One question that weighed heavily on Rachel Held Evans’ mind during the time that she was a practicing evangelical and now, when she identifies with the Episcopal church, is, “Who goes to heaven and who goes to hell?”
Often when she writes about heaven and hell, it’s in regards to the Holocaust and Anne Frank, one of her idols. As you’ll read in Evans’ following five quotes on heaven, it’s a question to which she continues to search for an answer.
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1. “I don’t pretend to know exactly what happens to people when they die, but my most instinctive and visceral sense of right and wrong tells me that a good and loving God would not torture Anne Frank for eternity. Yes, I know that this raises some theological objections for certain evangelicals, and yes, I know that I could be wrong. But I’m finally beginning to believe that the thing inside of me that compels me to ask uncomfortable questions like this one is worth listening to now and then, that maybe it’s not a weakness but a strength.”
2. “If only born-again Christians go to heaven, then the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony and the hands of angry God. If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it’s terrible news.”
3. “I am eager to have this conversation because my own doubts about Christianity sprang from questions related to heaven and hell. As a little girl, I struggled with the idea that my hero Anne Frank had died in a prison camp only to suffer eternal torture in hell at the hand of an angry God because she was a Jew and not a Christian. If my Sunday school teacher was right, I reasoned, then the German guards who professed Christian faith were more likely to make it into heaven than the Jews they persecuted.”
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4. “In Sunday school, they always make hell out to be a place for people like Hitler, not a place for his victims. But if my Sunday school teachers and college professors were right, then hell will be populated not only by people like Hitler and Stalin, Hussein and Milosevic but by the people that they persecuted. If only born-again Christians go to heaven, then the piles of suitcases and bags of human hair displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children suffering eternal agony and the hands of angry God. If salvation is available only to Christians, then the gospel isn’t good news at all. For most of the human race, it’s terrible news.”
5. “One of the biggest questions I’ve had to confront in my years of wrestling with doubts about my faith is what it means to live without the absolute, unfailing certainty that I will go to heaven when I die. Working through that question has been both terrifying and challenging.”
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