Heretics

From the public radio show This American Life:

Carlton Pearson's church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the reverend. He didn't have an affair. He didn't embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse: He stopped believing in Hell.

Listen to the entire show here.

I haven't listened to the entire show yet, myself, but I did manage to catch most of it Sunday afternoon when I was getting ready for work.  But I'm definitely going to be finishing it.  This is pretty amazing to me.

If you're a longtime Real Art reader, then you know that my central most objection to Christianity is the belief in Hell.  I cannot accept a just God sending people to Hell.  Because Hell is not just.  Hell is eternal torture.  It cannot possibly be just.  And if you believe, in fact, that the nature of reality is that Hell exists, and that God thinks it is grand and wonderful to send souls there, then your understanding of humanity and justice and compassion must necessarily reflect that notion: you must also believe that torture, in the abstract, is acceptable, desirable even, that people deserve it, and that humanity has no value; you must also believe that torture is justice.

So Hell leaves Christianity forever insufferable to me, a closed option, a philosophical notion that cannot be true, one that automatically contradicts itself.  But here we have a Pentecostal minister having what amounts to a revelation: Hell does not exist.  What happens when Christianity sheds its most damning attribute?  I don't know for sure, but it automatically makes the religion far more appealing, a religion that focuses on love and forgiveness, without coercion, without threat, one that can truly fulfill the promise of Christ, which is not salvation, but rather compassion for the suffering--it comes out of the Bronze Age and into the twenty first century.

I'm amazed that someone coming out of Oral Roberts University could even consider throwing Hell out the window, let alone deciding that's the right thing to do.  I had to turn my back on the religion in which I was raised in order to do so.  This guy did it as a Christian.  Clearly, a guy who understands that there is no reconciling the Old Testament's wrathful God with the New Testament's Prince of Peace.  He's brave, for sure.  But also wise.

Something to think about this Christmas.

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