Hell and Headcovering

I'm back at it, after a year off!  (A lot has happened in that year, which will be the topic of future posts.)

For now, I am thinking about two topics that got me to Divinity School: hell and headcovering.

Hell was a Given for any person who grew up as an Evangelical in the '90s.  But as I pursued a call towards hospice chaplaincy, I needed to know what I believed about hell, for the sake of the dying.  During Divinity school, my own grandma, for whose salvation my family had prayed over 20 years, passed away, without becoming a Christian.  Could I honestly say she was going to Hell?

It was during that semester that I was reading Jurgen Moltmann's In the End--The Beginning: The Life of Hope, which framed Eternity and God's Justice in very nuanced ways.  Moltmann is an important theologian because he was writing in Germany after the Holocaust.  He truly had to wrestle with difficult issues!  For my final paper in Introduction to Theology that semester, I wrote about a Theology of Hospice, and that helped me to process my grandmother's death.

That semester, I was also enrolled in Introduction to New Testament, for which I wrote a paper on 1 Corintians 11 and the topic of Headcovering.  Headcovering had been a topic with which I'd wrestled as I left an intimate church community and an almost-fiance in 2012.  It symbolized competing values within Christian communities--on the role of women, complementarian marriages, and how to interpret Scripture through historical and cultural lenses.  I paid a price for living into what I felt was the person God had created me to be: spirit-filled, free in Christ, and bold for the Gospel.

My ex wanted a "nice, simple girl" who would submit to his leadership and ask no questions in church.  He has since gotten married, I've learned, and I hope his heart's desire has been fulfilled.

I went on to become a theologian, and my current field of study is Practical Theology, which puts diverse human lived experiences in conversation with our (often limited and damaging) interpretations of Scripture.  In the West, much of the ways we read and think were influenced by Greek Philosophy and the Enlightenment.  Much of Scripture should be understood from a Jewish and Middle Eastern perspective.  So what we say is "Biblical" in the American church is often already a skewed interpretation.

Divinity School was a liberative experience for me.  My view of God is much deeper and broader than it was before.  My ethos was always to follow Jesus wherever He leads.  Even if that means losing friends and a feeling of stability and security.  But that is the life of faith that every believer is called to--and neither Hell nor Headcovering can deter me from the One who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life!