Where Mormons have erred, and erred egregiously, is in blindly failing to realize that God did not only intend heaven to resemble life here, but for life here to resemble heaven. Our task as Mormon Christians is not to ensure that we and all other human beings "go to heaven," as though heaven were entirely removed and far off. Instead, it's about dragging the heavenly future into the earthy present. We follow the commandments not because doing so will earn us frequent flyer miles for a nonstop postmortem evacuation flight to heaven, but because doing so equips us to serve God's children right here, right now, in the refugee camp that is this world. Bell writes:
It's very common to hear talk about heaven framed in terms of who "gets in" or how to "get in." What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he's interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.
Bell's book presents an unwavering emphasis on the kingdom of heaven as something that begins in the here and now. This is something that Joseph Smith understood intimately but that contemporary Mormons, whose pastel imaginings of heaven sometimes appear to stop with the blissful reunions of their own eternal families, have largely forgotten. The kingdom of heaven is not a vacation spa located somewhere else in a future, postmortem time. It is to be built here and now, brick by brick, by people committed to God's justice. Some of those people will be Mormons, and many more will not.
*To be fair to the critics, Bell's book, for all its strengths, is not particularly thorough on the idea of hell in the Bible, church history, or theological traditions. Evangelical readers who want more in-depth theological and biblical explanations of hell by two of their own should look to Sharon Baker's excellent recent book Razing Hell and N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope.
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