I was reading a book review by Christopher Hitchens some time ago when I started at something he wrote, something which seemed too outrageous even for a man who would go on to write God Is Not Great. He referred to what he understood to be a widely accepted Christian vision of heaven, namely, that it consists of all those who are “saved” standing and praising God in an eternal church service. That, Hitchens declared, sounds like what most people would consider hell.

My first thought, upon reading his audacious claim, was: Can he say that? There was more to the review, so unless he wrote the entire piece and then added that sentence as an afterthought, it seemed that God had not struck him dead. My second thought, the sort that slips out before our better training and self-righteousness kick in, was: I think he’s right.

I felt really guilty for thinking it. Thankfully there was no lightning. I suppose we all have blasphemous thoughts from time to time, or maybe it’s just the sinners among us. Only lately I’ve been thinking, maybe it’s not blasphemy. There is that bit about saints casting their crowns at the feet of the Lamb, but it’s not entirely clear, after all, that there won’t be food and naps and touch football, too. Further, there’s the original Garden, and Adam’s first, delightful work, before he got tongue-tied and failed to stand up for his woman in the moment of truth. Surely that’s evidence, isn’t it, that heaven will be more than one eternal church service?

But it’s interesting that this is what Hitchens absorbed as the Christian theory of heaven. I wonder if he absorbed, likewise, the doctrine that seems prevalent in some Christian circles, that of a perpetually furious God. It’s not an official doctrine, but a theme that emerges gradually from the lips of some Christians. Yes, Jesus loves us, yes, God is merciful, but oh boy are those homosexuals and Babylonians and a good many of our so-called brethren going to get it, and good.

I had a friend, a new Christian back when I wasn’t a Christian, who told me how he went to the front of his church and announced that a lot of people in the sanctuary were going to hell, where they were going to burn and burn and burn. Apparently someone got him started reading the Bible, and he was zealously working his way through the Old Testament. I’d already formed that impression, of God being really angry, from being dragged to my grandmother’s Baptist church as a child, as well as — oddly, given how little else we read in my high school — from studying “Sinners In the Hands of An Angry God.”

It’s at once unfair and telling to examine what someone picks up about a subject by random osmosis. Unfair, in this case, because an ignorant new Christian, an unrepresentative sample from a particular sect, and a hell-obsessed essay hardly constitute a definitive treatment of Christian doctrine. Yet this is how people formulate opinions about Christianity, isn’t it, through the random assemblage of what they read or what they hear a televangelist say or what someone who professes the faith tells them?

(At this point my Calvinist friends are gritting their teeth over my use of the word “random,” while my Limbaugh/Hannity/O’Reilly-following friends are shaking their heads that I didn’t list the biased media in my explanation for mistaken impressions of Christian doctrine.)

I suppose it’s like anything else, we gravitate to certain attributes of God, or certain elements of doctrine, and amplify them. Presbyterians talk about predestination, Catholics about the grace of Mary, and so on. So some of us focus on God’s mercy, and others on his anger, and I suspect that somewhere behind our fumbling recitations of doctrine is the true God, at once more majestic and awful than we can imagine. I’m sure I don’t understand him so well myself, even after these eleven years of wrestling. I’m just thankful none of us gets to define him.

When the Church has a problem it really has two problems. The first problem is the problem. The second problem is how to handle the first problem.

I have become aware of a controversy in the small circles I move in. It has to do with matters of doctrine — and doctrine is important to Christ: “But as for you, teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). “[The overseer] must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Titus 1:9).

So doctrine is nothing to go soft on.

Interestingly, however, one of the chief doctrines is love. The whole Old Testament is summed up in the doctrine to love God and love neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40). Moreover, love is the “aim” of all doctrine. While telling Timothy to stay put in Ephesus and “charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:3), Paul says, “The aim of our charge is love….” (v.5).

So how to you do that — hold firm to doctrine and hold firm to love?

There are some Christian controversies that are as old as the hills (millennium, baptism, Sabbath). Is it not possible that these have been around so long because the issues are genuinely “hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:16), and because each of the disagreeing parties has some genuine kernel of insight in his position?

Maybe controversies are God’s gift to the church to force us to listen to and love one another?