Lorrie Spinney

Tag: God

  • 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.

  • Mortality (or Hell #2)

    From early on, Ellyanne was very worried about her relationship with God. She asked hard questions, “What happens to people who don’t love God?”

    I tried to be reassuring, but clearly (see previous post) I failed.

    Her essential struggle, as she got older and able to explain it to me, was a common one: how is it possible to love someone who says, “Love me or I will make you suffer forever“?

    She knew it’s not enough to just obey. God wants our love.

    But if the consequence of not loving him is that he punishes forever, well: it’s a conundrum. What does it say about his nature that he’d do that? And then how can you love someone like that?

    And the thing was, these weren’t just academic discussions we were having. Often, they’d end with her in tears. She was scared. She did not trust herself to ‘stay with’ God. She wanted to, but was terrified she’d fail.

    And I was at a loss. I did not know how to reassure her. I would tell her that God ‘gets’ us, he knows our hearts, what we wish we were, and what we are. He doesn’t ask for perfection, only our best effort – whatever that is on any given day. He is kind and loving and patient. He will help us. I tried to explain grace – none of us ‘stays with’ him the way we should. He is grace-giving.

    But the existence of hell seemed to disprove all of that to her.

    And no amount of emphasis on the cross, and Jesus’s death for our sins, and the new life we have in him – none of that was compelling enough to overcome her horror of hell.

    Her fear was genuine, and her argument made sense to me, though I resisted it. There had to be a flaw in it, since God is perfect and hell is eternal suffering and both are true and we just have to accept that.

    But I don’t accept it any more.

    We talked about how Jesus said it would be “better for Sodom and Gomorrah” than for other towns, even though Sodom had been burned for its sins. This seemed to indicate that there were degrees of hell, somehow. That even among those who were punished, it would better for some than others.

    That comforted me because it seemed to crack open a small potential hopefulness, but it wasn’t enough for her.

    Her arguments and her fear caused me to really consider what I mean when I talk about Eternal. Conscious. Torment.

    I started ‘researching’ it (thanks Google), and came upon something that changed everything for me. It was the idea that the whole teaching around eternal conscious torment (ECT) assumes that humans are eternal beings.

    That twigged something I had read in The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis. He argued that hell (as ECT) was God’s only option for what to do with eternal beings who eternally resist him. Lewis’s whole, reluctant, argument for that kind of hell was based on an assumption that we are immortal and so God was kind of stuck with us.

    But are we? Does the bible teach that?

    I don’t think so.

    God alone is immortal (1 Tim. 6:16).

    We are mortal.

    In Genesis, God makes it plain that eternal life is not for fallen humanity. He blocks the tree of life and we don’t see it again until Revelation, where it shows up in heaven. It is a gift to those who have ‘washed their robes’ and will ‘go through the gates into the city.’

    Just do a word search in your phone bible of both “mortal” and “immortal”. Nowhere does immortal apply to humans, or their souls.

    Then I started thinking about all the teaching about Jesus giving us eternal life.

    Again, up until recently I would sort of mentally swap out “eternal life” for “heaven”; and all the “death” and “destruction” language I would replace with “hell”, but why?

    Where does the bible tell us to do that?

    What if “eternal life” means just that, and “perish” means just that? What if the choice isn’t between heaven and hell but life and death?

    The more I consciously stopped substituting words for what it actually says, the more I began to think life and death are the real things at issue.

    And maybe for some people – maybe many – the idea of death isn’t much better than hell, but for me it’s huge. Huge! Death is nothingness. Hell is eternal. conscious. torment. So I thought.

    The idea that Ellyanne might be dead is awful. But the idea that she might be in that kind of hell is infinitely worse.

    I still have hope that she is neither but I don’t have certainty and in its absence I’ll take death over hell. Beaten down and exhausted by the inexorable losses of all her dreams and no clear reason why, nor any reassurance that it would ever change, all Ellyanne wanted was rest. Nothingness. I doubt she could even imagine a heavenly existence that wouldn’t be marred by inexplicable suffering.

    She just wanted out.

    But it’s not about what we want. I know that.

    If God is, and if the bible is true, then we can’t just ignore it. And Jesus, in the bible, talks a lot about hell (and heaven).

    I will too, but not today.

  • 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.