Well said, friend. I've only been a member here for a few months and it outright breaks my heart, how many people (usually young ones) I see here who are struggling with utter terror that they aren't saved or can't be saved because they have doubts or fell away from faith or are simply battling depression and anxiety and dark thoughts and this fear of everlasting hellfire only adds the ultimate horror. I suffered from chronic depression myself for years before I re-found Christianity — and thank God I WASN'T brought up to believe in eternal torment for unbelievers, or I would have been a LOT more depressed and despairing and terrified than I was.
It may not be intentional, but it IS fear-mongering — that is the only reason the doctrine of eternal punishment gets perpetuated. It's the only reason anyone believes in it, no matter how sincere they are as Christians. It's all fear. (After all, if you truly believe in a God who mandates eternal torment for anyone who doesn't believe all the correct teachings, then you logically cannot bring yourself to think outside that box — that mental cage — because if you do, if you doubt or question it, YOU are putting yourself at risk of that same eternal punishment. So you just can't go there, can you? )
And there is surely nothing else that puts so many thinking, caring people right
OFF Christianity as the teaching that everyone who isn't a Christian, or isn't
the right sort of Christian, or otherwise isn't in the exclusive club of the saved, will go to hell forever. Thank God not all Christians believe that, or I for one would be an agnostic — one who hoped there was a God, but who wanted to be anything BUT Christian — to this day.
I'm not going to go into all the Biblical and theological reasons for believing in universal salvation / universal reconciliation — and that's CHRISTIAN universalism I mean, not fluffy "oh, it doesn't matter what you believe because we're all going straight to heaven" stuff. There have been two excellent discussions on that topic recently (under Controversial Christian Theology
) where quite a number of brothers and sisters put those reasons forward in great detail.
But DeerGlow and all you other people who are suffering with this terror of eternal torment, please understand you don't have to. You don't have to. God is so much bigger and better than that — so much more powerful than those fears and inner torments, so much more powerful than even the greatest evil, let alone the hardest human heart or the most stubborn human will. He
will break through to you and He
will show you how great His love is, in a way you can no longer resist. As He will for EVERYONE, eventually... whether they want to know or not.
Resistance is futile.
