Hell and Evangelism

Part 1, Are We Selling Fire Insurance?

In The Book of Love I tell the story of my very first sermon.

Here’s that bit from the book:

When I was in middle school, I was invited, for the first time in my life, to preach a sermon for my small church. Growing up, we went to church twice on Sundays...These Sunday evenings, given the smaller audience, were a training ground for the younger generation...

The week prior I had encountered a tract in the church lobby...The pamphlet I had picked up was ominously titled “What Hell Is Like.”

The tract shared a transcript of a famous fire and brimstone sermon preached far and wide within our denomination and was similar to Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The “What Hell Is Like” tract was like walking through Dante’s Inferno. Vivid descriptions of hell were piled on top of each other—darkness, weeping, fire, and torment. I was stricken and terrified. “People need to be warned!” I thought to myself.

I’m embarrassed looking back at this memory. I have no idea why I thought people who came to church twice on Sundays needed a warning about hell. My audience were the devoted and committed. They weren’t backsliding or lost. Still, I felt compelled to sound the alarm. The emotional shock of the “What Hell Is Like” tract had simply overwhelmed me.

I plagiarized the entire sermon. Point for point, I followed the outline of the tract. I’d announce some horrible description of hell—“Hell is filled with weeping and the gnashing of teeth” or “Hell is a place of eternal torment”—and read a passage from the Bible proof-texting the declaration. On and on it went.

But then, in the middle of the sermon, something inside of me cracked. Some deep sadness welled up. Halfway through the sermon I began to weep. I sobbed all the way to the end.

What brought me to tears that night was the incalculable sadness and pain I was describing. The weight of sorrow I was sharing was simply too much for my sensitive little soul to carry. The vision of torment was unbearable. My heart broke underneath my words.

I go on to share how weeping through my first sermon sent me on a spiritual journey, a journey that culminated in a more hopeful eschatology. To be sure, the Biblical passages concerning God’s judgment and wrath, along with Jesus’ many descriptions of hell, demand our attention. In a nod to my affection for Johnny Cash and his last great song, I have a chapter in The Book of Love entitled “When the Man Comes Around” where I share how to reconcile the Biblical vision of hell with the confession “God is love.” I’m not overly dogmatic in the book, and I try to create space for a diversity of viewpoints, even the traditional. In this series I want to tackle a related issue, the role of hell in evangelism.

By far the most common question you face when you share that you espouse a hopeful eschatology is the question of evangelism. The point is easily made. If everyone is getting into heaven in the end, then what’s the point of evangelism?

Now, the knee-jerk response here sounds like this: “Really? Evangelism means warning people that they are going to hell? Evangelists are selling fire insurance?”

I think this is a legitimate comeback. Evangelism isn’t selling fire insurance. And truth be told, there’s a lot of fire insurance being sold. But I do want to steel-man this argument in this series. I don’t want to traffic in caricatures. I don’t want to preach into my hopeful eschatology echo chamber. Because I have faced true curiosity about this question. It sure seems like the urgency of evangelism abates if hell is taken off the table. And it’s also true that progressive churches, who are pretty indifferent to evangelism, are squishy when it comes to sin, judgment, and hell. That connection isn’t a coincidence.

My point is this, while I will, to my dying day, resist reducing the gospel to fire insurance, I am legitimately concerned about the lack of passion and urgency I find in progressive and liberal Christian spaces when it comes to evangelism. There’s a real problem here, and it’s one of the reasons I describe myself as “post-progressive.”

In short, the issue, to my eye, concerns our experience of eschatological urgency and pressure. That urgency and pressure does seem to be lacking in progressive, liberal spaces. And it is a sharp disjoint with Scripture, both with Jesus and Paul.

Consequently, I think there’s something here we need to explore.