David LaChapelle : Heaven to Hell
With that they experienced good and evil -- they experienced duality. And now I am caught between Eve, my feminine side, which is my spirit, and Adam, my masculine side, which is matter. Caught up in an infernal duality, a battle between these two. I left that earthly paradise to become more conscious.
From the Prison Within to Heaven on Earth
I long to go back, not as a member of the herd, but as an indivi-dual. That is what I came to Earth for, to become an indivi-dual and realise that the two are really only one. It is my true nature. It can accomplish anything, it is all knowing, it is abundance and it answers to no one. This is important because it is fundamental.
From the Prison Within to Heaven on Earth
It seems so radical and is difficult to accept because for thousands of years I have been repeating the message via my cells that I am merely a poor creation of an external creator. As a result, I live according to a survival program: However, I have decided to stop! I have made the choice for me, because if this is living I might as well give up now. So why do we stick around?
We do so because somewhere deep within ourselves we know that there is something else. Life on Earth can be better, we can experience peace, happiness and solidarity. I have finally found it. I have realised that I am all powerful and the rest is a manifestation of my inner self.
The more I take care of my being, the more it will be healthy, the better off I will be. To start living one must come to a complete stop, make a U-turn and head in the opposite direction that leads towards immortality, not only of the soul but also of the body. Making an about turn is an individual decision, it is the key to transformation. This means amassing everything that I have believed in and built and throwing it away.
And doing just the opposite of everything I did in the past. It is a matter of finding my true unlimited creative nature. I realise that since I created hell on Earth, I can just as easily create paradise on Earth. I learn to think and act as a divine being. I transform my illusionary fears into true love.
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I discover that there is a meaning to life. I experience ease and simplicity. I improve my health, I grow younger, I laugh and I live. This is what I came on Earth to accomplish: Paradise on Earth will take shape only after I create it within. When I become one, peace will automatically follow. She went on to outline how to put this ambitious program into action. It was stimulating, refreshing, disturbing and an eye opener all rolled into one. I never once heard a reference to hell. The goal was to work out why these people were turned off by the gospel, and then to create a worship service that responded to their perceived needs.
Essentially, this is consumer-based management. Hybels keeps a poster in his office that reads: Who is our customer? What does the customer consider value? Harry and Mary were made uncomfortable by overt religious symbolism and archaic language. The solution was a more positive message: Once I became aware of what was missing at Willow Creek, it was almost a game to watch the ministers try to manoeuvre around the elephant in the room.
One strategy was to place the focus on heaven, letting people mentally fill in the blank about the alternative.
But away from the pulpit, these ministers were surprisingly traditional. In his book Honest to God? But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity. Most of my friends at Moody disagreed with their approach, but our only other option was to be the ranting voice in the wilderness. It was a hopeless effort, and we all knew it. People looked at our street evangelism team like we were Jesus freaks. In fact, a number of passersby felt compelled to say as much. Many of my friends were planning to leave the US after graduation to become missionaries to the developing world.
Apparently it was easier to convince people of the existence of hell and the need for salvation in places like Uganda and Cambodia. I started my sophomore year at Moody in September I was eager to see how Bill Hybels would handle the event — whether he would demonise the enemy or invoke safe platitudes about the brevity of life.
As it turned out, he did something completely different. Because boy, I felt it this week. Did you feel it in you? The vindictive rage we felt watching the attacks from our kitchen televisions was the same emotion that was creating hell all over the world. In speaking about his own capacity for revenge and hatred, he had opened up a possibility, a way of talking about evil that felt relevant and transformative. Rather, he was challenging his congregation to exercise empathy in a way that Jesus might have, suggesting that he among us without sin should cast the first stone.
Two weeks later he invited Imam Faisal Hammouda to speak at the Sunday service — an act that led to a huge backlash. People began to find tolerance tedious. Back at Moody, though, I was still staying up late, thinking about all those people who would suffer for eternity for never having heard the gospel.
By the end of the semester, the problem of hell had begun to seriously unsettle my faith — so much so that I had lost the ability to perform the basic rites. I left Moody the summer after my sophomore year and took a volunteer position with some missionaries in Ecuador, which was just an elaborate escape plan — a way to get away from Moody and my parents.
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I ditched my study Bible at a hostel book exchange and stopped going to church entirely. To be a former believer is to perpetually return to the scene of the crime. Bell wears hipster glasses and black skinny jeans. It was a light read. Bell sets out his prose like a free-verse poem, and roughly half the sentences are interrogative, a rhetorical style that seems designed to dampen the incendiary nature of his actual argument. He does not, as the Time headline suggests, make a case against the existence of hell. Rather, he argues that hell is a refining process by which all of the sins of the world, but not the sinners, are burned away.
Essentially, this is universal reconciliation — the idea that all people will be saved regardless of what they believe or how they conduct themselves on Earth. Love Wins created an uproar in the evangelical community. At the same time, a lot of evangelicals who seemed to have been harbouring a private faith in universal reconciliation defended the book. In the secular media, the theology of Love Wins was lauded as visionary.
From the Prison Within to Heaven on Earth
There was one moment while reading Love Wins where it seemed as though he might initiate a much-needed conversation about the meaning of hell. Toward the end of the book, he begins to mobilise a more radical argument — that heaven and hell are not realms of the afterlife but metaphors for life here on Earth. He recalls travelling to Rwanda in the early s and seeing boys whose limbs had been cut off during the genocide. But no such moment came. Love Wins succeeded in breaking the silence about hell, and its popularity suggests that a number of evangelicals may be ready to move beyond a literalist notion of damnation, reimagining hell just as God-fearing people across the centuries have done to reckon with the evils of their own age.
Bell claims to address the exact theological problem that motivated me to leave the faith, but rather than offer a new understanding of the doctrine, he offers up a Disneyesque vision of humanity, one that is wholly incompatible with the language biblical authors use to speak about good and evil.
The darkness of his past ancestry continues to haunt and discourage his hope of understanding the beautiful vision of his childhood, shared and painted by the artistry of his young sister. Many dark and deceitful secrets must be recovered and dealt with before the return of a beautiful Dreamwalker who is destined to help him regain the true wisdom of the heart in all its glory. Paperback - Trade Pages: Review This Product No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
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