From AP via Yahoo! News:
Who's in hell? Pastor's book sparks eternal debate
Since even Catholic priests don't talk about Hell anymore, this story should not surprise anyone.
DURHAM, N.C. – When Chad Holtz lost his old belief in hell, he also lost his job.
The pastor of a rural United Methodist church in North Carolina wrote a note on his Facebook page supporting a new book by Rob Bell, a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.
Two days later, Holtz was told complaints from church members prompted his dismissal from Marrow's Chapel in Henderson.
"I think justice comes and judgment will happen, but I don't think that means an eternity of torment," Holtz said. "But I can understand why people in my church aren't ready to leave that behind. It's something I'm still grappling with myself."
It's really simple, kiddies. If making it to Heaven means the eternal bliss of union with God, then eternal separation from God must be the ultimate in pain and torment. QED!
I'm guessing these clowns are afraid they won't get enough cash from the poor prod rubes who sit in their pews if they scare them with the very real consequences of their sins. Of course, this is protestantism at its core. Martin Luther wanted to get laid so he broke his solemn vow to God and proclaimed the death of free will. After all, God had made him into a man who wanted to get laid more than he wanted to serve God, so his sin wasn't his fault. Brilliant!
That's the genius of Satan [horns and all]: He convinces us that we know what the good is, regardless of the evidence in front of our noses...and regardless of the will of God.
The debate over Bell's new book "Love Wins" has quickly spread across the evangelical precincts of the Internet, in part because of an eye-catching promotional video posted on YouTube.
Bell, the pastor of the 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., lays out the premise of his book while the video cuts away to an artist's hand mixing oil paints and pastels and applying them to a blank canvas.
He describes going to a Christian art show where one of the pieces featured a quote by Mohandas Gandhi. Someone attached a note saying: "Reality check: He's in hell."
"Gandhi's in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?" Bell asks in the video.
In the book, Bell criticizes the belief that a select number of Christians will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven while everyone else is tormented forever in hell.
"This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear," he writes in the book.
For many traditional Christians, though, Bell's new book sounds a lot like the old theological position of universalism — a heresy for many churches, teaching that everyone, regardless of religious belief, will ultimately be saved by God. And that, they argue, dangerously misleads people about the reality of the Christian faith.
"I just felt like on every page he's trying to say 'It's OK,'" said Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler at a forum last week on Bell's book held at the Louisville institution. "And there's a sense in which we desperately want to say that. But the question becomes, on what basis can we say that?"
Bell argues that hell has assumed an outsize importance in Christian teaching, considering the word itself only appears in the New Testament about 12 times, by his count.
"For a 1st-century Jewish rabbi, where you go when you die wasn't the most pressing question," Bell told The Associated Press. "The question was how can you enter into the shalom and peace of God right now, this day."
Bell denies he's a universalist, and his exact beliefs on what happens to people after death are hard to pin down, but he argues that such speculation distracts people from an urgent point. In his telling, hell is something freely chosen that already exists on earth, in everything from war to abusive relationships.
Whoa! That's some pretty heavy heresy there, boy. All you good little kiddies should put this nonsense out of your heads and go to Mass, light a candle, and pray for the salvation of all these poor ignorant prods who think we're the ones going to Hell.
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