Why do we experience a profusion of Christmas carols each winter and such a scarcity of “Easter carols” each spring? We get plenty of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” but maybe a single Sunday morning of “Up from the Grave He Arose” or “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”.  I am left to conjure up some good Easter music in my imagination.  Do you recall the name Sandi Patty? She was a popular Christian vocalist in the 80s with a powerful voice. Her Easter song, “Was It a Morning Like This?”, has been nearly forgotten by everyone else, but the melody and…

Every April the gratitude I feel for my wife skyrockets.  Because she does the taxes. This year Sarah is the only one in the family to avoid Uncle Sam’s scrutiny. As for the rest of us, we look to Melissa to take care of all the paperwork.  Our three college students have no idea what mom is saving them from. Yesterday evening she presented neat stacks of finished tax papers for each one around the kitchen table and called on them to add their signatures and address the envelopes.  That was the sum of their responsibility, and still they groaned.…

Sometimes I think it would be cool to write a book. But I don’t know if I could ever do it.  Not because I wouldn’t have enough opinions or stories to fill a book. And not because I couldn’t figure out how to say what I wanted to say. The writing part I suppose I could handle. I just would be hesitant to publish it. Why?  I am the stereotypical “judgmental English teacher” type. If even one typo made it into MY final publication, I would be mortified. I know I would obsess over that mistake. “Here’s a copy of…

At least one more post on Hell versus annihilation. (I would quit writing about it, but the more I consider it, the more I see the importance of getting this issue straight in our heads – and making sure our theology is based on the Bible and not tradition.) If one wanted to do some proof-texting favoring annihilation, here are some verses which “disprove” eternal punishment if you read them as literally as the traditionalists read the Revelation verses on torment: (In no particular order.)  Proverbs 12:7 – “The wicked are overthrown and are no more, but the house of…

The gospels tell a story about a man who taught rather outlandish ideas and the handful of people who were able to lay down preconceptions and objections and say, “I think this guy is speaking truth!” Everyone else mocked and threatened violence. And those who opposed Jesus most violently did so believing their theology was infallible. The theology of the Pharisees was built on various assumptions about where the Messiah would come from and what he would do when he arrived. Those assumptions worked against them and against God’s mission. The book of Acts tells how Paul and others had…

  2 Peter 3:9: “

The traditional understanding of Hell is that it is: As I now lean toward “annihilationism”, I want to be clear that I am only rejecting #5, the eternal torment. Annihilationism would simply substitute “eternity of death” for “eternity of torment”. The other four points stand. There is a fair amount of talk in the New Testament (and even a bit in the Old) about a lake or a furnace of fire being the ultimate destination for those who are wicked. So I have no choice but to embrace the “fire” as being reality. But it still strikes me as mainly…

Here’s another way of looking at what I was trying to convey yesterday: Are the Bible verses cited in support of a literal eternal Hell of torment representative of what we find throughout the Bible? Or are they simply proof-texts?  Citing particular Scripture verses  to illustrate a particular teaching is useful if they are a sampling of verses that represent a thread of teaching running through an entire book, section, or the Bible as a whole.  But proof-texting is the practice of cherry-picking a handful of verses to teach a “truth” which runs counter to the general tenor of the…

 In an 1892 Sherlock Holmes story called Silver Blaze, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has his famous detective solve a mystery based on a clue’s absence rather than its presence.  The crime – a murder and the theft of a racehorse – occurs late at night. There are no witnesses, of course. In all of the testimonies given by the household staff, Holmes notices something that is not there. There is no report of the dog barking.  And thus, Holmes correctly reasons, the perpetrator was not a stranger.  ***** Those who want to prove that the Bible teaches that unbelievers suffer eternal…