On last month’s TNT I said something that I have heard a lot of feedback on (some positive and some negative ). I thought it would be good to continue the conversation here on the blog.
My assertion was that: If you are a Christian, you have to believe something about hell. It is just not an option to say “I don’t believe in hell”. The word ‘hell’ is in the English version of the Bible and you can’t just say, as a Christian, that you don’t believe it. You can hold that it was a burning garbage dump in a valley outside Jerusalem that Jesus makes a poetic illusion to … but you have to believe something about hell.
I would go on to broaden that assertion. I would say that you must believe in predestination, election, and the Book of Revelation.
All 4 of these are topics that l have personally heard people say “I don’t believe in __”
- You have to believe something about hell.
- You have to believe something about predestination.
- You have to believe something about election.
- You have to believe something about the Book of Revelation.
It is is just not an option to say “I don’t believe in hell”. Jesus did. If you are a Christian, you have to hold some belief about it.
Paul spoke of predestination. Election is a theme in scripture. You can’t just say ‘I don’t believe in Revelation’. You can object to how some people interpret and preach the Book of Revelation … but you can’t ‘not believe’ it.
Why It Matters:
I come from an Evangelical-Charismatic background and am now employed at a Mainline church and attend a Mainline school. I am passionate that thoughtful progressive Christians can not make the same mistake that Liberals made in the past century. By ‘de-mythologizing’ the Bible they undercut the very foundation that the tradition is built on.
It is like sawing the very branch that your a sitting on … on the tree side of the branch! What do you think is going to happen? You are left no place to perch.
I love Biblical Scholarship. I delight in post-modern and progressive theology. I take seriously the post-colonial critique and the perspective of feminists and queer theory. But it does us no good if we know what we don’t believe about something but do not have the ability to present in a constructive way what we do believe about those very subjects.
There is so little value in participating in a community based on a tradition where one does not believe in the very words of that faith’s sacred text.
Why even do it? I think that is why so many ‘nones’ have just opted out. I actually greatly respect those who participate in the emergent conversation and who are valiantly attempting to update their denomination from within. It is far easier to just walk away from the entire project all together … and many have.
So How Do I Do It?
Predestination: Forget about the historical hyper-Calvinist understanding that you ‘don’t believe in”. Romans 8:29 says “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”
Who did God foreknow? Everyone. What are they predestined to? To be conformed to the image of the Son. Does everyone arrive at their destination? No.
Predestination might be, what some Process thinkers would be called, an ‘initial aim’. It is God’s desire for all. God doesn’t always get what God wants ( see 1Timothy 2:4).
Election: Karl Barth said it clearly. God elected Jesus. All humanity is involved in that election. All who are ‘in Christ’ are elect.
The Book of Revelation: You may not like the ‘Left Behind’ / Hal Lidsey / Jack Van Impe interpretation of the Book of Revelation … but you can’t, as a Christian, say that you don’t believe in it. It’s in the Bible. You have to believe something about it.
The Book of Revelation was a political critique of the Roman Empire of the first two centuries written in the genre of the ‘apocalyptic’. It is not predictive of the 21st century. But we don’t want to throw it away! What we need, more than ever, is to imitate it and write an apocalyptic critique of our as-it structures, systems and institutions of injustice and our empire. We need a prophetic imagination.
You can’t say, as a Christian, that you don’t believe in this stuff. You have to believe something about this stuff. My suggestion is that we just believe more informed better stuff about these topics. The simple fact is that we are community of people centered about a sacred text and it is simply not acceptable to say ‘I don’t believe in something’. We are free to not believe in some people’s interpretation – but we have to believe something about it.
Thoughts? Questions? Comments?
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 
December 2, 2012 at 4:09 am
brilliant, thanks. sawing the tree branch on the wrong side is spot on. and i’m going to steal your “how do I do it” short blurbs on Predestination and Election. maybe put them on a business card to hand to those pesky hyper-Calvinists when they chase me down the street like zombies
December 3, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Glad it helped 🙂 Please feel free to use the ‘how I do it’ section ! and please be careful around those mindless zombies ;P they can be quite deadly -Bo
December 2, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Some things you keep saying that are false 🙂
“The word ‘hell’ is in the English version of the Bible and you can’t just say, as a Christian, that you don’t believe it.”
No, it’s easy. Hell is clearly a mistranslation of three different words in Greek, none of which means anything like the common meaning of Hell in English. So I can easily say I don’t believe in Hell, and then go deal with Hades, Tartarus and Gehenna, which are not Hell, but are mistranslated as Hell in English.
“It is is just not an option to say “I don’t believe in hell”. Jesus did. If you are a Christian, you have to hold some belief about it.”
No, he didn’t, since he hadn’t read Dante, which is where we get almost everything we “know” about “Hell”.
“There is so little value in participating in a community based on a tradition where one does not believe in the very words of that faith’s sacred text.”
This is also demonstrably not true. You say you’re in a Mainline denomination – I guarantee the people around you 1. find value in participating in your community and 2. do not believe the very words of the faith’s sacred text (at least not certain sections of it). Heck, I preach and lead, and I don’t “believe” in any simplistic sense many of the words of my tradition’s sacred text.
To say it ‘isn’t acceptable’ for someone to say they don’t believe in something that you see in the Bible is ridiculous. Of course it’s acceptable, and I think everyone does it. I imagine I can find something in a text that you don’t ‘believe in’. (and really, you should go back a step and say what you mean by ‘believe in’ – cognitively assent to? Existentially trust in? Theoretically understand?)
On the other hand, to say that it is lazy to opt out of learning and struggling with the text by merely saying “I don’t believe in that” as a way to skip the hard work of understanding – that makes sense to me, and is a far stronger position to take.
My non-belief (do not cognitively assent, do not trust in, do theoretically understand) in some of these things is hard-won, and in my opinion, deeply Christian.
Bear in mind, this comes from someone whose gut-level reaction to “You have to believe something about that” is “Make me”.
December 3, 2012 at 6:23 pm
This is simple: #1 you are doing exactly what I am asking on the ‘hell’ issue. You have a response! You know your stuff! You believe something about the issue!!
We are not disagreeing.
#2 your whole point about participating in community is tainted by you misunderstanding point #1 😉 We would disagree on some of what you said in that section… but not as strongly as if you got what I was asking earlier.
#3 I will stick to my original assertion that participating in a community that does not have continuity with its tradition can be empty.
– always glad when you post in (even if it is with push-back) helps me clarify my thoughts. – Bo
December 10, 2012 at 1:25 am
You didn’t reply with what you believe about hell, Bo! What’s your analysis? I know this is sort of leading onto a tangent away from the meaning of your initial post (which was to reenforce intellectual discourse when approaching various interpretive perspectives) but what would be your assessment of hell? Eternal, annihilation, purgatorial? 🙂
December 11, 2012 at 6:10 pm
I believe many things about hell.
As I said in the post “it was a burning garbage dump in a valley outside Jerusalem that Jesus makes a poetic illusion to”.
Or as Douglas Hagler pointed out “Hell is clearly a mistranslation of three different words in Greek, none of which means anything like the common meaning of Hell in English. So I can easily say I don’t believe in Hell, and then go deal with Hades, Tartarus and Gehenna, which are not Hell, but are mistranslated as Hell in English.”
I also think that linguistically the concept of hell functions in the Protestant community in a powerful way.
I also think that in the past 50 years of Evangelicalism, Hell has become a litmus test and morphed into a kind of master signifier. (ala David Fitch)
how is that ? 🙂 -Bo
December 11, 2012 at 8:28 pm
I understand that. I would obviously agree. See, in the Bible belt, I have learned that all of the things you mentioned above (with the exception of election) are litmus tests in my area. When I first read Love Wins, I passed it around to a few folks at my church to borrow. None of them claimed to ‘get his point’. And shortly after many folks in the youth departments began to sell their NOOMA box sets in yard sells. Rob became one of the ‘out’-group members vs. ‘in’-group members. And I think that’s what Piper was doing in his tweet “Farewell Rob Bell'”. Of course, Piper is the king of conducting litmus tests. With Driscoll ready to escort any body that doesn’t pass out the city gates to the ‘garbage dump’ in question.
To me I have always seen Hell as functioning as a practical metaphor for this life. I wouldn’t engage it as Bell does. My hermeneutics are different. But I reject the doctrine of eternal conscious torment b/c I feel it’s foreign to the biblical text. I also don’t know about the purgatorial concept of hell as a place of postmortem cleansing b/c I’m not convinced we each have immortal souls (which to me comes down to the metaphysics of Plato v. Genesis). And if there is in fact an eternal afterlife then I would lean more toward annihilation (of course not in the sense of God destroying someone but instead them simply not being resurrected) than any, but I don’t really put much stock in the afterlife. To me, hell wasn’t an ambiguous concept. It was right there when Jesus talked about. He actually had a place he was pointing to. People saw Gehenna and didn’t want to end up being like the bodies of unidentified criminals and useless trash that burnt there. To me, its saying that if the transformation of God’s Logos or Word aren’t embodied in one’s life then their life is void and has been a waste.
What’s your take on that?
Sorry if my reply was too long! 🙂
-Toy
December 11, 2012 at 5:48 pm
Great thoughts. I have been struggling with what I believe about Revelation, Satan, atonement, violence, hell . . . You’ve challenged me to keep formulating a belief rather than just rejecting the parts that do not make sense.
December 11, 2012 at 5:55 pm
SAWEET! That is EXACTLY what I was trying to say ! You have made my day. -Bo