What the Hell?

I chose into the Christian faith as an adult – well almost. I was 17. Even though I’d been born into a Christian family and had held a genuine fascination with Jesus since childhood, I didn’t actively chose into the faith until the first week or so of my freshman year at Iowa State University.

It must have been less than 24 hours later when something about my newfound faith troubled me. “What about all this business regarding hell?” I asked God. “Especially for those who were born, lived, and then died outside of any decent information about Jesus?” This was one of the very first prayers I prayed after going all in with Jesus.

The answer was immediate. And the thing I like about the words that pierced my soul that day was that they came in the form of a question. Answering a question with a question, I came to discover, was God’s modus operandi. Now, 38 years later, I recognize God’s accent in the response.

“Do you believe I’m good?”

This, of course, was the question behind my question. Underneath all the theologies of hell, beyond the scriptural passages that deal with judgement, behind the questions buzzing around predestination and free will, was a deep question about God’s goodness and my willingness to trust God.

The existence of a Creator has never really been a serious question for me. There’s simply too much evidence that points to a Great Beginner, a Divine Breather of Life into “all things seen and unseen.” And I’ve never really doubted that the Creator possessed an insatiable desire for intimacy with creation. Any Being responsible for dreaming up the emotional, social and relational wiring of humans must want to enter into that space with us. Or perhaps it’s as the Hebrew creation story says – we bear the capacity for intimacy because we are made in the likeness of God. These things have always just made sense to me.

What didn’t make sense was the goodness of the Creator given the doctrines of sin, judgement and eternal separation. So God’s response to me, do you believe I’m good, has served as an invitation to faith in the midst of many disturbing questions. And I have had to consider that response, put to me as a 1-day-old Christian, nearly every day since.

I said yes. With a tinge of insecurity and healthy dose of self-doubt. “Yes,” I said that day, “I believe you are good. I trust you to work out the mechanics of judgement and be good about it. Your good is gooder than my good. Yours is the goodest of all goods that good people have pronounced good. I mean, we even get our English word ‘good’ from the name we gave you – God.”

I don’t think this answer satisfies my theologically conservative nor my theologically progressive friends. And it certainly doesn’t satisfy my atheist or agnostic friends. But it satisfies me. It satisfies my inner child. That part of me that Jesus talks about when he said you can’t enter God’s domain (he called it the kingdom of God) unless you become like a little child.

Saying “yes” to the question is God good is what the little child in me wants to say. So I have let him say it – over and over and over for nearly forty years.