Many drugs hinder human flourishing, but few are worse than pornography. And I use the drug metaphor advisedly. According to Dr. Juli Slattery, an evangelical Christian sexuality researcher, porn is at least as addictive as cocaine.

Porn is hell. Both viewers and subjects lose out on the full human experience. Many of us have felt the flames of this hell or borne mute, horrified witness to friends, perhaps even communities, whose lives were stunted because of it.

I am not a counsellor for people with porn addictions, and if you think you have one, find someone who is. Furthermore, my goal is not to find a weird gratification in talking about porn, but to discuss how to stop viewing it. And this is what I really want to say: we need lifelong inner transformation.

Which is not to say we don’t need protective measures. Internet porn is insidious and crafty and shows partiality to none. Without a safety net, many Internet users will be left wide open to its devastation. Statistically, this is especially true of males. Using software that monitors and filters our web activity is not prudishness, it’s prudence; as is giving face-to-face reports to a friend, and even using a brick phone.

Spending time online has become all but a necessity, and accountability software is a means of grace. But let me repeat: in the long term, only root-level inner transformation will keep us free.

When Dallas Willard was a boy, he and his friends often carried around BB guns, and sometimes they wreaked havoc by shooting at streetlights. Telling the story as an adult, Willard said that although he still faces temptations, vandalizing streetlights with a BB gun is no longer one of them. Through a variety of spiritual disciplines he learned to stop. Coming from a dignified, grey-haired professor this was amusing, but his point was profound: as we follow Christ intentionally, we can expect transformation with all our destructive habits.

Yet God will not transform us in a vacuum. Sinner’s-prayer Christianity–a belief system that promises instant change–is a fond illusion. We change through struggle, through unknowing and reorientation, by acquiring new habits and new ways of being. I don’t care if you’re liberal or conservative or what you are, that’s simply the way it is.

With sexual integrity, we change by working for human rights–a thoroughly Christian idea, by the way, long before it was a secular one. Men objectify women in many subtle ways. In some cultures, objectification happens because women feel pressure to behave and dress promiscuously, but in other cultures objectification happens through imposed suppression of women. Both are soul-destroying. Whatever our gender, healthy sexuality is predicated on treating every human as a divine image-bearer.

Also, to find sexual healing we must cultivate a life of integrity. To paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin, the infallible sign of God’s presence is a constant narrowing of the gap between the persona we project and true selves. We all deal with faith crises, lack of direction, hypocrisy, egocentrism, and many other universal problems. If we avoid being vulnerable about issues that are not specifically sexual, we will hardly find healing from porn and lust.

Another essential element of sexual transformation is mindfulness. It is our thoughts, more than our circumstances, that shape our lives. Thank goodness we have the option of being mindful. Mindfulness means observing our thoughts as they arise. Then, through breathing and other techniques, we can let them pass before they derail us. In my experience, this practice brings freedom not only from sexual lust but also rivalry, worry, and other poisonous thoughts. If you are interested in reading more, I highly recommend Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness.

Finally, we should take it for granted that growth requires change. Christians are transformed as they follow Christ into new territory—physically, mentally, and spiritually. When we lovingly and faithfully engage with our God-soaked world, the desire for escapism, through porn or otherwise, stands little chance. But it proliferates when we dwell in the virtual world, a future disembodied heaven, or any other state of unreality. For people in a sheltered religious environment, transformation might mean putting aside hackneyed jargon for a time, zooming out our focus to explore wisdom from the fresh paradigms of other cultures and traditions.

Dallas Willard, in his excellent book The Spirit of the Disciplines, wrote this: “If we make all the reasonable preparations, sin becomes dispensable, even uninteresting and revolting.” Surely that includes the sin of porn. Whether the issue is vandalizing streetlights or viewing porn, transformation is possible.

Consider:

• What “reasonable preparations” have allowed you to stay free of porn?
• Healthy sexuality promotes chastity without prudishness and celebration without promiscuity; in your experience, what barriers keep us from enjoying that healthy sexuality?

For some reason a great number of people, among whom I shamelessly include myself, have found it appropriate to speculate ad nauseum about what the first Anabaptists would do were they magically resuscitated and plopped into the 21st century.

The first Anabaptists would break Covid restrictions with abandon; they would fastidiously uphold them in order to protect the vulnerable.

They would homeschool their kids in order to ward off the rot of broader culture; they would send their kids into any school so they could be the salt of the earth.

They would challenge leaders of organized religion; they would meekly submit to God-ordained authority.

Those dear old Radical Reformers might, depending who you ask, align themselves with the Emerging church or the Plain People from Ohio; with an eco-community in London or a homeschooling network in rural Kentucky. They might be socially liberal or they might have founded Focus on the Family.

In reality, short of a séance, any speculation about that esteemed band of pilgrims from central Europe remains just that: speculation. We don’t actually know what they would do.

We do know some things, and an obvious place to start might be that they tended to promote baptism for consenting adults. Well, actually it was stronger than that. Their views on baptism gave them their very identity (Anabaptist means re-baptizer).

But even here, if we are looking for prophetic characteristics of early Anabaptism, then emphasizing adult baptism might no longer be a good starting point. As Stuart Murray Williams points out in The Naked Anabaptist, in most contexts today the act of baptizing adults is about as benign as taking a walk in the park.

All of us who claim to be modern-day Anabaptists have one thing in common: we think our practice or belief—or website, or diet, or clothing, or style of worship, or view of gender and sexuality—is different from the dominant group. We all seek to offer another perspective, a “third way.” We are all careful to keep church and state separate. In terms of authority, Anabaptism, at least officially, looks to the community, in contrast to Catholics who look to church hierarchies and Protestants who look to the individual conscience and the Bible.

I know it is grossly oversimplified, but that is my explanation for why organizations as diverse as Rod and Staff Publishers and Mennonite Church USA are all claiming the label of Anabaptist.

This is my belief: the term Anabaptist still holds currency. It is a transnational, trans-ethical movement in which all may freely participate. However, as is the fate with prophetic words and names, the provocative associations around the term Anabaptist can decrease quickly. Maybe we do not need more seminars hammering out who is a true Anabaptist and who is not. Instead, maybe we should follow our convictions—follow Jesus in our time and place—and let people call us what they will.

Because all speculating aside, that is exactly what the early Anabaptists did.

My wife still has the book she studied two decades ago during the instruction class before her baptism. The other day I was perusing the slim tan paperback again, interested to see what our generation absorbed about God, the Bible, and because I have been pondering it lately, the subject of hell.

Ironically, though the book’s comments on hell are forceful in tone, they are prefaced with a sentence about mystery and how we cannot know all that will take place after death. But, it continues cheerfully, we can know “enough to satisfy.” Here’s a sampling of that:

• “Before God concludes his work on earth, millions will be resurrected, only to be condemned and sentenced to eternal suffering in the lake of fire.”
• “The sinner is aware that death will bring him face to face with Almighty God. Eternal suffering is waiting for the sinner. That is something to fear.”
• “This will be a sad day for many, many people.”

I will lay my cards on the table at the start and say that I find the above formulation of hell to be misguided: skewed at best and psychologically abusive at worst. Presented in this way, it has the potential to damage young people in their spiritual formation. I propose that it ought to be reconsidered.

ECT. Eternal Conscious Torment. The teaching that after death a number of humans will experience unending bodily suffering in a literal fire. How did the teaching become so entrenched? Why do people believe it? Are its proponents horrid monsters with red tights and a pitchfork?

Usually not. The reasons for believing ECT are often well-intentioned and worth engaging. I would like to offer my perspective on three common ones.

Reason #1: God is sovereign and can do whatever he pleases, including orchestrating ECT. Verses such as Romans 9:20 (“Who are you, a human being, to talk back to God?”) are used to argue that God’s ways are inscrutable. His justice and morality are rooted on an altogether different plane.

While the tone of such talk is appropriately reverent, it is doubtful that anyone really operates from this framework on every issue. Most people know, for example, that it would be wrong of God to require parents to sacrifice their firstborn child in the manner of bloodthirsty ancient Near Eastern deities, or to have violent love affairs like the capricious gods of Greek mythology.

Even in these examples, God could, given enough time, reveal how his actions were just and redemptive. But let’s call a spade a spade: leaving someone in eternal hell is immoral and disproportionate even for the most retributive of deities, not to mention the God whose very essence is love (1 John 4: 8,16). And while Reformed theologies have tried hard to reconcile ECT with God’s love, all too often both God and love are changed into psychologically abusive parodies. Sincere seekers turn away and detractors gain fodder for their strawman arguments.

In his recent book That All Shall Be Saved, David Bentley Hart argues that we cannot trust a Creator who conceived of a universe in which there was a chance, however infinitesimal, that even one creature would suffer eternally without the possibility of redemption. Hart’s language may seem arrogant. Doesn’t the Bible make it clear that eternal hell exists and that’s that? A mere human should not argue with the God revealed in the authoritative Holy Bible.

But what if Hart’s sense of justice originates with God himself, who programmed it into humans as his image bearers? And as for the biblical passages on hell, what if they are indeed authoritative and inspired, but we miss what they’re really saying?

Which brings us to the second common reason for belief in ECT.

Reason #2: You have to believe in ECT to take the Bible seriously. Indeed, taken at face value without context, some Bible verses point toward ECT. “And the smoke of their [worshippers of the beast] torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night” (Revelation 14:11). There are also a handful of other passages that, at least in some English translations, seem to presuppose ECT (Jude 7,13; 2 Thess. 1; Matt. 25:31-46).

But as Robin Parry points out in The Evangelical Universalist, if someone is into proof texts for establishing doctrine on the afterlife, they might well consider that there are just as many proof texts for universal reconciliation as there are for ECT. For starters, consider these passages:

• “The Lord will not cast off forever. He does not willingly afflict the children of men.” (Lamentations 3:31)
• “[God] desires all people to be saved.” (1 Timothy 2:4) One translation says God intends for all people to be saved.
• “His mercy endures forever.” (A phrase that occurs 26 times in Psalm 136 alone)
• “Just as all died in Adam so all will be made alive in Christ.” (Romans 5; 1 Corinthians 15)
• In the fullness of time God will unite and reconcile all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth, in the whole cosmos. (Ephesians 1:20 and Colossians 1:20)
• God’s will is that all come to repentance. (2 Peter 2:9) Does God get what God wants?
• Every knee will bow to Jesus. (Philippians 2:10)
• Every creature in heaven and earth will praise Christ. (Revelation 5:13)

The goal of this article is not to argue for universalism, but to show that there are viable understandings of hell other than ECT. (See also Preston Sprinkle’s biblical defense of Annihilation.) However, before leaving this point, it is worth commenting briefly on several other factors that color the discussion on ECT and the Bible.

First, proponents of ECT often employ selective biblical literalism. For instance, when reading Revelation, they contend that “the lake of fire” and “the smoke of their torment” must be taken literally even though they take almost every other imagery in Revelation as metaphorical. Likewise with the separation of the sheep and the goats: everyone agrees that the sheep and goats are metaphorical, but few are ready to agree that the fire is metaphorical.

Second, we cannot fully understand, from the remove of the 21-century West, the cultural imagery surrounding the terms that are translated as the English word hell. When Jesus talked about plucking out our offending eye to avoid hellfire, the audience heard something different than a Dantean pit replete with drunkards and prostitutes. Consider also that the English word hell is a catch-all for Sheol, Gehenna, Tartarus, and Hades, biblical words that each carry distinct, culturally-specific meanings in their original context.

Third, and related to the second factor, is mistranslation. In most English translations, Matthew 25 has the goats going into “everlasting” fire. Yet there is a growing view that a better translation would be a fire–whether metaphorical or literal–that lasts “for the age.” Translators must constantly draw from more than 5,500 extant fragments of early New Testament manuscripts and compare wording and update definitions based not only on those manuscripts but also other period texts. The Bible is trustworthy and authoritative, but it is also ancient, messy, and endlessly layered. God has always entrusted normal humans to edit, translate, and interpret the Bible. It did not drop out of the sky one day in a Ziploc bag.

Finally, the punchline of hell passages is often directed toward religious people, not sinners seeking the Kingdom. Consider that the main point of the sheep and goats passage, for instance, is not to provide doctrine on the afterlife, but to demolish religious people’s tidy categories and call them to serve the marginalized. Other subjects of hell are the hypocrites and the self righteous (Matthew 23:15) and those who trust empire over Christ (Revelation 14). Many foundational texts that tell us how to enter and live in the Kingdom–John’s gospel, the book of Acts, all of Paul’s writings, the Didache–do not mention hell.

It’s time now to look at one final objection.

Reason #3: Everything falls apart without ECT. This idea has a tenacious hold on the modern church, and it holds some weight. The reasoning goes like this: no matter how horrendous hell is, if people know it doesn’t last forever, they will do their own thing in this life.

I am willing to grant that there might indeed be a kind of universalism that immobilizes people from transformative discipleship (“Don’t worry, it will all work out in the end”). However, a similar immobilizing effect can be observed among people who dogmatize ECT, some of whom find it enough to say a one-dimensional sinner’s prayer and live the basic clean moral life (“I don’t smoke, drink, chew, or sleep with girls who do”), and then never progress into further spiritual wrestling.

Furthermore, using ECT as motivation goes directly against the idea of obedience based on love. First John 4 says, “He who fears has not been made perfect in love.” The inbuilt heaven of virtue coupled with the inbuilt hell of sin is more than enough motivation to follow the Christ–in this life! Who wouldn’t want to sign up for a life free from the tyranny of greed, anxiety, jealousy, sexual infidelity, rivalry, and slander?

I can testify that things did not fall apart for me when I took ECT out of my operative framework. On the contrary, I find it much easier to get on board with the project of the universe, knowing that its architect isn’t a sadist who will allow some (most?) of the 150,000 people who die before this day ends to suffer in a perpetual Guantanamo Bay. Being a human–a calling none of us signed up for but one we nonetheless want to embrace–is hard enough without that barbaric threat hanging over our race. The true God helps his prized creatures in every hardship. He is for us. His mercy endures forever. He won’t leave us orphans.

That is a snapshot of where my journey has taken me in the years after the tan catechism booklet. Despite my strong words in the beginning, I realize people may believe in some version of eternal hell even after engaging with differing views. I want to listen to them. Already in the first few centuries of the church, patristic-era believers disagreed on hell. Some indeed believed in eternal hell, though before Augustine they weren’t as influential as now. Others were Universalists, meaning they believed everyone would ultimately be saved but that anyone who didn’t participate in Christ’s Kingdom here would experience a purifying post-mortem hell. Still others espoused Annihilation, the belief that hell is a place of final loss and cessation of existence, a kind of diplomatic middle sibling between ECT and Universalism.

To sum up, hell is not an issue that calls for a dogmatic stance. The catechism booklet got this much right: there is mystery surrounding the afterlife. Quite possibly, time and space will function differently there; to borrow N.T. Wright’s metaphor, any language we have about the afterlife is like signposts pointing into the fog: they don’t show what lies beyond the fog, but they do show us which way to go.

In fairness, the authors of the catechism booklet may not have intended to give us the final word on hell, but a springboard for discussion. But if that is the case, then why not include alternate viewpoints? Young people will find them anyway, in a 5-minute YouTube video if nowhere else. For better or worse, the days of one-sided doctrinal positions are over. Personally, I regret that my early spiritual journey did not see more exposure to different understandings of God’s justice and the afterlife. As it is, a lot of my adult life has been a process of finding the God whose every impulse is love, and unlearning the retributive, queasy-at-our-failings god. But then something tells me that kind of unlearning is entirely normal for healthy spirituality.

Even so this is me daring to hope that two decades from now when my daughters dust off their own catechism booklet, they will find in its pages the endlessly creative, utterly undefeatable God whose will is not that millions should burn forever, but that all should come to repentance.

Despite our differences in how we approach the Bible, my father once made a statement about Biblical interpretation with which I agree completely. This is what he said: “Everyone knows that some of the Bible is literal and some of it is metaphorical. The problem is deciding what is literal and what is metaphorical.”

Forsooth. And this reality holds significant implications for those who view the Bible as authoritative.

So just how do we decide what kind of reading a text is asking of us? Some passages should be understood as culturally specific. For instance, I have not heard of any church that holds to a completely literal interpretation for “Let the women keep silent in church” (1 Cor. 14:34), or “Provide for widows only if they wash the saints’ feet” (1 Tim. 5:10).

Or, looking at the Old Testament, how do we understand God’s commands to Saul that the Amalekite babies should be killed (1 Samuel 15:3), or to Moses that disobedient Israelite children must be stoned to death (Deut. 21)? Personally, I have yet to find a way to follow the God revealed in Jesus unless I interpret such violent portrayals of God as culturally specific and even unenlightened (“Ye have heard…but I say unto you”).

Also, with some passages a literal interpretation is simply unlikely. Did Isaiah literally go around naked for three years? Did the cows of Nineveh literally repent and wear sackcloth? Did it literally take three days to walk across Nineveh? That would mean Nineveh was 45 miles in circumference. There is no record of any other ancient city approaching even half that size.

Strictly speaking, the issue is not whether a literal interpretation is possible; ours is a magical world home to pregnant male seahorses and frozen methane bubbles. Rather, the issue is whether a literal interpretation exalts a passage to robust literature that speaks perennially to humanity’s deepest needs, or woodenly reduces it to a Veggie Tale.

The point is, interpreting a passage literally does not automatically make us better Christians, or even prove our commitment to Scripture’s authority and veracity.

That said, some conservative Christians probably emphasize biblical literalism because of the vociferous views of hyper-progressive theologians, which is perfectly understandable. But might they be overreacting and shooting themselves in the foot? After all, the ancients were just as capable of conveying truth through hyperbole, allegory and archetypal literature as we are today. As John Dominic Crossan said, “It is not that the ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

I certainly do not have all the answers for interpreting Scripture, but I will leave for your consideration two points that I have concluded as being generally true.

First, cultivating an awareness of what influences our interpretation is often just as important as our specific sources of authority. Some contend that Scripture interprets itself internally, and this can certainly be true. But I wonder if anyone holds to a uniform Sola Scriptura interpretation method that is independent of reason, church leaders, our own shaping influences, and a knowledge of biblical culture and history. We weight these external factors differently, but I suspect we are all guided by them to some extent.

For instance, Esther and I have two friends, Ben and Jane, who approach the Bible quite differently. For Ben, if the Bible says Noah’s ark was 500 feet long—longer than any other wooden ship on record, ancient or modern—then that is literally what the Bible means. To him the holy grail is taking biblical details “at face value.” He fears that anything else would lead him down a slippery slope to doubting the Resurrection.

Ben points out that Jesus regularly referred to Old Testament characters like Adam, Noah and Jonah. And although Jane would say there are unmistakable literary elements in their stories and names (Adam=humankind; Noah=rest; Jonah=dove), Ben assumes that Jesus must have viewed all or most details as having unfolded literally in human time and space, and naturally he wants to follow Jesus’ lead in everything.

Jane, on the other hand, seeks to familiarize herself with the ancient world, being careful not to co-opt biblical language to fit modern categories. When she reads that Methuselah lived 969 years old, she takes into account that the Mesopotamian numbering system is hard to translate. It was sexagesimal (based on multiples of 60) and regularly used hyperbole and numeric symbolism. Ben counters that this exegetical approach requires too much knowledge of Bible times, but this does not bother Jane. That knowledge is more available today than ever. Whoever has ears, let him hear.

As you probably detected, I favour Jane’s method of interpretation over Ben’s. However, I respect them both because they are equally transparent about what guides them.

Second, people experience transformation despite holding to different hermeneutics. With Jane and Ben, I cannot say that one is a better Christian than the other. Albeit for different reasons, I value and appreciate both of them. I once heard that it is safer to loan out garden tools to a Biblical literalist, but that it is more enjoyable to have a dinnertime conversation with someone who is open to literary or culturally specific interpretations. It is a rather quirky way of putting it, but maybe there is truth in it. Maybe both types have something to teach the other.

At the end of the day, both Jane and Ben are committed to obeying literally several crucial and actionable passages, such as “speak evil of no one” (Titus 3:2); “take every thought captive to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5); and the Golden Rule from Matthew 7. (Unbeknownst to many Christians, when Jesus spoke of the “strait and narrow way that leads to life,” it was in the context of living out the Golden Rule.)

May I suggest that the task of faithful biblical interpretation is not about forcing a literalist interpretation onto the passages that were never meant to be taken literally. Rather, it is about faithful obedience to the crucial passages that were always meant to be taken literally but usually weren’t.

We are Christians, not biblicists, and it makes sense for us to start by following Christ’s teachings as seriously as possible. It has not escaped the attention of many onlookers that Ken Ham, who starts with treating Genesis 1-11 as scientific and historic fact, has no qualms about filing lawsuits over his Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. Jane and Ben would quickly agree that this is an exercise in missing the point.

In summary, we must not trivialize the literal-metaphorical discussion. Both extremes can stunt human flourishing. Yet the important meaning of a passage is usually found beyond the literal-metaphorical dichotomy amid far nobler themes, such as increased wonder at the “unbearable wholeness of being,” to quote Ilia Delio. Ultimately, the right reading of Scripture leads us to its central message: the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

What are some passages you are unsure about, and what guides you in interpreting them? What are the strengths and weaknesses in how your church interprets Scripture? How do you live peacefully with people who do not share your interpretive methods and assumptions?