Wayne Northey's Reflections in Response to Robin Schumacher's article, https://www.christianpost.com/news/a-letter-from-hell.html
Interesting that the photo chosen (see it here) for Schumacher's article is along the lines of what Larry Dixon wrote (The Other Side of the Good News: Contemporary Challenges to Jesus’ teaching on hell) in apparent approval of an instance of “horrific violence” by the U.S. Empire in the first Gulf War:
A brave journalist who was in Baghdad when the bombs landed, cried out in his television report, ‘I have been in hell.’As horrible as war is we would have to say to him, ‘No, you haven’t. If we understand Jesus correctly, war is only a small foreshadowing of that final condition of the forsaken (p. 14, emphasis in original).’
Besides the sanctimonious piety in these kinds of warnings, the tragic flaw in Dixon’s book begins with the title: there is no other side to the Good News, or it simply ceases to be such . . .
Or as 19th-century American newspaper columnist, Matt Miller, wrote in an ironic riff on Evangelicals’ all-time favourite verse, John 3:16 (I love the verse too!):
For God so loved the world that he temporarily died to save it from himself. But none of that really matters because most people will be tortured for eternity anyways.
John Alexander dedicates his book,Your Money or Your Life: A New Look at Jesus’ View of Wealth and Power (1986), to his father this way: “He is an unusual fundamentalist; for he believes that inerrancy extends to the teachings of Jesus.”
There is indeed an arcane footnote/exception–clause theology of John 3:16 at play – and more generally amongst conservative “Evangelicals” by extension. As a good fundamentalist, I discovered eventually to my shock that apparently John 3:16 has a reprised footnote inserted into so many Christians’ Bibles–what one could call a footnote/exception clause theology at work in the text. It is never stated out loud, however. But it is observably no less binding dogma.
After “world,” “whosoever,” “perish,” and “life” the footnote reads: “except our enemies.” They must in fact be exterminated–and be relegated to hell (whom as God’s enemies Christians are to hate with a pure zeal, so claims Larry Dixon, discussion of whose sad book is in my: WAR AND HELL – and Exception-Clause Footnote Theology)! Yet, I was always taught in my upbringing it was the “Liberals,” so-claimed masters of the exception clause and footnote theology, who played fast and loose with Scripture…
It seems almost invariably the case that apologists such as the writer of the article highlighted below spend inordinate energy “apologizing” for an image of God that if true, would so fundamentally contradict all ethical concepts of human decency, that one could simply grant them such a “god”–and be done with the entire travesty of religion!
Not unlike legitimizing during the Crusades the kind of message given by the Papal Legate–Chaplain–who told the soldiers at the siege of Béziers France in 12091:
Kill them all. God will recognize his own.
How lovely and endearing of “god!”
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