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The word "hell" has had a checkered career in the history of the church.
And it wasn't hugely important in the early days.
It was important, but not nearly as important as it became in the middle ages.
And the in the middle ages, you get this polarization of heaven over here and hell over there,
and you have to go to one place or the other eventually.
So you have the Sistine Chapel,
with that great thing behind the altar. This enormous great judgment seat,
with the souls going off into these different directions.
Very interestingly, I was sitting in the Sistine chapel just a few weeks ago.
I was sitting for a service, and I was sitting next to a Greek Orthodox...
who said to me, looking at the pictures of Jesus on one wall. He said, these I can understand
The pictures of Moses on the other wall, he said, those I can understand
Then he pointed at the end wall of judgment,
and said, that I can not understand
That's how you in the West have talked about judgment and heaven and hell
He said, we have never done it that way before, because the bible doesn't do it that way
I thought, whoops. I think he's right actually.
And whether you're Catholic or Protestant, that scenario which is etched
into the consciousness of Western Christianity
really has to be shaken about a bit
Because if heaven and earth are to join together
It's not a matter of leaving earth and going to heaven
It's heaven and earth joined together
And hell is what happens when human beings say,
the God in whose image they were made,
we don't want to worship you. We don't want our human life to be shaped by worshipping you
We don't want, who we are as humans to be transformed by
the love of Jesus dying and rising for us
We don't want any of that
We want to stay as we are and do our own thing
And if you do that, what you're saying is,
you want to stop being image bearing human being
within this good world that God has made
And you are colluding with your own progressive dehumanization
And that is such a shocking and horrible thing, that it's not surprising
that the biblical writers and others
have used very vivid and terrifying language about it
But, people have picked that up and said, this is a literal description of reality
Somewhere down there, there is a lake of fire
and it's got worms in it and it's got serpents and demons
and there coming to get you. But I think actually
the reality is more sober and sad than that
which is this progressive shrinking of human life
And that happens during this life, but it seems to be that
if someone resolutely says to God
Im not going to worship you...
it's not just I'll not come to church
It's a matter of deep down somewhere
there is a rejection of the good creator God, then
that it the choice humans make. In other words
I think the human choices in this life really matter
We're not just playing a game of chess,
where tomorrow morning God will put the pieces back on the board and say,
"Ok that was just a game
Now we're doing something different"
The choices we make here really do matter.
There's part of me that would love to be a universalist,
and say, it'll be alright. Everyone will get there in the end.
I actually...the choices you make in the present are more important than that