Before I came to believe in UR I was a keen Calvinist for a while. Somehow I seemed to have got hold of the idea that, after death, the unbeliever would revert to his true, fiendish nature and would be abhorred both by the saints and by God himself.
I don't know where I got this notion: it certainly doesn't seem to appear in the scriptures and I don't remember ever hearing it preached.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this little gem in a sermon from an evangelical Calvinist preacher whose church I attended for a while back in the `70s. Maybe I was daydreaming when he said it.
“Unbelief makes us silent when people ask us a reason for the hope that is in us. You think of this, that that dull stranger who is sullenly listening to you stammering to him about Christianity will one day be changed into either a creature whom you are strongly tempted to worship or to a creature who is an utter horror, whom you only see now in nightmares. There are no 'ordinary people.' You never witness to a mere mortal. We travel on a train, and we sit in lectures, and we make jokes with, and we work alongside, and we visit immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”
The most frightening thing is that Christians who believe this sort of stuff seem unaffected by it! They even seem to delight in the idea that “I'm alright, Jack`.
If the general public who (in the UK at least) are very scornful about Christianity, ever realize what evangelicals really believe instead of all the PR double-talk about how “God loves you” they will quite rightly, keep well away.
Jeff
