How I Changed My Mind - 3

I continue to respond to my Minnesota friend Dan's interest in how I got to where I am today spiritually.

Simply aiming to follow Jesus deconstructed many of the Christian teachings (such as hell) that I had received. Given the difficulty of finding a unified message in the Bible itself (as I recounted in the previous post), I focused on the person of Jesus as the lens through which I would read the rest of Scripture. John 14:9 gave me a reason for this. Jesus is quoted there  as saying, "Those who have seen me have seen the Father."

I ran into trouble pretty quickly in the Old Testament book of Joshua, which tells the story of Israel's conquest of the Promised Land from its Canaanite inhabitants. There the people of God are told by God to slaughter all the men, women, children, and farm animals of the Canaanites. So I said to myself, if someone who has seen Jesus has seen God, and since Jesus therefore shows us what God is really like, it should make sense to imagine Jesus telling the Israelites to commit Joshua's mass slaughter. It doesn't work. Again, Jesus' message and life are all about loving the undeserving, even one's enemies.

In an earlier part of my life, I might have replied to this that God's plan had different stages, and that the slaughter of the Canaanites was God's just judgment on their sins. I would have added that in the same way, God justly condemns to eternal hell those who do not repent and believe. (Yes, writing that now evokes a strong cringe factor.) And that Jesus himself warned people against hell.

That might have worked as a way to retain the link between Jesus, unconditional love, and God. But I couldn't figure out why God couldn't forgive his enemies unless they repented. Didn't that make him just like "the pagans" (Matthew 5:43-48)?

To make things yet more difficult, I was struck one day by Saint Paul's word in 1 Corinthians 13:8 - "Love never ends/fails/perishes." Traditional teaching is that God loves you until you die. At that point, his "righteous wrath" takes over and sends you to endless torment with no possible relief or escape. But then God's love does indeed end/fail/perish.

Following Jesus' example and teaching led me to conclude that there is no hell, despite other passages that teach that there is.

In returning to the U.S. from 20+ years in France, I saw that Evangelicalism had changed. The movement that had been focused on saving souls from hell was now almost entirely silent on that score. Politics and "taking America back for Christ" and "restoring God's moral absolutes" was now the dominant theme. Thus it seemed to me that I wasn't the only one that found hell hard to believe. That was the only way to explain why people's "eternal destiny" could be sacrificed on the altar of today's politics. Deep down, Evangelicals didn’t really believe in hell either. 

More next time on Jesus' unplanned meeting with one of the descendants of those Canaanites that Israel was supposed to destroy....