Here is an excellent article by Paul Ellis of ‘Escape to Reality‘, on how controlling-type Religion* gains power over you – which it never should have done in the first place – by damaging your hope.

Over to Paul:

Click the image below to go to the original article:

*I use the word ‘Religion’ here in the sense of people trying to make themselves acceptable to God by using ‘methods’, ‘formulae’ or ‘rituals’ as opposed to the radical concept that actually Jesus Himself is all you need. If you need further clarification on that, please comment below and I can explain more. or, there is more explanation in the linked article itself.

I love this article. “Your faith is your sole property”, says John Pavlovitz at the end of this excellent piece, and you’ll see why by the time you get there.

I do a lot of commenting on religious forums where minorities such as gay people, those with doubts and so on are blasted by some really nasty religious types who, I’m sure, are acting according to the dictates of their consciences but actually are not manifesting the love of Christ in any way. No doubt they are “telling someone the truth about their sins so they won’t go to hell” – although this is simply judging others, by any other name! Many’s the time I have been blasted by someone who thinks I am not a Christian – and says as much – simply because I do not believe exactly the same things that he does. Quite often, some discussions simply degenerate into one or both sides denigrating each other’s faith structure, usually because one of them can’t ‘win’ the discussion by any other means. Not that I enter into such stuff, but there we are.

Now this sort of behaviour is completely unproductive and, ultimately, smears the character of the Christ these people claim to represent. They are a ‘Bad Witness‘, in fact.

Anyway, enough of my rants. Over to you, John:

“Air quotes are an abomination unto the Lord. – John

There, I said it.

You know what I’m talking about, friend. You’re engaged in an online discussion with another Christian; sharing your religious views, comparing Scripture interpretations, discussing politics, or debating the issues of the day, and in the face of a perspective that doesn’t quite match theirs, they finally decide to detonate the bomb of bombs upon you in some lazy theological mic drop:

They call you a “Christian”.

The air quotes ooze sarcasm, they drip with condescension, and they exist solely to demean you, disqualify your perspective, and shut down conversation. (All very Jesus-esque tactics, btw.) The quotes are a sugar-coated middle finger, letting you know that this relative stranger is declaring your personal faith convictions fraudulent, your public declaration irrelevant, and your life story false. The air quotes are Gospel.

Bull.

The irony of such tactics is that they reflect the kind of unchecked arrogance that Jesus frequently condemned in the Pharisees; the Jewish religious leaders who appointed themselves gatekeepers of the Kingdom. Fancying themselves authorities on the moral condition of humanity, they made it part of their regular job description to police the souls of strangers, while themselves losing the plot.

Jesus verbally tore them a new one, quite regularly. 

The Pharisees are still alive and well today; lurking in comments sections, cluttering your Twitter mentions, and trolling your Facebook threads. They regularly dispense damnation and claim to know you better looking through a few 140-character windows than you know you, based on a lifetime in your own skin. This is hubris at Everest levels.

One of the greatest mistakes we make in our spiritual journeys, is wearing the degrading labels that others would affix to us. We allow their snap judgements and drive-by evaluations to stick. In the face of our far less-informed critics, we so easily forget our roads, doubt our experiences, and second guess our own hearts.

Resist these temptations at every turn, dear friend. They are the stuff devils are made of.

The truth is, Jesus is the only one qualified to verify your Christian testimony; not Jesus as translated by someone else, not Jesus as passed through another’s theological filter, not Jesus constructed from a few isolated Scripture verses tagged onto their opinions.

That’s the beauty of your spirituality—it belongs to you alone.

It is the sum total of your life, your study, your experiences, your relationships, your private prayers, and the things God has revealed to you alone. It is outside the jurisdiction of other people. They don’t get a say. They don’t get to determine your devotion to Jesus. They get to shut up and worry about the redwood plank in their own eye.

The air-quoters want you to feel that your pursuit of God is less intelligent, less authentic, less real, and less relevant than their own, and when you refuse to do so—they lose their minds. When you ignore them, they implode.

Here the good news: Jesus alone defines your Christianity; not a stranger, not a social media friend, and not a bitter Pharisee with a Twitter account and control issues. Never be defined by someone who knows less about you than you do—which turns out to be a pretty extensive list.

The next time anyone tries to cheapen your religious convictions with air quotes, sarcastic remarks, or outright insults, realize that this says far more about them than it will ever say about you. Remember how unqualified they are to comment on the path that you’re on. You keep walking your road and resting in what your heart knows and what your eyes have seen.

Your faith is your sole property.

As for the air-quoters: bless their “hearts”. ”

Original article is here or click the image below:

I must warn you that some of my readers may find some parts of this article, and some of the concepts described in it, to be very disturbing. I know I do.

Standard Evangelical doctrine holds that everyone who does not believe in Jesus Christ in this life (before they die) will spend eternity in hell, a place of conscious, permanent and ongoing fiery torment from which there is no escape.

My regular readers will know that I do not, indeed can not, in all my best conscience, believe in that doctrine. While I believe that hell exists – we see it all around us in the daily sufferings of ordinary people – I have some very serious theological misgivings with Scriptures supposedly supporting the ‘standard’ doctrine I have summarised above. And, as you will see from the article quoted below, some of the things that you have to believe, and indeed the type of person that you have to become in order to really believe in hell, are really quite out of keeping with true Christian character. I mean this in all respect, and I know that my beliefs on this score may be offensive to some of my friends, but I am seriously worried about what a belief in ‘traditional’ hell actually means. We need to consider honestly and seriously the claims of modern theologians and prophets on this subject, for reasons I will describe in a future article.

And I’m not on my own in believing these things; there are many genuine, believing Christians who are also reconsidering the whole concept. Part of humility, part of remaining teachable, is the ability to reconsider what we think we ‘know’, and being willing to consider new ideas, concepts, scholarliness or research that sheds new light on a subject.

Here is a piece by one such scholarly person, Dr. Randall Rauser, and I include the link to the original article at the bottom of the piece:

Last year I interviewed Robin Parry, author of the book The Evangelical Universalist (which he wrote under the pseudonym “Gregory MacDonald”). During the interview, Robin observed that Christians should want universalism to be true. Indeed, he put the point rather provocatively when he declared,

“You’d have to be a psychopath not to want [universalism] to be true.”

Psychopath?! That’s mighty strong language, isn’t it? But as provocative as that statement might sound, Parry pointed out that Calvinist philosopher Paul Helm agrees on the main point: Christians should want universalism to be true.

If you want to see folk damned, there is something wrong with you

Nor is Helm the only defender of eternal conscious torment to make this point. With the publication of Knowing God in 1973, J.I. Packer quickly established himself as one of the foremost conservative Calvinist theologians and a staunch defender of doctrines like penal substitution and eternal conscious torment. As conservative as he is, even Packer makes the following declaration: “If you want to see folk damned, there is something wrong with you!” (Revelations of the Cross (Hendrickson, 1998), 163).

If, as Packer suggests, you shouldn’t want to see anybody damned, then it logically follows that you should want to see them all saved*. And wanting to see all people saved entails wanting universalism to be true.

This leaves us with an interesting situation in which all agree that proper Christian character requires that we hope universalism is true even as (according to traditionalists like Helm and Packer) we are to believe it isn’t. That’s awkward for the traditionalist … but it gets worse.

How eternal conscious torment undermines Christian character

As my interview with Robin continued to unfold, he then addressed the underlying tension between the doctrine of eternal conscious torment and the moral character formation of the Christian. Robin explained it like this:

“Someone said to me, ‘Oh, I believe that hell is tormenting people forever. I don’t have a problem with that.’ And I think when you first come across this view, if you’re an ordinary human being, you would have a problem with that unless there’s something really wrong with you, something seriously in terms of your moral compass. So then you have a theological system where you have to try and desensitize yourself to this. And there is a real problem of a theological system that actually, rather than cultivating virtue in your attitudes and so on, cultivates attitudes that are actually vicious.”

Now this is a really important point, one that is worth camping out on. As Parry points out here, the doctrine of eternal conscious torment (i.e. the doctrine that the damned will suffer unimaginable retributive punishment in body and mind for eternity in hell) presents a real problem for the Christian who is serious about developing a Christlike attitude. The problem, in short, is that acceptance of the doctrine of eternal conscious torment encourages attitudes which are, as Parry put it, “vicious.”

Vicious? Really? Indeed, I think Parry is right here. On this traditional view, the Christian is committed to the belief that a subset of God’s creatures (“the damned”) will be subject to eternal torments even as the elect experience maximal joy in a heavenly new creation. Here’s where those vicious attitudes enter the picture: Christians now seek to develop the kind of character they will have in eternity. Indeed, that’s precisely what sanctification is all about: becoming like Christ. But on this view, becoming like Christ means becoming the kind of person who can be maximally happy and joyful despite the unimaginable suffering of the damned.

You think that’s bad? It gets even worse. You see, the mainstream view of eternal conscious torment represented by theologians from Tertullian to Thomas Aquinas to Jonathan Edwards to J.I. Packer, is that the suffering of the reprobate is not merely tolerated by the elect. Rather, it actually increases the joy of the elect since it manifests God’s righteous holiness.

Let’s consider that incredible claim for a moment. But let’s make it personal. In eternity, you could end up in heaven while your beloved parent, child, or spouse, could end up suffering unimaginable torment forever in hell. And you would be maximally happy and joyful even as you witnessed the righteous divine wrath being poured out on this damned wretch: the mother who had raised you, the child you nurtured, the spouse you had loved, now reduced to a writhing burning cinder even as you sing divine praises.

If we’re supposed to become like that now – if that’s what sanctification really looks like – then preparation for eternity requires the cultivation of attitudes that would indeed look on any conventional measure to be vicious, not to mention perfectly horrible, and morally repugnant.

Consider this pale analogy. Imagine the meat eater who is overcome with compassion when witnessing the horrors of the slaughterhouse. But rather than resolve not to eat meat, or at least to adopt a new commitment to the humane slaughter of animals, he instead cauterizes his emotions against the terrible fate of industrial livestock. He will not allow their suffering to adversely impact the pleasure of his meal.

In like manner, on this picture the Christian who is now overcome with compassion or immobilized in anguish for the eternally damned should recognize that these attitudes are at odds with the end goal of becoming Christlike. The sanctified person in glory is the one who can rejoice in the glow of the suffering of the damned.

This brings us to a deep paradox with the traditional view of hell as eternal conscious torment. Even defenders of this view of hell like Paul Helm and J.I. Packer agree that we ought to hope that all are saved. Despite this fact, a commitment to become sanctified like Christ requires that we seek to cauterize our emotions so we may become indifferent to, or even rejoice in, the torment of the damned.

Right doctrine should lead to right character

The problem can be put simply. This doctrine of eternal conscious torment seems to be fundamentally at odds with becoming like Christ. But isn’t that backwards? Shouldn’t right doctrine seamlessly interweave with right character formation? Put another way, if a doctrine requires us to cultivate vicious attitudes, isn’t that reasonable evidence that this doctrine is false?

Eric Seibert believes so and he offers a way forward with a hermeneutical principle to guide theological reflection. (For more on Seibert see my audio podcast interview). Seibert begins by quoting the great Church Father, St. Augustine:

“Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this two-fold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.”

Seibert then fills out Augustine’s principle:

Whenever we read and interpret the Bible, we should always be asking whether our interpretation increases our love for God and others.” (The Violence of Scripture: Overcoming the Old Testament’s Troubling Legacy (Fortress Press, 2012), 66-67).

The Augustine-Siebert principle offers a reasonable resolution to the problem. Whenever we encounter a doctrine or a reading of a biblical passage, we must ask of it, does that doctrine or reading increase our love for God and neighbor? If one concludes that it does neither, and indeed does the opposite, we have a reason to reject it.

With that, we can turn back to our current dilemma. Defenders of eternal conscious torment are left with a cognitive dissonance at the heart of their conception of sanctification. On the one hand, they recognize the obvious: if you want to see folk damned, there’s something wrong with you. On the other hand, they are obliged to recognize that in eternity you will find joy in seeing folk damned, and yet there won’t be anything wrong with you. Indeed (and incredibly) this will be what it means to be like Christ.

But that’s not what it means to be like Christ. The logic of eternal conscious torment leaves one with the cultivation of vicious attitudes that militate against love of neighbor. This doctrine is fundamentally at odds with Christian sanctification and discipleship, and that devastating consequence provides a reasonable ground to reconsider the biblical and theological credentials of eternal conscious torment, if not to reject the doctrine altogether.”

Quoted from: How the Traditional Doctrine of Hell Undermines Christian Character, on the Unfundamentalist Christians blog on Patheos.com

*In this context, I am assuming that the writer means that to be ‘saved’ means to be ‘saved from hell’ and that he in his turn assumes, for the purpose of the argument, that hell exists as described by evangelical doctrine.