{"id":6484,"date":"2014-05-24T15:04:41","date_gmt":"2014-05-24T14:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/?p=6484"},"modified":"2014-05-24T15:10:33","modified_gmt":"2014-05-24T14:10:33","slug":"god-judges-no-one-ron-rolheiser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/?p=6484","title":{"rendered":"God Judges No One. Ron Rolheiser"},"content":{"rendered":"

God Judges No One.\u00a0<\/strong>Ron Rolheiser<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a question about God\u2019s goodness as old as religion itself: How can an all-good God send\u00a0someone to hell for all eternity? How can God be all-merciful and all-loving if there is eternal\u00a0punishment?\u00a0It\u2019s a false question. God doesn\u2019t send anyone to hell and God doesn\u2019t deal out eternal\u00a0punishment. God offers us life and the choice is ours as to whether we accept that or not.\u00a0God, Jesus tells us, doesn\u2019t judge anyone. We judge ourselves. God doesn\u2019t create hell and God\u00a0doesn\u2019t send anyone to hell. But that doesn\u2019t mean that hell doesn\u2019t exist and that it isn\u2019t a\u00a0possibility for us. Here, in essence, is how Jesus explains this:\u00a0God sends his life into the world and we can choose that life or reject it. We judge ourselves in\u00a0making that choice. If we choose life, we are ultimately choosing heaven. If we reject life, we end
\nup living outside of life and that ultimately is hell. But we make that choice, God doesn\u2019t send us\u00a0anywhere. Moreover, hell is not a positive punishment created by God to make us suffer. Hell is\u00a0the absence of something, namely, living inside of the life that\u2019s offered to us.
\nTo say all of this is not to say that hell isn\u2019t real or that it isn\u2019t a real possibility for every person.\u00a0Hell is real, but it isn\u2019t a positive punishment created by God to deal out justice or vengeance or to\u00a0prove to the hard-hearted and unrepentant that they made a mistake. Hell is the absence of life,\u00a0of love, of forgiveness, of community, and God doesn\u2019t send anyone there. We can end up there,\u00a0outside of love and community, but that\u2019s a choice we make if we, culpably, reject these as they\u00a0are offered to us during our lifetime. Hell, as John Shea once said, is never a surprise waiting for a\u00a0happy person, it\u2019s the full-flowering of a life that rejects love, forgiveness, and community.\u00a0Sartre once famously stated that hell is the other person. The reverse is true. Hell is what we\u00a0experience when we choose ourselves over community of life with others. Human life is meant to\u00a0be shared life, shared existence, participation inside of a community of life that includes the\u00a0Trinity itself.\u00a0God is love, scripture tells us, and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.
\nIn this context, love should not be understood primarily as romantic love. The text doesn\u2019t say that\u00a0\u201cthose who fall in love\u201d abide in God (though that too can be true). In essence, the text might be\u00a0reworded to say: \u201cGod is shared existence, and those who share life with others, already live\u00a0inside of God\u2019s life.\u201d\u00a0But the reverse is also true: When we don\u2019t share our lives, we end up outside of life. That, in\u00a0essence, is hell.\u00a0What is hell? The images the bible chooses for hell are arbitrary and vary greatly. The popular\u00a0mind tends to picture hell as fire, eternal fire, but that is only one image, and not necessarily the\u00a0dominant one, in scripture. Among other things, scripture speaks of hell as \u201cexperiencing God\u2019s\u00a0wrath\u201d, as \u201cbeing outside\u201d the wedding and the dance, is \u201cmourning and weeping and grinding\u00a0our teeth\u201d, as being consigned to the \u201cGehenna\u201d (a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem), as being\u00a0eaten by worms, as fire, as missing out on the banquet, as being outside the kingdom, as living\u00a0inside a bitter and warped heart, and as missing out on life. In the end, all these images point to\u00a0the same thing: Hell is the pain and bitterness, the fire, we experience when we culpably put\u00a0ourselves outside of the community of life. And it is always self-inflicted. It is never imposed by\u00a0God. God doesn\u2019t deal death and God sends nobody to hell.\u00a0When Jesus speaks of God, he never speaks of God as dealing both life and death, but only as\u00a0dealing life. Death has its origins elsewhere, as does lying, rationalisation, bitterness, hardness of\u00a0heart, and hell. To say that God does not create hell or send anyone there does not downplay the\u00a0existence of evil and sin or the danger of eternal punishment, it only pinpoints their origins and\u00a0makes clear who it is who makes the judgment and who it is who does the sentencing. God does\u00a0neither; he neither creates hell nor sends anyone to it. We do both.\u00a0As Jesus tells us in John\u2019s Gospel: \u201cGod did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,\u00a0but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not\u00a0condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not\u00a0believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, the light has come into the\u00a0world, and the people loved darkness rather than light\u2026.I judge no one.\u201d\u00a0He doesn\u2019t need to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

God Judges No One.\u00a0Ron Rolheiser There\u2019s a question about God\u2019s goodness as old as religion itself: How can an all-good God send\u00a0someone to hell for all eternity? How can God be all-merciful and all-loving if there is eternal\u00a0punishment?\u00a0It\u2019s a false … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fr-ron-rolheiser-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6485,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6484\/revisions\/6485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stbedesclaytongreen.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}