In Christ alone Part 1

  I think a lot of people struggle with this issue but are too intimidated to talk about it. 
I think I have been some kind of Christian universalist for as long as I can remember, long before I had ever heard of Rob Bell or David Bentley Hart. The idea that God would send billions and billions of people to eternal hellish torment simply because they were born in the wrong part of the world and grew up in the wrong religious tradition has always repulsed me. I was raised in traditional, mainline Baptist and Methodist churches. There was never a time when I did not believe in God or Jesus. The first time I remember this being an issue for me was when I was in junior high and a friend who was Catholic told me that anyone who did not believe in Jesus was going to hell. My immediate reaction was to say “What about Moses?” My friend didn’t have an answer for that.
A few years later when I was in high school I went to a church camp and someone was passing out those little Chick Tract comics that had cartoon images of angels throwing hundreds of people into a huge lake of fire because they didn’t “believe” in Jesus. Once again, I was repulsed. I did not find it at all persuasive and rejected it. But I did not reject my faith, just this interpretation that kept being thrown at me. 
It was hard enough trying to rationalize a place of eternal damnation for truly bad people - I mean, how many years do you need to torture Hitler? A million years? A billion years? - but now it was not just bad people going to hell but lots of good people too whose only crime was not believing the correct political dogma. The unforgivable sin of incorrect belief! That just didn’t seem right. Is that really why we are here? To ‘believe’ the correct dogma so we can get an A on our test and earn our golden ticket to heaven? Nonsense!
As I went through my deconstruction/reconstruction phase over the next few years I held firm to my belief in God - life doesn’t make sense without a creator - and to my love of Jesus. But where I finally landed was the determination that love is ultimately the most important thing - more so than faith or belief or anything else we try to prioritize ahead of it - just as Paul states in 1st Corinthians 13:13. God wants our love most of all. He is not that concerned with what we think we believe about things. The Great Commandment is in two parts for a reason. The first part is to love God. But how does one love God? That’s where part 2 comes in - Love your neighbor. If you do that, then you are showing your love for God. You are following the Great Commandment. You are, in essence, “in Christ”.