Robbing the Bell Tower, a Finale

This is a continuation of a previous post that ended with this cliffhanger:

Which brings us back to Rob Bell and Love Wins.

A Reformed friend of mine asked me pointedly on Facebook if I would agree with calling Rob a false teacher now that the book had finally dropped.

After reading the book, my answer is, No.

I’m not going to ring the three-alarm gong, nor am I joining a team to announce that a heretic is among us.

But I do want to end this post with more in the way of a review; specifically, two serious FAILS from Love Wins, followed by, you guessed it, two serious WINS.

FAIL #1: The Authority issue.

Again, I am tipping my Protestant and evangelical hand here, but the fact is that Rob sometimes handles the source material, and especially the biblical source material, poorly and maybs just a wee bit disingenuously, throughout the book.

In other words, I’m granting that DeYoung, and others like him, at least have a point that holds. (Note the singularity of “a”.)

What this looks like is verses torn out of context in the form of prooftexting riffs that are nearly as impressive as those in the Westminster Confession. And as snippets of Scripture are thrown out that seem to be more universal in tone with respect to salvation and the next life, the balancing verses and passages – which may exist in the very same passages – are given virtually no play. It’s less than scholarly; and even though Bell himself may not be a scholar in the technical sense, every pastor needs to be more of a scholar than this.

Rob’s main offenses happen in chapter 4, entitled “Does God Get What God Wants?” (although there are others throughout):

And so, beginning with the early church, there is a long tradition of Christians who believe that God will ultimately restore everything and everybody, because Jesus says in Matthew 19 that there will be a “renewal of all things,” Peter says in Acts 3 that Jesus will “restore everything,” and Paul says in Colossians 1 that through Christ “God was pleased to…reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

At my church we are currently studying through Acts and recently plowed through chapter 3. So any dweller would tell you that right after that verse Rob quoted comes this: “For Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you must listen to everything he tells you. Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from their people.’”

So yeah, FAIL.

FAIL #2: The Universalism Issue.

I realize that Rob has clearly denied the label “universalist”, and the blogosphere is abuzz with folks contending that Rob is just like CS Lewis and not a universalist at all, etc., etc.

But let’s be real.

Chapter 4 at least contains a solid defense of classic universalism – you know, the kind where those who are judged to be wrong or unbelieving on Judgment Day are punished, or set right, or given a ‘hell’ for a time, during which they are purified, or their hearts are melted, and they all eventually freely choose to turn to God in a postmortem decision. And then they all go to heaven.

And in that way…love wins.

And I agree that Rob is careful to use language in this chapter that seems to distance his personal beliefs from the defense, language like, “…there is a long tradition of Christians who believe…” and, “…an untold number of serious disciples of Jesus across hundreds of years have assumed, affirmed, and trusted…”

But this, at least, seems clear:

Telling a story about a God who inflicts unrelenting punishment on people because they didn’t do or say or believe the correct things in a brief window of time called life isn’t a very good story. In contrast, everybody enjoying God’s good world together with no disgrace or shame, justice being served, and all the wrongs being made right is a better story. It is bigger, more loving, more expansive, more extraordinary, beautiful, and inspiring than any other story about the ultimate course history takes.

And that, I think, is a FAIL on his part – again, in not dealing with the text, and various views on the text, well.

But here’s the thing.

Rob balances out his vigorous defense in chapter 4 by restating his emphasis on free will towards the end. It’s a persistent theme that began in chapter 3: “God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it.” And again: “There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.”

Chapter 4 ends with Rob putting the tension back in place (while still emphasizing eventual universality): “Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choices? Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact.” And again: “It’s not ‘Does God get what God wants?’ but ‘Do we get what we want?’ And the answer to that is a resounding, affirming, sure, and positive yes. Yes, we get what we want. God is that loving.”

What, then, of the universalism FAIL? For me, the ‘next life’ aspect of Rob’s universalist tendency is not the biggest problem; it’s the ‘this life’ aspect that bothers me the most. If I were going to jump on the false teacher bandwagon – and still, I’m not, but if I were – this would be the reason.

Chapter 6, “There Are Rocks Everywhere,” is a diatribe on Exodus 17 and 1 Cor. 10 that is, again, taken well beyond what is warranted in either text. And Rob’s point is to universalize the experience of Jesus’ way and work across religious boundaries. ”As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion.” And again, “As soon as the door is opened to Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Baptists from Cleveland, many Christians become very uneasy… What Jesus does is declare that he, and he alone, is saving everybody. And then he leaves the door way, way open. Creating all sorts of possibilities.”

Universal, culturally contextual, Jesus-centered missionality is what we need, not a (sorry, Rob) vague, ubiquitous experience of divine peace and love within other faiths.

Now, the WIN’s.

WIN #1: The Right Questions.

Even as I write this review, I’m realizing that I’m relying on Bell’s chapter divisions a great deal.

I would even say that his chapter divisions are in and of themselves the nuanced reason why calling Rob a false teacher at this point would be wrong, divisive, and even reckless.

Namely, there is too much in certain chapters that commends him as one who loves Jesus and the Bible faithfully, within the pale of orthodoxy, despite his scholarly failures or creative contrivances in other places.

The first field upon which our author finds himself #winning is, incidentally, Chapter 1.

Chapter 1 lays down gatling-gun coverfire in the form of questions about heaven and (especially) hell – the kinds of questions that do not get asked, or if they do, are not really answered beyond simplistic platitudes or vitriolic rants, like one I heard in a sermon recently regarding the preacher’s baby granddaughter who is, apparently, “GOING TO HELLLLLL!” If folks actually took time to digest that screaming warning from the preacher concerning his own granddaughter, that God is the kind of God who would consign a baby to eternal torment in “the fires of hell” – I mean really digest it, and question it from every angle – then I doubt a single one could live with themselves while believing such a horrid and inhumane thing (if such a thing could honestly even be imagined by the human mind).

The fissure that is producing the current quake is being caused by these kinds of questions, and they are good questions leading us to a better future. They are actually leading the church to her only future.

That Rob has the courage to ask these questions is laudable, even if there is hyperbole, even if he overcompensates at points. He is asking them, and I would say that the only reason some of us “elders of the town” are becoming bold enough to try to answer them is precisely because he is asking them.

And if you want to call Rob a false teacher, fine: but do it only after answering his questions. Which, by the way, not a single critic has even attempted to do.

Here is a sampling of Bell’s coverfire:

Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?…

Some Christians believe that up to a certain age children aren’t held accountable for what they believe or who they believe in, so if they die during those years, they go to be with God…This belief raises a number of issues, one of them being the risk every new life faces. If every new baby being born could grow up to not believe the right things and go to hell forever, then prematurely terminating a child’s life anytime from conception to twelve years of age would actually be the loving thing to do…

If there are only a select few who go to heaven, which is more terrifying to fathom: the billions who burn forever or the few who escape this fate? How does a person end up being one of the few? Chance? Luck? Random selection? Being born in the right place, family, or country? Having a youth pastor who ‘relates better to the kids’? God choosing you instead of others?

On believing in Jesus to get to heaven: “When one woman in our church invited her friend to come to one of our services, he asked her if it was a Christian church. She said yes, it was. He then told her about Christians in his village in eastern Europe who rounded up the Muslims in town and herded them into a building, where they opened fire on them with their machine guns and killed them all… That Jesus?”

And most importantly: “Some Christians believe and often repeat that all that matters is whether or not a person is going to heaven. Is that the message? Is that what life is about? Going somewhere else? If that’s the gospel, the good news – if what Jesus does is get people somewhere else – then the central message of the Christian faith has very little to do with this life other than getting you what you need for the next one. Which of course raises the question: Is that the best God can do?”

WIN #2: The New Perspective.

One of the high points of the book was actually the reading list Rob includes at the end. Among them is The Great Divorce by Lewis, The Prodigal God by Keller, and, my favorite, Surprised by Hope by Wright.

I’m not trying to be mean, but I’d rather be reading any of these other authors than Bell. And I hope everyone who reads this review will go to these books for a far more balanced and biblical perspective on these kinds of things.

BUT, herein lies the most important contribution of Love Wins: Bell’s opening questions lead him to begin painting a picture in Chapters 2 and 3 that few of the critics are grasping – namely, a contextual perspective on the New Testament that sweetly resembles the work of Lewis and especially Wright.

This is what we need: a new perspective.

Rob wins by bringing eternal life into the present and exposing the marginalization of this life that happens in traditional heaven/hell emphases:

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking heaven seriously, now. Not because we’ve bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere.

And he gives a good defense of judgment and wrath, too.

The less important Chapters, in my view, are 5, 7, and 8. Certainly some folks are flipping out a bit about the atonement survey in Chapter 5, but it was only mildly concerning to me, and there is a good deal of truth in the fact that we need to think through the atonement and all its facets more deeply.

Chapter 8 is a winsome (evangelistic? pastoral?) invitation taken from Rob’s own experience of faith in Jesus, one that he sees as centered on the love of God made known through Jesus, a love that…wins.

I found myself finishing that chapter and feeling a rush of hope. Yes. Love does win.

And the love of God in Christ is right now paving a way forward for his people, that the work of restoration through Jesus and his Church might continue – winning – for another 2,000 years.

(That was longer than expected.)