Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture invites you into transformative conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Host Joshua Johnson engages thoughtful guests in conversations about spiritual growth, justice, creativity, and healing - drawing from the teachings of Jesus to break cycles of division, violence, and pain.
If you're searching for practices that go beyond theory into real-life change - a way of living that honors the dignity of every person and seeks reconciliation even with those we disagree with - this podcast offers fresh perspectives for navigating today's complex world.
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Shifting Culture
Ep. 367 Brian Recker - How the Fear of Hell Holds Christians Back from a Spirituality of Love
In this episode, I talk with Brian Recker about his new book Hell Bent and the ways fear-based theology has shaped so many of our spiritual imaginations. Brian grew up learning about hell and God in the same breath, and he unpacks how that fusion created a system built on binary thinking, punishment, and spiritual insecurity. We explore his journey from fundamentalism to evangelical ministry to a reimagined faith centered on love, liberation, and a vision Jesus preached. We get into Gehenna, apocalyptic language, why evangelicals cling to certainty, how fear distorts our understanding of God, and what it means to live as people who bring heaven to earth rather than create hell on it. This is a conversation about reclaiming our belovedness, deconstructing fear, and rediscovering a spirituality that looks like compassion, justice, and the radical welcome of Jesus.
Brian Recker, M.Div, is a public theologian, speaker, and writer on Christian spirituality without exclusionary dogma. The son of a Baptist preacher and an alum of the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, he spent eight years as an evangelical pastor before deconstructing his faith to find a more inclusive spirituality. He now speaks about following Jesus without fear of hell on his popular Instagram account and his Substack, Beloved. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has four children and a rescue pup named Maev.
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What if nobody's coming to save us? What if, actually, this isn't about getting the hell out of here. It's about getting the hell out of this world. It's and staying here and rolling up our sleeves and doing the work of okay, maybe none of us are going anywhere. Maybe we have to actually figure out how to live with each other in a world of neighbors, in a world of people who believe different things, who look different ways, maybe we have to figure out how to love one another.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, in this episode, I sit down with Brian Recker to explore how fear has shaped so much of modern Christian spirituality and why so many of us inherited a vision of God built more on punishment than love. Brian grew up in a fundamentalist world where he learned about hell and God at the exact same time, a period that has shaped his earliest ideas of faith and distorted his understanding of grace. As he puts it, many Christians enter the relationship with God on the premise of avoiding eternal torture, not embracing unconditional belovedness. Together, we unpack how the evangelical system came to require hell as a mechanism of control, how fear based theology produces spiritual anxiety instead of spiritual safety, and how Jesus's own words point us to a very different vision. Enter into this conversation, and even if you aren't where Brian is, theologically, reckon with fear and punishment, love and compassion. If we truly believe God is love, how does that change us? So join us reclaim a God whose posture toward us is love, and learn how to build a world shaped more by compassion than fear. Here is my conversation with Brian. Wrecker, Brian, welcome to shifting culture. Thanks for joining me. Excited to have you on
Unknown:Well, excited to be here. Thanks for having me, dude, Brian. Why the hell
Joshua Johnson:do you think that we have a hell problem, especially in the evangelical church? Wow.
Unknown:Where do we begin? Why? That's an interesting question. Actually, why do we have a hell problem? I think we could approach that from a lot of different angles, but the one that just sprung into mind like, why is this a problem? I don't think we have a hell problem because of what the Bible says about hell. I do think somebody asked me recently if Christianity requires hell, and I answered, well, it depends what you mean by Christianity. I think in many ways, the white evangelical system that we've created does require hell, not because the spirituality of Jesus required hell, not because the way that the New Testament talks about and uses apocalyptic hyperbole requires a literal hell, but because we have created a system of, well, first of all, it's a binary system. There is an inside and an outside, and you're either you're either in it or you're out of it. And part of the way that we feel spiritually safe is by being a part of that, in group, and by having people that we can other, that we can say those are the people that need what we have. They need to be more like us and believe like us. It gives us our marching orders. It gives us our mission. It defines our identity as Christians in oppositional to people that are outside. And also it frames it as there's a punishment, so there's a there's a stick, I think, you know, you have carrot and stick with heaven and hell that really are for many of us the reason we become Christians in the first place? You know, even though I think a lot of evangelical churches don't talk about hell so much anymore, I think especially if you're part of a seeker sensitive mega church, it's possible that you'll never even hear it from the stage, although some, you know, there are some preachers that are really trying to bring it back that are quite popular, like a Philip Anthony Mitchell, for example, is a, he's a fire and brimstone guy who's blowing up right now. But for the most part, like a Stephen Furtick mega church style pastor, isn't talking about hell that much. But for the most part, if you pulled a room of evangelical Christians and asked them, think about when you first became a Christian, when you got, whatever you want to call it, born again, converted, you accepted Jesus into your heart. You accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. When you made that decision, was a hat was hell explained to you as a part of your mental model for making that decision. And 99 out of 100 will say yes, absolutely, that was a part of that decision. And so for many Christians, we enter into that relationship with God on the premise of understanding the consequences for not being in that relationship with God, namely being eternally tortured in hell. And so that is so foundational to even what it means to be a Christian that it is hard for then later down the road to say, oh, maybe that's a metaphor. Okay, well, if it's a metaphor. What are we doing here? Because I thought that's why I did this in the first place. So it's not that I again, to bring it back to your question of why I think we've built a system that really demands punitiveness and exclusionary binary thinking. Well,
Joshua Johnson:okay, so then what does that look like? Like theology? If it is a fear based exclusionary theology, how does that distort the way that we encounter God and the way that we view God?
Unknown:I say in my book, you know, I talk about, for your listeners, my book hell bent, how the fear of hell holds Christians back from a spirituality of love, came out a little over a week ago. I don't know when this will air, so maybe a few more weeks. But in the book, I talk about this idea that evangelicals use all the time, that you know, it's not a religion, it's a relationship. I think that can be a helpful phrase, but the reality is, many of us that relationship began with hell. I learned about hell the same time I learned about God. And in many ways, what I learned about God in that initial conversation was God is holy. You deserve punishment. Who you are and who God is is that you're the one that really destroy deserves to be destroyed by God and destroyed in hell. And that's really what that relationship is. Except for, you know, you enter into this through Jesus, and now you can have this different kind of relationship to God, but it is kind of predicated on the fact that you know, outside of Jesus actually your relationship with God, you would be deserving of punishment. So God is essentially someone that we are inherently separated from, not inherently connected to, inherently what we have by, by nature of our birth, is God's displeasure, not God's pleasure, not God's delight, but God's punishment. And I do think it fundamentally, yeah, is, are you innately worthy of love from God, or are you innately worthy of punishment from God? I think that that is a really important thing in any relationship. We talk about grace a lot in Christianity, that we don't have to earn it, but I think we miss. I personally think that many Christians have a short sighted and kind of an incomplete picture of grace, because if your default is that you believe that what everyone fundamentally deserves is hell and punishment, then you end up defining grace as anything you get from God that's a step better than hell. Like every breath is grace. Everything that happens to you that's not eternal torture is grace. And because grace is getting what you don't deserve and what you deserve is hell, I personally think a better way to think about grace is not that what you deserve is hell. So anything that you don't, you know, get that's better than that is grace. But actually that as image bearers of God, I believe that all people deserve love. I believe that we're worthy of love and that that's what grace is. Grace is the fact that you don't have to earn love. You don't have to do anything to be loved just by virtue of being human. I mean, I was taught that just by virtue of being born I deserved hell, but I believe that just by virtue of being born. You deserve love, care, compassion, kindness, and I actually do think that changes how you view God, how you view the world, how you view others, how you view yourself.
Joshua Johnson:Let's just go into your story growing up under your your family, your parents, you know fundamentalist pastor, so growing up in a fundamentalist church where hell was the first thing that you learned about right beside God, what was going on in your life like? What did it look like internally for you to have a faith that was more fear based than love based? Well,
Unknown:I definitely, as a kid, one of my primary memories when I think about what did spirituality look like for me, it looked like very frequent, repeated salvation prayers. It looked like a struggle with the assurance of my salvation. That was really the chief spiritual struggle as a young person, was, am I really saved or not? And I think that's a really it's such a like inward looking and unhelpful thing to spin your wheels about, because really, at the end of the day, that question of, Am I saved or not, was rooted in, am I going to be punished forever when I die, or am I going to get to experience God's love and redemption and reconciliation? And so that that is really a fearful thing. So the question is like, am I loved or not? Really does what is God's posture towards me. What does God think about me? Does God actually want to hate and destroy me, or does God actually want to love and cherish me? And that shouldn't be something that kids in church are struggling with and wrestling over. That should be the place where they are assured of God's unconditional love. And so it just kind of shows where, how far we've gone wrong in so many ways. But, yeah, I wrestled with that, and then when I hit puberty, it got a lot worse. I would say, like, what do I even have when I was seven or eight years old to, like, be worried about, like, oh, did I lose my salvation? Like, what did you do? You know, but, and obviously I would say that puberty, it's not like you've done anything either, of course, but the church certainly. Does give us a lot to feel guilty about when it comes to natural, normal human sexual development. And by that time, you know, since I got saved when I was five or six, by the time I started to go through puberty, I had already been a Christian for five or six or seven years, and so it's like, oh, my sanctification is supposed to be up into the right I'm supposed to be getting more and more holy. But it seems like things have taken a turn. You know, I'm now, all of a sudden, experiencing lust and all these things that so I had a good reason to doubt my salvation, and so my sexuality was the enemy of my spirituality, and so I grew to loathe it in many ways, and see my very humanness as something that could get me damned, destroyed by God. So again, none of this breeds spiritual safety. And I think what it ultimately led me to do was kind of compartmentalize and just learn how to live with cognitive dissonance. Learn how to live with the fact that, like, Okay, I'm going to choose to believe that, you know, God is love and I'm saved. But then, like, when that happens, when I have, you know, some fall into sin. I just because it was, it was such a threat to my salvation, you know, because, yeah, they'll say, Christians, you know, in fundamentalism, they'll say, Oh, of course, Christians can sin, but they won't continue in sin. And it's like, but who decides, like, what that line is, you know, like, that was a scary and I can that was all as a straight person. I think of my queer brothers and sisters who grew up in the church who were made to feel so especially despised, and continue in sin. Well, every like every day I wake up and I'm gay, then am I continuing in sin? And does that mean that God is going to destroy me in hell? It's a it's a really, it's a hell of a thing we did to him.
Joshua Johnson:As you're then looking at the landscape, and you're thinking about like fundamentalism and what that happened. Your first shift was into mainstream evangelicalism. Became an evangelical pastor from the stage. People weren't talking a lot about hell. They were talking about grace. How did you start to see that some of the same threads of fear based, hell based theology was happening in mainstream evangelicalism as well, even if they weren't talking about it on stage all the time. Yeah, it's really
Unknown:interesting, because I never preached about hell when I was an evangelical pastor, but I did encourage people towards salvation and and that was pretty common in our movement, that was the way we talked about it. And it really was like some sleight of hand that was happening there, because I think everybody knew what we meant, because we didn't have to say it. It was in the either it had been, you know, it was in the foundation of their spirituality already. And so we were able to rely on the fact that people already knew about heaven and hell, and so we could just talk about how Jesus wanted to save you without having to, like, go into grisly detail over you know what I grew up like? Literally, we had a visiting speaker in, like, a revival meeting, and I remember his sermon was called, How hot is hell? Like that that was normal in my world, but that I wasn't preaching sermons called, How hot is hell, neither were the other evangelical pastors around me. But we didn't really have to. And I think that you know, if you were to essentially, like, pick at our theology, hell was like, right under the surface at any given time, especially when we would talk about the cross and the way what salvation meant was always framed in terms of, basically, you know, the main problem that we have is that we are, you know, alienated from God because of our sin, that God is essentially required to punish us. Like punishment, in some ways, is more central to God than love in this paradigm, because God can't just forgive sin. In this paradigm, God is required to punish us. And therefore, in order to be saved, what salvation basically means is that somebody has to be punished, and it's either Jesus or you, but punishment at the end of the day is king. And so the question is, are you going to put your faith in Jesus so that God's punishment is poured out on Jesus, or are you going to have that punishment poured out on yourself in hell? And that was basically, and again, I'm maybe saying it in maybe harsher or more straightforward terms than we would have couched it. We would have tried to make it, we would have glossed it up a little, but that was basically the story. And I think that's the story in most evangelical spaces of what it means to become a Christian is to become the kind of person who is not going to suffer for their sins in hell because that transaction has been made. It's a transactional gospel, and it primarily, by the way, doesn't change us. It primarily changes God's posture towards us that now God isn't forced to punish us in that way.
Joshua Johnson:So you're looking at that and you are an evangelical pastor, you're thinking about these things. Where was the dissonance happening within your own soul of like this doesn't feel right. I don't know if this is correct. Where did that start to happen in your own life?
Unknown:So the first time that I. Able to give myself permission to really, I think I've had that dissonance my whole life. I mean, I was very I was the kid that took this seriously and felt fear about the afterlife when I was a kid. And I think one of the reasons I even went into ministry was, and I wouldn't have ever articulated it this way. This is all in hindsight. I'm able to see that. I think part, at least part of it was this need to feel spiritually safe, and it's like, Okay, I've got to double down on making sure I've got my shit buckled in and locked in and like, like I have, like, my eyes dotted and my T's crossed. I'm going to make sure that I know the answers here, because so much of it was about believing the right thing and having the right cognitive information about, you know who Jesus was, why he died, that He rose like you. Your doctrine is right, and a lot of that. I mean, no, again, an evangelical wouldn't say it this way, but at the end of the day, it's almost as if we're gonna die and there's gonna be like a god test. And if you get the answers wrong on the god test, you're going to hell. And so it was very important that I get those test answers right. And so I went in deep, but it always did feel like I didn't like a lot of that it didn't square. I mean, the loving God, I'm being told God is love, and I'm also being told that God has to punish people forever in hell, and it didn't ever square. And and there's theological workarounds, but I say in my book, there's no emotional work around and so like the theolog, the theologies that you'll hear an evangelical say, Well, God doesn't actually want to send people to hell. You know, that's their rejection of God. It's locked from the inside. They'll do all these sort of theological gymnastics to get around how God can both be loved fully love, and also send the majority of humanity to hell forever for not believing the right thing. And so you have like a theology that helps make sense of that, but it never, it just felt like there's got to be a better story that can't be the story. And for me, the first moment of permission giving, I had to really start to question some of it was really the ascendancy of Donald Trump in 2015 2016 and that might not seem like it has much to do with Hal but in many ways, seeing evangelicalism line up behind Trump it like it showed me where that spirituality was leading, like it didn't lead to the kind of moral discernment that could see through someone like that. And therefore it kind of revealed that, oh, maybe this is actually like about power the whole way down. Maybe this is not maybe there's a lack of good faith here. You know, maybe some of these ultimately, when you start to really question it, and you start to, I mean, now on this side of it, and I think about hell doctrine, I think about that we really told people that the worst possible thing that could ever happen to anybody for the longest possible amount of time, like, it's actually kind of ridiculous on the face of it, it sounds almost silly. Like, yeah, does that sound like it might be a control tactic to you? Like, hey, you have to stay in the in group and keep believing what I say. You have to believe or God's gonna burn you forever. Like it's you can see how clearly, oh, this was a use to keep us in line. And in some ways, I was like, Oh, this is a fear tactic to keep us in line. And the result of this is, like, really bad things happening in the world that we're justifying in the name of Christian supremacy. And in some ways, Trump is not, you know, I think Kristin Dumais, in her book Jesus and John Wayne, does a great job of making the point that Trump is not an aberration of white evangelicalism. Like, wow, white evangelicalism was going pretty well, but then this Donald Trump thing happened, and, oh man, it got all weird. It's, in many ways, the culmination of that project, and I'm pretty convinced of that. So I think seeing that happen, seeing people in the movement get so behind him, really just gave me permission to question it gave me permission to say, I know they missed it on this I'm not the smartest guy. I'm not the most political guy. I don't know everything about everything. You know this is me in 2015 thinking, I don't know everything, but one thing I know is that, like, that's a bad, evil guy, and he should not be president. And if you think, not only would he be a better like, he's like in many of them, he's like their favorite, he's like the he's like the best possible president. It made me realize that our, the movement I was a part of, had a real lack of moral discernment, which gave me permission to question other things as well, like, what else are they wrong about? What else aren't
Joshua Johnson:they Well, I think a lot of people would then, then argue, if you're talking about, oh, maybe like hell doesn't exist, like people think it does, maybe there isn't the eternal torment in hell, and people aren't going to burn alive for eternity. A lot of people, I think in evangelical spaces, will say, Yeah, of course, that doesn't feel good. And we you can't just rely on, oh, it doesn't feel good to have your you know, thoughts changed. How did you move into a feeling of like, this isn't right? Which, of course, I think a lot of people would feel that way, into a place of, oh, actually, let's look at what the Bible actually has to say. About hell, and how can I reinterpret some of the things that people have been saying is this, but it's actually something different.
Unknown:Yeah, so while I was still a pastor, I began to deeply research hell. I read books on different sides of the aisle, coming at the position from different ways, and what I realized was that the biblical data on hell was a lot messier than what I was led to believe. I my first stop, I'm a Universalist now, which is the position that all people will ultimately be reconciled to God. But my first shift was from so the traditional position is known as eternal conscious torment, which I didn't make that up. That's what the people who hold that position call it, and that's exactly what it sounds like, that they believe that everyone who's outside of Christ, who's not a believer, will be eternally tormented, consciously. They'll be, you know, aware. They'll be alive, basically, and suffering forever. But my first move was actually towards annihilationism, which is the belief that the wicked or unbelievers, whatever you want to call them, will be just destroyed, put out of existence, as opposed to suffering forever. And the reason I believed that for a while was that when I studied the biblical data on hell, well, first of all, the Old Testament doesn't have a conception of hell. It talks about the grave and death, and really everybody goes there, but it does talk about the fate of the wicked. And when, when it talks about the fate of the wicked, it typically uses language of destruction, never of torture, never of torment, never of suffering. Talks about the wicked being destroyed. And in the New Testament, it's similar and even images like fire, for example, the image of fire in the Bible is not typically one of torture and suffering. It's one of consumption or refinement. And then I also got to study, you know, the genres of the Bible and how the Bible uses language. I think this is something that evangelicals are quite naive about. Honestly, if I'm honest, you know, they claim to be like the biggest Bible people, and they often know their Bibles really well in terms of, they know the words that it says, but they're not necessarily. It's almost like they need less time studying their Bible and more time in English Literature class, like learning how literature works, because the Bible is full of metaphors, and it uses language in particular ways, especially apocalyptic hyperbole that that is common in the prop the prophets and so, you know. And I don't have the passage in front of me, I think it's Isaiah 36 that prophesies about Edom. For example, one of the most commonly cited passages about hell is in Revelation 14, where it says the smoke of their torment will rise forever. But what a lot of people don't understand is that image in Isaiah, and I think it's Isaiah 36 I don't have in front of me, but it says that the smoke of edom's torment will rise up forever when God destroys the nation of Edom. But that didn't mean that the people of Edom would suffer forever in hell. The point was that that civilization was going to experience historical destruction. In other words, the natural consequences of our actions in this world come back upon us within history, not in the afterlife. And so now while, while my initial stop with studying those apocalyptic passages that have destruction language was, oh, maybe, maybe annihilation, instead of eternal to conscious torment, now I would actually see a lot of those destruction images as as this worldly, as opposed to next worldly. In other words, the chickens come home to roost like what you We reap what we saw, and it's about the kind of world we're creating. And yeah, when we spend more money on bombs than on health care, we create Hell on Earth, not in the next life, but in this life. Now here what I didn't get there while I was an evangelical pastor, into that place of universalism and seeing hell primarily as of this worldly reality. And the reason for that is not the Bible, it was the system that we created because I began to see, oh, there's a lot of holes in these hell doctrines. But the reason I still had to hold on to some sort of punishment for unbelievers, like annihilation, which would believe that, you know, unbelievers are punished with destruction, is that our whole view of salvation, of why Jesus lived and died, all of this, was tied to there being some people that are saved and that are inside, and then other people that are damned and are outside. I don't think that was the teaching of Jesus. I don't think that's the gospel message, but that was our message. And so that was a really tough thing to deconstruct. And one of the reasons I wrote my book is not just to reframe what the Bible says about hell, but actually to zoom out and say, if there's no Hell, what is salvation? Because I'll tell you what if, if, if hell is more of a metaphor, then salvation can't just mean going to heaven. If salvation, if one way or another, all people will be reconciled to God, then salvation has to be a this worldly reality or it doesn't really mean much at all. And so part of the reason I wrote the book was to help people not only deconstruct what the Bible says about hell, but also understand, okay, if there's no Hell, like, what is the spirituality of Jesus for us? Then, because it's not just to get out of hell. Out of it's not just a get out of hell free card. It's good. News this life and the way we live in this life.
Joshua Johnson:So then when Jesus talks about hell or Gehenna, what's he talking about? Then Okay,
Unknown:so I'll try to do this quickly. So I have a whole chapter in the book called Hell on Earth, and I think that's the simplest way to say it is, I believe he's talking about hell on earth Gehenna. So a lot of preachers will say, Well, how could there be no hell? Because Jesus talks about hell more than anybody. Now, what Jesus actually talks about more than anybody is Gehenna. And first of all, I think it's really sad that our Bibles all translate the word Gehenna hell, because the word literally means the Valley of hanoum. And I could just imagine, just think about how different some of these passages would read if it said like repent, or you'll be thrown into the valley of hanoum instead of hell, you know that that would it hits the imagination differently, because we have a particular mental model for hell that might not be the same one as Jesus has original hearers. And what we should know is that most of these people knew their Bibles, and they would have known that Jesus did not make that metaphor up. I don't think Jesus was actually talking about the literal Valley, although it was a literal Valley. The Valley of hanoum is a valley outside of Jerusalem. But Jesus was using a metaphor that he borrowed from the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah in I believe Jeremiah seven says that the day is coming when the Valley of hanoum Gehenna will become a valley of slaughter, because the dead bodies will be stacked so high there will be no more room in Gehenna for the dead. So this is not a gentle image. This is an intense, scary image. But what's it about? Well, Jeremiah was prophesying just before the historical cataclysm of the Babylonians coming to destroy Jerusalem and the temple. And he was prophesying that unless we get our act together and get in line with God's ways, that unless we turn away from our violence, our nationalism, our despising of the poor, we're amassing weapons of war and we're not caring for the orphans and the widows like God called us, and that as a result of that, we are going to be destroyed, not in the afterlife, but by Babylon in this life. That was what Gehenna meant for Jeremiah. So now you fast forward 600 years later, and now they've rebuilt Jerusalem. They've rebuilt the temple. But Jesus uses this metaphor again and says, The kingdom of God is upon. You repent. The kingdom of God is at hand. The alternative either we embrace God's vision of the kingdom of God, which, by the way, Jesus unpacks as a world where the poor are blessed, the hungry are filled, a vision where we see the face of Christ in the least of these we welcome the stranger. We right. This is the vision the kingdom of God. Vision, not a not a vision for the next world, but a vision for what kind of world are we going to build? It's God's dream for this world, the kingdom of God, or Jesus, says the alternate to that is Gehenna. And just as shortly after Jeremiah prophesied, Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in the temple, 40 years after the life of Jesus, in AD 70, Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed for the second time in history, but not by Babylon, but by Rome. And just as in the first time, the historian Josephus tells us that the Valley of hinojom actually was filled with the bodies of Jerusalem's dead. And so Gehenna actually happened. Jesus said it would happen, and then 40 years later, it did happen. And I don't think it happened in the afterlife. I think hell was on earth. And Matthew, who uses the term Gehenna, the most of the gospel writers, wrote his book to the Jewish Diaspora who had fled the destruction of Jerusalem. And so they were just, they were very aware of that destruction, that historic. It changed their lives. That was their civilization in a heap of rubble that they might have had family members whose bodies were in the valley of hinom. And when, when they were reading that this was helping give context and perspective, as, How could God let this happen? Why would something like this happen? And and so, yeah, Jesus's prophecy was a warning, because God does not want us to experience those consequences. God wants something better for us. God has a vision of love. He wants us to bring heaven to earth. He wants us to pray as on Earth as it is in heaven. And so that was the mission of Jesus. And I think Gehenna is what you get in the world when we refuse to embrace God's dream for the world.
Joshua Johnson:That's going to lead us to some questions of like, what does that look like for us living today to bring heaven to earth? And so we don't create Hell on Earth. But before that, I think one of the things you said before in your last answer, is that one of the reasons you wrote the book, people are wondering now, if there isn't Hell, if there is going to be everybody is going to be redeemed and reconciled, made new in Christ forever, then what is. The good news, and what is the gospel, and why did Jesus have to die? I know that everybody's wondering that. You get that question all the time, so
Unknown:figured out a better answer, a shorter, more succinct answer for it. By now, I think there's a few ways to talk about the gospel. I think so when Jesus in Luke four, Jesus explained his ministry and why he came, and he said that he came to preach good news to the poor, liberation for the oppressed, to set the captives free. And so from one angle, I think the gospel is the liberation of the oppressed. It's good news for the poor. It's not the gospel, it's that God is with us, especially the most vulnerable, the most out, the people that the world is not with. That's who God is with. I think that's part, that's a big part of the gospel. I think another thing I would say is that the gospel is mean, one really simple, that you're loved, that you're deserving of love, that you are worthy of love right now, that you're Beloved. One of my favorite gospel images that I reflect on in the book is of Jesus in His baptism, that when Jesus is baptized, it says that heaven was torn open and that he heard the voice of God. So Jesus has an ecstatic vision, a mystical vision of God. I don't think when it says Heaven is torn open again, I don't heaven. I think we have to get away from heaven being the place we go when we die. Heaven is God's space when, when the Bible says that we're citizens of heaven, that doesn't mean that we're the kinds of people that are going to go to heaven when we die. That means we're the kinds of people who are meant to represent God here on Earth. That's what that means. And so when Heaven was torn open, in other words, heaven is with us and all around us. It's, it's, it's where God is active right now, but we're not always aware of it. And for some of us, God feels very distant. And in this moment, in his baptism, God was very near, and Jesus heard the voice of God say, You are My beloved Son. With you, I am well pleased. And Jesus heard that before he had preached a single sermon, before he had forgiven anybody, before he had done any miracles, before he had done anything at all. And in some ways, I think Christian spirituality is as simple as believing that message that was true about Jesus is also true about every one of us, that we are God's beloved children, and God is pleased with us exactly as we are. We don't have to do anything to be loved. I don't think you need to be saved in order to be loved. Being saved is just another way of describing the moment that you come to know that you are already loved, that you have always been loved. You have to earn it. You just have to believe it and receive it. It's good news. It's that you are loved. But then the reason I started with the liberation of the oppressed is that if the good news is that everybody is loved by God, then that sends us back into the world, because we've realized that we've ordered the world in such a way that many people do not experience that belovedness. We act as if some people matter more than other people, and that's why in the kingdom of God, Jesus always started with the poor. It wasn't trickle down economics. It was always Trickle Up. It was always God is for everybody. But if God is for everybody, then that means he's especially with those people that society is often aligned against and oppressing. And so I think the gospel compels us to preach that good news, especially to the poor and vulnerable. But yeah, I would say that the good news is is our unconditional, unmerited, belovedness. That's the grace of God. So why did Jesus die? I think there's a lot of different ways to talk about this, and I think the easiest where I would just start, and I don't think this exhausts the topic, but I think where we should start is with the acknowledgement that Jesus didn't just die. Jesus was killed. Jesus was actually more accurately executed. Specifically, Jesus was executed as an enemy of the state by the Empire. And for many of us, our atonement theology has nothing to do with the reason Jesus was killed as an enemy of the state. He could have died in any old way to be a sacrifice for sin. Instead, he died as someone in opposition to Empire, fighting for a better world, fighting for the kingdom of God on the side of the least of these. And so I think where we should start is that Jesus died as every great radical prophet does. Jesus died for what he lived for. And so you can't disconnect his death from his life and his ministry. If Jesus said, I came to preach good news to the poor and liberation to the oppressed, that's why he died. We always kill those people.
Joshua Johnson:That's true. That's what the
Unknown:world does. The World crucifies the poor and the oppressed and anyone that dares to stand with them. And so that's the first, I think, reason. And when we get away and we make it about a metaphorical, or, sorry, a metaphysical, transactional thing with God, I think we're getting away from the actual thing that Jesus bled and died for, which was the kingdom of God.
Joshua Johnson:Then what does it look like to live in the kingdom of God? Here and now, today, in this time where you have seen this, this fear of punishment, the theology of fear, take root and take hold, especially in America at the moment, and we see it over and over again take place. What does it look like to bring heaven to earth and to see the kingdom of God flourish in a place like this. I
Unknown:think that's the work. I think first of all, you're asking the right question. I think that is the question of that we should all be asking, that churches should be asking, that Christians should be asking, and I think we're not all going to answer it the same way, because we're all going to have different callings and passions and directions some people will devote their entire lives. Their answer will be, I'm going to fight for the end of the death penalty. Right? That's Shane Claiborne. For instance, Shane Claiborne is he is zeroed in on and like standing up for the people that are on death row, saying this punitive society that we've created does not reflect the love and justice of God, and that's what it looks like for him. But that's not going to be everybody. Jamar tisby, he talks about racism, systemic racism, white supremacy, anti blackness, and that is, he said, this does not reflect the kingdom, you know, other people. Sheila Gregor talks about the ways that patriarchy hurts women in the churches that actually that, you know, if Jesus is a liberator of the oppressed, 50% of our society is actually oppressed in many ways because we have these patriarchal cultures that hold women down. It could look like a million different things. I do think that in a moment right now where we are in the United States experiencing an increase in authoritarianism and fascism and militarism. I think it looks like being very clear that those that that dominant violent suppression of freedom and liberation and asserting order and hierarchy does not reflect God's heart, that even though there's a lot of Christians that are standing up and saying, Yes, this we there's an anti Christian. We need to for them. Christianity looks like law and order. Those things are almost interchangeable. But I think Christianity looks like liberation for the oppressed. And so I think once you get captured by that vision, it could take you into untold places. For me, it means speaking up really clearly for queer people who have been often oppressed by the church and the world. So I don't know, I think that that's where you've got to listen to the sound of the genuine in yourself. But a lot of us haven't even been, I think, unleashed, to be able to listen to, okay, what does it look like for me to be a force of liberation in this world to stand where Jesus stood? Who would Jesus be standing with right now? That's that is the question of spirituality that we have to, I think, work out with some fear and trembling, but I think many of us haven't even gotten to that question because we're so worried about just making sure that we're saved and we're going to the right place when we die. But the work of spirituality isn't in the afterlife. It's right. It's right here now, and that's why right now, in a time when fascism and authoritarianism and violence and division are on the rise, more and more Christians are saying Jesus is coming back soon. That's what I'm hearing from a lot of evangelicals. They're releasing new hit singles, Forrest Frank's new song, Jesus is coming back soon. It's all Jesus is coming back soon. It's a spirituality of escapism, a spirituality of tribalism, because it's Jesus is coming back soon for us, for my team, right? It's not a spirituality of justice and flourishing in this world. What if? What if nobody's coming to save us? What if, actually, this isn't about getting the hell out of here. It's about getting the hell out of this world. It's and staying here and rolling up our sleeves and doing the work of, okay, maybe none of us are going anywhere. Maybe we have to actually figure out how to live with each other in a world of neighbors, in a world of people who believe different things, who look different ways, maybe we have to figure out how to love one another. Is there a
Joshua Johnson:way that you have found, I know you've been able to do this in your life and for people around you, how do we get that certainty thinking like I am certain that it is about the afterlife, it is about what's next. It is not about what's here and now, and so whatever I do here and now, only what I believe matters, not what I do matters. How do we get that out of us? How do we, like, start to shake it, especially when it's it's almost like, embedded in our bones, and it's almost DNA, like, is there the shreds of that, is there a way to start to decompress from that? What does that look like for people? I
Unknown:think that's a first of all, very common question. I think a lot of us wrestle with that, and I don't know that there's an easy answer. I think the way that we change is slowly and one thought at a time. And. I do think that that certainty mindset that rigid. I mean, there's fundamentalism in progressive Christianity. You know, we can, we can still bring those rigid and I try, in my book, to be I try to really encourage people to engage curiosity. And I don't want to present like, Okay, I'm ditching the old dogmas. And here's the new dogmas. I'm ditching the old rigid formulas. Here's some new rigid formulas. I don't think that that's helpful. I think that the answer is coming to the place where you actually can listen to yourself, and you can listen to your intuition and your conscience and the voice of love inside of you, and learning to listen to that voice of love inside of you that many of us were actually told to drown out. Many of us the things that I'm saying, I tend to this is what I tend to hear from people when I say things like what I've been saying on this podcast, I don't tend for people to say, I have never thought anything like that, and you are blowing my mind right now with these new ideas. You know, what people tend to say is, I thought I was the only one that felt that way, and I didn't know it was okay to feel that way. You are. They'll say, you're giving words to things that I have been thinking and feeling. But I didn't know it was okay. I didn't have permission to say that out loud, and you're saying it out loud, what feels very true to me, a lot of what I'm saying right now, I it felt wrong to me at six and seven years old that God would send a child to hell from another country who just hadn't ever heard the name of Jesus. That felt wrong to me, that I remember asking my Sunday School teacher about it and getting some convoluted answer, oh, maybe Jesus can send him a dream or, you know, that's what we're for. We're missionaries, and we have to send missionaries there so that the whole world will know. None of their answers actually sat right with me. And I did a bunch of theological work, and now I've got two master's degrees. And here I am, 38 years old, and I'm back like, you know what seven year old Brian. He was so real for that that question was on point. He was right actually all along that that love and compassion impulse inside him, he should have followed that instead of suppressing it. And so I think getting in touch with that and learning how to listen to that is a big part of this. I think punishment makes it hard, because hell is, as we've mentioned, a major control factor. Because if the stakes are that high, there's no room for lack of certainty. When hell is on the table, you've you got to be pretty freaking certain you're not going there, you know. And so that, I think poking holes in Hell is really important to even be able to give yourself that permission to be curious and to color outside the lines, because if coloring outside the lines could get you tortured forever, you're never going to do it. And so for me, studying it was helpful, seeing it as ridiculous and like, at the point where now, if I hear health theology, I'm not like, I really am not like, Wait, what if I'm wrong? I don't really think that anymore. I mostly am like, man. I can't believe I ever thought that. But it took some time to get there. I do think that there was a period where to replace, yeah, I think exclusionary, fear based beliefs with more open hearted, curious beliefs that you don't have certainty as your foundation. It takes time. And I think when you have certain thoughts, you just have to kind of coach yourself through them and replace those thoughts. And one thing that's been helpful, I do have some, actually, an exercise in my book about this, but long story short, to just go through an exercise of judging the fruit of that belief. Okay, I'm going to go to hell for believing the wrong thing. Or my loved ones who don't believe in Jesus, they're going to go to hell. Is that true? Do I absolutely know that that's true? How does that what does that do to me, that belief? Does that lead me deeper into love, or does that create more fear and alienation? Who would I be without that belief and actually then coaching yourself? Okay, maybe that's actually not something that I should devote myself to. Maybe here's a better thing for me. The question I use now with my beliefs is not, is this right? Because at the end of the day, there's not really a way to be certain about the correctness of these metaphysical or theological beliefs, but what you can ask is, Is this making me more loving? And so that's, I think, a better question at the end of the day, when it comes to our beliefs, I don't think when hell is on the table, you better be right, but when this isn't about a God test and acing the questions at the end of the day, it's about, Am I growing in love?
Joshua Johnson:How has this changed your parenting? How do you parent differently now,
Unknown:well, I'll tell you what, I don't have some weird pressure that like, Oh no, my kids are getting older, and they haven't, you know, prayed a salvation prayer. I think I don't feel the need to even push spirituality on them. They know that I love Jesus, that I care a lot about this sort of thing. So far, they're not that into it. But I think at some point they may show interest. But if they don't, I'm not afraid of that. I'm more interested in what kind of people they become. And if using God language and Jesus language is helpful in that journey, some point they may they'll just have to need that for themselves. What I don't want to do is scare them into needing that. It takes the pressure off. I will say that I was raised and I get into this in the book, how when you believe that your children are born innately evil and deserving of hell and punishment, that does, in fact, affect the way that you parent them. You are expected to be a punishing parent and punish your children to kind of beat the hell out of them, essentially, in that literal sense. Of like, yeah, that's my job to, like, enforce these I don't believe punishment is effective in personal relationships. I don't believe punishment gets people to change. I believe it's love and connection that causes people to change. Now, natural consequences might be are one thing, but I don't I try not to punish my children. They can experience consequence. Boundaries are important. Children need boundaries, and everybody learns through through consequences, but arbitrary punishments. I personally that's been something that I've deconstructed, and I really recommend Dr Becky Kennedy's work on this, and her book good inside, has been really helpful. But what I found is that that can be really challenging, because I received a paradigm where I deserved punishment. Everybody deserved punishment, and I was punished as a kid, I was spanked. And so often, when I'm showing my kids grace and trying to lean into connection instead of punishment, I might be thinking or feeling like this feels wrong. Actually, it would feel like the righteous thing to punish these kids, because that's what happened to me. And my inner child feels like this isn't fair at all, and so it has taken some work of reminding myself in those moments and coaching myself through it, reminding myself, No, I didn't I didn't deserve punishment then, and I don't deserve punishment now. And what my children need is not a punisher and an authoritarian. What they need is a father, and they need me to connect with them in relation. And as I walk myself through that, it often will involve even repenting to them and apologizing for the ways that things still show up in my parenting that I don't think really accurately reflect my values or or the heart of God to them, because, yeah, I think I my punishment or my parenting still does often include punishment against my, you know, better impulses, but that just gives me the opportunity to to do repair work, which is, I think, also an important part of human relationships.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, repair work is very important. You know, I facilitated a discussion around Luke, 15, prodigal son on Sunday, and it was interesting as so many people as they were getting into the story that Jesus told about this son who stole, you know, he took the inheritance money, and, you know, spent all the money on prostitutes. And he he feels shame, and he says, you know, my father's servants eat better than me. I'm going to go back. He thinks that he's going to be punished. It's very much of a punishing type of mentality, and what he gets when he comes home is not more punishment, it's just love and compassion. So in the New Living Translation, it says that the father met him with love and compassion, and that shifted everything, and that changed him and changed everything. It's the love and compassion. But so many people, as we were discussing it, thought a if it was me, it was it would be about punishment. If it was me, I thought I would be punished. It is shocking what this father does to people with a paradigm of punishment. Of like, this is the way that we think. This is the way we think God will react. But to see a somebody who represents God in the story of Jesus telling it, and there's no punishment there, it's it actually is shocking. If you look at it, it's not just a cute little story. It's shocking. It's love and compassion. It is not,
Unknown:doesn't even let him get the words out. That's my favorite part in the story. Is when, yeah, the prodigal son is trying to, like, say, I have sinned against you and against God, and the father's like, I don't, you know you're good actually, you know, like, you're my son, and you don't have to say any of that. Like, I'm just, I'm just glad you're here. No, that's such a beautiful story, and it really was meant to reframe our ideas about God. And it's so sad to me that that was not the controlling image of God that I really received, because that image of God doesn't really square with hell. It really doesn't.
Joshua Johnson:Is there a verse that you used to hold on really tightly and knew the interpretation that then has shifted for you and go, Oh, I see that differently now, and you hold on to it in a different space. So many,
Unknown:so many, so many, so many. There's one that I reflect on actually in the book, I have only one verse. Which side is done. I have a tattoo with a dagger that says Galatians 220 I forget which. Oh, it's this one here. Anyway, Galatians 220 is tattooed on my collarbone, and that verse says, I'm crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, not I, but Christ who lives in me. I kind of go into my my paradigm shift with that verse. Long story short, I think many of us received a spirituality of, yeah, not I, but Christ. And what that really meant was that our self didn't really matter. We were supposed to shrink ourselves and really disappear into this Christian identity, not I Christ. You know, I no longer live. It's Christ who dwells in. Me and the way that I see that now, I don't think this idea of being crucified with Christ, yes, the spiritual path is one of dying and rising with Christ. Nevertheless, I live, and I still see so much beauty, beauty in that spiritual path. But it's not it's not to lose my authentic self. I was told that couldn't follow my heart, couldn't really listen to my intuition. My heart was desperately wicked. There was no emphasis on self love in the world that I grew up in. But Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and it's impossible to do that if you don't love yourself. And so how was I supposed to square that with this idea of dying to self? And how I think about that now is that it's it When, when, when we die to self. It's not the true self that dies we have. So there are so many things that we grasp onto to establish our identity, to establish our desire to be loved that we cling to that say love me because I'm this, because I'm that, because I'm a man, because I'm white, because I'm a Christian, because I'm you know, and we hold on to all these superficial aspects of the self that we try to carve out our identity, but the thing that's always true about us is that we are beloved by God. I believe that that is the true self that's in every one of us. There is the image of God stamped in every one of us that we are all deeply loved by God. We don't have to earn it, but we try. And so we build these superficial selves trying to make ourselves lovable when we never had to do that, like God was always ready to run out to us and just say, you, I don't need you to say anything like, I'm I love you. I'm just glad you're here. That was always the story for us. But we have these superficial identities. But when we die, to those, when we die, and a lot of times they have a painful death, like when I deconstructed and stepped away from pastoring, it felt like a part of me dying. I thought Pastor Brian in many ways, that felt like who I was. And then my marriage ended and I got divorced, and husband Brian felt like who I was. These felt like some real deaths that made me less less of myself, less of who I was less of a man, less of a man of God. But that's not true, because none of those things were who I really was, who I really was, was beloved by God. And what I have found is that when I experience death of these aspects of my ego that I hold up to try to gain belovedness. When those things die, the true self becomes more and more alive. And so how I see that verse now, you know when, when, yes, Jesus calls us to come and die, but whenever Jesus calls us to come and die, he is at the very same time calling us to rise and come up out of our tombs a lot more alive than ever before. And so Christ in me, I don't see as like well, I don't matter. I can't listen to myself. Brian doesn't matter. There is no Brian, only Jesus matters. That's not how I think about that. I think of Christ in me as the the most holy and divine part of myself, the part in me that that can never die, the beloved part of me. That's the hope of glory. And so I have, I have discovered God more in the parts of myself that I didn't know that I was allowed to listen to listen to before. And so, yeah, that's just how I think about that verse now, which is a little different than kind of this sob story of self deprivation. I think that maybe I would have thought about it in the past. That's
Joshua Johnson:beautiful. I have a couple of quick questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, Brian, what advice would you give?
Unknown:I'd tell him to read my new book. No, so I'm joking, but seriously, I did write in many ways. I wrote the book that I wish I had, and I would tell I would tell him everything that I just I was, yeah, I guess I would say, you you don't have to be good, you know, maybe I'd read him like Mary Oliver's poem, wild geese. You know you don't have to crawl on your knees 1000 miles repenting for God to love you. Yeah, I think I would want him to be able to listen to himself and what was going on on the inside, and not think that you had to do something to yourself to be loved. And it's funny because in evangelicalism, we do talk about that. We talk about grace. We do say you don't have to earn God's love, but then we ultimately have all these restrictions. It's there's all asterisks everywhere.
Joshua Johnson:It's true. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend
Unknown:who I've been my reading is all over the place lately, although I am reading this really, this book, reason, faith and revolution by Terry Eagleton is really good. It's kind of heady. Terry Eagleton is like a leftist Christian philosopher, and he makes a really good case for why progressive people could still get a lot out of Christianity, which is, I think, an interesting book that I'm enjoying right now. Also I'm reading willie james Jennings commentary on acts, which is really good. He's sort of a black liberation theologian. I think maybe the president of the Yale theology department, maybe, don't quote me on that, but he's, he's, I think the seminary president at Yale, I think, anyway, that's a really great commentary that i. Been enjoying. I kind of had been perusing like and studying some of the book of Acts, which is kind of fun because I've spent most of my time lately in the gospels, so kind of like venturing acts a little for fun. Watching, oh, here's a fun recommendation. I recently watched the show dying for sex with I think the actress is Michelle Williams, the girl from Dawson's Creek. Yeah, have you seen
Joshua Johnson:that? I haven't seen it, but yeah,
Unknown:bro, really, really incredible show about so basically, long story short, a woman finds out she has stage four cancer and she's dying, and she realizes what she needs to do is leave her husband and her bad marriage, and she spends the last bit of her life before she dies, trying to figure out how to have pleasurable sex. Because she's never really, like, had an orgasm. And so it is very much this journey of self discovery. Because so many people are so confused. Like, wait a second, you're dying. Like, why do you care about this? But in her mind, it was like, why? What have I been doing my whole life? Like, why have I not been actually listening to myself and learning about myself, and I've been like in this trance. And so in some ways, in this path towards dying, she becomes more fully alive. And the whole show is really incredible. The end parts where her cancer begins to really accelerate. And okay, so spoiler, it's about her death. The show is about her death. And I mean, I wept like a baby at the end of the show. I'll just say that. So it just be prepared. This is a very emotional recommendation, but if you're, if you're up for the emotional journey, I think it's quite something.
Joshua Johnson:Hellbent is out anywhere books are sold, congratulations. It is a USA Today bestseller. So it's hitting a nerve. People are buying it. How could people get it? Where can they connect with you? What do you hope? Yeah, get from the book so you
Unknown:can get it. I think the best place is always at your local bookstore. It should be there, probably, if not, you can order it from them. But you know, if you want it quicker, it's, of course, available on Amazon. It's also on Audible. I did, I recorded the audio, which is, I think I've heard some people really love the audio, actually,
Joshua Johnson:like, yeah, I listened. I listened to it, and I love i i loved it. It just felt like you were like, now just talking to me, it was, I love the way that you read your book. That didn't feel like a reading of a book. It felt like a conversation. It was perfect. You did a great
Unknown:wow, that's really meaningful. Thanks so much. Man, I wanted that, and so I felt good about it, but I, you know, I'm, I was curious about other people's perception of it. So, yeah, the audio is another great option, of course, on like Kindle or digital available as well. So yeah, I think, you know, in some ways, this book, I want to help people shift out of a paradigm of punishment. If you believe that God must be a punisher and that the gospel only makes sense. If God is going to punish people, then I want to suggest to you that you are possibly missing on a deeper, richer gospel, and, and, and it's hard to even imagine a gospel without punishment, but I think when we begin to I think some, some really neat stuff opens up. And so this book is about deconstructing hell, but it goes beyond. This. Isn't just about what the Bible says about hell. This is, I really want to help people shift out of a whole paradigm of punishment into a spirituality of loving connection, because that's what life is all about, and I don't think we should miss it. So, yeah, it is really encouraging that it's connecting with people. Because I know that I said a lot of things in the book that you're you're just not supposed to say in Christian publishing. And you know, to include, yeah, I use the F word. I talk about how Jesus would have loved trans people. I call out American complicity in in genocide and global war. And those are all things that I think were important for me to say out loud that would maybe, you know, get a lot of books, not, you know, not shared by their pastors, I guess. But I yeah, I hope people, I hope people expose themselves to these ideas, despite the fact that 70% of my Instagram following said that it was difficult to purchase the book because it triggered religious guilt. In other words, they felt like they were doing nominee thing by even engaging with this topic. Because, oh, Is God gonna be okay with the fact that I might think that maybe, like, Hell's not a thing, like I'm I'm literally scared of God even buying the book. And what I would say is, if you resonate with that feeling at all, then this is definitely for you. Excellent.
Joshua Johnson:Well, Brian, thank you for this conversation. Really enjoyed talking with you, and thank you for bringing us into a place of less fear and punishment, into a place of love and connection, so that we could actually bring heaven to earth and see something of love and connection in this world, that we could stop this, the hell of genocide and fear mongering, polarization, just hate on all sides and the dehumanization of so many people that We have in this world into a place of recognizing that there is stamped on every single person, the image of God, that they are everybody is a beloved child of God, and that we could actually see people like God sees people into a place where there's love, there's compassion, and we can connect with others. So. Thank you. It was fantastic.
Unknown:Thanks, man, appreciate you having me. Joshua, you.
