Hi, quick background: agnostic, want to understand Christianity a bit better. My current understanding is limited to that which I got from christian friends and media, forgive any and all misconceptions that I have.
I have two question right now:
1) God gave us free will, but then followed up by basically saying "if you don't follow me, you go to hell", which is kind of the equivalent of saying "your choice, but only if you make the right choice". How is this fair?
Not all Christians believe in one, the other, or either of these propositions. For example as a Lutheran I don't believe that human beings have the free will to choose God, in Lutheran theology the human will is not truly free, but is limited, and bound, and yoked to human sin. Further, I don't believe in "get it right or go to hell", that isn't how I understand Christianity, nor is it an accurate assessment of the problem of hell. But to discuss those matters properly would likely require their own topic.
But, in short: It's not about "follow me or go to hell"; I neither believe that Christianity is about getting our religious or theological t's crossed properly, or that hell is what happens to those who happened to lose the ideological or religious lottery by not picking the right numbers in life.
2a) I do not understand the differnece between repentance and just acknowledging a fault. Say a christian experiences an outburst of emotion, experiences guilt, prays, apologizes to the person the outburst was directed at, and make mental note to keep emotions in check (is this a good example of repentance?). Now an atheist does the same, without the praying. Both of these people continue to do the same thing, both grow up and become better and better people, but in the end, (I assume), the atheist goes to hell, and the christian goes to heaven. Why?
In the Greek of the New Testament the word rendered as "repentance" is metanoia, in the most mundane sense it can just mean a "change of mind", but it probably more accurately reflects the idea of changing one's way of thinking and going about things another way. For example in the beginning of the Gospel of Mark Jesus is presented as preaching, "The kingdom of God is near, repent and believe the good news!" It may be easy to simply imagine that Jesus is saying, "feel sorry about your sin" or "try not to sin again" but that's not really what it means. We have another instance of this kind of language in the case of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus who, though a Jew, served in the Roman military; when coming upon a Zealot (a Jewish freedom fighter) Josephus said to him, "repent, and follow me". Josephus did not mean "feel sorry for you sin and treat me like a guru" but instead, "stop, change the way you think about the world, and do things my way". So when Jesus says, "repent, and believe the good news" He is inviting people into having a new way of thinking, one that is reflected in the idea of God's kingdom, God's reign.
In Christian theology, broadly speaking, repentance does carry with it the notion of remorse over one's sin; but repentance is ultimately a process, a way of life, in Christianity; and while some would argue that implicit is moral self-improvement (but, again, as a Lutheran, I would take issue with that notion), what it's really about is the deep recognition of our failure to be the just people that God says we ought to be, where His law says we should love our neighbor, we don't love our neighbor; and that in ourselves there is despair and hopelessness--repentance therefore crucifies our ego and our pride and compels us to cling, in faith, to Jesus Christ, His cross, and the mercy of God. In the Penitential Rite, part of the traditional liturgical service in Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran (etc) churches, we pray a corporate prayer such as the following:
"
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved You with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and earnestly repent. For the sake of Your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in Your will, and walk in Your ways, to the glory of Your Name. Amen." - Taken from the Book of Common Prayer
Further: repentance neither gets a Christian or an atheist into "heaven". Salvation isn't a moralistic enterprise.
As I noted earlier, it's not about being on the right team, or having one's religious t's crossed and i's dotted, it's also not about having the right feelings, or performing the right actions, it's not about trying to be as good a person as we possibly can.
The core Christian message is this: God is, in Christ, redeeming, reconciling, rescuing, and restoring the world. That's God's work, that is the reason why the Messiah came. Jesus is the means by which God is taking a world of sin, death, suffering, and violence and bringing it into Himself, and ultimately bringing it into complete wholeness. Our individual salvation is not about making the right choices or performing the right actions, or having the right religion; it's about what God has done, and is doing, and will do--and our participation in it. The Christian is one who, having been born of God through Baptism has been united to Christ and therefore has hope in Christ, not in themselves, not in their efforts, not in their having chosen the right team; but confesses trust and hope in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, that He is the Christ, through and in and by whom God has, is, and will bring about the complete rescue of all creation.
This is why the Christian hope is not to go to a place called heaven after we die (though, many have been confused on this point), but instead look forward to the resurrection of the dead, of the body, and the everlasting life right here on this good, green world; after the conclusion and consummation of history, in the age which is to come when God has made all things new.
It's not about "going to heaven" and/or "not going to hell"; it's about the divine rescue operation of God, in Jesus, for the whole of creation. It's not "Christians go to heaven" and "everyone else goes to hell"; it's about God, in Jesus, rescuing and redeeming the whole of creation. For one, I do not believe "hell" is a "place" of eternal torture, nor do I believe that "hell" is really a "place" at all; and further I do not believe that there will be anyone "in hell" who does not truly, sincerely, and consciously choose to be "there". No one goes to hell by accident, nobody goes to hell because they chose the wrong religious team in this life. If I was to give a short description of hell, according to my current theological positions, it would be: Hell is what happens when a person deliberately, consciously, and explicitly refuses to be part of what God is doing for the whole of creation, it is what happens when a person chooses to forever identify with this present world that is falling away and refuses to ever have their identity in that new, future world. It may be, that from the vantage point of the person in Hell that it isn't quite so bad, it may not seem very much different than the kind of life they had here; but it remains a bleak, grey, vanishing of oneself into oneself.
In his book, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes hell as an immensely expansive, but sparsely populated, dull grey city where the inhabitants live out their forever receiving everything they could ever want. They must merely think it and it is theirs, food, pleasures, anything. They also all choose to live as remote and far from one another as possible, there can be no room for community here, no room for others, no place to welcome someone who isn't
me. Hell, in Lewis' envisioning, is the infinitesimally small and paradoxically wide expanse of where there remains nothing but myself for myself. It's all about me, getting what I want, having everything as I want it, without anyone else getting in my way. That's Hell.
2b) Also, I fail to understand why several thousand years after Adam and Eve ate the apple, I still retain inherent sin from that, and have to repent. That's like saying that the grandson of Hitler has to apologize every day just because he's hitler's grandson. It just seems more petty than all-loving. Please explain?
Short answer: According to the classic understanding of Original Sin you're not guilty for Adam and Eve's sin, your guilty of your own sins. Original Sin refers to the original sin, and because of that sin, we are all born with the inherent propensity toward sin, what Western theologians call Concupiscence, the inward, selfish desire. As a Lutheran I also like Luther's phrasing, "Homo incurvatus in se", Latin for "man, curved inward upon himself". You don't have to answer for Adam and Eve's sin(s), just your own. Original Sin isn't about you being condemned for someone else's faults, it's an attempt at understanding, in the context of the Genesis story, the deep and universal problem of human sin.
I'm sorry if I sounded like I was belittling Christianity in any way. I have great respect for the central message of love, but I just fail to see why the spiritual aspect is necessary for me to get into heaven (assuming I believe in heaven, which I currently am uncertain about). Why do I go to hell, even if I were to live following all the moral rules of the Bible just because I don't acknowledge god?
Hopefully I've offered some ideas that you may not have encountered before. What is helpful to understand is that Christianity is a fairly large tent, and also because certain ideas tend to be more popular, or popularly voiced, in contemporary society and culture one may often not encounter what else is out there. The ideas I've articulated, if they seem foreign, really aren't that foreign, but are firmly within the mainstream of Christian thought; they just might not be what is often popularly voiced today depending on where you live.
-CryptoLutheran
