Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Randy Alcorn on Hell

taken from his blog


He quotes Francis Chan and others..


Chan is honest, admitting that when it comes to Matthew 25:46 “everything in me wants to interpret it differently, to make it say something that fits my own view of justice and morality.” Then he adds, “But from what I can tell, this is what the text is saying.”
One of the tests of whether we truly believe in the authority of God’s Word is whether or not we bow to it and accept it by faith even when it is painful or disturbing to do so. (What should it tell us if the Bible seems to always agree with us?) Chan models this approach to biblical interpretation. Will we pridefully believe what we want to, or humbly believe whatever God has told us?


C. S. Lewis said of Hell, “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason.” Dorothy Sayers, another broad-minded Christian, claimed, “We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.”
Too many Christians choose to believe whatever makes them feel good, while they ignore, deny, or reinterpret Scripture when it doesn’t fit culture’s current definition of love and tolerance. Hence, culture and the reader of Scripture become the authority, rather than Scripture itself. Faith becomes merely a collection of fleeting opinions, always subject to revision. That is something very different from historic, biblically grounded Christian faith.

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