One God, Millions of Views

     The process I utilized to discover clarity regarding my quest for relativity in today’s culture was searching various authors, titles and doctrines to gain knowledge.  I spent a lot of time churning internally with God about this issue of God’s nature of love, hell and how to do church in this culture without becoming watered-down. I compared those with traditional views of a literal, eternal hell to those whose views tend toward Christian universalism by considering the voices of the early church fathers to some voices of today.  This helped me to also consider the questions ecumenically and be able to appreciate our differences and find our commonalities.  I found this to be overwhelming because once I was convinced of a certain belief, the next section made me question the whole path once more.  The details of this conversation will, I think, remain a mystery until my own face-to-face meeting with God, but I feel it is essential to begin rethinking hell and how we communicate about it in this modern world.  

     In Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr explained, “What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important.  Too often people think it is necessary that we all see God in the same way (which is impossible anyway), but what is really necessary is that we all follow God according to what God tells us…God is not threatened by differences. It’s who we are.”^[1]  I feel this statement is an anchor for this dialogue because my heart is to explore the best way I can follow what I feel God saying to me for the sake of the people I am called to minister to in my own unique path.  I believe the body of believers works best when we are not conforming to each other, but rather being transformed into the image of Christ within us!

Views on Hell

     In All You Want to Know About Hell, Steve Gregg researched hell through three main streams. He explained, “The traditional view, according to which the damned will suffer everlasting punishment for their sins; the annihilationist (conditionalist) view, according to which the damned will simply be put out of existence forever; and the restorationist view, according to which all human sinners will in the end be reconciled to God.”^[2]Additionally, the Four Views on Hell, a compilation of different voices surveyed hell through four unique views: literal, metaphorical, purgatorial, and conditional.  They explained that the literal view is comparable to the orthodox beliefs that the wicked will suffer an eternal punishment with no relief. The metaphorical view is like the literal view, in that it is believed that the wicked will not inherit redemption or blessing, but their sentencing of judgement is not taken literally as referred to in the Bible.  The purgatorial view is most identified with the Catholic church and offers a period for those with unconfessed sins to be purified and readied for Heaven’s gates, although still some are eternally punished. The fourth view they described was conditional, in which hell may be either temporary or a place of total annihilation, where there will not be consciousness of suffering, but those who are wicked will simply die. ^[3]