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Is Hell a Lie?
A chat with Holy Hell author, Rev. Derek Kubilus
When I was a believer, my adoration for God was matched with a nagging concern: hell just didn’t make sense to me. Why would a loving God torture any part of human creation? Forever? Why give people free will then punish choices made in a reality created by that same omnipotent and omniscient God? It seemed like a cruel setup. If only ‘good Christians’ avoided hell, that meant the majority of humanity wound up being tortured for an eternity. I certainly didn’t have the ego to believe I was one of the elect.
I probably went deep on getting saved, over and over in my teen years, because I couldn’t be sure it stuck and I definitely didn’t want the alternative. As an adult, I’ve talked to far too many people for whom threat of hellfire was used as a weapon to force compliance.
I know I’m not alone in this. That’s one of the reasons I had such interest in Holy Hell by Rev. Derek Kubilus, vicar of First United Methodist Church in Ashland, Ohio. He makes a compelling case that our idea of hell is a construct that mistranslates and combines a number of ideas, and has become a catchall term for a notion that does not track with the all-loving God Christians claim. As he writes, “whenever you see the word hell printed in a Bible or you hear it preached from a pulpit or brought up in the midst of…
