Hell and Evangelism
Part 4, Debating Sin
Let me underline a couple of points from the last few posts.
First, many hopeful eschatologies believe in hell. So to claim otherwise is to traffic in bad faith arguments or outright lies. Going forward, I’m focusing on hopeful eschatologies that believe in hell.
Second, these beliefs in hell are often grievous visions. Sparing people this suffering is compassionate, the very same compassion that motivates all evangelistic urgency.
Third, the fact that the sufferings and harms are finite does not undermine our compassionate urgency to intervene. The examples abound here. Consider the passion of a climate change activist or a social justice warrior. Given how these perceive the grievousness of these harms, to the environment or to oppressed persons, they are filled with an evangelistic fervor. The same goes for when we witness self-destructive behaviors in our loved ones. If we see a friend slowly destroying their marriage and family, we act to intervene. If we see a drinking problem develop, we don’t sit on our hands until they kill someone in a drunk driving accident. If we see a bad habit developing in our child, we head that off at the pass. This is natural and compassionate human behavior.
As I shared in the last post, the pressing issue here concerns hamartiology rather than eschatology. Conservatives often say that progressive Christians “don’t believe in sin” or are “soft on sin.” Really? Progressive Christians don’t believe in sin? Being a progressive, Christian or not, means being obsessed with sin. As everyone knows, progressivism and Wokeism are very moralized worldviews. And because of this, as I pointed out above, progressivism and Wokeism are driven by an evangelistic passion. The contrast here with conservatives and evangelicals concerns the nature of sin. As I said, the issue is hamartiological. With different visions of sin, we have different evangelistic expressions. So the simplistic “no sin, no evangelism” frame just doesn’t apply. Both groups—conservative and progressive—believe in sin, and both groups are characterized by evangelistic urgency. Their disagreement isn’t fundamentally about eschatology, about whether there is a hell. They disagree about who is going to hell.
So what’s all this noise that conservatives make about progressive Christians not believing in hell?
When conservatives lament progressives not believing in hell what they are really going on about is the progressive Christian vision of sin. There are folks conservatives want progressives to say are going to hell. Progressive Christians, for their part, think different sorts of people are going to hell. Once again, the debate isn’t about hell but about a theology of sin.
My point here isn’t to adjudicate between these groups. To do so would wade into the culture wars. My goal here is to simply draw attention to how, in these debates, the issue isn’t really about hell at all but about competing visions of sin and God’s judgment. The claim that progressives think that “no one is going to hell” isn’t true. Just ask them. They have a list.
I'd say yes to what you've proposed, with a couple of modifications. First, my experience in the progressive church is that the word "sin" is avoided, unless quickly followed by progressive-friendly modifiers. The sin of... white supremacy, or patriarchy, or hate rhetoric. Second, do progressives really believe in an after-death hell? Or is the evangelistic fervor more oriented toward the 'hell' of social and economic penalty for the sinner in this life? I'm suggesting this because of the potential social cost of espousing any form of Biblical hell, but I don't know what is actually believed in people's hearts.
What both sides have in common, I think, is a sense of revulsion or disgust about eating with sinners or washing their feet. However 'sinner' is defined.
I assume that this may constitute its own series of posts, but I think the phrase “going to hell” confuses the issue. For many, conservative or liberal, it implies hell as a physical place like prison. You commit the crime, then you are convicted and sent to prison (hell). It is applying a human convention and assumption to a divine concept, which I see as misguided. As a progressive Christian, I do believe in “hell,” but I frame it as a state of being, rather than a physical place, and it’s a state of our own creation. Hell is separation from God, and we are the ones who separate ourselves from God. The acts that one might define as “sinful” are simply some of the indicators that we may be separating ourselves from God. But ultimately, that’s a determination for each individual to determine between God and themselves (yes, I know my liberalism is showing). I agree that focusing on eschatology likely is the wrong place to focus, especially because the afterlife and all that it may encompass are probably far beyond our understanding, but I doubt it merely resembles a human prison system (or all-inclusive resort for the heaven equivalent). Time and time again, the Bible reminds me that my focus needs to be on now, today, and the good I can do in the world and for my fellow humans. How that plays out in the afterlife is somewhat secondary in most of the Bible as I read it. For the notion of sin, I want to avoid anything that I believe violates the Greatest Commandment, not for fear of eternal damnation but because it separates me from God and the joy, peace, and fulfillment therein. Sin is as much a problem for me today as in whatever afterlife may follow, perhaps more.