Everywhere I Turned, I Found A Nightmare

Eric
I would like to add my own testimony about the fruit of the teaching of never-ending torment on my own life.  The issue has been a big barrier to my relationship with God for around a decade.  The thought seemed as monstrous as anything I could ever imagine.  Yet when I looked at the translations of scriptures I had in hand, I saw no way around it.  So I backed away and was a nominal Christian at best.  Every time I began to get excited about Christ, I realized I had to believe and tell people that never-ending torment was a major part of the “good news”, so I pulled back.  It wasn’t good news.  I would have professed Christ with my mouth, but I lived as though there was no God.

Ten months ago, I decided to really take a look at this teaching and decide whether I was in or out.  Many conversations with my pastor, family, and friends led me into a deep, dark hole.  I was taught that God does not want every person to be saved—that He is glorified when people are tortured endlessly because He has decided not to love them.  I ended up in a clinical depression.  I went several days without sleeping and put my family through severe emotional trauma.  I missed a lot of time from work.  The spiritual darkness carried over into physical issues.  My blood pressure was sky-high, my heart rate was out of control, and we discovered that I had an enlarged thoracic aorta—a chronic and potentially fatal condition that resulted from the high blood pressure.  The doctors put me on blood pressure, anxiety, and depression medications.

I felt as though I was stuck with nowhere to go.  If Jesus says that the Father loves his enemies, yet he chooses not to love most of them but to torture them with a never-ending nightmare, then one of two things must be true.

1. If this is the way He is, then He is a monster and a liar that I can’t love, trust, or worship.  If He chooses not to love one of my children and torture them forever, how can I trust Him?  How can I love Him?  How can I worship Him?  I could not follow the first and greatest commandment – to love Him with everything I have.
2. If this is what Jesus meant when He talked about hell and my pastor, family, and friends are right, then this whole thing is a bunch of hooey.   It is self-contradictory to say that God loves his enemies, yet He tortures them forever.  That is not love.  That is the worst thing we can do to someone.  That is hate.  (Becoming an Arminian wouldn’t make it better.)  So it could not be true if I know anything about what it means to love or hate.  But to become an atheist, I knew, would lead me down nearly as dark a path.  

Everywhere I turned, I found a nightmare. 

When I looked back on what I had been taught, I saw the destruction it left in its wake throughout history.  I had been taught to revere Augustine, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, in particular.  What were their fruits?  Augustine was the father of persecution by the church.  His teachings led to people being tortured, imprisoned, and burned at the stake.  John Calvin successfully lobbied to have his theological adversary executed.  Jonathan Edwards taught a theology so dark that the First Great Awakening ended with several suicides including his own uncle.  Is that the fruit of a sound theology?  Is that what happens when Good News is preached?

Fortunately, I remembered reading George MacDonald and that he believed that God was better than what I had been taught.  I read MacDonald and Michael Phillips.  In one final desperate hour, I lay on the bathroom floor with my wife weeping beside me and knew that the God of George MacDonald was my only way out.  I would not survive this storm physically or emotionally if I went any other way.  I was not positive, at that time, that what he believed was true.  I only knew that I had to follow this path and never turn back; never come to this place again.  I would be a Christian Universalist or nothing at all.

As I read more of MacDonald and Phillips, I soon came across Tentmaker and the great resources here.  I read Thomas Allin, Beecher, Robin Parry, Gerry Beauchemin, George Sarris, Thomas Talbott, William Barclay, Baxter Kruger, Paul Young, and learned that the early church was filled with Christian Universalists.  I saw the mistranslations and misinterpretations and my heart leaped for joy! 

I am now sound, whole, and enthusiastic about Our Father and The Good News!  We have changed churches and our family, my body, and my soul are healing in ways I never dreamed possible.

Thank you, Gary, for helping make that happen. Eric