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I don't know how to begin this, or even what exactly I'm trying to say, but I've noticed a lot of posts attacking Christianity on the grounds that it consists of a supposedly loving God damning people to eternal suffering for their errors. That isn't technically a strawman, because strawmen are usually erected by their attackers, and the idea is pretty much common belief in many Christian churches today. It just happens to be a completely inaccurate and absurd common belief. No, this isn't another Orthodoxy-is-Great post, because there are people in just about every branch of the faith who have a halfway reasonable idea of how redemption is supposed to actually work. The more popular delusions are simply the result of several centuries of increasing theological ignorance.
So far as I can tell, there are two popular but nonsensical views of salvation. The first is popular among evangelicals like Chick and seems to be based on the concept of salvation through faith. Under this system, Heaven is something like a divine mob protection scheme, or a gang membership. Come judgment day, Jesus is going to bust the cap of damnation in the collective rears of humanity, with the exception of his designated holy homeys, who signed up to be part of his crew, took the membership oath, and support the group by giving cash to guys on TV with bad suits and excessive hair-gel. Provided you are on the ok list, all your sins are redeemed. Aside from not making a lick of sense, this whole scheme is very reminiscent of the Mark of the Beast, and makes you wonder how exactly the road to salvation is supposed to be as hard as the Book of Matthew makes it out to be. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to spout some babble about accepting Jesus as his personal savior and get in on the outfit. Um, no.
Then there's the even more popular works-based fallacy seen in Dante's Inferno(I really hate that book!), in which the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto an income-tax form. Come Judgment Day, God will measure each man's sins, make deductions for every sacrament he has taken part in, give credits for helping old ladies cross the street, and add all the numbers up and see if the balance is positive or negative. Thankfully, we can all clean up our credit history via confession. I don't know why exactly the king of glory who knows the hearts of men is required to add up numbers like a calculator to determine their worth, and if so why he was so harsh on the Pharisees for showing good fiscal sense.
They are both popular conceptions of heaven, and both pretty much completely wrong. The classical Christian sense of virtue is a measure of how the actions of human beings change their hearts for better or worse over the long run, not a matter of physical consequences or legalistic obedience. The people in Hell aren't supposed to be the guys who didn't quite make the grade. They're the folks whose behavior in life gradually turned them into something that wasn't really human at all. The proud, the vain, the selfish, the cruel, people more concerned with being better than those around them than with being in a good way at all. The damned are those who freely chose to become thin parodies of what they were and ought to have been. That's why the Gospels say, "I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink..." rather than, "you didn't give enough food, you were stingy with your water, you only visited the sick three times in your whole life..." It's not the actions themselves that are important, it's why you do them and what they make you into. Apparently all the Pharisee-whooping passages didn't make that clear enough.
Hopefully this will at least lower the ignorant comments for a little while. Anybody else have anything to add?
So far as I can tell, there are two popular but nonsensical views of salvation. The first is popular among evangelicals like Chick and seems to be based on the concept of salvation through faith. Under this system, Heaven is something like a divine mob protection scheme, or a gang membership. Come judgment day, Jesus is going to bust the cap of damnation in the collective rears of humanity, with the exception of his designated holy homeys, who signed up to be part of his crew, took the membership oath, and support the group by giving cash to guys on TV with bad suits and excessive hair-gel. Provided you are on the ok list, all your sins are redeemed. Aside from not making a lick of sense, this whole scheme is very reminiscent of the Mark of the Beast, and makes you wonder how exactly the road to salvation is supposed to be as hard as the Book of Matthew makes it out to be. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to spout some babble about accepting Jesus as his personal savior and get in on the outfit. Um, no.
Then there's the even more popular works-based fallacy seen in Dante's Inferno(I really hate that book!), in which the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto an income-tax form. Come Judgment Day, God will measure each man's sins, make deductions for every sacrament he has taken part in, give credits for helping old ladies cross the street, and add all the numbers up and see if the balance is positive or negative. Thankfully, we can all clean up our credit history via confession. I don't know why exactly the king of glory who knows the hearts of men is required to add up numbers like a calculator to determine their worth, and if so why he was so harsh on the Pharisees for showing good fiscal sense.
They are both popular conceptions of heaven, and both pretty much completely wrong. The classical Christian sense of virtue is a measure of how the actions of human beings change their hearts for better or worse over the long run, not a matter of physical consequences or legalistic obedience. The people in Hell aren't supposed to be the guys who didn't quite make the grade. They're the folks whose behavior in life gradually turned them into something that wasn't really human at all. The proud, the vain, the selfish, the cruel, people more concerned with being better than those around them than with being in a good way at all. The damned are those who freely chose to become thin parodies of what they were and ought to have been. That's why the Gospels say, "I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink..." rather than, "you didn't give enough food, you were stingy with your water, you only visited the sick three times in your whole life..." It's not the actions themselves that are important, it's why you do them and what they make you into. Apparently all the Pharisee-whooping passages didn't make that clear enough.
Hopefully this will at least lower the ignorant comments for a little while. Anybody else have anything to add?
ACK!
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