Wrestling with the Good News

Three nights ago I dreamed I was alone in a hotel room. Spread across the bed were towering stacks of books and magazines about Christianity. They represented nearly fifty years of reading, questioning, underlining, highlighting, and hoping. I stood over them with the terrible realization that they had brought me no closer to certainty than when I began.

The dream carried me back to the age of seventeen, when Christianity first overturned my life. What seized me was not the promise of heaven but the terror of hell. I found myself unable to escape the thought that the universe might be governed by a God who had already consigned billions of people to eternal punishment. I never reconciled myself to the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, the idea that divine wrath could be satisfied only through the sacrificial death of God’s Son. Yet I was irresistibly drawn to Jesus himself. I wanted to imitate his humility, his freedom from ego, and his radical love for others.

For most Christians, the phrase “the Good News” evokes joy. For me, it always carried a shadow.

If the good news was that some of us could escape hell, then the corollary was that most of humanity would not.

That realization settled over me like a permanent winter.

I remember working at Jackson’s Wine and Spirits in Berkeley during college. One afternoon a familiar customer, a French immigrant, entered the store with his young son. The boy accidentally dropped a box of puzzle pieces near the register. His father patiently knelt beside him, gathered every piece, smiled gently, and placed them back into the box.

I watched them and felt an almost unbearable sadness.

Is this kind father destined for hell? Is his little boy? Is this really the central drama of existence—to rescue people from eternal punishment before it is too late?

I slipped into the walk-in beer cooler and stocked shelves because I needed somewhere to hide from my thoughts.

The strangest part of that season was the reaction of my Christian friends. They congratulated me on my conversion. They shook my hand and welcomed me into the family of God.

One afternoon my high school friend Kevin looked at my face after congratulating me.

“Aren’t you happy?” he asked.

I lied.

“Yes,” I said.

The truth was exactly the opposite. Even if I somehow managed to be saved, how could I rejoice while imagining that countless others—including decent, loving people like the French father and his son—were marching toward eternal torment? Salvation, as I understood it then, seemed to require emotional compartmentalization of a kind I simply could not achieve.

So I spent the next several decades reading.

Believers. Skeptics. Historians. Theologians. Agnostics. Biblical scholars.

I hoped that somewhere, hidden among thousands of pages, certainty awaited me.

It never arrived.

That is what the dream exposed.

I stood beside the hotel bed and realized those books represented an entire lifetime spent chasing certainty without catching it. My reading suddenly appeared fruitless, almost absurd.

Then I picked up one magazine.

Across the cover were the words:

The Good News.

I felt rage.

Those words mocked me.

The phrase marked the moment my childhood intuition of God as the source of boundless love gave way to a theological universe in which humanity stood beneath an infinite sentence, offered mercy only because divine justice demanded the execution of an innocent substitute.

And yet another voice interrupts my protest.

What if I have misunderstood the struggle?

What if my resistance has less to do with theology than with myself?

Perhaps I resist Jesus not because his demands are too cruel but because they are too demanding. Perhaps I prefer comfort to sacrifice, autonomy to obedience, self-interest to discipleship.

Jesus offers no comfortable religion. He tells his followers to surrender wealth, deny themselves, carry their cross, and lose their lives in order to find them.

His words continue to accuse me.

Many are called; few are chosen.

The gate is narrow.

Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say?

I want to answer him.

You told us your yoke is easy and your burden is light. Yet the doctrine of hell has never felt easy or light. It has filled me with sorrow. If my life’s mission is to save as many people as possible from eternal punishment, then existence itself becomes unbearably heavy.

And yet I cannot imagine a life entirely without you.

A purely secular existence devoted to comfort, consumption, and personal fulfillment strikes me as equally impoverished. Nietzsche’s Last Man, blinking contentedly amid endless entertainment and consumer pleasures, offers no compelling vision of human flourishing.

So I remain suspended between two worlds.

I cannot wholly embrace the traditional theology that first converted me.

Neither can I embrace a secular life emptied of transcendence.

Perhaps that is why my favorite biblical image has never been David slaying Goliath or Moses parting the Red Sea.

It is Jacob wrestling through the night with the mysterious stranger.

Jacob survives, but he limps for the rest of his life.

That limp has become the defining metaphor of my own existence.

For nearly fifty years I have wrestled with God.

The pain in my hip is the pain of never quite letting go.