H - E - double hockey sticks

via Slacktivist and (a place of recognition I recently arrived at.)

Carlton Pearson's church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the reverend. He didn't have an affair. He didn't embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse: He stopped believing in Hell.

That didn't go over too well in the Pentecostal/evangelical circles in which Pearson used to be a rock star. It got him officially branded as a heretic by a Pentecostal bishops group. His congregation dwindled to a fifth of its previous size and its makeup changed to include all sorts of dubious types, like Episcopalians, homosexuals and Unitarians.

Wikipedia has a brief but useful entry on Carlton Pearson, the site for his New Dimensions church has a bit more information, and Selwyn Crawford of the Dallas Morning News fleshes out the story in his article, "The fall and rise of Carlton Pearson."

What I find most interesting in this whole saga is that Pearson was never condemned for his earlier heresies, which strike me as more extravagant. He began his ministry, after all, as a protege of Oral Roberts and for years taught a variant of Roberts' "prosperity" doctrines. Going around and telling people that serving Mammon is the same as serving God apparently doesn't get you in hot water with the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops. Denying the existence of Hell does.

That's curious, since the Bible spends much, much, much more time on the dangers of chasing money than it ever does on the subject of eternal torment. The Bible's priorities, however, have been inverted by evangelicals, for whom Hell has become a central, essential doctrine.

I'm not sure how that happened. St. Paul had precisely nothing to say on the subject of Hell. He had a lot to say about death, resurrection and the kingdom, but not one word about Hell. The Nicene Creed, similarly, mentions heaven three time, but never mentions Hell at all. The Apostle's Creed mentions it. Once. It says Jesus went there. (Yes, that Jesus).

Yet ask any evangelical Christian about their faith and Hell is one of the first things they'll mention. And they know all about the subject. They can describe Hell, earnestly providing details from Dante or Fantasia while dimly believing these come from the Bible (you know, the Epistle to the Ghibelines or something).

So let's take a quick look at what the Bible actually does have to say on the subject of Hell. Specifically, let's look at three passages that Carlton Pearson has been condemned for not "interpreting literally."

1. Luke 16:19-31 describes a soul in agony in "Hades." He is described as being "in fire" and "in this place of torment."

2. Matthew 25:31-46 says that the unrighteous "will go away to eternal punishment" sent "into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels."

3. Revelation 20:11-15 describes the judgment of the living and the dead. "The lake of fire is the second death," it says. "If anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire."

That's three separate mentions of eternal, fiery torment. Sure sounds a lot like the Hell all those evangelical preachers love to talk about.

And yet this doesn't fully convey how deeply, deeply weird it is for such preachers to turn to these three passages and to come away from them with nothing other than a belief in hellfire and torment.

That's not what these stories are about. The preachers seemed to have latched on to the descriptions of hellfire and torment in these stories because those tangential details seemed less troublesome and dangerous than the central themes of the stories. Those central themes may be more threatening than anything Carlton Pearson has ever had to say.

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