A few days ago, I posted about the most frustrating conversations that I have had with other Christians. None of them are new to me, but I’ve seen a resurgence of those discussions in recent months. Today, I’m talking about the third conversation, identifying what Slacktivist says some evangelicals call “real, true Christians.”
Defining and identifying “real” Christians depends on several pre-existing assumptions on the part of the Christian doing the defining:
1) There is a literal place called “Hell,” in which people experience eternal conscious torment after they die.
2) God’s default location for dead souls is Hell.
3) Rather than being saved for something, people need to be saved from something–namely, Hell.
4) Only certain people will learn the secret to escaping punishment, while the rest will be eternally excluded.
I’m not going to get into addressing the first assumption. It’s enough to say that I simply don’t buy the concept of Hell as it’s taught and presented by evangelicals. I believe this concept came not from the Bible, or historical Judeo-Christian belief, but from Milton and Dante. It’s fictional. How fiction came to be taught as reality is beyond my scope of knowledge or understanding, but I’m sure that a good Google search would turn up plenty of information.
I do want to address the second assumption. It has never made any sense to me whatsoever that God intends all humanity for the scrap bin unless we do or say some particular thing. This doesn’t seem to me to fit either the image of a loving Father or the actual Biblical text. Before someone gets their knickers in a knot over that, let me explain. I don’t read anything in the Bible where the text says that God will put people in Hell (or allow them to go there, if you think that sounds nicer) unless you say, do, or believe something that will change His mind. That idea is an interpretation based on several texts pieced together and likely evolved over time.
The third assumption, that people need to be rescued from Hell, only matters if you agree with the first two assumptions. I actually wonder how anyone could ever be a real, true Christian under those circumstances. I don’t think a decision made out of a certain sense of fear is necessarily stable. Yesterday, my children were taught in Sunday school that they “deserve to be punished” because they do “bad things” every single day. Next week, we who teach Sunday school are expected to encourage the children to “ask Jesus to be their forever friend.” How many of them are going to choose Jesus because that sounds better than being punished forever?
