on the subject of HELL

This is a visitor that camped out on our deck last summer. A pregnant praying mantis, I think. She moved awfully slowly which is why we were able to get quite a few good pictures.

I don't like bugs, I don't like worms, I really don't like snakes. I don't like frogs or fish much either. I suppose being tossed in a pit filled with all those animals would be a pit of a "hellish" experience for me, to use a hyberbolic, colloquial term. I have nearly finished my book on hell (a rather weak segue, I know, but it's all I got) and while I still don't know exactly what I believe about it (the Bible is not that clear, so I don't think we can be that dogmatic about it), I believe that hell, just like heaven, might be a slightly different experience for everyone. I do think one can conclusively say that heaven is where God is and hell is where he is not, but even the terms, heaven and hell, are relatively ambiguous in this day and age as so much myth and folklore has been attached to them. Most of the questions about hell, like "How could a loving God create a place like hell?" or "If someone sincerely follows a path to truth, but has not encountered Jesus, do they still have to go to hell?" are not the right questions. They have already assumed the Western Christian view point of the afterlife, which draws on tradition probably more than scripture.

The Bible is a progressive revelation of the character of God as pictured through the setting of many different cultures. Hell and heaven and the afterlife are a relatively late addition in this big picture, yet so much of the message of the current gospel is one of salvation from eternal damnation. That is totally the wrong emphasis, I believe. The invitation of Jesus is not one to escape punishment, but to walk with and know and become a friend of God. The question is not where will you spend eternity, but do you know God, for eternal life is to know God.

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Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go...

Esther's protest

I have been hesitant to write anything here pertaining to the student protests in Montreal, partly because I didn't believe I had any solutions to offer and partly because I just wanted to stay out of the controversial mess it has become. Besides, I have studying to do. But this weekend, something changed. I read the book of Esther. First, some background: the unrest started early in the year when a group of students decided to protest the tuition hikes proposed by the Quebec government ($325 a year for the next 5 years). Seeing that tuition rates have been frozen for almost ten years, it seemed reasonable to the government to increase them to reflect rising costs. This did not sit well with some students, and they organised an ongoing protest in which students were encouraged to boycott classes and refuse to hand in assignments. It has now grown into a movement which has staged several organise...

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ C...

outWORD by Matte Downey

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