“So God does not lose all sense of proportion. He excludes from Heaven only those who refuse to let go of their own wild and disproportionate sinning. God doesn’t demonstrate a lack of proportion. He banishes it from His presence. That is why there is a Hell” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 58).
Judging the Last Judgment
“We don’t want the last judgment to stop every mouth. We don’t want the realities of the last judgment to stop our mouths. We are modern men and want the doctrine of the last judgment to give us an opportunity to run our mouths” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 57).
Nothing But Proportion
“We often talk as though Hell were nothing but a gigantic miscarriage of justice, the end result of God somehow losing all sense of proportion. We want to think of the Last Judgment as requiring an impressive explanation and defense because we think of it as that day at the end of the world when …
The Outer Hell
“Those who are spiraling downward in the final lostness are people who are in the process of losing the capacity for relationship. Scripture describes that kind of relationship as one which bites and devours, or which wants a relationship with others so that someone might be within striking distance. But eventually everyone moves out of …
Law is Relational
“Sin must be against someone. It is not primarily a matter of being against a rule—for a rule does not exist without a rule-giver, or the specified persons that the rule concerns . . . whenever the law is broken, that means that someone has been wronged, grieved, or hurt” (Mere Fundamentalism, pp. 52-53).
Sin Veers
“Sin is necessarily parasitic. Sin is bent righteousness. Sin cannot exist in its own name, it cannot stand on its own feet. Goodness, being an attribute of God, simply is. Evil is a knock-off, a corruption, a twisting, and a deviation” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 52).
The Direction of Glory
“A man seeking true glory has his eye fixed on God. A man in pursuit of vainglory is given to the sidelong glance” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 51).
What Is Actually Delivered
“The striving is always in the direction of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, and it always seems to wind up as Nietzsche himself did—broken, mad, pathetic. The Ring promises us a king or an emperor with godlike powers, but delivers us Gollum” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 44).
And What a Failure
“Sin is a glory failure” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 42).
A Glorious Promise
“The attempts to create a superman have not been few. We see it in the attempt by the antediluvians to breed immortals (Gen. 6), we see it in the ravings of Nietzsche, and we see it with modern unbelievers tinkering around with the human genome. In reply, God says—God has always said—that mankind shall be …