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Mike learned early in his life about rescue and what it required. Do you think Mike believed in hell?

“Sit where you normally would”

Contemporary thinking on hell suffers from the same fractious polarization that plagues many other areas of the church.

As much of the culture is deeply skeptical about the reality of hell, the church, which in the modern era honed its pitch as the antidote to hell and its anxiety (Evangelism Explosion questions “If you were to die tonight…”) tries to figure out how to address the change.

One of the best illustrations I’ve heard of culture is that culture is like folding a piece of paper. Once you fold it one way it’s always pre-conditioned to follow the same fold. The American church in thinking about hell has followed this illustrations. The liberal wing of the church expressed deep skepticism thus prompting the fundamentalist wing to double down.

Hell?

From the Naked Pastor

While belief in God recedes slightly , belief in a God who wouldn’t hurt a fly flourishes. An enormous irony of our cultural moment is that while secularism flourishes with the assumption of Darwinian selection and mass evolutionary extinctions the God that is either responsible for this world or completely immanent within it (pantheism) is also supposedly a God who would never cause pain or suffering. This god is supposedly completely committed to giving us our best day now and helping us to always feel good about ourselves.  Doesn’t anyone stop to wonder why we have so many dead flies? Didn’t dinosaurs have feelings too?

Belief in Hell and Social Conditioning Continue reading →