Tag Archives: Theology

How can a loving God damn people to hell?: a response

I won’t attribute the source, since I can’t now find it; but in the blog of a friend of mine the question of damnation came up as an example of a religious dogma which cannot be accepted.

I beg to differ. If one accepts at least for the purpose of this discussion certain propositions about God, and heaven (I will reference these propositions as we go along) then some sort of doctrine of damnation is inevitable. The only other alternative is for our independence and autonomy to be an illusion.

 

Orthodox Christians may object that my argument is very short on appeals to the Bible. That is by design. In our current climate, appealing to Holy Scripture is mostly preaching to the choir. Continue reading

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Filed under ALL, Christianity, Heaven and hell, Theology

Is Creation Finished?

Mr. D. C. Toedt, who is a friend of mine from my church, writes a blog called The Questioning Christian
In a post entitled “The world isn’t broken, it’s just unfinished”
He suggests

1. Suppose hypothetically that God is still creating the world, using processes we’re only beginning to kinda-sorta understand — processes that entail generating lots of variations and keeping the ones that “work” as the starting point for later variations.

(These processes of the ongoing creation seem to include us as construction workers, incidentally: our powers of imagination let us generate new variations, while our powers of perception and memory let us see and remember — imperfectly — what does or doesn’t work.)

This hypothesis is not totally implausible, not if you take a long view of what we think we know of history. …

Now, D.C. (for whom I have a great deal of respect) and I disagree about much in the church, including what is the very nature of “church” and even what it means to be christian. I would argue that to be a christian means to accept Jesus as Lord, as being God incarnate who died in the flesh and rose again so that we might be released from the bondage of our sin. I will let D.C. speak for himself, which he does quite well, but he would more describe it as following the commandments of Jesus in that we are to love God and our neighbor, and teach others to do the same.

But in this post, I think he has it pretty much right. The main difference is that Continue reading

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Filed under ALL, Christianity, Theology