You're going to hell, but it's nothing personal

How can you take "you're going to hell" as anything but personal when someone makes you their pet project, even if it's just for one conversation?

I don't dispute that people's heading to hell is the popular evangelical doctrine; what I am saying is that it is hard not to take such a statement personally when it is meant personally. "You will go to hell, unless you accept Jesus as your personal savior."

It doesn't bother me as a point of doctrine if another religion indicates that I'm hellbound. It's abstract, it's cerebral, so who cares? There's something in the delivery, though, that makes me cringe.

Good news shouldn't be "You're going to hell"; and looking at the Christian Scriptures, it wasn't. Instead it was "Everything that you've been looking for, everything that you see wrong in the world around you, the answer is in Jesus Christ, whom God has raised from the dead."

I'd be such a bad evangelical.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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