First session: May 21 (tentative)
To many people, the promise of a better afterlife is the key selling point of religion. The main monotheistic religions also promise to provide an exclusive path to Paradise. For those who do not comply, the alternative is hell...a place typically described in terms that make Auschwitz look like a luxury resort.
(How) Can we reconcile hell with a God of love…or even just with a God who is good in any meaningful sense?
Christians believe that salvation is only possible through Christ, whose death on the cross provided propitiation by deflecting God’s wrath from us. What does that mean? What exactly does the Bible say about the path to heaven? What (if any) is the mechanism of salvation? How does it fit in with our (pre-)conceptions? In Philippians 2:12 we read, “…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”
For an interesting overview of verses on salvation, check out the section “Salvation Related Passages in Christian Scriptures” at Wikipedia Salvation Page.
I’ll try to add thoughts and references as they become available. I also encourage you to submit your reflections now, so that they can ferment and bear fruit for the meeting.
Happy soteriologizing! (Yes, I made that word up.)
Paul
PS Check out the calendar below. I'm not sure whether you'll be able to make entries in it, but feel free if you can (propose another date, etc.).
3 comments:
Yay! I'll be the very first to comment. I might not be able to attend the physical meetings, since I'll be away for the summer, but I'll stalk you online here.
I'd like to comment on this part of your post:
"Christians believe that salvation is only possible through Christ, whose death on the cross provided propitiation by deflecting God’s wrath from us."
I'd like to modify "Christians believe" to "some Christians believe." There are plenty of universalist Christians, and not just in recent history either. C.S. Lewis was a famous one, but universalists can be found in nearly all denominations, and come in all sorts of varieties - from the "there is no hell" sort, to the "hell is temporary, but one day 'every knee shall bow' sort," to the "hell is a metaphor" sort to the "hell is a cultural phenomenon that entered Judaism in the Persian period, became highly fashionable by the time of Christianity, and was taken over by Church authorities because it was financially beneficial but it was never the point" sort. :)
Secondly, in response to "What exactly does the Bible say about the path to heaven?", I'd just like to share that (back in his Baptist days), my hubby decided to sit down and compile a list of every Bible verse that mentioned heaven or hell, and analyse the results. What he found was a shocker (to a then-evangelical). Going by both quantity and quality, the universalist verses substantially outweighed the fire&brimstone&damnation verses. So it appears that so-called Bible-believers have CHOSEN to focus on a certain group of verses to the exclusion of others.
This brings us to the nature of the problem - views on Scripture. Those who take the fundamentalist view are at an impasse. Their "god-breathed, infallible" text needs interpreting, because it's internally inconsistent, so judgement calls need to be made - but the interpreters making the judgement calls aren't generally all that infallible.
I'm a universalist, but not because of anything in (or not in) the Bible. I got there using logic - if there is a God, and that God set up a plan where most people would definitely not succeed, with the result that they would burn forever in a tortured eternity - an eternity DESIGNED by that God ... then that God is not a good God.
If that's the situation, then I have no idea why the Christian message is called the "good news." A religion based around a get-out-of-hell-free card sounds like SUCKY news to me!
My two cents from my armchair (or should I say laptop)...
Dr. Weezie
Thank you, Dr. Weezie, you raise some really good points.
First, though, allow me to wax pedantic for a second regarding a definition. The name and reputation of Christ has been tremendously influential (for better or worse) for a long time, entailing a kind of coattails effect. Thus, in the early days there were Gnostics who called themselves Christians, in medieval times Cathars used the name, and these days one need only turn on the radio to hear someone say something like, “I’m a Christian, because Christ taught love and I believe that love is a good thing.” I would like to propose the following. We define as Christian any doctrine that accepts the Apostle’s Creed…i.e. tie it to a specific belief system, quite aside from value judgments (vague concepts are nearly as conducive to confusion as muddled thoughts). The Apostle’s Creed does not directly speak to universalism, as I understand it, but to me they somehow seem conceptually, if not literally, opposed. Are there any churches that accept the former but not the latter? Even at that, Christianity turns out to be a big tent, including the pacifists of the Anabaptist tradition to warlike crusaders.
My understanding of C. S. Lewis’ beliefs (based largely on The Great Divorce—which is specifically devoted to the subject of hell, and which I admittedly read a long time ago), is roughly as follows. He shrinks from a Gehenna vision of a fiery garbage dump, but does not trivialize the notion of hell. He seems, rather, to advocate a view in which, while God may never throughout eternity withdraw his offer of grace, the ability to accept grace may ultimately atrophy beyond recovery…thus making hell eternal.
The traditional view has hell as a place of torture (a lake of fire) into which we are thrown for the crime of being human (and in which our "sinful nature" is both our heritage and our fatal flaw). Christ’s sacrifice is then necessary to appease the wrath of a just God. This view is very difficult for us moderns to accept, but there are other views that are compatible with Christian doctrine (as characterized above). For instance, hell may be something we can do to ourselves and (within limits) to each other, and Christ on the cross may actually be begging us to accept salvation from that innate capacity.
Can we damn ourselves?
Actually, I have been thinking of covering a series of issues, and then culminating with a session on Biblical inerrancy. Here’s a teaser…everybody (and I do mean everybody) who has read the Bible seriously has dealt with the “what the Bible says” and “What the Bible means” dilemma. It strikes me that strong advocates of inerrancy invariably need that bit of doctrine to bolster their “What the Bible means” points. I’m really looking forward to that one.
I really don't know where to start. This is a huge topic, with clearly no easy answers, and already some diverse views to be sorted through. Perhaps I will begin by affirming what I can.
I can accept that there are universalist Christians; in the spectrum of so-called "Christian belief" they have been the minority, but I don't think that believing in the eternal punishment of sinners is necessary for one to be labelled a Christian. As a side-note, my perspective on C.S. Lewis would correspond more with pbk, also in light of Lewis's fun little book, "The Great Divorce." I don't see Lewis denying hell so much as he is the sort of hell that we are used to. What does the Creed mean (in quoting the scriptures) that Christ descended into hell? Is this a form of purgatory with time still for those contained within to repent? We serve a patient and loving God who has gone to great lengths to offer himself in our place, and all the while knowing full well (most would argue anyway) that some would die without ever hearing his name. I too have a hard time believing that this is as cut and dry as many evangelicals have made it out to be. However, I also think that there are some serious obstacles to a belief such as universalism (I would like to see that list of competing verses). For one, the need to comprehend the focus of missionization in Christ's ministry, and his subsequent command to his disciples to "go and make disciples." Moreover, a passage as simple as, "I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me" takes some serious interpretive gymnastics to bypass. Of course, it can be. But overall, the exclusivist tendencies in Jesus' teachings are difficult to avoid.
The two opinions preceding my own are correct in pointing out that much comes down to a question of hermeneutics. However, I don't think that much is solved by deriding fundamentalists and their "infallible" text because they have neglected to realize their own fallible interpretation. The step that Dr. Weezie takes is, in my opionion, to throw the baby out with the bath-water. The argument seems to go that because the Bible (and those that interpret it) is not infallible, we must move to the certainty of reason. But, this is to move from theology to philosophy, and to step much further to the fringes of "orthodoxy" than does universalism as an individual doctrine.
The so-called "logic" of Dr. Weezie, I can wholeheartedly empathize with. But I can also take it much further. The problem of evil/suffering in this world needs an explanation, and by this same logic I can conclude that there in fact is no God at all. If I want to maintain any belief in God, then I have to speak of free-will, responsibility, and ultimately, the righteousness of God. God is loving, and he is also holy. How do we know this? Only by the revelation of his Word in Jesus Christ. Surely there is some middle ground where we can accept Christianity as a revealed religion without believing the Bible to have dropped down out of heaven. The Bible may not be entirely infallible, but if it is not taken seriously then we have no foundation apart from reason and experience. And if the Bible is right - that our nature is ultimately twisted and distorted - then our reason and ability to interpret our own experiences, left to themselves, are in serious trouble.
But all of that is just a bunch of convenient circular reasoning right?
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