The Love Wins Companion: A Study Guide For Those Who Want to Go Deeper

4 What messages have you heard about who goes (or how many go) to heaven? Or about how God can be both loving Father and Judge?

5 What percentage of people who have ever lived do you estimate will end up in hell? Do you think Gandhi is in hell?

6 What do you think non-Christians would say about the church’s views on who goes and who does not go to heaven?

7 How do you respond to the problem Rob raises of explaining how a finite life of sin could entail eternal torment?

8 Do you believe there is no hope for atheists who die? Why or why not?

9 What role does our reason play in our salvation? What about people who are mentally handicapped, for example? How are they saved?

10 How important is the question, “Do you know where you will go after you die?” to your understanding of the Christian faith? Is “going somewhere else” (either heaven or hell) the message of Christianity?

11 Does our salvation depend on someone else sharing the good news of the gospel with us? Does others’ salvation depend on our doing the same for them?

12 Of the questions Rob raises in this chapter, which did you experience as pertaining to issues you have had before or issues you would like to discuss more?

Reading Questioning God by David Dark (#ulink_5f1bb1b5-4c70-51a7-98eb-0d7d77f9060f)

Do we really love God, or do we say we love God because we fear we will be damned otherwise? This nagging question, although primitive, nevertheless works its way into the souls of many Christians. Some respond by never letting questions arise; others deal with the questions by rejecting the faith. But what if God is actually the one behind the questions? What if God wants us to ask these questions? What if God actually loves questions? Such was the discovery of author and teacher David Dark, who writes about exactly these matters in his book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything (Zondervan).

Picture a tiny town with a tight-knit community. The people share joys and concerns, woes and gossip. They keep a close and often affectionate watch on one another’s business. They talk and talk and talk.

What an outsider would notice within minutes of listening in on conversations are constant and slightly self-conscious references to “Uncle Ben.” A beautiful sunset prompts a townsperson to say, “Isn’t Uncle Ben awesome?” Good news brings out how thankful and overjoyed they feel toward Uncle Ben. Even in tragedy, a local might say, in a slightly nervous fashion, “You know, it just goes to show how much we all need Uncle Ben. I know—we all know—that Uncle Ben is good.”

Uncle Ben is always on their minds.

Even when the magnificence of Uncle Ben isn’t spoken of aloud, he’s somehow present in facial expressions and actions. It’s the look of stopping a train of thought before it goes too far, of letting an uncompleted sentence trail off into awkward silence, of swiftly hanging the subject. It’s as if a conversation can only go so far. People hardly ever look one another in the eye for long.

At the beginning of each week there’s a meeting in the largest house in town. Upon arriving, people get caught up in good fellowship and animated discussion of the week’s events, with conversations straining in the direction of Uncle Ben. When a bell sounds, talk ceases. Everyone moves to the staircase and descends into the basement. Each person sits facing an enormous, rumbling furnace. Seated close to the furnace door, as if he were a part of the furnace itself, is a giant man in black overalls. His back is turned to them.

They wait in silence. In time the man turns around. His face is angry, contorted. He fixes a threatening stare of barely contained rage on each person, then roars, “Am I good?”

To which they respond in unison, “Yes, Uncle Ben, you are good.”

“Am I worthy of praise?”

“You alone are worthy of our praise.”

“Do you love me more than anything? More than anyone?”

“We love you and you alone, Uncle Ben.”

“You better love me, or I’m going to put you . . . in here”—he opens the furnace door to reveal a gasping darkness—“forever.”

Out of the darkness can be heard sounds of anguish and lament. Then he closes the furnace door and turns his back to them. They sit in silence.

Finally, feeling reasonably assured that Uncle Ben has finished saying what he has to say, they leave. They live their lies as best they can. They try to think and speak truthfully and do well by one another. They resume their talk of the wonders of Uncle Ben’s love in anticipation of the next week’s meeting.

But they’re limited, in myriad ways, by fear. Fear causes them to censor their own thoughts and words. Fear prevents them from telling anyone of their inner anguish and fright. Fear keeps them from recognizing in one another’s eyes their common desperation. This fear is interwoven, subtly and sometimes not so subtly, in all of their relationships.

End of story.

I find this story both jarring and entirely familiar. It captures some of my worst fears concerning the character of God. And I suspect a good number of people live their lives haunted by a nightmare similar to this one. Perhaps you entertain fears like these. Perhaps Uncle Ben forms your image of the divine even now.

Something akin to the Uncle Ben image might be what a lot of people refer to when they speak of religion as the worst thing that ever happened to them, a nightmare that damages everything it touches. We might protest that there’s much more to religion than such tales of terror. But I find it hard to deny that the image of Uncle Ben lurks within an awful lot of what is called popular religious belief.

Uncle Ben might be the bestselling version of an all-powerful deity, a great and powerful Wizard of Oz type who refuses to be questioned and threatens anyone who dares to doubt or protest. Fear constrains many to call this God good and loving, ignoring what they feel inwardly. The less reverent candidly observe that this God is the perfect model for a brutal dictator, the cosmic crime boss who runs everything and expects us to be grateful. Trying to satisfy such a God while also getting through a workday, trying to balance a checkbook, and being moderately attentive to the needs of others can take a certain emotional toll.

Loving God

For a long time, I was in the habit of praying a prayer (“I love you, Lord”) that was something of a gamble, like Pascal’s wager. I wasn’t sure I loved this God at all. In fact, I believed this Uncle Ben–like God was unlovable, determined to consign most of humanity to eternal torment for believing the wrong things. But, given the terrifying outcome of not loving him, it seemed sensible to say I loved and believed in him anyway. If, somehow, I succeeded in loving this God, lucky me. And if I didn’t love him, I’d be more or less damned anyway.

Having faith in this brand of God is akin to Orwell’s “double-think”—a disturbing mind trick by which we don’t let ourselves know what’s really going on in our minds for fear of what might follow. We learn to deny what we think and feel. The resulting mind-set is one of all fear all the time, a fear that can render us incapable of putting two and two together. Never quite free to say what we see.

When we think of belief intertwined with such fear, we might begin to wonder if self-professed believers caught in the grip of unseemly ideologies, religious or otherwise, are as fully convinced of what they claim to believe as they appear. Many are trying to prove their ultimate commitment by eliminating doubt—and fear—ridding themselves of the last vestiges of independent thought through force of will. Responding to the push that demands as much can become a kind of survival instinct. We do it without thinking about it. We witness the loss of independent thinking in a wide variety of settings—in offices, training camps, schools, political parties, clubs, families, and other religious assemblies. We’re instructed to believe and to silence our questions and our imaginations. Like Orwell’s Big Brother, Uncle Ben thrives when questioning is out of the question.

Open-ended questions such as “What on earth are we doing here?” and “Are we going crazy?” might occasionally give us enough air to keep breathing, but we’re very often suffocating. We have just enough religion to be afraid as we go through our days, as we wake up and fall asleep. We feel pressure to believe—or pretend to believe—that God is love, while suspecting with a sinking feeling that God likes almost no one.

William Blake captured this hateful spirit most effectively by naming him Nobodaddy (nobody’s daddy, non-father, Father of Jealousy). As a being of hatefulness and perpetual accusation, Uncle Ben might be called a Satanic perversion of the idea of God. However we choose to name him, his voice (or its voice) is at work within our world.

For the record, I don’t believe in the nonloving, fear-producing image that is Uncle Ben, but I hasten to add that I’m not without my own doubts. The intensity of the struggle ebbs and flows. When people ask, “Are you sure God isn’t like Uncle Ben?” I tend to reply, “Most of the time.”

Deliverance Begins with Questions

I readily confess that, in my darkest hours, the fear of an Uncle Ben, Nobodaddy-driven universe still has a hold on me, even as I hope and pray that my children and their children will find such an unworthy image of God to be almost comical. In my own religious upbringing, nobody ever told me that the Creator of the universe was a hellish handler of human beings. But as a child, I had a way of filling in the blanks with my imagination. Images sprang out of what I was told must be in the Bible somewhere. And some very dark ideas arose when talk of baptism and the age of accountability and assurance of salvation came up. I suppose such prospects motivated me, at least partially, to share my faith with other people. But would I really be doing others a favor if I managed to convince them of my own little nightmare? What should one do with a Nobodaddy on the brain? Is deliverance possible?

I believe deliverance begins with questions. It begins with people who love questions, people who live with questions and by questions, people who feel a deep joy when good questions are asked. When we meet these people—some living, some through history, art, and literature—things begin to change. Something is let loose. When we’re exposed to the liveliness of holding everything up to the light of good questions—what I call “sacred questioning”—we discover that redemption is creeping into the way we think, believe, and see the world. This re-deeming (re-valuing) of what we’ve made of our lives, a redemption that perhaps begins with the insertion of a question mark beside whatever feels final and absolute and beyond questioning, gives our souls a bit of elbow room, a space in which to breathe and imagine again, as if for the first time.

I had specific convictions concerning God and sin and eternity, but I also understood that my concepts, however well I might articulate them, were flawed, broken and always in need of rehabilitation. When I heard Leonard Cohen proclaim in his song “Anthem” that there are cracks in absolutely everything, I sensed he was describing my life. The cracks, Cohen croons, as if we should all know it by now, are how the light shines in, and it is only by remaining aware of our imperfections that we remain open to redemption and reform. When we have questions, illumination is possible. Otherwise we’re closed and no light can enter.

My inner Nobodaddy remained. Something clicked when a woman in Northern Ireland told me her own Uncle Ben story. She said she’d heard it from the Jesuit priest Gerard Hughes.[2] (#ulink_54b2bcf4-7ed0-5596-be8c-8fd1e1d3409e) Until I heard her story, I didn’t have a good way of talking about this binding, bad concept of God. I might even say that I didn’t know this death-dealing negative image was there. I didn’t know what had hold of me. The story, as stories will, prompted a lot of questions concerning the presumed goodness of God, the idea that God is love, and what it might mean to affirm, as I do, that God conquers rather than sponsors death.

The light began to shine through the cracks. Stories, I find, help the light to shine.

Sacred Questioning

There was a time in my life when I viewed the Uncle Ben story, despite its nightmarish quality, as an accurate depiction of the way things work. Protesting it would have seemed cosmically useless, given that this God doesn’t suffer questions, doubts, or complaints. But I eventually came to suspect that any god who is nervous, defensive, or angry in the face of questions is a false god. I began to realize that I often ascribed to God the traits of people who are ill at ease, anxious, and occasionally hateful and who even presume from time to time to speak on God’s behalf. I began to wonder if the Bible backs up the contemptuousness they carry around.

Over time, the Bible ceased to be a catalog of all the things one has to believe (or pretend to believe) in order to not go to hell. Instead, the Bible became a broad, multifaceted collection of people crying out to God—a collection of close encounters with the God who is present, somehow, in those very cries. Far from being an anthology of greeting-card material, those accounts of joy, anger, lamentation, and hope are all bound upon the most formidable array of social criticism ever assembled in one volume.

And Christianity, far from being a tradition in which doubts and questions are suppressed in favor of uncritical, blind faith, began to assume the form of a robust culture in which anything can be asked and everything can be said. The call to worship is a call to complete candor and radical questioning—questioning the way things are, the way we are, and the way things ought to be. As G. K. Chesterton observed, the New Testament portrays a God who, by being wholly present in the dying cry of Jesus of Nazareth, even doubted and questioned himself. The summons to sacred questioning—like the call to honesty, like the call to prayer—is a call to be true and to let the chips fall where they may. This call to worship is deeper than the call to sign off on a checklist of particular tenets or beliefs. It is also more difficult.

Reading The Temptation of Religious Success by Oswald Chambers (#ulink_6d61c114-0390-551a-967f-dfcbdfe485ed)

It is good to be reminded we are not the first to be tempted by snags and dead ends in the Christian life. The church has had two millennia of practice. Here writer and preacher Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) provides a meditation on how we are tempted as Christians to measure ourselves by “successful service” or tempted to conform ourselves to “the pattern and print of the religious age we live in.” Taken from his classic work My Utmost for His Highest, his caution is timely as we think through what the real message of Jesus is and what constitutes ill-fitting tradition. His advice is also wise as well as relevant: focus solely to be approved by God, and work (and debate) with kindness and gentleness, without coercion. Amen.

Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you. (Luke 10:20)