This American Life

Been listening, at Michael's suggestion, to the latest This American Life, which is about Carlton Pearson. This is a pentecostal preacher who stopped believing in hell (or, more accurately, in the traditional teaching of hell), and embraced a kind of universalism.

There are many things that interest me about this story. Here's just one:
T.D. Jakes, one of Carlton Pearson's proteges, criticized Carlton as a heretic. But what is interesting to me about that is that T.D. Jakes is non-trinitarian (he appears to believe in modalism).

So, Carlton Pearson disbelieves in hell, which makes absolutely no appearance in the Nicene Creed, or any creed of the early church, save for one word in the Apostolic Creed ("he [Jesus] descended into hell"), completely loses his flock and is trashed regularly for a year or more in conservative magazines to which his flock subscribes and bookstores that his flock shops, and is widely and openly criticized by prominent pastors, eventually losing his church.

But T.D. Jakes denies a fundamental tenet of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christianity, denies the Nicene Creed (as well as the Apostolic, Chalcedonian, and Athanasian creeds), and yet is considered the most influential black pastor in America with a flock of 25,000+.

WHY?

UPDATE:Here's a second reaction. One of the things that the interviewees talk about is how -- now that they are on the other side -- how insensitive they were to other people's faiths. Now that they have people who walk up to them and tell them that they are going to hell because they go to Carlton Pearson's church, they understand how insensitive they were to other people when THEY were the ones who went up to "non-believers" and told them that they were going to hell unless they believed what they wanted them to believe.

UPDATE 2: A third observation: I see again why God provides a Dark Night. I very much identify with Carlton Pearson's statement that said that if he KNEW where he would end up, what pain he would go through, when he started, he wouldn't have done it. So thank God for the dark night, for the mystery, for the cloud of unknowing which leads us where we would not want to go, until we get there.