Edgework

I am well aware that the major shift I have been calling for with respect to the notion of hell as a central Christian tenet is a difficult one for most believers to make. To turn one’s back on a worldview that has come down through many generations does not come without a tremendous struggle. At least it has been a volatile journey for me.

There are always many fears when we are faced with a challenge to rethink what we hold to be true.  One is the fear of being isolated or even shunned by the faith community in which one finds a place of belonging. This is especially true for those who make their living by working in the church and its various institutions. Perhaps that is why I am writing about this issue at this stage in my life in which I am not dependent on the church for my daily bread. Ideally, our church leaders should feel free to explore and rethink various aspects of our faith, but unfortunately that is not always the case.

Another fear is that we are somehow dishonoring our forbears in the faith by charting new directions. Most of us don’t want to be seen as “rebels” or “disturbers of the status quo.” But, really, would we not be honoring those who have gone before us by continuing to wrestle with the faith they delivered to us? Did they not also change their views on some matters of faith in their journeys? My parents, for example, were caught up in the revival movement of the 1930s which eventually gave rise to the Rudnerweider Mennonite Church. And in the process they rejected some beliefs and practices my grandparents held dear. Would they not ask us to also search the Scriptures and wrestle with its message for our generation like they did for theirs? I believe so.

Personally, I am thankful for what my church offered me when I was young. Although I have moved on to different understandings on some issues, I cherish the fact that they gave me a start, a place to begin my spiritual journey. Of course that context was imperfect, but then so is ours. I heard the name of Jesus from people who “looked through a glass darkly” just as I do. There is nothing perverse or sinister about “moving on” in our faith as we wrestle with faith and life questions. As a matter of fact, to grow in our faith, as the Scriptures challenge us to, will mean that we will change our minds about some things as we mature as believers.

If we find the paradigm shift toward a more expansive and inclusive vision of the future as envisioned by God and away from hell as an eternal torture chamber difficult, we do well to reflect on some of the major shifts we have been called upon to make throughout church history.

If we would transport ourselves to 1610, for example, to the rooftop of Galileo’s house in Italy and see the universe for the first time through his new telescope, how would we have reacted? Galileo proposed that what we saw pointed to the fact that the earth was not the center of the universe. For thousands of years it had been believed, and defended with Scripture, that the earth was flat, immoveable and the center of God’s creation. Would you have sided with the church authorities who had Galileo arrested because of the heresy he was teaching? Or would you have begun to reflect on what you had seen and start imagining a new worldview? The church now admits that Galileo was right but it took quite a while for the old worldview to die!  But by now, even the most conservative Christian scholars admit that the earth is round, that it rotates around the sun, and is only a very small part of a vast universe. Does that not raise some important questions for us about how we use the Bible to establish what is true?

Or let’s take the case of slavery. In the Southern United States before the civil war in the 1860s most conservative scholars considered slavery to be part of God’s plan for the ages. They quoted the Bible in defense of slavery and denounced abolitionist Christians as having forfeited the authority of the Bible and embarked on the slippery slope of liberalism. From today’s perspective, one is forced to wonder how so many sincere Bible readers, Bible believers, and Bible preachers could have been so very wrong for such a long time. I suspect that had we lived as slave-holders in the “Heart of the South” in those years we too might have defended slavery as biblical, as they did.

While still teaching Christian Ethics at Steinbach Bible College, I would preach a sermon in defense of slavery every year in one of my classes. I used all the biblical rhetoric used in the 1860s and all my persuasive powers to try to convince my class that slavery was biblical. Even during the discussion that followed I stuck to my “biblical guns.” On one such occasion, a student at the back of the class jumped up, shook her fist in the air and shouted out, “I’ve got it! If I had been the daughter of a slaveholder back then, that is exactly what I would have believed. And that scares me!”  I consider that moment the highlight of my teaching career.

So we must stand in holy fear and reverence before our Scriptures, aware that it is very possible to get a particular biblical teaching very wrong for a very long time. Is it possible that that is what has happened with regard to our views about hell? That since the time of Augustine in the fourth century at least, we have been thrown off course and that it is time to recover the true biblical teaching on this subject? I believe it is.