fretting over hell

The Dutch Christian opinion magazine CV Koers has published a themed issue on ‘hell’. They conducted an extensive survey on the topic among both pastors and ‘ordinary’ church members in orthodox church communities. What turns out is that the embarrassment surrounding this subject is enormous. People experience hell as “the sore spot of your faith.”

Striking, once again, is the gap between what the pastor claims to confess and what he actually believes. Half of the orthodox pastors admit (anonymously!) that they no longer believe in hell as a place of eternal torment. It is said that hell ought to be an important theme in preaching, but in practice it is kept silent (except, of course, in the stricter churches). That’s called hypocrisy.

CV Koers:

“Outwardly everything seems to have remained the same: the doctrine stands unchallenged. But that ‘unchallenged’ may well be the snake in the grass: hell—we just don’t talk about it much.”

The article once again shows how much fretting there is around this topic. People feel deeply uneasy, but that is rarely discussed. And those who are expected to ‘know’ (pastors and such) are ‘not at home’ when asked how things really stand.
Utter misery.

Anyway, read the CV Koers article in question for yourself. (Article is no longer available.)

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