In December of 2019, I was networking on the interwebs and made what I thought was a friend in Bolivia. We were both happy to practice one another’s languages so we mostly each wrote in our own native tongue and it worked out. Unfortunately, despite getting past the language barrier, we found a more serious barrier that ended in the termination of the friendship. As I have said many times, I love my Christian friends dearly and would be heartbroken to lose them. That’s because I choose Christian friends with healthy boundaries. Unfortunately, my friend here, “P,” was dead-set on saving my soul. This resulted in my getting very angry and not always expressing myself in the kindest ways. I did apologize to “P” for lashing out, but once it became obvious that he would not and could not accept me as an apostate, I had to stop talking to him. Which sucks, because it’s an example of a friendship that should have been, and probably would have been if humans hadn’t evolved this stupid religious tribalism.
Anyway, here’s a snippet from the beginning of our conversation (I didn’t crop very well so there’s a bit of overlap where I combined the images):
So that gives you a picture of how mad I was. Anyway, we continued talking for a while and it turns out that “P” had a different take on the bible that was slightly different from any of the other spins that I had heard on it. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me that I just hadn’t been exposed to their version of Christianity, and they could tell me what the Bible really said and then I would accept it, I would be a wealthy woman. Once again, the unique spin did not make me suddenly want to re-convert, but it was interesting:
“There is no part of the Bible that says that those who are not Christians will go to hell.
“In the Bible, it says that the Christians who live in Christ will gain entrance into heaven without the need for a trial.
“Those who are not Christians will be judged according to their works, and in accordance with their works, they will go to heaven or hell.
“Therefore, it is impossible that I could be a Christian living in Christ if I am a murderer, rapist, etc.
“Even if I’m in church every day.
”Doesn’t what I said seem logical to you?
“Therefore, if you don’t want to be a Christian, but you help people…
“You’re honest…
“You do things right…
“You won’t go to hell.”
[Me]
”In the Bible it says that he who does not believe in Christ will be condemned…”
[Me]
“…but it doesn’t say he’ll go to hell.
“It talks about the second death.
”And it says that in [the second death], those who who did not believe in Christ but in accordance with their works and the bad things they did, and those who oppressed their neighbor and didn’t do the good, will be sent to the lake of fire and sulfur.”
[Me]
Okay, so we’ve obviously got some stuff to unpack here. I do not care at all if this was the “correct” interpretation of the Bible. I grew up in “By grace alone through faith alone” in a group so extreme that even choosing Christ was supposed to be a work (but we still went to hell if we didn’t do it, leading to an incredibly complicated explanation in which our choosing salvation was supposed to be the result of our already having been saved). Since we also believed that it was impossible for someone who was “really” a Christian to fall away, we had to have an explanation for why certain people who had seemed so very saved actually weren’t, so the most common explanation was “Well, maybe they were trusting in their works for salvation.” I’ve met all kinds of people with all kinds of different approaches to that, and I’ve also met people (including Protestants) who believed that our salvation was indeed based on our works and not what we believed. “P” presented what seemed to be something like this:
This was, in any case, the best I could depict my understanding of P’s beliefs in a flowchart I made for free on Google slides. As convinced as he was that this new perspective would solve all my issues with the bible, it did not. First, it’s still equally black and white. Adding an extra qualifying round does not change that you end up in either heaven or hell. This does not work with a faith-based system OR a works-based system, because neither beliefs nor actions are all or nothing. Jesus is quoted in at least two of the gospels saying that people were either for him or against him, but that’s a huge oversimplification. People’s levels of appreciation of Christianity are on a spectrum, and constant sermons saying that you can’t sit on the fence don’t make it true. For example, I believe that Christianity is generally but not always destructive, but I also 100% believe in people’s freedom of religion because totalitarianism is more destructive than almost all religions. Don’t I get a pass over those terrorists out there who are killing Christians? Does it seem like divine justice that (according to this dichotomous belief system) I’ll be sitting next to them in hell and suffering equally? What about people who loved Jesus but didn’t put him “first and center” in their lives? What about the Jews who supposedly worship the exact same god? And if we’re operating in a works-based system, how many good works outweigh one bad work? The idea that it’s impossible to sit on the fence is crazy because why on earth is there a fence in the first place? Its placement can only be arbitrary. Life is shades of gray. Anyone who’s sat through a conversation about whether so-and-so from church is truly saved and whether we should treat them as one of us or an outsider, should be able to appreciate this.
Binaries make people feel safe. That’s why we have all sorts of binaries for everything from gender to the afterlife to politics. But the problem is that binaries rarely exist in nature and our efforts to oversimplify the world might comfort us in the short run, but they’re harmful in the long run.
References
(N.d.). Retrieved August 14, 2021, from Peko-step.com website: https://www.peko-step.com/en/tool/combine-images.html
