Hell

I’m wrapping up my thoughts on the most frustrating conversations I experience in Christian circles.  Today, I want to deal with the idea that we will know they are Christians by their denomination.

There is nothing anyone can say to justify thinking that any particular denomination has it right, while all others have it wrong.  There is no way to defend the belief that one branch of Christianity is superior to all others.  Similarly, there is nothing I could say or do that would change the mind of someone who believes he or she knows the mind of God and the heart of another.

No matter how many times I hear the message that a particular kind of Christian is “unsaved” because of denomination or doctrine, I simply cannot swallow that line.  When we have to box God in, when we narrowly define His standards for salvation, we unknowingly box ourselves in, too.  I’ve seen this happen.  We start to think we can’t have friendships without strings.  Every relationship is based on whether we think a given person is “saved” in the manner we deem appropriate or acceptable.  Every conversation produces another chance to evaluate the beliefs of another or a way to sneak in our version of Jesus.  We simply must see every person we meet as someone who is potentially going to Hell unless we intervene.  Sadly, this includes the majority of people of certain types of church.  (In my circles, it’s usually the Catholic church that gets the heat, although Orthodoxy gets its share.  Occasionally, it extends to certain Protestant denominations, but that is rare.  It seems as though the going assumption is that Protestant churches all teach the “correct” path to salvation.)

I would rather that my relationships be lower pressure.  When I stopped feeling like I had to convert everyone, I began to really enjoy my non-Christian family and friends much more.  I also found they were more interested in my faith when it didn’t feel like a sales pitch.  I also enjoy many of my Christian friends more, because we no longer feel the need to compare notes or compete for the most (as one friend put it) “notches in the side of our ‘Saved’ trucks.”  Instead, we can focus on being the kind of people Jesus would want us to be.

I’m going to pause here to tell a story that I think fits well with yesterday’s post about fear-based conversion.

I don’t generally like to talk about my kids on this blog.  I have a separate blog about being a mom.  There are a lot of reasons for that, which I won’t get into here.  But I wanted to tell this story because I think it’s a fitting example of why I feel so frustrated with the concept of the “real” Christian.

Back in October, our church held a special baptism service.  This isn’t surprising, it’s a Baptist church.  For the uninitiated, that means that we don’t baptize infants or young children, only adults who have stated belief in Jesus.  I actually have no problem with this; in fact I agree with it.  I think that it’s important for people to make their own choices about matters of faith, including whether or not to engage in the rites of a particular religion.

Anyway, My son, age 7, wanted to be baptized.  I was hesitant, as I think he is very young.  I would prefer he be at least an adolescent, to be certain that he isn’t making a choice because we his parents said so.  But my husband felt that it would be acceptable if he really wanted to do it.  So I reluctantly agreed.  I checked with our church and was told that generally, they don’t baptize anyone under age 10.  But if he was able to make a clear statement of faith, then they would consider it.  The children’s ministry director sent us a list of questions to ask our son, to find out whether he really understood his faith.  I have to admit to being uncomfortable with some of the questions, but my husband went over them with our son and said that he thought he was ready.

Our son met with the children’s ministry director, who asked him the same questions.  In the end, she determined that he was not ready for baptism.  Her reasoning was that he did not seem to understand the “role of his own sin” or the purpose of salvation.  He apparently told her that he needed to “be a good person” in order to go to Heaven (presumably rather than that he needed to just believe in order to be saved from Hell).  He also didn’t seem to be quite ready to explain just how he came to be “saved.”

I admit that I was a bit relieved, on several levels.  First, I didn’t think he was ready anyway.  Second, I’m glad he wasn’t just spitting back the correct answer as learned in Sunday school.  He’s a deep thinker and I believe he has a better handle on the meaning of salvation and faith than many of the supposedly “mature” members of our church.  For him, all that’s important is that God loves him and he loves God.  Yet at the same time, I was bothered by the fact that the people at our church, in a position of authority or not, believe they have the right to decide whether my son is a “real” Christian.  Afterward, I was talking with a friend from another church about what had happened.  He knows our church (and is somewhat unimpressed with it).  He said, “For the record, I wouldn’t want to be baptized at your church.  Don’t worry about it.”  I was strangely comforted by that.

In the end, what was off-putting about the whole thing was that even though my husband and I know for certain that our son believes, the church deemed him to be something other than a “real, true Christian” because they have a pretty narrow definition.  Tomorrow, I will explain more about that and how damaging it is to our collective body of Christ when we try to apply that kind of label.

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?