I think I’ve recommended this book before, but I’m reading it for the third time (because my students are reading it): The Doors of the Sea by David Bentley Hart (Eerdmans, 2005). It’s only 109 small pages in length, but it is one of the best books on God’s sovereignty and the problem of evil I have ever read. Which is not to say I agree with everything he says in it.

The subtitle is Where was God in the Tsunami? But it’s not just about that one terrible event or just about natural disasters. The book covers a lot of ground in just over 100 pages. Hart’s main opponents are deists of all kinds and divine determinists of all kinds.

Here’s a sample:

“There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of secondary causality–in nature or history–is governed not only by a transcendent providence [which Hart believes] but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But one should consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of–but entirely by way of–every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known: it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diptheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines (and so on). It is a strange thing indeed to seek peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome.” (99)

Powerful!

My response is: Hold the fire!  What does Bell say in that video that justifies accusations of heresy?  All I hear him doing is raising questions.  He doesn’t make any declarative statement that commits him to universalism or any other heresy.

The problem I have been pointing out here is NOT legitimate criticism; it is the tendency to jump the gun and assume what someone else believes or means based on very skimpy or non-existent evidence. 

In my opinion, anyone who reacts to that video negatively–with the intention of saying or implying that Rob Bell (based on the video) is teaching heresy–is theologically paranoid.  OR they just want to score points with their crowd by being the first to denounce Bell as a universalist.  Nothing in the video justifies the claim (whether explicit or implicit) that he is a universalist.

I await the book.  I hope others will do the same.  But I doubt all will.  My own experience of being in Bell’s shoes leads me to doubt it.  (As I explained in an earlier post I have been publicly accused of being an open theist and of denying the historicity of the Bible neither of which is true.)