No Jesus No Heaven No Salvation

The editor of "St. Anthony Messenger" magazine for many years, Fr. McCloskey has answered many questions in his "Ask a Franciscan" column. He mines that wealth of material to find the most helpful questions and answers for readers to help them see the connection between their faith and their spiritual growth as disciples of Jesus Christ.

“If there were a Guinness Book of World Records entry for ‘amount of times having prayed the sinner’s prayer,’ I’m pretty sure I’d be a top contender,” says pastor and author J. D. Greear. He struggled for many years to gain an assurance of salvation and eventually learned he was not alone. “Lack of assurance” is epidemic among evangelical Christians. In Stop Asking Jesus Into Your Heart, J. D. shows that faulty ways of present- ing the gospel are a leading source of the confusion. Our presentations may not be heretical, but they are sometimes misleading. The idea of “asking Jesus into your heart” or “giving your life to Jesus” often gives false assurance to those who are not saved—and keeps those who genuinely are saved from fully embracing that reality. Greear unpacks the doctrine of assurance, showing that salvation is a posture we take to the promise of God in Christ, a posture that begins at a certain point and is maintained for the rest of our lives. He also answers the tough questions about assurance: What exactly is faith? What is repentance? Why are there so many warnings that seem to imply we can lose our salvation? Such issues are handled with respect to the theological rigors they require, but Greear never loses his pastoral sensitivity or a communication technique that makes this message teachable to a wide audience from teens to adults.

Honesty. Humility. The purpose and future of the church. Useful and not useful parts of the Bible. A doctrine of salvation that includes mosquitoes. These are some of the topics dealt with in this controversial book. Written for those who still have hope for the church as well as those who don't, Wes Bergen's aim is to cast a vision of the church beyond divine fire insurance. Bergen's contention is that salvation is something that either happens here and now, on this earth, or not at all. Salvation is something that happens to bodies. More importantly, salvation is something that either will happen on this earth or we risk making the world uninhabitable by human beings. Souls are irrelevant when the air is dirty, the water is undrinkable, and there isn't enough to eat. These are the things that the Bible really cares about and form the building blocks for the salvation that God offers. This is also why this book is not about heaven. The Bible is not a manual for getting to heaven. The Bible cares very little about heaven and neither should you. Salvation is about what happens to bodies on Tuesday rather than what we do Sunday morning or what happens to souls after the body dies. Forget about heaven. Either you trust in God or you don't. Now get to work helping salvation happen.

A stunning reexamination of one of the essential tenets of Christian belief from one of the most provocative and admired writers on religion today “A scathing, vigorous, eloquent attack on those who hold that that there is such a thing as eternal damnation.”—Karen Kilby, Commonweal The great fourth-century church father Basil of Caesarea once observed that, in his time, most Christians believed that hell was not everlasting, and that all would eventually attain salvation. But today, this view is no longer prevalent within Christian communities. In this momentous book, David Bentley Hart makes the case that nearly two millennia of dogmatic tradition have misled readers on the crucial matter of universal salvation. On the basis of the earliest Christian writings, theological tradition, scripture, and logic, Hart argues that if God is the good creator of all, he is the savior of all, without fail. And if he is not the savior of all, the Kingdom is only a dream, and creation something considerably worse than a nightmare. But it is not so. There is no such thing as eternal damnation; all will be saved. With great rhetorical power, wit, and emotional range, Hart offers a new perspective on one of Christianity’s most important themes.