guiding people and giving to people and they give back to you and in their presence and their smiles and their vocal response and we pulled a lot of rabbits out of hats. xbl this is 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 is point of your services? of all services. of all the point 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 that 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 greek. so it opened your eyes a bit? absolutely.
wouldn t do that to christians. i m thinking. they deserved hell? they deserved hell. it was right then, right at that moment that carlton pearson had a revelation. and i said, god, god i don t know how you can call yourself a loving god and allow these people to suffer so much and then just suck them into hell. and i heard i believe it was the spirit of god in saying, is that what you think we re doing? you heard this voice? yes, sir. and i said, that s what i ve been taught. he broke down, he says. he cried. he talked back at that voice in his head. god i can t save this whole world and that s when i heard that voice say, precisely. that s what we did. and if you tell them that they are redeemed, you wouldn t create those kind of problems. can t you see they re already in hell? clear as a bell, says carlton, he heard god telling him to preach this new message that hell is a place in life and that after death, everybody is redeemed, everybody. i immediately start
are you picking up the tales to tell the world there is no hell? from the kind of evangelical certainty, carlton had always believed before. to some christian churches that seemed prone to 1,000 doubts even as they celebrated the ancient ceremonies, all of them christians. so now carlton had come to his own radical conclusion about hell. and decided he was going to preach it. that he had to. how dare we attach that horrendous creation of a customized torture chamber to the loving, merciful god whose mercy endured forever? and what happened? oh my. coming up, carlton pearson was about to pay the price for his new convictions. i didn t think it would be anything like it was.
affected by my life s drama but i m not infected by them. i m not defected by them. and in fact, ain t nothing wrong with me. where you are going with this now? to the world. i now hear from mormon, muslims, jews, gays, quakers, agnostics, atheists. a whole world that i d never had any contact with. some of the greatest letters i have gotten about god are from atheists. and from agnostics. the gates of hell, say that, the gates of hell the gates of hell. will not prevail. and the boy who was born to preach belts out a message about hell, which is, according to millions of bible-believing christians, dangerous and illegitimate. my emotion is, i love him. i feel sorry for him. i weep for him. i cry for him. it makes you sad? oh, yes, so sad. and to other christians, it s
some cruel, pre-modern imagination? my god, i m just getting started. i m just now starting to kick the devil out of my life and out of my home and out of my family. you re about to meet a man who came face to face with hell. was singed by that fire. did you have any idea before you began to speak what events you were going to set in motion? didn t have a clue. his name is carlton pearson and he still lives to tell his tale. but as you will shortly see, he may have lost everything. here is where our story unfolds. sunday morning in the christian churches of america, for carlton pearson s is a uniquely christian story. though it s great central question is one with which all people must struggle some day. maybe later, maybe sooner. what happens after? is it certain, ominous, real?