Does God really send people to hell?

The new movie (and earlier book) The Bridge to Terebithia offers lots of opportunities for reflecting on ultimate issues.

If you don’t believe the Bible, one girl tells another, God will send you to hell. The other girl can’t believe that. Waving an appreciative gesture at the beautiful creation around them, she says God doesn’t have time to send anyone to hell. He’s busy creating all this beauty and wonder.

The notion that God sends people to hell continues to astound me. Surely people find their way to hell through their own choices and actions.

Wherever the Bible describes God’s action, design or desire regarding salvation, it talks about how God “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” (1 Timothy 2:4, ESV)

Admittedly, all people do not come to that knowledge and find salvation. But that’s because of their choices; it wasn’t God’s idea for it to turn out that way.

The original consequence of sin was very specific. God tells Adam, “cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life... By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:17-19, ESV)

God does not say he is cursing the ground because of the man’s sin. The connection between the man’s sin and the curse is more direct, more immediate. The curse comes from the sin, not from God’s action. As the Bard might have said, "The fault lies not in our God, but in ourselves."

God’s desire is to bless us and lead us to an eternal promise. Continuing to blame God for things that are truly and properly our fault simply gets in the way of seeing his offer of salvation.

It takes all voices to remember correctly

Blogging from the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators conference in Philadelphia:

If our memory of our heritage is the foundation of our faithful future, and it is, then it's important to remember properly. Frances Taylor Gench, plenary speaker at the APCE conference, suggested that was not an easy task. Like urban myths in repeatedly-forwarded notes across the internet, interpretive mistakes tend to take on a life of their own. Often, it seems, an eternal one.

For example, there is no biblical evidence that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. So why, Dr. Gench asked, does that description seem to persistent and pervasive in popular imagination? Even Andrew Lloyd Webber (in Jesus Christ Superstar) has Mary respond to Jesus as just one more man among so many she'd been with. Why did this one scare her so?

Another example Dr. Gench offered was the woman Jesus met at the well in John 4. Okay, so she'd had an unconventional life and had been married many times. The text doesn't explain the situation, and Jesus doesn't use it as evidence of bad character. So why is the history of preaching full of sermons with salacious speculations about her character?

A more accurate memory of these and other stories about women in the bible would be very beneficial for the self image of women in the church. And Dr. Gench is probably right.

Though as I checked my memory of sermons I'd heard about these women. I couldn't remember hearing a minister preach myths like the reformed prostitute Mary Magdalene. And I do remember at least one or two being explicitly cautious about speculating where the text is silent. On the other hand, a news magazine had a sidebar to an article about the DaVinci Code detailing the history of preaching about her that mentioned it as a prominent theme, so somebody's preaching that way.

Dr. Gench had her own theory to explain why new insights into biblical characters had a hard time gaining traction in the church: the f-word. These interpretations came from Feminist Scholars. And people don't listen to feminist scholars. So she's on a crusade to get people to get over their negative opinions of feminist scholarship. After all, a feminist, she suggested, is just someone who thinks women are human.

If feminist scholarship is treated with suspicion, perhaps a better response is to ask why that suspicion exists. And here I see more than a little irony. After all, feminist scholars were among the inventors of the "hermeneutic of suspicion." That's an approach that presumes texts are written by people with an agenda. We don't trust what is written but stay alert for any signs of suspicious or unfair rhetoric.

And surely it is true some – and I repeat, some – feminist scholars have let their enthusiasm for the cause shape the way they have handled data. Some assertions have been shown to be based on rather thin support. If historic distortions by white males justifies a suspicious approach to their writings, surely it's only fair to apply it to all human writings. All people have agendas, prejudices, and axes to grind.

The best answer is not to "get over" our fear of feminism – or of evangelicalism, or of any other group who is "not like us". The best answer is to embrace truth wherever it comes and listen with an open mind. The best answer is to be fair in our discernment: no individual or group has a monopoly on truth. But no individual or group is completely excluded from it either.

Holding to the heritage

Blogging from the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators in Philadelphia:

The theme for this year's conference involves flying forward and looking back. And so the opening evening focussed on looking back.

Our preacher, the Rev. Bill Carter of Clark's Summit, PA, opened with a service celebrating the counter cultural attitude biblical faith takes toward the past.

When it comes to making progress, the cultural expectation is to look to the future. Any thought of the past is dismissed with the thought that itÂ’s water over the dam, or under the bridge, or something.

But the Bible takes a rather different opinion. Places like Psalm 78 stress the importance of holding to the past, not dismissing it. The mighty works and wise commands of God are things each generation is to teach the next "so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. Then they would put their trust in God." (Psalm 78:6,7, NIV)

The culture tries to get over the past so it can move beyond it into a new future. But the historic Christian faith has seen the past, not as something to be put behind us or something to be gotten over, but as the foundation for whatever is to come. A faithful future will not come in opposition to our past, but in continuity with it.

The importance of memory in finding a faithful future makes the work of the teacher crucial. The teachers must remember the stories accurately. Then they must take the lead to show the community how to pass these stories along to the children.

It is always a temptation for each generation to think it have finally resolved the great questions and figured out the mysteries, and there are only greater heights ahead. But that is a temptation. People who don't keep a good grip on their memories and heritage are like characters in Chuck Jones cartoons who do things like stand in midair wondering where the building around them went. Eventually they figure it out and plunge to earth.