The Last Word and the Word after That by Brian McLaren

Author:Brian McLaren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK

CHAPTER 17

Deconstructing Hell

To hell I thought we were returning.

—INFERNO, XXXIV.81

“IT’S FUNNY, PASTOR DAN, but I think I come at this different, as a woman of color, from the way you’d come at it. It seems like most white folks like to read the Bible as a kind of textbook, and they’re always looking for abstract, universal information. You know, it’s kind of an Easter egg hunt for propositions. But in the African American church, we don’t read the Bible that way, or rather, we didn’t used to. (Lately, I think a lot of black preachers have been getting paler, if you know what I mean.) Anyway, we’ve always read the Bible to preach it, to feel it, not so much just to study it and theologize on it. You know, sometimes we say, ‘That’ll preach,’ which is like a saying my daddy used to have, being from the country and all: ‘That dog will hunt,’ he’d say. When my daddy said that, he meant that whatever we were talking about would work. It would make a difference. It would achieve the goal, like a dog would find a raccoon or possum or whatever. I read the Bible more that way.

“So, when it comes to hell, I just use my common sense. Look, Jesus said God is good, like a caring father. Caring fathers don’t torture their children, even though they sometimes need to take them out to the woodshed or make them stand in the corner or take a timeout or go on restriction or whatever—it’s always for their own good. All that talk about God preselecting some people to be hell fuel—you know, all that predestination stuff—that seems wacky to me. It’s the kind of thing a lot of black folks wouldn’t have time for. Whatever God does, we know God’s doing it for our own good, and there’s no cruelty to it at all. Maybe this isn’t making much sense, but for me, I just hear Jesus talking about hell and think, well, he’s trying to scare the hell out of us. It takes strong language to do that, you know? It makes you think: Am I really pleasing God, or am I getting off track? I think we need that kind of unsettling from time to time.”

“It strikes me,” I said, “speaking as a thoroughly white guy, how messed up our approach is. Because when we talk about hell, it’s generally not to unsettle ourselves. It’s generally the opposite—to reassure ourselves, so we think, Aren’t we glad we’re insiders with God and going to heaven? Isn’t it a shame those other people are so bad and wrong and going to hell? It’s part of a system that reinforces us-them thinking, I guess—to strengthen the ‘us’ identity. Sometimes I guess we might use hell to motivate people to try to evangelize others: ‘They’re going to hell, so don’t you want to reach out to them?’”

“Oh, give me a break on that,” Casey said. “That just makes the evangelizer look down on the evangelizee.

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