No Pragmatic Downside? (Keith)

This is a great topic. I can't understand people who hold a belief in hell, and still choose to worship its architect. If anything is worse than torturing people, surely it is worshipping and adoring a torturer.

How could anyone's self-image survive proclaiming themselves to be worshipping a god who did such things? I would feel convicted of both evil and cowardice if I did so. That's why I think most of the good people I know who claim to hold this belief really don't believe it. However, it might also explain why so many people who do choose to defend the belief do so in a very fraught manner, as if it were the most important determinant of christianity. In a way, it is. It determines what kind of god one is worshipping.

Keith,

Thanks for the tip. I'll look it up. George MacDonald also wrote a great deal about this topic, all of it available on the internet. I've also found a lot of wisdom in the books 'If Grace is True' and 'If God is Love' by Gulley and Mulholland.

Doesn't the traditional formulation of hell produce a God that many cannot worship? If this is the case, then by teaching the traditional doctrine of hell you might be condemning this people to hell! The traditional view of hell, and the image of the character of God that it conveys, can be positively harmful to evangelistic efforts, rather than helping them as the proponents of the traditional view usually maintain. How many of the people reading this could hold your child's hand in a fire for even a second, yet traditionalists expect people to worship a God that who will "burn" not just a hand but an entire being, and not just for a second but forever, in hell.

Alright, let me approach this somewhat differently, and it stems from what are usually held as the essential characteristics of God: omnipresence; omnipotence, omniscience.

Hell can be seen as a state of maximal separation from God, and heaven as a state of maximal proximity to God. (If anyone has a problem with these two definitions, please let me know.) Specifics in terms of the forms that are used to portray these states are derivative, though the human imagination of poets like Dante (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighier) and painters like Hieronymus Bosch (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch) create very evocative images that I expect have shaped the way a lot of people imagine these states.

The only essential characteristic of the Divine that I will raise for your consideration is omnipresence.

Omnipresence is the quality of being present throughout all places, times, states, and dimensions. If God is in fact omnipresent there is in fact no separation, only a perception of separation. God is no less present at the birth of Jesus or in the gas-chambers of Auschwitz. The difference from a human perspective is that we have a persistent sense of separation, of having a distinct self. We experience existence locally and time linearly. To use the Genesis allegory, we know good and evil, self and other, duality. As soon as the rational faculty dominates and interprets; the sense of timeless unity, the Presence of God, collapses from our awareness. In other words, the underlying state is union, we just ordinarily occupy states which frame our experience in a duality.

And so, as there is in fact no place where God is not, (if God is omnipresent), heaven as being ultimately proximate to, and hell as being ultimately remove from the Presence of God are fallacious in fact, even if in our minds we can imagine and occupy heavenly and hellish states.

"Alright, let me approach this somewhat differently, and it stems from what are usually held as the essential characteristics of God: omnipresence; omnipotence, omniscience."

Are those biblical understandings of God, or Platonic-reasoned ones?

If you wish to say that God is contained within time and space, you are free to do so, but that makes the universe greater than God. If you wish to say that God lacks all knowledge, then such a God is ignorant and subject to error. If you wish to say that God is not all powerful, then there are forces that even God will be affected by and are outside of the Divine ability to alter.

No, such limits cannot be imposed upon God, or the word is misapplied.

God is not to be imagined or projected like some magical talisman, or placed within a frame to appease the needs of the ego. Rather the ego must relinquish its idols and attachments, to be so drawn into the Presence of God as to like a moth drawn to flame be consumed in the solitary brilliance of the Divine. If form (such as a book) takes precedence and imposes itself upon the mind of one who claims to love God, that person is deceived by an idol. He is like a groom who stands transfixed upon his bride's veil, rather than being drawn by love to part all veils that stand between himself and his Beloved.

God is infinite, and it only through surrender of our idols, drawn by longing that the soul finds its way back into the perfect Presence which is boundless and complete in itself. This is not a matter of appeal to a book or an authority held above what God imparts directly to each, and that is unbounded Presence.

I'm in a tough place these days with this topic, due in large part to convincing articles and books I keep coming across in favor of Universalism. I, like Sam, read "The Last Word and the Word After That" by McLaren, and it only increased my suspicions about a God who would shift gears in the NT so drastically.

I wasn't converted to Christianity out of fear- I fell in love with Jesus. Or maybe I realized how much he loved me and then I followed. Either way it wasn't fear of Hell that drew me to this life. It was that I accepted an invitation to what I believed (and still believe) is the best kind of life. My motivation to "behave" is not only Christ, and not only Christ in me, but also the realization that this is the best way to live. That's not just a bonus... it's part of the gospel.

I never quite understood how Jesus' "good news" would actually mean that from then on most people would go to hell. I say "from then on" because the doctrine of hell was rarely mentioned prior to the formation of the NT doctrines.