this person who you lost, who you love so much, if this person might, perhaps, possibly, go to hell…

    I’m just saying it’s hard to find books or sermons or even blogs about that. And unless you really love someone who fights God, who refuses him, you may not have noticed how singular, how self-oriented, many worship songs are. Yes, Jesus is my hiding place, but my daughter is getting shot at. Yes, Jesus is in the boat with me, but she’s out in the waves drowning.

    Yes, he’s my comfort but she is sobbing in an isolation room in the psych ward.

    Honestly, I didn’t want him to be hiding me, or in the boat with me, or comforting me. I wanted him to GO GET HER! Take care of her.

    And then he let her die.

    More, he let her kill herself.

    And I’m here now trying to make sense of what makes no sense: how a smart, funny, loveable, pretty, young woman, who knew herself to be deeply loved, is let to kill herself.

    And how those of us who are left have to navigate the ending of a story which, in the churches I’ve known, is potentially horrific.

    It’s made me think about what comes after death, a lot. Hardly surprising.

    So, if I continue to be as brave as today, I want to write a few posts about what I’m learning. I don’t pretend to be an expert. But I’ve faithfully read scripture (the whole thing) all my life – that’s gotta count for something. And yes, I know, “the human heart is desperately wicked, and deceitful above all things”. I know it’s easy to make scripture say what we want, especially when we REALLY want it.

    But we all read this book through filters – all of us. And lately I’ve noticed one filter in particular that I’ve used my whole life and didn’t realize.

    “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.“

    Whenever I would read that verse, I’d lay over the word ‘perish’ a filter of “go to hell”; and over ‘eternal life’, “go to heaven”. But that’s not what it says.

    That’s not what Jesus said.

    So yeah. I’m starting to think I’m allowed to question the doctrine of hell as “eternal, conscious, torment,” since we are not – despite C.S. Lewis – eternal beings by default. Only God is immortal.

    If you’re interested, stay with me.

    If not, no hard feelings.