When I was a student at Oral Roberts University, I went to Higher Dimensions Evangelistic Center one Sunday morning to hear Carlton Pearson preach. The sermon is still vivid in my mind, 25 years later. It had to do with Carlton’s childhood as a bed-wetter, and the fact that his grandmother was the only member of the family who would have any physical contact with him after he’d wet the bed. He used his grandmother’s unconditional love as a metaphor for God’s unconditional love of us, and it was powerful and beautiful and brought tears to your eyes.

At the time, Carlton was one of ORU’s favorite alumni — a former member of the singing group which appeared on Oral Roberts’ television program. He was second in the pecking order to Billy Joe Daugherty, another ORU alum, whose church met in the Mabee Center arena on the ORU campus and counted Richard and Lindsey Roberts among its members. (That was before Oral himself had left the United Methodist church.)

A few years ago, I read something about Carlton Pearson and some sort of theological dispute. But I didn’t follow it closely, and somehow over time I forgot the details and got some crossed wires in my head about what it concerned; I think I got Carlton’s controversy confused with that of another well-known Christian leader who had renounced the doctrine of the Trinity.

Anyway, I was following a Twitter post by GingerSnaps last night and discovered that MSNBC was running a documentary about Carlton Pearson. I tuned it in.

It turns out that what Carlton had actually done at some point was renounce the existence of hell and preach that God’s salvation was universal — just as we had no choice about being born into Adam’s sinful nature, he argued, Jesus’ death and resurrection saved everyone, and we would all be sanctified and welcomed into heaven, regardless of whether or not we had made any earthly decision to accept that salvation.

This teaching, it almost goes without saying, is completely counter to the evangelical understanding of the Bible. The producers of the MSNBC documentary made a particularly vivid comparison of Pearson to one of his critics — Pearson thought that Hitler would be in heaven, while the critic thought that Gandhi, because he had never accepted Christ, would be in hell.

I think the problem of hell is one that many Christians struggle with. There’s some cognitive dissonance there. On the one hand, our understanding of God as loving and forgiving and gracious makes us want to believe that there is hope for everyone. When you disagree with someone, you often believe that if only they understood the facts as fully and completely as you understand them, they would take your side. Christians have always believed that in the afterlife, our human limitations will be stripped away and we will be able to more fully understand God’s love, our own past sins, and other truths about the world. Surely, faced with those truths, someone who had rejected God in his or her earthly existence would recognize the folly of that rejection and would take the opportunity to accept God if it were offered. And surely, God would not be so cruel as to reject anyone who displayed honest and real repentance.

And yet, the Bible paints a clear picture of heaven, hell and the need for salvation — a picture that is so integral to the scriptural narrative that it’s not easy to cast away just because we want to believe in a warm and fuzzy God. I insist on God’s loving and forgiving nature, but I also believe the Bible to be a key to our faith, and I resist theologies which throw away parts of the Bible just because they are inconvenient or unpleasant. I believe that faith sometimes involves paradox.

We struggle constantly with the Bible in our current day and age. Even if you believe the Bible to be God’s divinely inspired and inerrant word, there is room for differences of opinion about how it is to be applied. The phone book, a newspaper story and a chemistry textbook are all “true,” but they are meant to be read and applied in quite different ways. What parts of the Bible are meant to apply to all eras, and what parts are directed to their immediate readers? What parts are meant metaphorically, and what parts are meant literally? When Bible scholars say that such-and-such a book of the Bible could not have been written by the historical figure to whom it has been attributed, is that arrogant revisonism, or a challenge for us to understand ancient literary customs? And who gets to decide?

The MSNBC documentary painted a very sympathetic picture of Pearson, and the fellow they chose to represent his detractors (I didn’t catch who he was) seemed rather cold. Pearson obviously has a gift for communicating God’s loving aspects in a way that many Christians don’t, as I discovered when I heard that sermon about his grandmother.

But I don’t believe I’m going to follow Pearson down that path. I think freedom of choice is the essence of the creation story. God created humanity so that we would be free to choose or reject him. The Christian story is that God, through Jesus’ sacrifice, offers us a path to reconciliation. We must reject legalism — the idea that salvation can or must be earned by specific behavior — but the Bible story, as it has been presented to us, indicates clearly that a decision is called for. There’s a whole Calvinist-versus-Arminian dispute over the nature, origin and mechanics of that decision, and I’m not going to get into that here. Can that decision be made in one’s last moment, without anyone else on earth knowing it has taken place? Absolutely. Can it be made in the afterlife? I can’t rule it out, and it would be the height of arrogance for me to claim to know exactly who is or isn’t going to be saved. But I fear that the automatic universal salvation put forth by Pearson is, while attractive, not Biblical. Based on what is put forth in the Bible, the decision to reject God has consequences — if not the cartoonish version of hell from popular culture, than a separation from God which is ultimately even more miserable. Am I comfortable with that? No. But I don’t know how to get around it without knocking the legs out from under my faith.

Pearson would, I imagine, say that evangelism is still important because living the Christian life and understanding one’s relationship with God during our earthly existence is its own reward, and the more people as we can bring that message to, the better. But that’s not how evangelism is portrayed in the New Testament. It’s portrayed with more urgency, as if it were a life-or-death matter.

All that having been said, while Carlton Pearson and i would have deep divisions on that particular point of theology, from what little I know of him I like him better, and he seems to have a more Christ-like spirit, than some of the other characters in the story. I might share many common theological points, plotted out on a chart, with Oral and Richard Roberts, but I think the TV evangelism which they practice leads its participants to pander, to self-aggrandize, to take shortcuts, to place too much of an emphasis on whatever the consultants say keeps the dollars flowing. Whatever else you can say about Carlton Pearson, he made a choice which cost him everything in terms of outward success because he thought it was the right thing to do.