For my first blog post, I wanted to share a theological wrestling match I had to be a part of over the last few months. Yesterday was the 4th of July, Independence Day, and we traditionally spend the time “Up North” in Lexington, Michigan. Our family has a cottage there and several generations have now come up to celebrate our nation’s independence year-over-year and now we have added a new tradition to our Lake Huron trips: burying the ashes of our loved ones. My father passed away this Valentine’s Day, February 14th and we buried his ashes on a hill at our cottage overlooking Lake Huron this Independence Day, joining his mother and father, whom we buried during another trip up there.

It was a hard experience, losing a parent and one that I knew was coming eventually but never expected. Amidst all of the emotions of knowing I’ll never see my father again, there was the confusion and quick reactions to planning needed when you are suddenly hit with the death and the need to make funeral arrangements. On top of having to handle the details of where my loved one was going to go to get cremated, wondering if it would be done in time for a funeral, questioning if I should just do a memorial without his remains, etc, I was dealing with another issue surrounding my father’s death: Where was my father now? Of course, I knew at all times where his remains were, but where did my father’s soul go?

I was raised in a household with love but without God or any religion for that matter. My dad’s philosophy on religion, and specifically Christianity, was that it was a corrupt organization like any other. The Holy Bible, he would tell me was, “a great piece of fiction to read.” He believed the book itself taught some valuable lessons but that you should take the actual stories with a grain of salt.

I recently became a Christian and received the call to ministry within a year of my father’s death, and we would have discussions around it, and near the end I feel he was coming around to the notion that not only was I a believer in a religion he didn’t believe in, but that I would be telling other people of my experiences and guiding them in that religion.

It wasn’t that my dad hated God. In fact, it wasn’t that he necessarily didn’t believe in God. My dad’s main issues were with how the “Church” used God to either profit from or control people, and had issues with what he considered the outlandish stories in the Bible being treated as fact. With these issues, however, my dad always raised me to believe what I want. His view on what other people believed was this: “Believer what you want to believe, or believe nothing at all. But no matter what, do it hard.” As in, whether you believe in God or not, stick to that belief (or non-belief) no matter what.

My dad, though definitely not a Christian, lived by Christian values. He honored his mother and father, he tried to do right by his children, he did to others as he would have them do, and he did his best to be a guide for us through life. With all of his opinions, he genuinely liked people and he wanted those he loved to have a good life, doing whatever was in his power to help that life in times of need, and to celebrate our successes with us. Though he had faults like any other man, my dad lived a decent life. But he was by no means a Christian. So the theological wrestling match between “Dad’s in Hell” and “Dad’s in Heaven” began.

There is a passage that seems to answer that my dad couldn’t go to heaven. In the Gospel of John, Thomas asks Jesus how they could know the way if they don’t know where he is going. “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me'” (John 14:6 NIV). This seems to suggest that since my dad didn’t believe in Jesus, he can’t come to the Father, who is in heaven. John the Baptist says about Jesus earlier in the gospel, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them” (John 3:36 NIV). Two different versus spoken by Jesus and John the Baptist, both saying something along the lines of, “Hey James. Your dad can’t go to heaven.”

I wrestled and contemplated and sought council about this issue for weeks, and on one occasion it made me question if I really should be continuing to be a Christian, if my dad and former atheist self were right all along and there can’t be a God, because if there was, why would He condemn my dad just for not believing in something even though he seemed to live generally by the rules of that religion?

I was still contemplating this up until my wife shared with me a story involving the Pope and a little boy with a question. Now, I am not a Catholic. I attend a Pentecostal church (although the pastor is the first to admit they are the “black sheep” of the collection of church campuses), although I consider myself an Ecumenical Christian. But I think as a Christian, I can’t to say I am not affected in some way by what the Pope says or decrees for the Catholics.

A boy asked the pope if his atheist father was in heaven. The first thing that comes to mind is, “Well, he was an atheist. He can’t be going to heaven.” But the Pope says something surprising, at least to me. He basically tells this boy that because his father was, and because God has the heart of a father, he is proud (You can see USA Today’s article and watch the interaction here).

This confirmed what I was struggling so hard to believe, because I desperately wanted to know for sure my dad went to heaven. I couldn’t bear the thought of my dad in hell. The Pope, the number one authority of God’s Will on earth in the Catholic faith, the leader of a denomination that even those who aren’t even of that denomination are affected by, said that this boy’s nonbeliever father was in heaven because he was good.

Then I remembered the passage of Matthew: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21 NIV). Whoever does the will of God gets the key to the kingdom? Surely my dad, who without him realizing it, gave me the freedom to find Jesus and who supported everything I did, was doing the will of the Father in heaven.

Thinking back on the verses in John that seem to condemn the nonbelievers to hell, I started thinking more about my views on the holy trinity that I discussed in my podcasts before, where it was explained in the beginning of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) And then later he writes: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 NIV).

The Word became flesh, saying that Jesus was the Word on earth. So when the verses speak of those rejecting the Son receives God’s wrath, I started thinking about the Son being “The Word became flesh” and started replacing “Son” with “Word” in my mind. Whenever they speak of following the Son, they are speaking of following the Word, and even though my dad didn’t believe directly in the Bible, he was living a life following the Word of the Bible, particularly loving those as you love yourself and the other commandments!

The Pope and the words written down so long ago have taken away my worries.

So, where does a good non-believer go? “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17 NIV). Do what I did and replace “Son” with “Word” and you have your answer.