Tag: Rob Bell
0 Battlestar Galactica is to Heaven What the Sopranos are to Hell
Dwight Shrute isn’t the only person who loves Battlestar Galactica. Sure that probably makes me lame. Whatever, it’s awesome. It’s also theologically resonate and a spot-on imagining of the Exodus story played in out in the wilderness of space.
Apparently, Ross Douthat is also a fan. Here are his reflections from a few years ago in First Things, pairing BG with Heaven, Lost with Puratorio and Sopranos with Hell.
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There was a time in American life, not so very long ago, when the only significant relation between religion and popular culture seemed to be the tedious symbiosis enjoyed by such envelope-pushing television producers as Steven Bochco and David E. Kelley and the conservative Christians who loved to hate them. The pattern repeated itself endlessly: Some line would be crossed (a bared buttock, a profanity, a dollop of anti-Catholic bigotry) and the Moral Majority or the Catholic League or the Traditional Values Coalition would mount a protest or a boycott, which in turn only ensured higher ratings for the television show in question and incentives for further envelope-pushing the next time around.
Today those battles are all but finished, and the religious side has lost. It was beaten in part by provocateurs like Bochco and the broader left-wing campaign against anything that even hinted at censorship. But it was also defeated by forces beyond the control of either artists or agitators. Technological change, above all, doomed the fight for decency in American popular culture, as every successive technological innovation weakened the power of regulators, moral and otherwise, while expanding the venues where human weakness could be exploited for fun and profit (mainly the latter). Russell Kirk famously called the automobile a “mechanical Jacobin,” but the fissiparous, fragmenting effects of cable television, DVDs, and the Internet make the Model T look Burkean by comparison.
The result is the unrestrained and unrestrainable popular culture of today, where every concept, no matter how lowbrow or how vile, can find a platform and an audience. A television show that proves too violent for NBC ends up on Showtime; an FCC crackdown on a raunchy radio host only nudges him into a lucrative new spot on satellite radio; a community that manages to keep X-rated movies out of its theaters and video stores is just pushing money into the pockets of sleaze merchants who peddle their wares over high-speed Internet connections. Small wonder that America’s movies and music and television shows make us enemies in traditional societies around the world—and small wonder, too, that many cultural conservatives, despairing of their country’s future, embrace withdrawal from the world into a narrow, well-defended Christendom, where their families and their faith can be protected from the lowest-common-denominator swill that washes against the walls outside.
Yet religious believers have also profited in certain ways from the crack-up of the old middlebrow, PG-rated common culture, even if it’s sometimes hard to see the gains through the gore and exhibitionism. This is the great paradox of twenty-first-century popular culture in America: For all its profanity and blasphemy, the new culture arguably takes religious issues and debates more seriously than it used to in a more decent, less decadent era.
Or perhaps it isn’t a paradox at all: There was a time, after all, when many religious thinkers were skeptical of the kind of mass culture that had its American heyday at mid-century, critiquing its homogeneity and complacency, tackiness and philistinism. They rose to the defense of the old dispensation only because the alternative—the mainstreaming of the 1960s counterculture, with its contempt for every tradition and authority—seemed far worse. (The Bells of St. Mary’s might not be The Divine Comedy, but it was better than Basic Instinct.)
The counterculture has largely won, and our society is in many ways the worse for it. But there are opportunities in defeat as well as victory, and places where new life can spring up amid the ruins. The old gatekeepers were at best superficially conservative and favorably disposed to religion only because they believed in being inoffensive about every segment of the mass market on which their films and shows depended. Now the incentives to be uncontroversial are far weaker. Which means that, along with all the dreck and smut and mediocrity, there’s more room for idiosyncrasy, controversy, and political incorrectness as well. These can be the raw materials of blasphemy, but they can also be the stuff of popular art that drills deep into issues—theology and human destiny, sin and redemption, heaven and hell—that the old mass media treated with kid gloves.
True, God has to compete with Paris Hilton and Family Guy for attention, but at least He’s in there fighting.
Consider recent developments in science fiction and fantasy. These are genres that have traditionally provided fertile ground for metaphysically inclined fiction, but for a long time their presence in the American mass media began with Star Trek and ended with Star Wars—fun but shallow entertainments whose take on religion mixed Daniel Dennett with Deepak Chopra, secular condescension with New Age mumbo-jumbo. As late as the early 1990s, the only sci-fi show of any merit on television was Star Trek: The Next Generation, a U.N. bureaucrat’s fantasy of the twenty-fourth century, in which a crew of asexual socialists in leotards kept the galaxy safe for cultural relativism and conflict resolution.
A decade later, the landscape looks very different. The cost of bringing what J.R.R. Tolkien called “a secondary world” to life has dropped, and the possibilities for creativity have widened. The two great Christian fantasies of the century just past—Middle-Earth and Narnia—have been given vivid, wildly successful big-screen treatments. The dreadful Star Wars prequels were briefly eclipsed by The Matrix, whose blend of religious allegory, pop philosophy, and balletic violence aimed much higher than George Lucas ever did (though The Matrix descended into pretentious incoherence in the later installments). And the best sci-fi show on television today isBattlestar Galactica, a “reimagining” of a short-lived late-1970s series about the last remnants of humanity fleeing a genocide perpetrated by their own creations—a race of humanoid robots called Cylons—and searching for our species’ last refuge, a mythical planet called Earth.
The brainchild of a frustrated Star Trek scribe named Ronald Moore, Galactica is deliberately designed to be the anti-Trek: Instead of a bloodless, hygienic future in which the human race seemed to have outgrown every recognizable human aspiration on its way to outer space, the show depicts a star-faring humanity driven by familiar motivations—religious faith chief among them. At its best, Galactica isThe Longest Day crossed with Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, chronicling a gritty man-versus-machine interstellar war (fought with bullets and nuclear weapons rather than the usual phasers and photon torpedoes) that has as much to do with theology as politics. The original series borrowed from Mormon cosmology, but the newer, better incarnation pits the Greco-Roman polytheism practiced by the humans (they worship the ancient Mediterranean pantheon, and each of their “Twelve Colonies” is named for a sign of the Zodiac) against the crusading monotheism of the Cylons, who are convinced that their human progenitors worship idols and that they themselves are God’s latter-born, perfected children, destined to inherit the universe from a flawed and sinful humanity.
This may sound like an allegory designed for know-nothing liberals: crazy fanatical monotheists (think Osama Bin Laden or Jerry Falwell) pitted against tolerant pagans (think Berkeley, California, or maybe Burlington, Vermont). But Moore’s show is far too clever to slide into that trap. The human polytheists, in practice, have a great deal in common with the Abrahamic monotheists of Planet Earth: They’re a people of the book, divided between fundamentalists who take the sacred scrolls literally and more latitudinarian believers who don’t, and divided, as well, on all the culture-war questions—notably abortion—that divide our own semi-Christian West. And the Cylon monotheism, too, appears riven by theological factionalism, with tenets that are open to quasi-Buddhist as well as Mosaic interpretations.
More interesting still, the fundamentalists in both faiths have a tendency to be proved right, and the skeptics wrong. Prophecies are fulfilled and ancient scrolls prove accurate, and the religious choice, in any given situation, is likely to be the right one. The Old Testament overtones of the show’s conceit—twelve tribes looking for a promised land—aren’t accidental, and as Galactica‘s quest narrative proceeds, so does the audience’s awareness that the story is unfolding according to some larger design.
Whether this design belongs to the Colonists’ pantheon or the Cylons’ single deity remains uncertain. Both sides, despite their theological differences, seem bound to a common destiny in ways that neither understand; like Jews and Christians after Christ, they’re joined in brotherhood and enmity, till the end of their quest or perhaps the end of time. But however their relation turns out, it’s likely to dovetail with the show’s overarching premise—the idea, at once old-fashioned and subversive, that human history has an Author.
The same set of issues—meaning and purpose, common destinies and divine interventions—dominates the action on Lost, ABC’s addictive serial about the survivors of a plane crash who find themselves marooned on a South Pacific island, cut off from any hope of rescue. Most of the castaways carry secret sorrows or hidden sins: There are murderers and adulterers, drug addicts and former mental patients, an African warlord and an ex-torturer from the Iraqi Republican Guard. And the island is attuned to all of them in some mysterious fashion, speaking to the survivors in dreams and visions, pushing them into strange obsessions and dangerous quests, delivering healing to some and sudden death to others.
The creators of Lost have repeatedly denied that their characters are literally in purgatory, which was a popular theory among early viewers of the series, and most of the evidence from later episodes suggests that they’re telling the truth. Still, the show’s island is at the least a purgatorial landscape—it’s no coincidence that several of the characters are Catholic, lapsed and otherwise—where the things that the castaways carry from their previous lives provide the raw material for suffering, struggle, and growth.
But the show has larger ambitions as well. The island isn’t just a supernatural catalyst for individual redemption; it’s a microcosm of Western modernity (many of the characters, not coincidentally, share names with modern political philosophers—there’s a Rousseau and a John Locke, a Hume and even a Mikhail Bakunin), and a place where the two most powerful forces in recent human history, utopian hubris and scientific arrogance, have worked themselves out with what appear to be disastrous consequences.
At some point, long before the plane crash, the island was the site of an overlapping series of experiments on everything from genetic engineering and radical life extension to parapsychology and magnetism, which apparently involved cooperation between a sinister multinational corporation and a Walden II-style commune of idealistic scientists. The landscape is littered with the detritus of these efforts—abandoned hatches with cryptic instructional videos, empty zoos and laboratories, mysterious processes that may still be working themselves out—and populated by what appear to be the experiments’ surviving custodians, a group of people known only as the Others, whose purposes remain inscrutable even as they emerge as the castaways’ antagonists. The shadow of a larger apocalypse hangs over the narrative as well since, whatever the experiments were meant to do, they seem to have created the possibility of a world-ending cataclysm.
Meanwhile, the castaways are divided among themselves both personally and philosophically, constantly arguing over whether their lives on the island are governed by purpose or blind chance, and whether faith or reason is a surer guide in their strange circumstances. Some of the characters are Christian, others embrace a kind of New Age island-worship, others cling to a stringent materialism. At its best, the show seems capable of synthesizing all these elements and building to a metaphysical battle royale, in which the various forces at work in our own civilization struggle with one another for mastery, and nothing less than the fate of the world hangs in the balance. At it worst—well, Lost is in its third season now, and there are disturbing signs that the show is running out of steam, and that the creators may have thrown too many mysteries into the air without a plan to catch them. (This is known among television doctors as the X-Files Syndrome.)
However the saga of the castaways manages to finish up, though, it’s clear that Lostultimately shares with Battlestar Galactica a certain degree of cosmic optimism. With God (in some form) taking an active role in the narrative and nothing less than the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, it seems like a safe bet that the gates of hell won’t prevail against the heroes. This is the nature of fantasy and epic, at least in the context of a Christian culture—by raising the stakes, the genre gives away the ending. Frodo will always destroy the ring; Aslan will always defeat the White Witch; Harry Potter will always put an end to Voldemort. A price will be exacted along the way, but, however dark the story gets, the logic of eucatastrophe still holds, and with it the knowledge that the light will overcome the darkness.
This eschatological optimism contrasts sharply with the pessimism of the best realistic show on television today: The Sopranos, which is ending its six-season run on HBO this spring. Where Galactica and Lost are shows about getting through purgatory to heaven, or at least a promised land, The Sopranos is a show about what it means to go to hell. Like The Wire, another HBO production (and the leading candidate for The Best Show on Television title once the Soprano family enters the afterlife of reruns), The Sopranos offers a devastating critique of American life. Unlike the kind of social commentary that Hollywood still churns out—in which everything would turn out better if only conservatives weren’t so busy oppressing homosexuals or women or maybe unionized employees—it isn’t interested in easy sociological answers or cheap political point-scoring. And while even the best episodes of Galactica and Lost are ultimately pop-culture ephemera, HBO’s mob show is closer to real art: Dostoevsky crossed with Emile Zola, a novelistic meditation on the nature of societal corruption and personal sin.
There have been pop-culture portraits of mob kingpins descending into hell before, of course—think of Michael Corleone fading into shadow at the end of Godfather II. But the artistic temptation is always to make this fall splendid and Miltonic, a matter of a few grand and tragic choices rather than the steady accretion of small-time compromises, petty sins, and tiny steps downward that usually define damnation.
The Sopranos dares instead to explore the terrible banality of evil, depicting ordinary people held prisoner by their habits and appetites who choose hell instead of heaven over and over again, not with a satanic flourish but with an all-American sense of entitlement. Sin is never glamorized or aestheticized: The violence is brutal rather than operatic, the fornications and adulteries are panting and gross rather than titillating. The characters’ sins breed even physical dissolution: obesity, ulcers, hemorrhoids, constipation, cancer. The show offers a vision of hell as repetition, ultimately, in which the same pattern of choices (to take drugs, to eat and drink to excess, to rob and steal and bully and murder) always reasserts itself, and the chain mail of damnation—in which no sin is an island, and gluttony is linked to violence, sloth to greed, and so on—slowly forges itself around the characters’ souls.
The only players in this drama who seem capable of escape are Tony Soprano himself, the mob boss and antihero who makes repeated excursions into psychotherapy, and his wife, Carmela, whose guilt over her husband’s lifestyle coexists with an unwillingness to give up the possessions and status that his criminality has won for her. The arc of the show, over six seasons, has traced their attempts to leave their sins behind—Tony’s dialogues with his therapist and halting steps toward self-knowledge; Carmela’s religious forays, adulterous fantasies, and abortive quest for a divorce. These always end in failure, partially because the avenues they choose tend to be therapeutic rather than truly redemptive (the show is particularly hard on psychotherapy’s pretensions) and partially because actually escaping seems to mean giving up too much: the combination of bourgeois comfort and the kind of “freedom” that the Mob life offers, a freedom to do as you please, unhindered by any societal restraint, that is gradually revealed as the worst prison there is.
In one of the show’s darkest and most telling moments, Tony’s nephew and lieutenant, Christopher, plans to betray the Soprano family and go into the witness-protection program with his fiancée, who has been blackmailed into becoming a government snitch. But while refueling his glossy black Hummer in a gas station, he finds his gaze drawn to the family across the pumps from him—the runny-nosed kids, the harried parents, and above all their battered station wagon—and in that instant decides that it’s better to have his fiancée killed than to accept the constraints of life outside the mafia. The freedom to do whatever you like in this world, it turns out, is just another word for choosing your SUV over your lover.
Whether The Sopranos‘ creator, David Chase, believes in a literal hell I have no idea—but his show believes in it. Just as Lost and Galactica tease out their metaphysics through hallucinations and dream sequences, The Sopranos deals frequently in private visions—mainly Tony’s richly detailed dreams, which are more psychological than metaphysical, but also a pair of theologically fraught near-death experiences.
The first belongs to Christopher, after a second-season car accident briefly stops his heart, and it lands him in hell, which turned out to be an Irish bar—every Italian’s idea of the inferno—populated by deceased “soldiers” from his crime family, who give him a message to carry back to his bosses: “Three o’clock.” (That hour of the day, with its Good Friday associations, has been associated with bad news for members of the Soprano family ever since.) The second near-death moment, meanwhile, belongs to Tony himself, a several-episode sojourn in limbo following his shooting at the hands of his senile uncle. It concludes with him literally going toward the light and finding himself at the door of a brightly lit family reunion, where his mother (a monstrous woman who once took out a hit on him) and the rest of his departed relatives have gathered to greet him.
Whatever afterlife waits for him aside, it clearly isn’t heaven.
The question, of course, is whether the audience gets the point, or whether The Sopranos‘ faithful viewers are in it for the same reasons the mobsters are: the adrenaline rush that comes with any violent or sexual encounter, no matter how degrading it may be. This is the problem for any artist who seeks to show sin as it is. Does depicting an act make you complicit in it, even when you stand in judgment?Last Tango in Paris makes loveless sex look like hell on earth, for instance, but there are still people who watch it for titillation, just as there must be some segment of The Sopranos‘ audience—young men, in particular—who spend their time cheering on the killers, identifying with the mobsters instead of profiting from their hell-bound example.
And even if The Sopranos isn’t glamorizing sin, you only have to flip down a few channels to find a dozen shows that are. Battlestar Galactica may be a step up fromStar Trek, in terms of both artistry and philosophical seriousness, but is it worth enduring the ever-vaster wasteland of basic cable to make that step up possible? Or again, is the chance to see the story of Christ’s Passion as Mel Gibson reimagined it—blood-drenched and harrowing and brilliant—worth giving the same R-rated carte blanche to Quentin Tarantino, or worse, the makers of torture-porn thrillers likeHostel and The Hills Have Eyes?
This is an important argument for cultural conservatives to have, but for the time being it’s also largely theoretical. The old standards for mass culture, on television and the silver screen—minimal violence, no nudity, and no ideological conflict that couldn’t be solved by asking What Would JFK Do?—are long gone, and no political pressure is likely to revive them. Religious believers can take the risk of competing in this riotous marketplace, where there’s a great deal to gain but even more to lose, or they can withdraw from it and tend their own cultural gardens, like the new St. Benedicts that Alasdair MacIntyre envisioned at the end of After Virtue. There doesn’t seem to be a third way out.
And yet, whether they choose to withdraw or stay, believers should be wary of overstating either the horrors of the present era or the virtues of the American pop cultural landscape gone by. By a host of cultural indicators, American society was better off in the 1950s than it is today, and the constraint and self-censorship of that age’s mass media had a great deal to do with this achievement. But the old order turned out to be built on sand, and the generation that was weaned on the movies and TV shows of the 1950s, with their League of Decency seal of approval, grew up to think of orthodoxy as a dead hand and tradition as an epithet. Today’s generation, if they turn to the right channel and find the right show waiting for them, may instead discover the truth of Chesterton’s dictum: “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.”
None of this means that religious believers, and particularly religious parents, don’t have understandable reasons for trying to wall their families off from the worst of what American pop culture has to offer, whether by canceling their cable subscription or packing up and moving to Ave Maria Town.
But if they do, they ought to at least consider bringing a DVD player along with them.
3 Without Jesus, You Go to Hell
Mark Driscoll is neo-Calvinist pastor Mars Hill Church in Seattle and a first class d*&%^$ bag (Exhibit A: He wrote a marriage book explaining how it’s the wife’s job to…you get the picture). He’s made a name for himself- and not a few enemies- by his no-holds barred personality and confrontational sermons.
As someone who has a bit of both those traits himself, I guess I can’t judge too harshly.
However, I can judge his exegesis of Luke 16, the very same scripture I used this weekend’s sermon on Hell.
I can only imagine that if Jesus read Driscoll’s assessment of the parable, then Jesus would ask: ‘Belief? Who said anything about ‘believe in me or you’re going to Hell?’ It’s about the rich man ignoring the poor man in need at his doorstep.’ I also like to think Jesus would say: ‘Well, you know it’s a parable. Maybe you should focus on the point and not get hung up on the details because it’s, you know, a story.’
For someone who claims preaching about Hell is ‘difficult’ Driscoll seems to evidence no restraint. He seems almost gleeful in his shoot from the hip pronouncements on the mysteries of eternity. But
I’ll let you be the judge.
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In admittedly his most difficult sermon in 15 years of ministry, Seattle pastor Mark Driscoll made it abundantly clear that hell is real and is the destination for those who don’t trust in Jesus.
“Let me say it clearly, … plainly, … loudly: You are in danger. Without Jesus, you go to hell,” the Reformed pastor told thousands at Mars Hill Church this past weekend.
Driscoll was preaching from the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke – a New Testament book that he has been going over for the past year and a half with his church. But what made the sermon even more timely and that much more urgent was the recent debate on hell in light of the release of Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, by Grandville, Mich., pastor Rob Bell.
Bell, who has been accused of heresy and preaching universalism, has made media rounds during his book tour this month. In a visit to MSNBC, the popular author was pushed four times by host Martin Bashir on the question of eternal destiny after receiving unsatisfying answers – or rather, unclear ones.
“Is it irrelevant about how one responds to Christ in this life in terms of determining one’s eternal destiny?” asked Bashir, who also accused the author of amending the Gospel so that it’s palatable.
“It is terribly relevant and terribly important. Now, how exactly that works out and how exactly that works out in the future, we are now when you die firmly in the realm of speculation,” Bell replied.
“You have to be very careful that we don’t build whole doctrines and dogma about what is speculation.”
Without naming names, Driscoll, author of Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe, expressed profound concern over false teachings and messages that proclaim anything other than salvation through Jesus Christ.
“It greatly disturbs me when well-known pastors and preachers and authors get invited onto television … when the world is listening to them, the interviewer inquires of them ‘if you don’t believe in Jesus are you going to hell?’ and they squirm or they change the subject or they appeal to the emotions or they tell a story, they do anything but say ‘yes, if you don’t know Jesus you go to hell,'” the 40-year-old pastor said.
“Friends, this is the most serious of matters,” he told the congregation. “I’m not the judge but there are pastors that are going to hell. So be careful who you trust.”
For Driscoll, there is no ambiguity in Jesus’ teachings about heaven and hell.
Stressing throughout his sermon that his job is to tell the truth, Driscoll pointed to Jesus’ teachings on the hard-to-stomach issue of hell.
Jesus, he said, speaks of hell more than anyone in the entire Bible. Roughly 13 percent of his teachings and half of his parables are in reference to hell, judgment, or punishment, Driscoll noted.
“Some say Jesus is so loving, certainly Jesus doesn’t believe in hell. I would say the most loving person who has ever lived not only believes in hell but clearly, emphatically, repeatedly teaches on it, which must mean that our sin is more damnable than we can fathom if it requires the most loving person to speak in the most stark of terms,” he pointed out.
“The existence of hell, the instruction by Jesus of hell should reveal to us how sinful sin truly is and how rebellious we really are.”
From the get-go, Driscoll, who was raised a Catholic before converting at age 19, rejected as false several popular positions people hold about death and the afterlife, including naturalism (no soul), universalism (all or almost all go to heaven), belief in reincarnation (multiple, successive lives), annihilationism (suffer in hell a while but eventually cease to exist), and belief in purgatory (temporary punishment and ultimately going to heaven).
Making clear what Jesus made clear, the Seattle pastor known for his no-holds-barred attitude said everyone who doesn’t know Jesus will go to hell.
“Have you received Jesus? Have you trusted in Jesus? If not, you are in the path of the wrath of God. You are headed to the conscious eternal torments of hell,” he asserted.
Quoting Jesus, Driscoll underscored, “‘No one comes to the Father but by me.’ No one. No one. Buddhism, no. Hinduism, no. New Ageism, no. Mormonism, no. Jehovah’s Witnessism, no. Nice people, no. Good people, no. Generous people, no. Religious people, no.”
“There is no salvation apart from him (Jesus)!” he exclaimed.
Regarding a second chance after death, Driscoll stated plainly that there is no second chance.
“Your eternal destiny is sealed upon your death. This life is your only opportunity,” he preached.
“I’m going to bury a lot of people. So for me, this is not just heartless academic speculation,” he stressed. “It’s heartfelt pastoral affection.”
“I’m really worried about some of you,” he said as he became teary-eyed. “I love you. I can’t have your blood on my hands.”
While some try to elevate one attribute of God over another (such as love), Driscoll noted that while God is love the Bible speaks more of His holiness than anything else.
“God is love, and whatever God does is loving. God is also just. God is also holy,” he said. “Our God is also simultaneously, perfectly a God of wrath. Not just our God but the only God.
“God is holy. If we do not repent, we are in the path of His wrath.”
It is in love, however, that God sent Jesus “as our substitute, to go to the cross and give us eternal life,” Driscoll added.
Responding to questions about why God would create people if their future is hell, Driscoll stated, “People go to hell because they reject Jesus. We are in no way innocent.”
“This is not the world as God made it. This is the world as we have corrupted it,” he explained.
He continued, “What is astonishing is God would become a man to live in the world as we have destroyed it.”
The wrath of God was poured out on Jesus, he added, so that it may be diverted from us.
“That is the gift of salvation. That is the love of God.”
In one illustration, Driscoll stated, “It makes perfect sense to me that a convicted criminal goes to prison. Similarly, it makes perfect sense that a condemned sinner goes to hell.”
Hell, he noted, was made for the devil and his angels who rebelled against God. And just as prison was made to protect the rest of the public, hell was made to “protect us.”
“You need not go there. Trust in Jesus.”
Regarding what hell is like, the illustration in Luke reveals a place of torment with flames. It’s like being trapped in a burning building forever, Driscoll said.
Jesus also uses as illustration a place outside Jerusalem called Gehenna. There, children were murdered and sacrificed by fire to false demon gods.
It was a cursed place that became a garbage dump of the city where worms were always feasting and flames were always burning.
Near the end of his sermon, Driscoll pleaded with the congregation not to judge God.
“We have three-pound fallen brains. We have sinful dispositions. We have only been around for a few short years. We are not all knowing,” he pointed out.
“For us to sit on a throne even if it is an academic throne propped up by footnotes, asking the Creator of heaven and earth to pass before us that we might render a verdict regarding His holiness and justice is how all the trouble began in the first place.”
Driscoll urged the congregation and other listeners online to make a decision – eternal life or eternal death.
“You’re still alive so I’m pleading with you. Make your decision while you’re still alive.”
You can read more here.
3 Hell: A (Very) Rough Travel Guide
Here’s a hilarious satire of the Medieval graphic of Hell from the Economist.
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Why visit Hell?
Hell’s landscape is unrivalled. Its bottomless ravines, towering mountains and fiery floods have inspired artists for centuries. Pandemonium, the capital (formerly black Dis) has a strikingly cosmopolitan buzz and, as a bonus, is crime-free. Overweight and out of form? Hell offers the ultimate workout. Shed those extra pounds, and keep on shedding them!
If you like to travel light ’n’ easy, Hell is for you. Get all your jabs on site, and don’t bother to pack the sun cream. Only hypocrites wear clothes; fiery serpents and fat maggots are often the only attire. In a charming tradition, each visitor is presented on arrival with hot metal chains as a lasting memento of their stay. Get yours personally engraved at no extra charge.
Time stands still here, as the ocean boils and the great abyss yawns before you. Feel the hot sand under your feet, watch the chimeras and gorgons frolic, take a trip on a demon’s back, smell the brimstone on the breeze! You know how you always hope holidays will never end? This one never will.
Getting to Hell
The quickest route is to sin big and persistently, and refuse to show remorse. The sin against the Holy Ghost gets you there in one, though no one knows exactly what it is.
The way to Muslim and Jewish Hell lies over a high bridge as thin as a hair. Primrose paths of dalliance (Shakespeare, “Hamlet”) offer a slower but more relaxing approach.
Currency in Hell
Money may well be the reason you are here; especially if you come from Cahors, the city of usurers, or worked for Lehman Brothers. But don’t bring cash or cards, unless you want them melted down and poured into your mouth through a funnel.
Top Sights to Visit in Hell
Hell Gate. In fact nine layers of gates, three of brass, three of iron and three of burning adamant. Don’t miss the famous inscription on the first: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”. Satan’s paramour, Sin (aka “the Snakie Sorceress”), keeps the key and will make a scene, even though—since Christ harrowed the place in 33AD—the gate no longer shuts. Beware belching fire and three-headed dogs.
Satan’s palace. The architectural marvel of Pandemonium, made of pure gold (Hell’s major export, and the world’s bane). Its council chamber can accommodate “a thousand Demi-Gods on golden seats”, with 26 standing. Raised above it is Satan’s throne, far outshining “the wealth of Ormus and of Ind”. Photography is not allowed.
Satan himself. Frozen in ice at Hell’s core, gnawing on several sinners at a time, and with his three horned heads weeping gigantic tears of frustration, this extraordinary sight amazes everyone. Staggered entry at peak times, or when sated. Not suitable for vegetarians.
Dining
Chez Tantalus: See your dinner hover over you, but never quite get close enough to eat!
Bar Lethe: A popular, even crowded, establishment, despite the slow and surly service of barmaid Medusa. You’ll soon forget everything, including why you came.
Fresh ‘n’ Fruity: Hell has several branches of this surprising chain, where you can experience the fresh-picked fruit of your choice turning to ashes in your mouth. Fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil in season.
Accommodation
Holes of the Simoniacs: Dive head-first into these funnels of fun, and let a devil set the soles of your feet on fire!
The Sacks@Malebolge: Ten delightful mini-ditches in the trendy 8th Circle, specially designed for liars and flatterers. Enjoy an in-room massage from attentive demons.
Angel Rocks: A cheap and charming perch from which to brood on your circumstances.
Spas
The Third Circle Spa (M. Cerberus, prop.): Wallow in perfumed mud for as long as you like, and longer!
Il Sanguineo (7th Circle): Watch your body turn as red as this river of blood, in an exceptional toning experience!
Gay and LGBT scene
Much improved in recent years. Continual cruising is the norm in the 7th Circle, where anyone who stops encounters an intriguing rain of fire.
To sum up: “Hell: Your first resort, and your last!”
0 What Is Advent?
It’s been brought to my attention that many (Christians and Non) have no idea what some Christians mean by the season of ‘Advent.’ I guess that’s to be expected. Many Christians in the Reformed Tradition don’t observe Advent or Lent.
Here’s this essay by Rob Bell from Relevant Magazine, reflecting on the meaning and purpose of this season of ‘preparation.’
Christmas is coming. It may seem like it’s way too soon to be talking about trees and lights and presents and eggnog and all that. But Christmas is the culmination of Advent, and Advent is about the church calendar and the church calendar is something we never stop talking about.
So that’s what I’m writing on here: Advent. But to talk about Advent, we need to talk about sound, and then time and then Spirit.
First, then, a bit about sound.
If you are quiet enough in your kitchen, you will hear a noise. It is a continuous sound, a long, droning noise with no particular beginning or ending. It has very little, if any, dynamic range. It may go up and down in volume, but those changes are rarely perceptible. It is the same flat noise, and it goes on and on and on, hour after hour, day after day. If it’s loud enough, it can grate on the nerves, but otherwise it’s simply there.
Making that sound, mostly unnoticed, there in the corner of your kitchen.
It is the buzzing of your refrigerator.
Now for another noise. I’m currently listening to the new Jónsi album (he of Sigur Rós fame), which I’ve had on repeat for a number of weeks now. From the first bleeps, squawks and chirps of the first song, the album is full of noises. Drums, voices, piano—the noises stop and start, come and go, they’re loud and quiet. Some notes sustain for a measure or two, others come and go within the second. The kick drum rumbles, the cymbals clang, the strings flutter. All those sounds work together to make something compelling, inspiring, beautiful, evocative, confrontative, urgent, hopeful, honest or peaceful—something that sounds stunning.
And so it is noise, it is the sound—but it is a particular, intentional arrangement of those noises and sounds that make it what we commonly refer to as music.
Two kinds of noise, two variations on sound—one we call music and the other we call refrigerator buzz.
Next, then, a bit about time, because time is a lot like sound. A song works because the noises and sounds and voices and drums are arranged with a precise awareness of time. Music divides time up into beats, giving time a shape, a flow, a pattern, a rhythm.
We’ve all experienced the low-grade despair that comes when our days blend into each other—wake up, eat breakfast, brush teeth, go to school or work or the office, change another diaper, do another load of laundry, write a check, fill a tank, cook a meal and then repeat it all over again the next day.
One day looks like the next, everything starts to feel the same, life starts to feel like the existential equivalent of refrigerator buzz.
And that, of course, takes us back to the Exodus. (Didn’t see that coming, did you?) The story of those Hebrew slaves being rescued from Pharaoh isn’t just a story about the God who rescues people from having to make bricks every day—it’s about the God who rescues people from other kinds of slavery as well. Namely, the one involving time.
Life in Egypt was comprised of making bricks for the Pharaoh every day, all day.
Bricks, bricks, bricks, eat, sleep, more bricks, bricks, bricks. Tomorrow will be just like today: bricks, bricks, bricks.
When the Israelites are rescued, however, God gives them commands, one of the most urgent being to take a Sabbath day a week, a day unlike the others. A day without bricks.
Six days you shall work, but on the seventh, don’t. Why is this so monumental? God gives them rhythm. But not the rhythm of sound, the rhythm of time. Life before was an interminable succession of sevens. Seven, seven, seven.
But now, their time is broken up, measured, arranged with a beat: six and one, six and one, six and one.
God is the God of the groove.
We need rhythm in our time—it’s what makes one moment different from another. It gives shape and color and form to all of life.
The first Christians understood this—that time, like sound, is best when broken up, divided and arranged into patterns and rhythms. And so they created the church calendar. A way to organize the year, a way to bring variance to our days, a way to find a song in the passing of time.
For example, Lent. For the seven weeks leading up to Resurrection Sunday, we practice sober awareness of our frailty, sins and smallness. It starts on Ash Wednesday when those ashes are traced on our foreheads in the shape of the cross, a tactile reminder of our origins in the dust. From there we come, and to there we will go.
You want to really live, the kind of living that drains the marrow from every day? Then start by facing your death, your weakness, your smallness. We spend seven weeks facing our death and despair and doubt, entering into it with the fullness of our being—heart, mind, emotions—we leave nothing behind.
We do this for a number of reasons, chief among them the simple truth that Sunday comes after Friday. Only when you’ve gotten through, not around “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are you ready to throw the only kind of Resurrection party worthy of the occasion—that Sunday when we run huffing and puffing from the open tomb, beating our pots and pans in that clanging raucous outburst that begins with those three resounding words: “He is risen.”
That day when all the amps are turned up to “11.”
But that’s not the end—don’t let your pastor start a preaching series on tithing or marriage that next week—because Resurrection is just the beginning. On we go to the season of Pentecost—the celebration of the Spirit, the One who moves in mysterious ways. Jesus is not with us in body, He’s with us in Spirit. He’s risen, but He’s also here, in ways that transcend language, and so reflect on this for a season, tuning your radar to the divine presence in every moment of every day.
And so we’re headed somewhere, we’re coming from somewhere else, and we’re doing it together, as a community of disciples, as a church.
Finally, then, a bit about Spirit. Because Spirit, it turns out, is a lot like sound and time.
The first thing Spirit does in creation is move. That tells us the deepest matters of the Spirit are constantly moving, shifting and morphing. The life of the spirit is a dynamic reality, taking us through a myriad of emotions, experiences and states of being.
Sometimes we’re exhausted, other times we’re overwhelmed with doubt. Sometimes we’re on top of the world and everything is going smoothly, other times we find ourselves standing in the midst of the wreckage, surrounded by smoldering flames, wondering how it all went so wrong.
What the church calendar does is create space for Jesus to meet us in the full range of human experience, for God to speak to us across the spectrum, in the good and the bad, in the joy and in the tears.
This is the crime of only singing happy victory songs in church (we often ask sad people to sing happy songs)—half of the Psalms are laments.
The math should move us on that. The Bible is not a collection of war chants from victors—it’s an incredibly varied collection of writings reflecting an intensely diverse amount of postures, moods and perspectives.
A lot like how life is, actually. Sometimes you’re furious with God, other times you’re madly in love.
The issue then, as it is now, isn’t just getting us out of Egypt—it’s getting the Egypt out of us.
Rescuing us from sameness, dullness, flatlined routine, reminding us that however we’re feeling, whatever we’re experiencing, wherever we are in our heart—the Spirit waits to meet us there.
And that takes us to Advent. Advent, then, is a season. Lots of people know about holidays—one day a year set apart. The church calendar is about seasons, whole periods of time we enter into with a specific cry, a particular intention, for a reason.
Advent is about anticipating the birth of Christ. It’s about longing, desire, that which is yet to come. That which isn’t here yet. And so we wait, expectantly. Together. With an ache. Because all is not right. Something is missing.
Why does Advent mean so much to me?
Because cynicism is the new religion of our world. Whatever it is, this religion teaches that it isn’t as good as it seems. It will let you down. It will betray you.
That institution? That church? That politician? That authority figure? They’ll all let you down.
Whatever you do, don’t get your hopes up. Whatever you think it is, whatever it appears to be, it will burn you, just give it time.
Advent confronts this corrosion of the heart with the insistence that God has not abandoned the world, hope is real and something is coming.
Advent charges into the temple of cynicism with a whip of hope, overturning the tables of despair, driving out the priests of that jaded cult, announcing there’s a new day and it’s not like the one that came before it.
“The not yet will be worth it,” Advent whispers in the dark.
Old man Simeon stands in the temple, holding the Christ child, rejoicing that now he can die because what he’d been waiting for actually arrived.
And so each December (though Advent starts the last Sunday of November this year), we enter into a season of waiting, expecting, longing. Spirit meets us in the ache.
We ask God to enter into the deepest places of cynicism, bitterness and hardness where we have stopped believing that tomorrow can be better than today.
We open up. We soften up. We turn our hearts in the direction of that day. That day when the baby cries His first cry and we, surrounded by shepherds and angels and everybody in between, celebrate that sound in time that brings our Spirits what we’ve been longing for.
Here’s the post.