#reknew

The real challenge we face, I submit, is that we must interpret violent divine portraits in such a way that we can discern the self-sacrificial God revealed on Calvary within portraits of God declaring he will use Babylon his servant to smash together parents and children (Jer. 13:14), or of God planning to trample his own “Virgin Daughter Judah” like one crushes grapes in a winepress (Lam. 1:15), or of God bringing about a judgment in which babies would be dashed to the ground and pregnant women would have their wombs ripped open (Hos. 13:16).

Since people have misquoted this verse to me hundreds of times, here is a great answer from Greg Boyd.

The natural skeptic in me loves loves loves this and makes me glad that I'm not the only one.

An excerpt from A Reknew Manifesto by Greg Boyd.  The whole article can be found here.  (Emphasis all original).

The earliest Christians understood “hell” in several different ways. Some viewed it as annihilation, others as eternal conscious suffering, and others redemptive process that will result in everyone being saved (“universalism”). After Augustine however, the view of hell as eternal conscious suffering became dominant. Annihilationism quickly became a marginal view and universalism was eventually officially condemned.

In light of the love that God has revealed for all humans in Christ, we are convinced that if there is any way that God could save all, he most certainly would save all. Moreover, we don’t see how anyone who genuinely loves all people—as Christ commands and empowers us to do—could fail to hope that God’s love will eventually rescue and transform everyone. At the same time, our belief in free will rules out the Universalist’s belief that there will come a time when everyone must be saved. Moreover, we don’t see in Scripture sufficient warrant for being confident that all will be saved.

What is more certain to us is that the fire of God’s love will salvage and purify everything in a person that is consistent with God’s loving character and will burn up (metaphorically speaking) everything that is not. If it unfortunately turns out that people can sink to the point where there is nothing salvageable, it’s our conviction God will justly, yet mercifully, withdraw his sustaining hand, allowing them to return to nothingness – “as though they had never been” (Obadiah 16). When Scripture speaks of hell as “eternal,” we believe this most likely refers to the effect of this punishment, not the duration of anyone’s experience of it.

Or in other words, I don't believe in the god you don't believe in neither...