Hell? No.

From Pastor Steven:

The church, throughout history, has told people that the whole point of Christianity is like having a fire insurance policy; you need salvation from hell, we were told.  

I do not believe in hell for many reasons.  One is this: if God did not intervene, then after we die, we would just rot away as any other animal does. There is nothing automatic about life after death.  

So, God has to step in and do something, like raise us from the dead, otherwise we just decompose; “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  

But if God raised us up, only to judge us, then our biggest problem is God; salvation would mean being saved from God who could condemn us to hell.  If salvation means being saved from God, then something has gone seriously wrong in our theology.  But that is exactly the corner that the church painted itself into for many years.  

Having painted itself into the corner of believing that God’s job was to raise us up to judge us, the church then focused on what we needed to do so that we would not end up condemned and in hell.  

Can you imagine that on one of the six days of creation, God took a break from creating good things, and turned to create a torture chamber where evil would exist forever, unredeemed, and suffering would be infinite? Is that even conceivable? Not to me.  

The very character of God is called into question by the idea of a place of torment after death. Our bedrock, most elegantly simple and profound concept of the character of God, is Love. The Bible says it that clearly: “God is love.”