Scripture calls us to a high degree of things that don’t play well with mortals. As we attempt to comply, we come face-to-face with a difficult proposition: the rules of a good life are extremely difficult to follow.

In part, that’s the point. St. Paul said that God’s rules were given so we’d come to understand one of humanity’s greatest limitations – we can’t follow the rules. When it comes to compassion, mercy, forgiveness, generosity, self-control, justice, peace, morality, etc., we’ll all fall short. Desperately so.

That’s supposed to humble us, opening our hearts to the other part of the gospel, the good news – God’s answer to our frailty. It’s also intended to draw us together, to get the rules out of the way so we might see past the shortcomings of others, into their true worth and beauty. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to easy to go the other way instead convincing ourselves that we’re doing a great job, or at least a better one than all those poor, spiritual failures who can’t seem to get their shit together.

Enter the spiritual caste system that’s prevalent in so many religions: a person’s worth, and place within the system, is based purely on their ability to follow the rules.

Christian community will always struggle here. We’re dying to find some kind of redemption that might cancel out the personal faults and failures swirling around in our minds. In New Testament thought, God has offered just that; a redemption that has nothing whatsoever to do with rule-following, but we struggle with solutions that don’t come at our own hands – a salvation story where we don’t rescue ourselves. If God has to do this work for us, doesn’t that make us weak? Though we confess otherwise, we see ourselves as warriors, overcomers – we’ll handle our own redemption, thank you very much.

In all of this, the rules of our religion become the point of our religion, giving birth to a system by which we find our worth, and measure the worth of others.

From here, things go tribal, fast. Our theology (thoughts of God and humanity) is quickly overthrown by not-so-biblical speculations on “who’s in?” and “who’s out?” We reject those who don’t follow our rules, or value our values, seeing them as some kind of threat, distancing ourselves and re-interpreting the scriptures that command us to do the exact opposite.

It’s easy to get sucked into the belief that God’s endgame is to turn people into us – people who value what we value, believe what we believe, vote how we vote, church how we church – live how we live. The legions of those who aren’t interested have rejected God Himself, and aren’t worth our investment. We have bigger fish to fry than the ones who don’t want to jump into our frying pan, so we turn to other, much more benign pursuits, making our religion one of the most boring, self-serving propositions on the planet.

Then we complain that nobody wants to listen to us.

New Testament Christianity, on the other hand, calls us to “the ends of the earth,” proclaiming a message of forgiveness, hope, compassion, and an big dose of unconditional human worth. It paints the picture of a God who is overthrown by all of humanity, right down to the worst sinner. But our worship of rule-following, paired with our tribal urges and bullshit politics, compel us to reinterpret our sacred scriptures into a document of isolation and self-defense.

It’s easy for our theology to become propriety; a system of thought by which we are the sole beneficiaries of God’s blessing, where the only worthy people are, go figure, us.

Who’s In? Who’s Out?

The religious elite of Jesus’ day were very clear – only the wealthy, devout Israelites were “in.” The rest of the world; sinners, sufferers, poor folk – anybody who’s life seemed “cursed,” couldn’t possibly be the beneficiaruwa of God’s blessing. Jesus straightened a bunch of that out, thank God, clearing the way for us to dig a bit deeper when it comes to issues of wealth, suffering, misfortune, etc.

But, not unlike those who got it wrong so long ago, us modern God-folk think in terms of “in” and “out” when we consider how God’s world works. Some people will spend an eternity in heaven, some won’t. The “in” people did something right: believed the right things, did the right things, avoided the wrong things, or some combination of the three, and hell will be full of those who didn’t make the right choice.

Theologians have spent a fair chunk of humanity’s existence thinking about who’s going to heaven and who’s not. As a culture, we’ve taken those thoughts, along with our tribal, proprietary urges, and convinced ourselves that we know who’s in and who’s out. You can guess where we place ourselves in this game, and where we place everyone else. We’re the ones who’ve thought the right thoughts, done the right deeds, the ones going to heaven, and we’re the ones planted firmly on the receiving end of God’s blessing – the recipients of His salvation because we made good choices. Granted, anyone can make the choices we’ve made, but until they do, there’s trouble in this life and nothing but hellfire in the next.

That might be right, but what bothers me is how that piece of theology affects the way we interact with the rest of the world.

We haven’t just labeled the non-Christian world as “out,” we’ve considered them to be cursed, in a way, and have come full circle with Jesus’ detractors who believed the same about the faithless minions of their day. God doesn’t interact with them as He does with us, so we feel uterlly uncompelled to interact with them the way we interact with each other. Cursed people, by definition, are not blessed by God, nor should they be blessed by us, so, our church buildings, worship services, financial endeavors, etc., are, for the most part, ours.

I’m not suggesting that church buildings, staff salaries, and funding missionaries is wrong, but if you follow the money, the vast majority of it is spent on the “in” crowd, or on those who might soon join us.

A very small percentage goes anywhere else.

Our churches are mostly white, our financial endeavors are mostly “Christian,” our politics are mostly conservative (God’s politics), and the community that we love and serve the most looks and thinks like we do. In our defense, it’s a human thing; we know where we fit in a world that most resembles us. We’re comforted by people who think and act like we do. But the Bible begs us to worship, invest, and live with a more “everybody’s in,” significantly less proprietary perspective.

I have to out myself on something that many of my Christian friends will be uncomfortable with (and maybe a few of my seminary professors). But hang with me here, there’s a compelling argument to be made, heretical as this might be.

These days, I lean heavily towards what theologians call “Christian Universalism,” i.e., the idea that everyone goes to heaven. I’m not completely there yet, as I’ll share in a moment, but this way of thinking has all but annihilated my proprietary predispositions.

Before you pen an urgent IM, begging me to repent, walk with me as I unpack  what Christian Universalism has in common with Orthodox Evangelcial thinking.

• • It has the person of Jesus at its core – everything revolves around Him.
  • It bears the exact same staurology/anthropology: humanity can’t stop sinning, but Jesus’ death on the cross has somehow gotten that problem out of the way. 
  • It confesses that scripture is the word of God, without error.
  • Most importantly, Jesus is personal, begging us to have a relationship with Him, to rely on him for strength, peace, and hope, especially in the moments where we can’t find it for ourselves. “Salvation” is now, and in eternity.

Far as heresies go, it’s not a bad one. I can believe what you believe about humanity, cross, heaven, Jesus, Bible, etc., and at the same time I don’t have to tell my friend that her father is rotting in hell because he died a Bhuddist.

But the issue of eternal damnation is where we might differ the most.

Reflections on the Other Place

Hell is referenced in scripture many times throughout the Old and New Testaments. Sure, there are times when these passages refer to suffering in the here and now, but others talk plainly about eternal damnation, which is why so many expressions of Christianity have a belief of hell at their core.

In my opinion, the most clear depiction comes via Jesus as He’s trying to unpack the inner-workings of God’s world to His disciples.

He first tells two parables, one about a group of women who were prepared for the return of Jesus, the other about the importance of investing what God’s entrusted to us. These parables leave us thinking, “How should one be prepared for your return?” and, “How do we invest?”

The next think Jesus says is the most clear depiction of judgment day (and what it looks like to be “prepared” and “invested”) that you’ll find anywhere else in scripture. I’ll share it here, though it’s long, just so we’re clear. This is from the book of Matthew, chapter 5, starting in verse 31:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

This is difficult to reconcile with the idea that only those who think the right thoughts and/or avoid the right sins are “in,” and it certainly doesn’t jive well with my “everyone’s in” brand of thinking. It’s also fascinating that Jesus’ understanding of who’s “in” and who’s “out” revolves entirely around “social justice,” something that my bible-believing conservative friends have dismissed as a mindless liberal agenda.

The bible’s reflections on hell weren’t written so that we’d craft for ourselves an understanding of who goes to heaven and who doesn’t. St. Paul himself warned us against such endeavors:

“The right kind of righteousness says: ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?”‘ for that is to bring Christ down, or, ‘”Who will descend into the deep?”‘ for that is to bring Christ up from the dead.”

In my opinion, the bible’s hell passages were written so that we would reflect on the mind of God, asking deep, painful questions about where we stand with Him, not everyone else, driving us into humility and God’s overwhelming, unconditional love for humanity.

Theology that’s gone proprietary, in-and-out, and tribal is the farthest a thinker can get from the much bigger picture that God has called us into.