endorsement from the new hampshire union leader. and occupy protestors in los angeles have received written orders to leave their encampment by midnight tonight. police say those who do not will be arrested. i m alex witt. see you in an hour. carlton pearson, the pentecostal bishop, would become a mega-preacher, a star, who had been invited to the center of influence, had staked it all, everything, on a change of heart. he d stopped believing in hell. and so he stood up in that big church of his, in front of his thousands of worshipers, and let it all out. and for the first time in all of my life as being a christian, i really not only love god, i started liking god. he called it the gospel of inclusion because it included everybody, not just christians or evangelicals or
downright dangerous, was putting people at risk to say the least. we have to look at fact the bible says the blind leaders of the blind shall they not both fall into the ditch? the bottom line is, he preached an erroneous message. are we going to believe what jesus says? jesus spoke 12 times more about hell than he did heaven. it did not take very long for the message to get around. carlton s hero, his father figure, oral roberts, was by all accounts crushed. it was more in sorrow than anger that the old evangelist sent his favorite student a long letter of rebuttal. this doctrine is as dangerous as any i have come in contact with in 66 years of ministry. i implore you, my dear one, please give it up. i feel this so deeply, i weep, i pray, i beseech, i plead. and then, in due course, the letter was followed by a decision to remove carlton from the board of regents at oral
thinking about my grandparents where maybe they re not in hell. maybe if they re already saved, if the cross and christ and all of that stuff really happened and is really spiritual, which i believe it is, then if he came to save the world, then the world is saved unless he s a failure. carlton began to question everything, including the bedrock belief of his own church. that is, if people did not accept jesus as their savior, they were bound to spend eternity in hell. if we don t come here and bow at those altars and light these candles and do what people do to appease the presumed angry god, you go to hell. that s the only alternative. carlton went back to his bible. he pored again over those greek and hebrew texts. the bible is like an idol. it s like an it s certainly an icon, but that s the greek word for idol. we swear on it. we keep it in our cars. lay it under our pillow when we are afraid. eventually, he said, he would come to only one conclusion. i respect the b
people and they give back to you in their presence and their smiles and their vocal response and we pulled a lot of rabbits out of hats. this was not just showmanship. he had a mission. because i presumed that most people would go there, i had a responsibility if i m benevolent to get as many of them out of hell. which that s the point of your services. of all services. of all the point of your life was to keep people from hell. absolutely. it wasn t we didn t come here just to worship god. we came here to avoid his hell. but, even then, the trouble had already wormed its way into his brain, though he hardly knew it. he d been studying the bible in the original greek and hebrew peppering his sermons with translations. and he couldn t help but notice some strange discrepancies. very often the king james version translation was different from the hebrew or the
fundamentalists. there would be conflicts of course, but surely, he, of all people, could convince his congregation and maybe the evangelical community to welcome his new idea, that everyone is saved, that hell as a place after death does not exist. so is it really authentically biblical to believe in the hell we ve been taught? but you don t always get what you wish for. my wife and i heard it on television. just outside tulsa, carlton s home turf, is a fiery old-time pastor named bill timms. timms had once been a mentor and friend to carlton. and now? well, this was a shock. he says they re all saved. and, if they re all saved, what s he preaching for? that ought to be the end of it. if jesus made the way for everybody and they re all safe and happy, what s he preaching for? worse, said timms, carlton s preaching about hell was