Heaven’s Doors: Wider Than You Ever Believed!
Winner of Silver Medals in Theology and Christian Thought in 2018 and 2024 Illumination Book Awards for exemplary Christian literature.
Summary
What happens to us after we die?
For the first 500 years after Christ, most Christians believed that God would ultimately redeem all of his creation. Hell was real, but it had a positive purpose, and it didn’t last forever.
Then beliefs changed. For the past 1,500 years we’ve been told that most of the billions of people who have lived on this earth will remain separated from the love and mercy of God for all eternity. The moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, sons and daughters, relatives and friends who have not exhibited the “right kind” of faith here in this life will suffer in hell forever.
But is that really true?
The idea of hell as a place of never-ending suffering is not taught in the Bible, although most people think it is. It’s a myth that was forced on the Christian Church by a power-hungry Roman emperor, was supported by a highly respected but misinformed cleric, and has endured for centuries because it became the status quo.
Heaven’s Doors exposes that myth. It explains both historically and Biblically how Jesus Christ succeeded in His mission to seek and save the lost. And it shows how the doors to heaven really are wider than you ever believed!
Endorsements
George Sarris has performed a splendid service in tracing the Christian view of universal salvation, which has deep roots in the Bible and in the Church Fathers. . . . Sarris’ book is gracefully written, deeply thoughtful, and based on careful scholarship; it deserves the widest audience.
David Konstan
Professor of Classics, New York University; Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature, Brown University
Evangelicals congratulate themselves on their willingness to submit to the final authority of scripture. Yet they also have cherished beliefs that they defend to the hilt . . . Quite rightly, George Sarris insists that even these beliefs should be subjected to the test of scripture.
Nigel G. Wright
Principal Spurgeon’s College London and Council Member of the Evangelical Alliance, UK
Hear Both Sides
Former professor and pastor Jack Deere holds to an eternal hell position and critiques Sarris’s evaluation of the scriptures and church history put forth in Heaven’s Doors. Read Deere’s Critique and Sarris’s Response to this weighty topic.
Critique
Jack Deere
Pastor, speaker and former professor at Dallas Theological Seminary
Response
George W. Sarris
Author of Heaven’s Doors
Additional
AWARD
Heaven's Doors . . . Wider than You Ever Believed! received the prestigious Illumination Book Awards Silver Medal in Theology from the thousands of Christian books published in 2017.
The book challenges many traditional beliefs about heaven and hell. It addresses Church teaching from the time of Christ till the present from a historical and Biblical perspective that the judges deemed "exemplary."
Winners were selected from publishers large and small, including HarperCollins, Zondervan, Oxford University Press, Faith Words, Thomas Nelson and Tyndale House Publishers.
Author George W. Sarris says the book exposes a 1,500-year-old myth about hell that began with a power-hungry Roman emperor, was supported by a highly respected but misinformed cleric, and has endured for centuries because it became the status quo. He says that for the first 500 years after Christ, Church leaders and laity believed that, ultimately, all the people God created will be in heaven.
"Hell is real," Sarris says, "but it doesn't last forever, and its purpose is to transform sinners, not torture them for all eternity. That's the only answer that's consistent with an all-loving, all-powerful God."
INTERVIEW
VIDEO PLAYLIST
