“This is probably heretical,” I began to my pastor-in-training friend from across the table at Cups, a favorite coffee shop right next to my college.
“That’s the best way to start any conversation,” he replied, joking but also not. In our theological discussions, no question is stupid, no idea off the table.
To understand my thoughts that day, it’s important to know that I was a terribly anxious child. So when Sunday School teachers told me in grade school that hell is like putting your finger on a hot stove, except it’s your whole body and you can’t take it off, Christianity became a no-brainer.
As I grew, I learned there was more to Christianity than escaping hell, but it’s hard to unlearn a faith rooted in fear. I spent hours agonizing over whether my non-Christian relatives might die in some accident before conversion. And since some Protestants taught that Catholics were only sorta-kinda Christians, did those friends and relatives “count?”
Maybe this is a controversial statement, but I don’t think it’s right to put the eternal fates of family members’ on the shoulders of children. Most Christians wouldn't show their kids an R-rated movie or explain the graphic details of what ISIS does to prisoners, so why would the idea of your whole body burning forever be somehow easier for a sheltered kid to handle?
Throughout school, every other guest preacher asked if we were sure we were saved. “You might think you know you’re going to Heaven, but do you know? Are you sure you know Jesus? You might think you do, but what if you don't? And then you'll regret it for eternity." Lots of educated, successful adults repeatedly challenged and doubted my eternal fate, and this just caused so much worthless anxiety over something I believed wholeheartedly.
I wish I knew then what I know now—that a vast number of Christians, and prominent theologians, don’t believe the same thing about the afterlife. Some of them believe that non-Christians will simply rest forever, outside of heaven but not in conscious pain (annihilationism), while others literally believe the statement from Revelations about “every tribe and every nation” represented in heaven (universalism).
If a kid is old enough to be told about never-ending torture, surely they are also old enough to be taught that not every Christian person or denomination believes the same thing about it.
When I learned that the Christian faith contains a rich traditional of universal reconciliation and annihilationism, all of the doubts that I had throughout childhood suddenly cleared. I’d heard it said that when people finally reject God, God rejects them in turn, but this sounded more to me like the conditional love of this fallen world than unconditional love. I’d heard that heaven is perfect and free of tears because we’ve simply forgotten about our suffering friends and family, but I wondered at how forgetting our loved ones could be the perfect ending of Christ's love.
Was I simply a bad, unbelieving child? The doubt persisted until I realized that a lot of theologians, like William Barclay, Marcus Borg, Rob Bell, Karl Barth and many more raise the same questions that lingered with me.
I discovered that there are devout Christians on every side of hell theology, and even most ‘hell apologists’ would agree that only belief in Jesus can save a person, not their ideas about hell. With that room to decide for myself, I will always choose the prevailing love of God that reaches beyond our physical state. It rings more true to me from what I know of Scripture, with so many verses* that reference the salvation of all mankind, and mentions of eternal conscious torment limited to a few parables and other metaphorical illustrations (directed, like the story of Lazarus and the rich man, at the wealthy).
These views also ring true with what I’ve read in Scripture about the character of God. What I’ve learned in my own life about God is that, to borrow a phrase from Rob Bell, love wins. If billions of people are screaming in agony right now and forever, begging for mercy with no hope, then death won all the souls that love can no longer reach.
“I don’t think the Gospel of eternal conscious torment was very good news,” I told my friend that day in Cups, and he agreed. “I like to call universal reconciliation the Great News.”
Great news for the children who died before they had a chance to understand religious doctrine and the families who died in foreign countries with no Bible. They do not have to suffer forever while people in predominantly Christian countries win the eternal lottery just by their place of birth. Great news that love wins.
In the words of the great biblical commentator William Barclay, "I believe that in the end all men will be gathered into the love of God."
*Some of the verses that annihilationists use to defend their view include Psalm 1:6, Psalm 37:20, Psalm 69:28, Psalm 34:16, 21, Psalm 92:7, Proverbs 24:20, Dan 2:35, Isaiah 1:28, 30-13, Obadiah 1:16, Mal 4:1, Matthew 10:28, John 3:16, Matthew 7:13, 13:40, John 15:6, Phil 3:19, 2 Thess 1:9, 1 Cor 3:17, 2 Cor 2:15-16, Romans 6:23, Hebrews 10:39, James 4:12, 2 Peter 2:3, Revelation 20:14. Universalists favor John 12:32, John 3:17, Luke 3:6, Romans 5:18, Romans 11:32, 1 John 2:2, 1 Tim 4:10, Col 1:20, 1 Cor 15:22, Phil 2:11, 1 Cor 5:19, 1 Peter 4:6, though these lists are not exhaustive.
