My son and I at a community service project last Fall.
This morning, while sitting at the kitchen table, the question that I had expected my son to eventually ask me, was finally asked. After taking the self-applied clip-on tie off of his undershirt, buttoning his top button, and correctly reseting the tie, he looked at me and said:
“Daddy, why don’t you go to church with us?”
Kim happened to be walking down the hall, but she heard the question and raised her eyebrows at me as if to say “He’s your son!” She realized that this was going to be a man to man conversation, and continued to the bathroom to prepare herself for the upcoming church service.
I looked at my son’s earnest eyes, and contemplated his even more earnest question. As many parents do, I weighed the merits of a short answer that would stop his questioning, but be less than truthful, against a more truthful answer than might take a series of answers and explanations about things that he might have trouble wrapping his mind around. Today, I chose to give him the more honest answer.
I told him that it was because of my beliefs. Although the church and I share some of the same beliefs about living a moral life, we differ on so much more. The main difference, as I told my son, was the church’s view of the other, the outsider, the adherent of another faith, and/or the unrepentant sinner. This church (like many others) believes that after death, certain people will end up in some sort of hell. For most of my life, I have believed the same. But in the past few years, for a variety of reasons, I no longer do.
Before explaining anything else to him, I let him know that despite his desire to be just like me in so many ways, his beliefs would have to be his own. Whether my words of explanation will have any more influence on him than my actions, only time will tell. But, I wanted to express to him how personal everyone’s beliefs are, and how they should have some measure of respect.
After describing hell as a place where people were sad and crying for ever and ever, and where God could not/would not ever see them or rescue them, my son replied that he did not want to ever go there. I told him that some people believe that the population of hell is made up of people who deserve to be there. I shared with him my belief in a God who would not create someone who would eventually end up in hell. In fact, I read a great quote in a book by Samir Selmanovic just yesterday:
“I have become convinced that a God who favors me over others is not worth worshipping.”
In the end, my son walked away with a couple of new thoughts about God and hell, and an apparently sufficient answer about why daddy wasn’t going to church.
Really, I just can’t wrap my head around the belief that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and at the same time that God is the creator of this mess that falls short of Him. If God is responsible for the situations in our life that lead us to make choices, then He is also somewhat responsible for those choices. If He is not responsible for those situations, then everything is just chance and chaos. God cannot judge our actions justly if we are all playing with different pieces on often vastly different game boards.
I’m sure that I could say more about this, but I’ll save it for another time.
Not believing in hell is just a stone’s throw away from not believing in “sin”. In light of my Christian upbringing, this is a belief that challenges much of what is commonly understood about the purpose and nature of Jesus, the namesake of Christianity. If there is no hell, and there is no sin, then what was Jesus all about? If he was just a great moral teacher, and not God incarnate, then this changes everything. Depending on what criteria you use to classify a Christian, then you may not consider me one anymore. To be honest, I myself often wonder if I should claim that for myself anymore.
I feel like I’m a sort of religious no man’s land. Where I’m going to end up is unclear. I just know where I don’t want to be: In a place where God loves me (enough to give me life in heaven) more than he loves other people (so little that He lets them die in hell). If you found some place where I could find myself more at home, please let me know.
Zac,
First…thanks for having the guts to write this piece. It totally resonated with me( as cliche as that sounds) Your thoughts, subsequent questions and further wrestling with them and god…is refreshing to someone like me…who has in the last 2-3 years anyhow…found themselves in a sort of ambiguous “religious no man’s land” too .I never felt the freedom to be honest about my spiritual struggles and misgivings until recently.
While I know we ran in similar circles in the past…thru lc.tv…we never really got to know eachother. Seems we have lots of mutual friends in common…Bamfords, Newsomes etc…so many of these people have been invaluable sages as I navigate a new journey…@43 years old!
I am not sure if you still live in the valley or not…but…I want to extend a WARM invitation for you ( and your family) to visit us @ the Emerging Desert Cohort anytime you feel so inclined. Your questions and spiritual sturggles echo so many of not only my own but those of our entire group as well. It’s the only non ‘virtual’ place I have found that I feel safe to ask, wrestle, doubt, vent, seek, experiment etc.
You are not alone.
Joy,
Thank you for your kind and encouraging words. If we lived back in AZ, we would surely be apart of the EmDes conversations. Thank you for inviting us, all the same.
Where is your online community where you ask, wrestle, doubt, vent, seek, and experiment? Perhaps that would be an appropriate next step for me.
Wow Zaccy. You freakin pagan. Just kidding. You, like the venerable prophet David Bazan, have let the idea and concept of hell creep in and reprioritize your personal beliefs. The concept of a loving God sending people to eternal torment does not sit well with people of our generation for sure. How can people who were created as sinners be held accountable for how they were created when they had nothing to do with it? It seems either people are following away all together over the issue (Bazan) or restructuring their beliefs to allow for a hell that better fits our definitions of justice (annihilationism, universalism). I think both these alternatives are biblically viable they’re pretty much where I ended up landing. I kinda think that hell is far too ambiguous in scripture to leave the Church over.
Thanks for the comment Ry Guy. For the record, I agree with you about the ambiguity of hell in scripture. That was probably my first real struggle in Bible college when I started taking classes on individual books in the Bible. Something just didn’t jive with God’s love and God’s wrath. Over the years, I’ve begun to see how much I read the bible, hear a sermon, read a book, etc. with my own beliefs informing all new information coming in. I believe that this is called eisegesis, as opposed to the more objective exegesis. Now, I’m at the point that I’m not sure that an objective view of any truth really exists. I know, I know. How very postmodern of me!
Really, as hard as it is for me to believe in hell, it’s just as hard for me to believe in a world where people seek God, but are unable to find Him outside of Jesus. If the Christian life experiencing the Kingdom of God here on earth, then those “outside” are experiencing a type of hell on earth. I just don’t see that from the non-Christians that I have met. If I’m not a Christian, then I am probably a panentheist. Unfortunately, they don’t have a church in my neighborhood.
If I move to Evansville we can start one. I’m probably a deist at this point anyway.
Zac…I couldn’t remember how to get back to your blog sorry for the delayed reply…..Here are a couple of blogs I read and people I have connected with that help me keep my head above water.
http://kathyescobar.com/2010/01/04/rethinking-the-word-pastor/
http://jonathanbrink.com/2010/01/19/missional-community-formation-part-1/
http://communitascollective.com/fiction-and-truth/
also blogs by Brian McLaren, Frank Viola, Tony Jones, Emergent Village
of course almost everyone in EmDes blogs and I blog too at http://giveandtake67.blogspot.com/
The Emerging Church Conference in NM is absolutely worth the investment…we are going.
Reading these people and their struggles…helps me feel I’m not CRAZY…(sure…going to hell maybe)…but not Crazy (o:
I hope that if you guys come back to AZ for a visit you’ll stop over and talk etc.!
Joy. You’ve set me up for some reading and blog browsing this weekend. I’m looking forward to it.
I’m not sure when the next trip back to AZ will be, but I’m going to make a trip to EmDes a part of it for sure. Thanks again for sharing this.
Hi Zac, Mark here from Facebook. If you think about hell, salvation, Jesus, etc. (i.e. the big eternal issues) long enough and follow everything to its conclusion, I’m convinced you either end up at unitarian/universalism or full-on trinitarian/predestination/Calvinism. There’s no middle ground and these destinations are, of course, mutually exclusive. I applaud your willingness to think thoroughly and not settle for a half-baked theology. However, your trajectory is universalism, which I’m convinced is wrong. Email me or message me on FB, if you’re interested, and I can send you a few things that helped me come to the opposite conclusion.
By the way, nice site design – I love the layout.
-Mark
Thanks Mark! I’ll message you on Facebook. I’m definitely trending more towards universalism. I just can’t be sure that the “others” are wrong, especially if the “others” feel the same way about me.