SOUNDLIVING

Hell: Eternal? Temporary?  Figurative? Dr. Jerry Nelson Does the Bible teach that unbelievers will spend eternity in hell in conscious punishment?  First, let’s get our terminology straight; what do we mean by “hell?” If we mean where unbelievers go after they die, we are correct but not as correct as we might think. Immediately after death, unbelievers (as well as believers) are separated from their bodies (which are dead) and await the resurrection of the body when Christ comes again.  Until the resurrection, the spirits of believers are “with the Lord” which we often refer to as “heaven.” The spirits…

I recently read Ron Chernow’s massive biography of General/President U.S. Grant. It awakened in me a renewed sadness over how long it took for a significant percentage of our citizenry to acknowledge the evil of how Native Americans and African Americans have been treated.  Thousands (yes, thousands) of our fellow-humans were murdered, while many more thousands were brutally mistreated and treated as less than human. When I read the details of incident after incident occurring in a period of over one hundred years, I found myself emotionally recoiling at the magnitude and barbarity of it. Today, nearly every American of…

I am a pragmatist and thus cremation of the dead has seemed to me to be the sensible way to avoid the cost and sometimes macabre aspects of funerals. My mother, though well-schooled in the reality of decay and the theology of resurrection, said she wanted to be buried, not cremated, because she wanted Jesus to be able to find her body when he came again. Amateur theologian that I am, I laughed at such naivete. But the longer I live and the more memorial services I attend and/or conduct, the more I question my cavalier attitude toward cremation. Recently,…

“Compassion is not a snob gone slumming. Anybody can salve his conscience by (occasionally giving a dollar to a street beggar). Did you ever take a real trip down inside the broken heart of a friend? To feel the sob of the soul – the raw, red crucible of emotional agony? To have this become almost as much yours as that of your soul-crushed neighbor? Then, to sit down with him – and silently weep? This is the beginning of compassion.” (Jess Moody Quote-Unquote, p66)