Living Deeply

Grace or Self-Effort? (Sam Radford)

The ‘be better’ gospel leads to striving and shifts us away from the Gospel of grace. What might begin as an attempt to feel like a better Christian ourselves soon becomes an attempt to feel like a better Christian before others. And then, ultimately, it leads to our attempting to impress God by how much better we are.

Salvation is not and never will be by our good works. Nothing we can do will ever change God's acceptance of us. Nothing we can do will ever change the way God feels about us. He loves us as we are.

God Wishes All Humans To Be Saved (Kallistos Ware)

In a sense, God had to take the risk:  if He wanted there to be love, He had to give us freedom.  And by giving us freedom, He gave us the possibility of doing evil.  The world was not created evil.  But God took the risk because He wished there to be love.  This is the true meaning of the Christian doctrine of Hell, which is so widely misunderstood.

God does not condemn us to Hell; God wishes all humans to be saved.  He will love us to all eternity, but there will exist the possibility that we do not accept that love and do not respond to it.  And the refusal to accept love, the refusal to respond to it, that precisely is the meaning of Hell.  Hell is not a place where God puts us; it’s a place where we put ourselves.  The doors of Hell, insofar as they have locks, have locks on the inside.

Christ Will Come Again (Pierre Teilhard De Chardin)

One day, the Gospel tells us, the tension gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world.  And then will come the end.  Then the presence of Christ which has been silently accruing in things, will suddenly be revealed---like a flash of light from pole to pole.  Breaking through all the barriers within which the veil of matter and the water-tightness of souls have seemingly kept it confined, it will invade the face of the earth.  And under the finally liberated action of the true affinities of being, the spiritual atoms of the world will be borne along by a force generated by the powers of cohesion proper to the universe itself, and will occupy, whether within Christ or without Christ (but always under the influence of Christ,) the place of happiness or pain designated for them by the living structure of the Pleroma.  “As the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west . . . as the floods came and swept them all away . . . so will be the coming of the Son of Man” (Matthew 24:27, 29).  Like lightning, like conflagration, like a flood, the attraction exerted by the Son of Man will lay hold of all the whirling elements in the universe so as to reunite them or subject them to his Body.