In spite of me…

I like twitter. I get spammed with great short bursts of wisdom and good links all day long. Like this one from @elsander: 6 + 2 questions for the hell debate. Read it and read the article it in turn links too. Here are my answers to the eight questions.

1. Is God a being or the source of our being?

I would say both, and understood like Morgan (the author of the first article) describes the “ancient christian view”.

God was the source of all being, expressed most  succinctly in Colossians 1:17: ”In Him all things hold together.”

He outlines this idea more in the comments.

As far as the ontological question about God’s relation to our being, I really think that the problem with Western Christianity is nominalism, the idea that God is just another being in the universe which is held in place by His externally-imposed will, instead of the sacramental view from the first half of Christian history that God is the only “real” thing in the universe and all other things are contingent upon God for their being.

All of the arguments about free will vs. determinism, etc, disappear under the sacramental ontology, because if God is the source of our existence, then following God’s will for our lives is not submitting to some arbitrary omnipotent bully completely outside of us, but instead connecting fully with the source of our being instead of getting tossed around by idolatrous fetishes that don’t represent our true desires.

And I really like and more or less completely agree with the conclusions he puts forth.

If all things depend on God for existence and hell is eternal separation from God, then hell is the non-existence that results from rejecting the source of our being. The punitive nature of hell becomes literal rather than metaphorical only in modernity when it becomes possible to imagine existence independent of the presence of God.

2. Is God’s primary agenda to love His creation or defend His glory?

What a great source of mistakes and violence this has been. Thinking that God needs to defend His glory or Himself in any way. Especially when we from it derive that we need to help Him in that!

The God who did anything but defend Himself, not even with words, to the amazement of the authorities.

Then Pilate said to Him, “Don’t You hear how much they are testifying against You?” But He didn’t answer him on even one charge, so that the governor was greatly amazed. – Matt 27:13-14

Who instead humbled Himself, and let Himself be killed!

He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death — even to death on a cross. – Phil 2:8

Who’s primary agenda was indeed to love His creation.

For God so loved the world… – John 3:16

3. Is God’s justice primarily retributive or restorative?

I’d go with restorative. This is what sets it apart. It is not about punishment, or settling debts, or vengence. God’s justice brings shalom, the peace that is when everything is restored, healed, reconciled, and re-created in the way it was intended to be.

… if hell serves the purpose of restorative justice, then it isn’t a punishment measured out in proportion to the offensiveness of sin, but the denial of eternal communion to sinners who have refused the means by which God offers to heal and reconcile them with the people hurt by their sin.

4. Is God’s holiness an intolerance for imperfection or an intolerable perfection?

I’ll go with Morgan’s explaination in the comments on his article for this one.

Holiness is of course more than just “intolerable.” It’s also awe-inspiring, beautiful, wonderful, etc. In the context of describing hell as a product of God’s holiness, the question would be whether God cannot tolerate sin or sin cannot tolerate God. I like to say it the second way because it preserves God’s sovereignty and perfect benevolence. God doesn’t need to “react” to sin with wrath. Being entirely self-sufficient, God’s God-ness simply IS wrath to sin, which cannot survive its encounter with His holiness.

5. When we escape hell, is it because God changed His mind about us or because we changed our minds about God?

This:

Jesus’ death on the cross is often presented as the reason Jesus’ wrathful Father changes His mind about damning all humanity to hell. The objection to this is to point out that it breaks the Son and Father into two separate gods, rather than one single triune God. If God is truly both Son and Father, then He does not need to be persuaded by His own actions, which would seem to indicate that the cross is supposed to change our minds about God instead.

I think he nailed it there. But I also make the same interjection as Bram. There is more to it than a change of mind.

I would say there also is an ontological change in the universe due to the incarnation, cross, and resurrection (death, evil and sin being defeated Christus Victor-wise).

6. Are we saved by proving something to God or does God save us from having something to prove?

We are, as I implied with the title of this post, saved from ourselves. Saved from our ambition to show how great we are, our need to succeed by our own might, our striving to stand on our own, our longing to have everything under our own control, our inhibition to grasp that God doesn’t demand anything for His love, our failure to trust in His grace.

If on the other hand, salvation describes how God liberates us from thinking that we need to earn His approval, then hell could be our delusional imprisonment to the need to prove our worth to God…

7. Is the scope of salvation focused on saving single persons of on saving the cosmos as a whole?

When we make it about the single person, or even just about people, we make the scope way too small. The scope is the cosmos, all creation will be reconciled and saved, the whole universe. But that includes every single person. I am convinced that Jonah33, even if their song is cast in the mainstream evangelical mold, had it right when they sang:

You know that even if you were the only one… His reason was simply you…  it was all for you…

The single person matters as much to God as the whole cosmos. He is the shepard who would leave the 99 to find that one lost sheep.

8. Is the gospel centered on the saved person or in the reign of Jesus and the Kingdom of God?

As with the previous question, the problem of our age is individualism, so I would focus on proclaiming the wider scope of a salvation that is for the whole cosmos. Therefore I will go with the gospel being about the Kingdom of God. The good news is the proclaimation that Christ is Lord of all, that the Kingdom has come, that Jesus is the risen king, and he will reign for ever and ever. But as Kingdom people, as citizens of Heaven, as followers of Christ our king, the good news are centered on us serving every individual, to love them, each one, as we love ourselves.

I want to go with something like a communal indiviualism. Where we are included in a greater scope and purpose. We are brought out of our individual deaths into the communal life that is the Kingdom of God. Not for our own sake, but for our own worth. If that makes any sense. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to expand on it later.

Anyways, that’s my answers.

Title taken from, my all time favorites, Jars of Clay’s song Hero.