Disclaimer:  This article is not intended to represent a summary of my theological stance on hell or the perimeters of salvation, or the “emergent church”, or Rob Bell’s melodramatic video about his upcoming book.  I did however find it compelling and thought it worth sharing.

REGARDLESS of what Christians think about Hell, and more specifically, the question of who’s in and who’s out, Christians should not only hope and pray that no one meets this fate, but believe that God has the final say in these matters — even if this means confounding our best theological assumptions.

Christians throughout history have disagreed about who’s a real follower of God and who’s not — who’s in and who’s out — and who will enter paradise at the culmination of history. These debates have not always been civil; they’ve even led to violence between Christians, and also between Christianity and other religions.

When these conflicts break out, they are almost always over questions of “right doctrine” rather than because a particular group did too good of a job of acting like Jesus. Don’t get me wrong. I believe good theology – what we believe about God, people and the world – matters; for this reason, I take the gospel accounts about Jesus seriously.

Anyone reading the gospels will see that Jesus not only responds to the “lines” drawn by the religious leaders of his day; he draws lines of his own. But Jesus’ lines are almost always different than the lines drawn by the religious leaders, and even more startlingly, his lines are different than the lines Christians draw today.

Compare and contrast the stories of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25: 31-46), Jesus’ words to the Rich Young Ruler (Luke 18:18-23), and finally, his famous late night conversation with Nicodemus the Pharisee (John 3:1-21). Each of these passages are about dividing lines, but that’s where their commonalities end; in each passage Jesus seems to be redrawing the boundaries.

What’s most remarkable about these four passages is that Jesus changes his message depending on what each group of listeners needs to hear to bring them to a place of repentance and transformation. To use the crass language of today’s marketing world, Jesus offers a “customized value proposition” — a message that’s tailored differently for each unique market segment.

My point here isn’t to say that rich people will be in hell, and that poor people will be in heaven. My point is that it doesn’t make any more sense to take a passage like John 3:16 (you must be born again) and universalize it as the basis for drawing lines separating who’s in and who’s out than it does to do this with a passage like Matthew 25.

But isn’t this what many Christians, including John Piper, do today? We pick our favorite biblical passage, where Jesus’ vision for “who’s in” includes people like us, and excludes people who aren’t, meanwhile, we ignore other passages that redraw the boundaries that would force us to change in order to be included in Jesus’ “in-group.”

We should at least consider the idea that Jesus’ purpose for drawing lines was not for the sake of making his prospective followers feel more comfortable about their place in his kingdom, but to challenge them, shake them out of their complacency, and call them to repentance for the things in their lives keeping them from participating in God’s best hopes and dreams for this world.

Chris LaTondresse