What do you think about people who tell young children that all non-Christians will go to hell? And what do you think about telling young kids that they themselves are bound for hell unless they accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour?

The Child Evangelism Fellowship of Australia (CEFA) does just that:

Can you imagine what it will be like when Jesus is king? He is going to make a new earth. There will be no death, no tears and no pain. What a wonderful place it will be!

All of those who have trusted the Lord Jesus as Saviour will be with Him forever! Those who haven’t will be separated from God in a terrible place of punishment. (CEFA Tough questions from kids: ‘What will Jesus do in the future?’, New Life, 8 Sept. 2005)

To me, this looks like a very cruel thing to say to 7 and 8 year-olds, many of whom will have ‘unsaved’, but much-loved relatives and friends. It’s presented as a simple statement of fact, whereas surveys indicate that even most evangelicals don’t think it’s true. According to the weekly Christian newspaper New Life (1 Sept. 2005), most evangelicals (including fundamentalists and Pentecostals) have been taught the words of Jesus in John 14:6 where he says, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, and no man cometh to the Father but by Me.’ In other words, unless you’re a Christian believer, you’re doomed to spend eternity in hell:

But a US ‘Newsweek/Beliefnet’ poll showed [that] a shocking number of people who call themselves evangelical and born-again have come to reject those words. The question in the poll read: ‘Can a good person who isn’t of your religious faith go to heaven and attain salvation, or not?’

68% of evangelical Christians believe ‘good’ people of other faiths can also go to heaven …[H]ow could so many Americans toss aside such a central element of theology?

But when the Sunday School teacher presents kids with this choice between Jesus and hell, how many are going to be able to quote such survey figures back at him or her? How many will be equipped to defend themselves at all adequately?

Well, you see, teacher, it’s like this. The gospel of John, on which you’re relying here, is the latest of all the gospels, very different from all the others, and is really more of a theological statement than an actual history. It’s very unlikely that Jesus, even if he existed, actually used the words attributed to him by John - I mean, when you look at them, they take a suspiciously literary form, don’t they?

Anyway, most evangelicals don’t seem to agree that these words have the effect of excluding non-Christians from heaven. And should we really be worshipping a god who’d throw people, including innocent little kids like me, into hell just because we’d never heard of him? And when you say ‘hell’ or ‘a terrible place of punishment’, do you line up with evangelicals who think this is a permanent state of affairs, or with those who reckon it’s more like instant immolation?

Even if some prodigy were to come up with an answer like this, he or she would be assailed immediately for displaying a lack of ’submission’. (When you were a kid, were you ever annoyed by those lines in Once in Royal David’s City:

Christian children all must be,
Mild, obedient, good as he,

only to be told later that it was impossible to be as good and obedient as Jesus? Even after he hung out at the temple without telling his parents and then talked back to them, like a sort of first-century Bart Simpson?)

Anyway, when evangelical kids aren’t having the fear of hell drummed into them, they have to put up with sermons from the likes of Billy Miller (’An Obedient Son’, Good Report, Sept.-Oct. 2005, 8-9 - Good Report is a magazine with close ties to the Christian Democratic Party in NSW). According to Miller, children should base their relationship with their parents on the biblical story of Abraham and his son Isaac, described in Gen. 22. You should note in passing that all archaeological efforts to discover a ‘real’ Abraham have proven completely fruitless. In other words, Miller is almost certainly basing his strictures on a myth.

He begins by recounting the basic story:

… God told Abraham to go and sacrifice his only son Isaac on an altar. Abraham loved God so much that he took Isaac up the mountain and tied him up and reached back with a knife ready to kill him. But God stopped Abraham just at the last minute and told him not to kill the boy.

Now, Miller argues that a central feature of this story involves Isaac’s response to his father. Miller might have focused instead on God’s heartless behaviour towards both Abraham and Isaac, or on Abraham’s duplicity toward his son as he leads him to his supposed death, but for some reason Miller doesn’t mention these things at all. What really matters is that:

Isaac was submissive and obedient … [Abraham finally] told Isaac that he [Isaac] would be the sacrifice. Isaac readily obeyed and allowed his father to bind him with rope and lay him on the altar.

I must explain at this point that this is not what the Bible says at all. It says nothing whatsoever about Abraham explaining the situation and Isaac ‘readily obeying’. Like many other Christian expositors before him, Miller simply fools about with the biblical story so that it will appear to lead logically to his predetermined conclusion. He specifically says that he ‘imagines’ this happened or that happened, such as any good yarn-spinner might. Back to Miller’s mind-reading of Isaac:

… Isaac was obedient. He knew that God didn’t make mistakes and that everything would work out to the glory of God. Isaac was a willing and an obedient servant to do what Abraham and God requested of him.

In fact, the Bible simply says that Abraham bound Isaac, laid him on the altar, picked up a knife and was on the point of killing his son when God ‘mercifully’ intervened. There is no scriptural basis at all for Miller’s exploration of Isaac’s thoughts and feelings. Indeed, by emphasising the ‘binding’ part of the story, one might draw the conclusion that Isaac was supposed to have resisted his father.

But this reading would not suit Miller at all. Here is his remarkable conclusion:

How many of us would have been like Isaac in this instance? If your father told you that God wanted him to sacrifice you, would you be OK with it and be obedient? … Are you as willing and obedient as you should be? …

Abraham was willing to give his only son to die, though he loved him very much, because he loved God even more. If Isaac had refused to go along with his dad’s request, he would have messed up this great picture.

So there you are, boys and girls. If Dad suddenly asks if you’d mind being sacrificed to God, don’t run screaming from the house and set the police on him. After all, you wouldn’t want to mess up a great picture.

Filed in: Evangelicals