Pastor fired by church over posting doubts about sinners going to hell on Facebook

Reverend Chad Holtz was dismissed from Marrow’s Chapel in Henderson, North Carolina, when he posted a note on his Facebook page supporting a book written by prominent young evangelical pastor Rob Bell.

Bell is a much publicized critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.

Two days after he posted the comments, Rev Holtz was told he had been dismissed after complaints from church members.

He said: ‘I think justice comes and judgement will happen, but I don’t think that means an eternity of torment.

‘But I can understand why people in my church aren’t ready to leave that behind. It’s something I’m still grappling with myself.’

The debate over Bell’s new book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived has quickly spread across the evangelical precincts of the Internet, in part because of an eye-catching promotional video posted on YouTube.

Bell, the pastor of the 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, lays out the premise of his book while the video cuts away to an artist’s hand mixing oil paints and pastels and applying them to a blank canvas.

He describes going to a Christian art show where one of the pieces featured a quote by Mohandas Gandhi. Someone attached a note saying: ‘Reality check: He’s in hell.’

Bell asks in the video: ‘Gandhi’s in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?’

In the book, Bell criticizes the belief that a select number of Christians will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven while everyone else is tormented forever in hell.

He writes: ‘This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.’

For many traditional Christians, though, Bell’s new book sounds a lot like the old theological position of universalism — a heresy for many churches, teaching that everyone, regardless of religious belief, will ultimately be saved by God. And that, they argue, dangerously misleads people about the reality of the Christian faith.

Rev Holtz said: ‘We do these somersaults to justify the monster god we believe in. But confronting my own sinfulness, that’s when things started to topple for me.

‘Am I really going to be saved just because I believe something, when all these good people in the world aren’t?