Don’t be Afraid?

Matthew 10:24-33

24 “A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. 25 It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household!

26 “So do not be afraid of them. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. 28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

32 “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. 33 But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.

L. A. Times 6/15/02

Hold the Fire and Brimstone

By MIKE ANTON and WILLIAM LOBDELL , Times Staff Writers

Bill Faris believes in hell, that frightful nether world where the thermostat is always set on high, where sinners toil for eternity in unspeakable torment.

But you'd never know it listening to him preach at his south Orange County evangelical church. He never mentions the topic; his flock shows little interest in it.

"It isn't sexy enough anymore," said Faris, pastor of Crown Valley Vineyard Christian Fellowship.

In churches across America, hell is being frozen out as clergy find themselves increasingly hesitant to sermonize on Christianity's outpost for lost souls.

Hell's fall from fashion indicates how key portions of Christian theology have been influenced by a secular society that stresses individualism over authority and the human psyche over moral absolutes. The rise of psychology, the philosophy of existentialism and the consumer culture have all dumped buckets of water on hell.
 
"It's just too negative," said Bruce Shelley, a senior professor of church history at the Denver Theological Seminary. "Churches are under enormous pressure to be consumer-oriented. Churches today feel the need to be appealing rather than demanding."

 "Once pop evangelism went into market analysis, hell was just dropped," said Martin Marty, professor emeritus of religion and culture at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Hell is far from dead. A May 2001 Gallup poll of adults nationwide found that 71% believe in hell.

They just don't want to hear about it.

"When you have a group of people who are born again, you're not going to hell," said Bob Anderson, 51, a lawyer who attends an evangelical church in Fullerton. "So why talk about it?"

Traditional denominations also have pushed hell to the margins. The Presbyterian Church (USA)'s first catechism, drawn up a few years ago by a committee, mentions hell only once.

George Hunsinger, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the catechism's principal author, would have liked the document to address hell more directly and "talk about divine judgment in a responsible way." But the committee rejected the idea without much debate.


New Catechism Softens Language

Individual priests kept hell's fires burning for years, aided by a Catholic catechism of beliefs published in 1891 whose tone one priest calls "positively medieval." A new catechism, published in 1994, uses gentler language and emphasizes that hell's chief punishment is the separation from God.

"When you take [hell] away as a threat, everything changes," said the University of Chicago's Marty. "Who goes to confession anymore? Time was, a [Catholic] church had 16 booths and people snaked around the block. Today, a church might have one left."

One measure of hell's continued decline can be found in the changed attitude of the Rev. Billy Graham, who came to prominence in the 1940s as a fire-and-brimstone Gospel preacher. His depiction of hell was unequivocal, an unpleasant address for unrepentant sinners.

Even Graham has reconsidered hell—not whether it exists, but what it is.

" ... I believe that hell is essentially separation from God. That we are separated from God, so we can have hell in this life and hell in the life to come ... ," Graham told an interviewer in 1991. "But to describe hell in vivid terms like I might have done 30 or 40 years ago, I'm not at liberty to do that because ... whether there is actually fire in hell or not, I do not know."
 
Hell became more hellish when the early Christians infused it with a serious fear factor.

Jesus is quoted in the Bible describing hell as the "outer darkness" consumed by an "everlasting fire." The book of Revelation warned that sinners would be "thrown into the lake of fire." Matthew's Gospel offered a soundtrack: the "weeping and gnashing of teeth."
 
"How can something as wonderful as redemption ... be based on fear?" asked Father Wilfredo Benitez of St. Anselm of Canterbury Episcopal Church in Garden Grove.

 Perhaps more than any other pastor, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller is credited with inspiring the movement to supplant hell with feel-good messages.

The "Hour of Power" televangelist is founder of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, a forerunner of the thousands of nondenominational congregations that have popped up in recent decades to serve believers uncomfortable with the formality of old-line faiths.

Schuller is another believer in the concept of hell as an eternal separation from God. Yet he stopped preaching on the subject 40 years ago, moving on to a theology that stressed individual success in such books as "If It's Going to Be, It's Up to Me!"

 Question 1.  If Hell is not important then what is the meaning of Easter?

 Question 2.  If We are not to fear Hell is Jesus a Liar when he says, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

 Question 3.  If Hell is just a state of mind, Why do we do outreach and evangelism?

 Question 4.  Today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the church, it was needed because the old one was too small.  If Pastor Oetting had refused to preach hell and damnation, would the church ever have grown to the place it is today?