Jason Pratt has graciously offered me his review of Love Wins. I figured it was worth a look. ;)
So: is Rob Bell a
universalist?
This is what most people
want to know in regard to his book; and I would argue yes he is--but he doesn’t
think he is. Which leads to much confusion.
Christian soteriology can
be broadly divided into three categories: God persistently acts to save only
some sinners from sin; God acts to save all sinners from sin but not
persistently; and God acts persistently to save all sinners from sin.
Sometimes theologians,
through convenience, or for rhetorical purposes, or just out of sloppiness,
will speak as though the latter soteriology is true, even though when it comes
down to the wire they end up denying either the original persistence or the
scope of God’s salvation from sin.
Rob, in LW, claims and (to
some extent) defends both the persistence and the scope of God’s salvation from
sin, and doesn’t turn around later and deny one or the other. Consequently, he
falls squarely into the third category: and that’s universalism.
However, he overtly tries
to avoid claiming that God will certainly save all sinners from sin. This is
one reason why he thinks he is not a universalist (based on some interviews
promoting his book--the term itself is notably absent in the text of his book).
Another reason is because he very overtly denies that everyone will be
instantly saved from punishment by God after death. That’s a denial of
ultra-universalism, but it isn’t a denial of purgatorial universalism; and much
of what Rob writes indicates an expectation that hell can and will be
purgatorial.
Rob’s position is very
close to that of C. S. Lewis (of whom he is clearly a fan): God still tries to
save all sinners from sin after death; and God can be expected to succeed at
this to some extent. Rob goes a subtle but crucial half-a-step farther by
insisting (unlike Lewis, who expected otherwise) that God will never stop
acting to save all sinners from sin.
Rob allows that some
sinners may never-endingly refuse to repent of their sins. As indicated above,
this is one reason why he thinks he isn’t a universalist. But Rob refuses to
say that some sinners certainly won’t ever repent of their sins; and in
any case, so long as God continues to act toward saving them from their sins,
then the soteriology is still technically universalistic instead of being some
variant of Arminianism (which Rob hails from) or of Calvinism.
Moreover, Rob is extremely
insistent that “God gets what He wants”, i.e. “Love Wins”, and by this he
doesn’t mean God gets a permanent stalemate for love’s sake! Rather he exhorts
his readers to trust that God will be victorious. Considering how often he
references scripture testifying to God’s ultimate victory in bringing sinners
to repentance and confessional loyalty, his attempt at trying to back off in a
couple of places to allow for a God/sinner stalemate seems inept (one way or
another).
At any rate, Rob’s
opponents aren’t only being unfair or inaccurate to “out” him as a
universalist. The doctrinal evidence in the book adds up to that. And certainly
his publishers, if not Rob himself, have teasingly marketed his work along this
line. He has no one to blame but himself if opponents become annoyed at
evasions from him on this topic.
He has no one to blame but
himself for some other things, too. Rob is often unfair to his
opposition--which naturally leads them to bleed out of their eyes in decrying
him further!
For example, early in the
book he strikes out at the majority teaching on hell as being “toxic” and even
a crime against Jesus. Shortly afterward he wants his readers to appreciate the
“deep, wide, diverse stream” of Christian orthodoxy
“that’s been flowing for thousands of years, carrying a staggering variety of
voices, perspectives, and experiences” “in all its vibrant, diverse, messy,
multivoiced complexity”. This type of attitude that ‘the majority is trash but
we should appreciate all views for their contributions especially mine’ is a
worthlessly unfair double-standard, unless he actually puts his precept into
practice and starts pointing out the contributions of those other people whom
he decried a few pages ago. Yet, despite clearly sharing many beliefs with
them, Rob practically never gives them credit as such in their areas of
orthodox dialogue. Which is ironically similar to how his opponents are
treating him!--which he feels so upset about.
Later in his
first chapter, Rob implies that the Christian message of non-universalists is
merely that there is no hope. Again, an unfair rhetorical convenience, as of
course both Calvinistic and Arminianistic Christians (whether Protestant or
otherwise) preach there is some hope in God for salvation from sin. This
is exactly as bad, not remotely less so, as the type of straw-man
burning routinely tossed off by non-universalists against seriously dogmatic
Christian universalists. Sauce for their goose is sauce for his gander if Rob
does it, too. “But they’re doing it too!” is not a good excuse.
In his early
chapters, Rob frequently makes use of a strategy of rhetorically questioning
standard positions taken by his opponents, as if simply doing so without
discussing any of the issues involved, automatically reveals those positions to
be ridiculous and worthy of rejection. Using questions to bring out problematic
details is fair enough (as far as it goes); using questions to make an argument
from suspicious innuendo is cheating (to put it bluntly)--which his opponents
have rightly kvetched against afterward.
One of the
most inane statements in the book also occurs in the first chapter, when Rob
brings up an attempt at over-simply cutting through the knot of those questions
(by someone defending non-universalism thereby): “the real issue, the one that
can’t be avoided, is whether a person has a ‘personal relationship’ with God
through Jesus. [...] That’s the bottom line [according to these defenders]: a
personal relationship. If you don’t have that, you will die apart from God and
spend eternity in torment in hell.”
Rob’s sole
reply to this? “The problem, however, is that the phrase ‘personal
relationship’ is found nowhere in the Bible.”
This is
technically but worthlessly true, especially since Rob himself affirms
repeatedly in LW, not only that personal relationships are found in the Bible,
and that personal relationships with God are found in the Bible, but even that
personal relationships with God are treated in the Bible as being extremely
important and necessarily related (in one or more ways) to salvation!! The rest
of his book is practically crawling with references to the importance of
personal relationships, including in our salvation by God. He affirms each and
every one of those propositions--when it’s time to promote his idea. But
if an opponent dares (not even very aptly) to bring up the concept in defense
of their own idea? Well, the phrase “personal relationship” is found nowhere in
the Bible. Q.E.D. then!
(The critical
reader might hope that people wouldn’t be impressed by such a flagrantly
cheating tactic. But the critical reader should always get used to
disappointment: the last time I read through the book, 890 Kindle owners had
marked that precise passage.)
The first half
of his book is liberally salted with headslappers of this sort. Rob spends the
first half of chapter 2 complaining about a painting that used to hang on his
grandmother’s wall, and how it creeped him (and his sister) out as a child. Rob
shows the painting for his reader’s convenience; but perhaps he shouldn’t have
done so, because strictly speaking it would be difficult to find a painting
that visually showed more hope for the broad, secure, open-gate salvation of
souls out of an apparently-now-empty hell by way of the cross! Yet he’s still
so upset by it that he’s willing to deploy Christ’s warning about how it’s
better to be drowned than to cause a little child to stumble (though he tries
to deny that he really means to apply that to this picture. The reader
could be excused for thinking otherwise.)
As far as
Rob’s concerned, the “fundamental story” being told by the painting, is not
salvation through Jesus (and the cross of Jesus), not Christ’s salvation
being strong and safe and clear, not heaven’s gates being open to all
who come by Christ, not Christ being the only Way--not even (so far as
the painting indicates, probably by accident) hell being left empty and
abandoned thanks to the cross of Christ--but only that “it’s happening
somewhere else. Not here.” (Yes, Rob complains about this picture of
salvation out of hell happening somewhere other than here, while
spending most of the book complaining that people don’t teach
post-mortem salvation including out of hell!)
Later, when he
wants to complain about Christians not pursuing social justice in this life, he
neglects to mention that Arm and Calv Christians both have long histories of
pursuing social justice in this life. Rob spends some time (in chapter 2 and
afterward) making strong points about how our attitude and what we do with our
lives here and now, makes a difference in how we will be living (for better or
for worse!) in the new world to come. But since all Christians teach that, the
point becomes problematic when he wants to show he’s doing something different.
Consequently, he asks afterward when trying to contrast himself to those
teachers over there who think “we’re going somewhere else”: “if you believe that
you’re going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else [his emphasis],
then why do anything about this world?”
But Christian
teachers don’t teach we’re going somewhere else, unless they’re poorly educated
gnat-wits who don’t notice that the imagery of this world being destroyed is
balanced and exceeded by promises of this world being remade. And even if
they’re poorly educated gnat-wits, or even if it was in fact true that we’re
going “somewhere else”, Rob himself already explained why people going “somewhere
else” could and should still be morally expected to do justice here and
now!--not only because it’s right to do what is morally right anyway wherever
we are, but because it makes a difference now in the kind of persons we’ll be
later!
But since his
opponents can and do easily agree with him on this, he can’t just acknowledge
that this would be true even if we’re going somewhere else (although we’re not)
and even if his opponents taught we’re going somewhere else (which by and large
they don’t). So Rob insinuates by a question that because they believe heaven
will be somewhere else other than a transformed earth (which they may or may
not believe) then it makes no difference whether we do justice here and now
(which they definitely do not believe!)
His rhetorical
construction can be over-conveniently sloppy, too. For example, early in the
book (while trying to vaguely claim that just because many people before him
have taught and celebrated the same thing this in itself somehow makes
what he’s doing “orthodox”), Rob insists that his “teaching” isn’t “any kind of
departure from what’s been said an untold number of times”. But those people
who possess this thing called ‘memory’, will recall that the whole point
of the first part of his preface, a couple of pages previously, was that he’s
departing from what has been said an untold number of times and it ought
to be departed from!--because that other teaching, taught by the majority
to the overwhelming majority an untold number of times, is toxic and a crime against
Jesus, etc.
Later in chapter 2 he
overstresses his attempt at trying to show that “eon” (and its related cognates
in the Bible) sometimes doesn’t mean “forever”--a true and important
observation, but then he states that the adjective version “is an altogether different word from ‘forever.’”
And then he shows what he means by an altogether different word: “Let me be
clear: heaven is not forever in the way that we think of forever, as a uniform
measurement of time, like days and years, marching endlessly into the future.
That’s not a category or concept we find in the Bible.” When he tries to put it
that way, he not only instantly sets himself up to be refuted by obvious
counter-examples, he instantly contradicts himself and his own stressed
affirmations elsewhere--even nearby in this chapter, where he insists very
strongly (as well as later in his book) that God is acting to bring about a
world of perfect love and justice that will, once established in the next life
(however long that takes), go on forever in just the way he denies
heaven means ‘forever’ back here: as a matter of human and natural history.
Rob ends up
implying those self-refutations because he’s trying to cheat on his opposition
again. In order to avoid even the idea that hell might be ‘forever’ the way Rob
himself thinks God and the life of the age to come (i.e. heaven) are
‘forever’, Rob ends up directly (though not explicitly) denying that God and
the life of the age are forever. While also affirming that, of course, they
are.
To put it
mildly, he could have handled this point a lot better. But his opponents
are not likely to do that work of handling it better for him. They’re likely to
hysterically reject his attempt, the end, period.
Despite very
much good material in the book (not much of which I’ve mentioned yet), the
first half of it is peppered by this type of cheap hucksterism. His (twice
repeated) claim that he is going to talk (and has talked) about “every single
verse in the Bible in which we find the actual word hell” is another example of
that. (In short: no, he doesn’t. But he really, really, really wants his
reading audience to think he has covered everything in the Bible from which
Christians throughout history have derived beliefs and doctrines about hell.) When Rob’s opponents nuke him from orbit for trying
to hide his non-scholarly approach from critique behind his popular audience,
while he himself makes claims he expects his audience to take seriously as
though he was a scholar, and even outright and intentionally misleads his
audience: things like this are why.
The second half of Rob’s
book is much stronger, although there are plenty of good things in the first
half, too (despite the occasional ineptitude and outright cheating.)
I may not like the
question-spamming style of his first chapter, for example, but after a while he
begins making good use of it to help get across why there has always been a lot
of discussion among Christians on the issues raised by various things: starting
from a question about whether there is such a thing as an “age of
accountability” and the various doctrinal variants that this question leads to
in trying to answer it. His development of those threads reaches practically
epic levels. I especially like how he develops the
point that you might have people rejecting Jesus because of how His followers
lived, and how this is connected to the attempt to simply solve the prior
questions by saying “all that matters is how you respond to Jesus.”
Ironically,
considering how he has been often painted by his opponents, Rob critiques
doctrinally wimpy ways of trying to deploy that answer, emphatically
emphasizing that some Jesuses (Jesuii?) should be rejected. That’s a question
of claims rightly or wrongly representing Jesus (and God)--thus a claim about
ortho-doxy (right representation, right teaching, right praise)!
Rob throughout
the book rejects the notion of earning our salvation from God by our works; and
in Chapter 1 (as well as later) he goes so far as to include a challenge to
treating our ‘faith’ as a ‘work’ to earn God’s salvation. That may be annoying
to people who preach such a thing!--but it’s technically and aptly (and by
cited scriptural examples from the Gospels) very correct. And yet Rob is also
savvy enough to realize that the Gospels and the Epistles feature quite a few
places where different criteria of ‘salvation’ seems to be applied. “Is it what
you say, or who you are, or what you do, or what you say you’re going to do, or
whether you stand firm in what you say you’re going to do, or who your friends
are, or who you’re married to, or whether you given birth to children, or what
questions you are asked, or what questions you ask in return, or is it the
tribe, or family, or ethnic group you’re born into?” So he doesn’t over-simplify
his answer as if these incidents and statements don’t exist.
Rob is
entirely correct, and Biblically accurate, to preach (as in Chapter 2 onward)
that heaven isn’t only a post-mortem goal to attain to; the kingdom of God is
something we ought to be also bringing about in this age right now. If
we don’t even try, we’re like the man in the parable who buries his coin
instead of going out and doing business under the sign of our Lord!
Similarly,
eternal life (or ‘eonian life’ to transliterate it a bit more literally) is
something we Christians can and should be participating in here and now. It
isn’t only something for us after we’ve died and ‘gone to heaven’. Relatedly,
eonian (i.e. “eternal”) life isn’t primarily about living continuously forever.
It’s a qualitative statement first and foremost, not a quantitative one. Rob
agrees that those who live a Godly life will go on living forever (after they
die and are resurrected, just like those who live a life in impenitent
rebellion against righteousness Himself!), but the two concepts are not the
same thing.
His discussion
of the Gospel incident of the wealthy young ruler coming to beg Christ to say
what he should do to inherit eternal life, is pretty good, even though Rob
strangely avoids mentioning the implications of Jesus substituting the
following of Himself with the following of the ‘first tablet’ of the Ten
Commandments! Rob doesn’t deny that following Jesus is necessarily connected to
having (and enjoying!) ‘eonian life’. He affirms it plenty of other places. But
it’s hard (for me anyway) to avoid thinking that he avoided this important
detail because he didn’t want to distract readers with how important
it is to follow Jesus for having eternal life!
He has a tough
row to hoe in this book already, against standard reader expectations (whether
religious or irreligious). I can understand him wanting to avoid adding to his
problems. But by trying to avoid problems here, in this way, he only gives
opponents more ammunition to hang him with (so to speak!)
Other than
that, his discussion of the rich young chief features some of his best and most
quotable writing in the early chapters. “That’s why wealth is so dangerous: if
you’re not careful you can easily end up with a garage full of nouns.” Awesome!
And there are loads of other great things in that chapter: the faith of the thief on the cross, which is so
much less than what Christian teachers often insist upon for salvation, but
which Jesus accepts and immediately rewards. “According to Jesus, then, heaven
is as far away as that day when heaven and earth become one again, and as close
as a few hours.” The comparison between the poor abandoned mother of great
character in the eyes of God, faithful with what little she has been given; and
the beautiful, rich, famous, talented people endlessly embroiled in scandal and
controversy who waste their talents and their money. The sheep in the judgment
who are surprised to find out they’ve been serving Jesus all along, compared to
those who are sure they’ll get in but are turned away by Jesus.
While he
stumbles several times in Chapter 3, when trying to broaden readers’
understanding of how the Bible treats ‘hell’, Rob does have several good points
to make here, too; one of which is that we find “[W]e find in the scriptures... a more nuanced understanding that sees
life and death as two ways of being alive.” I like how Rob (via an example from
Moses in Deuteronomy) extends the practical application to here and now, as
well as in regard to what happens after our bodies die. “The one kind of life
is in vital connection with the living God, in which they experience more and
more peace and wholeness. The other kind of life is less and less connected
with God and contains more and more despair and destruction.” He even spends much
of that chapter discussing the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, as an
example of what happens (even in the next life) when we get into the habit of
rejecting God, including by refusing to care for those in need. The Rich Man
has died, but he hasn’t died the kind of death that brings life, the kind of
death the gospel of God calls us to die. “He’s alive in death, but in profound
torment, because he’s living [after death] with the realities of not properly
dying the kind of death that actually leads a person into the only kind of life
that’s worth living.” “There are individual hells, and communal, society-wide
hells, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously. There is hell now, and
there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.”
Rob marshals an impressive
list of OT references (in Chapter 3) where the point is, not necessarily that
God is prophesying the restoration of slain rebels after the resurrection to
come (although that, too, sometimes!), but at least that the purpose of the
punishment of God is hopeful of reconciliation. And not only positively
hopeful, but prophetically certain of success, too!--whether the references are
read as meaning only survivors or descendents of survivors, or of those who are
raised to live again in the Day of the Lord to come.
Rob’s book really starts
to strengthen from Chapter 4 onward, though; not least because he somehow
manages to discuss the opposition with fair sympathy while also trenchantly
critiquing their positions. This chapter also makes it somewhat clearer that
Rob is mainly writing as an Arminian to fellow Arminians, agreeing with them
about the scope of God’s saving action, and insisting (in effect) ‘But look,
the Calvs are right about God’s sovereign capabilities and persistence, too!
And look what happens when we put it together!’ This means it shouldn’t be
surprising if Calvinists attack Rob’s book more gung ho than Arminians do
overall. (Which by the way seems to be the case.) It isn’t only that they’re
ignoring how much he agrees with them, specifically concerning the persistence
of God to salvation (although if they’re fair critics they ought to be
stressing his agreement on this); it’s because Rob takes the scope of God’s
active salvation as being obviously obvious, or at worst easily established.
(Although he does take the time to make what is at least a very suggestive
scriptural case for the scope of God’s salvation. I especially like his
references to OT scriptures affirming that God is the Father of all humanity
(not merely the creator of all humanity). He doesn’t only quote that famous
verse from 1 Timothy 2, where God wants all people to be saved and to come to a
knowledge of the truth, as though that settles the matter.)
While Calvinist readers
may complain (somewhat rightly) that Rob doesn’t give enough attention (more
like no attention!) to Calvinist concerns about apparent Biblical testimony
that God acts to save some and not others; Calvinist readers ought to be able
to jump up and down agreeing with Rob in his stress on God’s competent
persistence. “This God simply doesn’t give up. Ever. [...] In the Bible, God is
not helpless, God is not powerless, and God is not impotent.”
Moving into
Chapter 5, Rob critiques the vaguery (and vapidity) of the popular prevalence
of the cross even in Christian culture, but adds that Christians can also
become so familiar with the cross that even statements like “Jesus died on the
cross for your sins” can lose their meaning--or meanings. Rob reports several
ways New Testament authors described what was accomplished at the cross, and
insists that all should be accepted and deployed without trying to minimize or
eliminate any of them. He does tend to deny the most popular concept of
vicarious penal substitution, but he does so on grounds of avoiding intentional
schism between the Persons of God, i.e. on grounds of trinitarian theism
doctrine (although he presents it in as non-technical a fashion as possible.)
He falls a bit foul of leaning on the language of post-modernism when addressing
this issue, which can understandably lead some people to think he’s being merely
metaphorical about the meanings of the atonement. But only if they’re merely
thumbing through the book and not paying sufficient attention. Ultimately, the
common thread he identifies between the multiple meanings is “enemies being
loved”; and that shouldn’t be controversial for any Christian at all to accept.
Rob’s
discussion of reconciliation and atonement is strongly oriented toward
peacemaking, specifically God bringing man to be at peace with God and man
through Christ. While this emphasis may bother some opponents because, if
accepted, it leads to a universalistic interpretation of various scriptural
testimony (especially in Colossians), that’s very different from having a
weakly defined or non-existent notion of atonement!
Rob stresses
the importance of the unity of the cross and the resurrection together, not
only as historical events, but as a cosmic event that “has everything to do with how every single one of
us lives every single day. It is a pattern, a rhythm, a practice, a reality
rooted in the elemental realities of creation, extending to the very vitality
of our soul. When we say yes to God, when we open ourselves to Jesus’s living,
giving act on the cross, we enter into a way of life. He is the source, the
strength, the example, and the assurance that this pattern of death and rebirth
is the way into the only kind of life that actually sustains and inspires.” Any
Calvinist or Arminian, Protestant or otherwise, ought to be able to agree with
that.
What impressed me most,
however, was that Rob’s Chapter 7 is the key to his whole book--and this key is
Jesus Christ as the life-giving Word of God incarnate, Who acted (and Who acts)
to convict people of their sin and lead them to repentance and salvation; the
Word Who is the living action of God and so is God Himself; Who brings order
out of chaos, indeed brings even the chaos of the universe into existence, and
continues to give life to all things.
Rob testifies that God,
this ultimate God, became a man, and challenges his readers as to whether they
are open or closed to that.
Rob very explicitly and specifically rejects the
inclusivity that thinks all religions are equally true, or that good people
will get in on their own merits by having their actions measure up enough, by
earning their way into the kingdom.
Instead Rob Bell insists
Jesus is the only way, exclusively the only all-embracing, saving love and Way.
What Rob rejects is not
the exclusivity of Christ as the only Way of salvation, but the exclusivity of
Jesus acting only to save some, of being the Savior only of some, instead of
being the real, true, one and only Savior of all (though especially of
those who believe).
Opponents have
plenty to shoot at in Rob Bell’s Love Wins; and even plenty to shoot at worth shooting at. But
fairness to the opposition cuts both ways. Readers paying attention only to
reviews of his book, need to be aware when his reviewers themselves cheat
against him.
Anyone who
tries to paint Rob as not caring about correct doctrine (especially concerning
Jesus) is flatly outright wrong. Rob strongly cares for what are and are not
correct claims about Jesus--which after all is one big reason for why he is
writing this book!
Anyone who claims
Rob denies the necessity of a personal relationship to God through Christ for
salvation, is flatly outright wrong. (Even though Rob does one asinine thing
himself, in being unfair to his own opposition, which could open himself to
this critique.)
Anyone who
claims Rob preaches a gospel of salvation by our works, is flatly outright
wrong. That includes bringing up his reference to Ghandi: I can confidently say
in Rob’s favor that he was only using Ghandi as a stock popular figure of a
‘good non-Christian’ (very briefly, at the beginning of Chapter 1) in order to
introduce issues he discusses elsewhere. He makes it very clear later that he
doesn’t mean Ghandi (or anyone else, including any Christians!) earned their
way into heaven by being ‘good’. (Although, since Rob’s main strategy
throughout this chapter, as well as the preface to some extent, is to throw
“challenging questions” at the reader, with at least some intention of
making implied arguments from suspicious innuendo along the way, he has only himself
to blame if opponents totally misread his reference to Ghandi as being a
typically non-Christian hidden argument to the effect that people can be good
enough to earn their way into heaven without being a Christian. But they’re
still totally misreading it.)
Anyone who claims Rob denies the existence of heaven after death, is
flatly outright wrong. They’re even flatly outright wrong if they claim Rob is
primarily interested in social justice for this life. He’s interested in
justice being accomplished, including socially, in this life and also in
the next.
Anyone who claims Rob denies that ‘heaven’ and God continue forever,
is flatly outright wrong. What Rob denies is that a particular adjective
primarily means this. (He isn’t very apt about how he does this sometimes,
particularly when he’s cheating against his opposition, which leads him to
overreach ridiculously in some things he says about this topic; but that’s a
different kind of criticism.)
Anyone who claims (or even implies) that Rob teaches everyone will
go to heaven ‘regardless’, is flatly outright wrong. Even as early as his
chapter on heaven, Rob warns that heaven, meaning God and God’s own life,
brings judgment against sin. “Heaven comforts, but...
heaven also confronts. Heaven, we learn, has teeth, flames, edges, and sharp
points. [...] Jesus brings the man hope, but that hope bears within it
judgment. [...] Jesus makes no promise that in the blink of an eye we will
suddenly become totally different people who have vastly different tastes,
attitudes and perspectives. Paul makes it very clear that we will have our true
selves revealed and that once the sins and habits and bigotry and pride and
petty jealousies are prohibited and removed, for some there simply won’t be
much left. ‘As one escaping through the flames,’ is how he put it.”
And that’s in
his chapter on heaven! Rob puts things just as strongly, or even moreso, in his
subsequent chapters (including the one on hell.) But even in his chapter on
heaven he writes: “It’s important to
remember this the next time we hear people say they can’t believe in a ‘God of
judgment.’
“Yes, they can.
“Often, we can think of
little else... every time we stumble upon one more instance of the human heart
gone wrong, we shake our fist and cry out, ‘Will somebody please do something
about this?’
“[...] Same with the word
‘anger.’ When we hear people saying they can’t believe in a God who gets
angry--yes, they can. How should God react to a child being forced into
prostitution? How should God feel about a country starving while warlords hoard
the food supply? What kind of God wouldn’t get angry at a financial scheme that
robs thousands of people of their life savings?
“And that is the promise
of the prophets in the age to come: God acts. Decisively. On behalf of
everybody who’s ever been stepped on by the machine, exploited, abused,
forgotten, or mistreated. God puts an end to it. God says, ‘Enough.’”
Anyone who claims Rob doesn’t take hell seriously, is flatly
outright wrong. He doesn’t take hell hopelessly; in that sense he
doesn’t take hell as seriously as he takes God! Or in Biblical terms, he
refuses to claim that where grace exceeds sin hyper-exceeds for not as the
grace is the sin! But such a refusal is not the same as refusing to take hell
seriously.
Similarly, anyone who claims Rob doesn’t take sin seriously, is
flatly outright wrong. He may talk more often about sins against other people,
but he does talk often about such sin, and he goes on to connect such sin
against other people as also being sin against God Most High--even when the
people who commit the sins are ‘Christian’ in nominally formal terms.
Again, anyone who claims
Rob is only concerned about some kind of corporate or abstract social justice,
and not about personal morality, is flatly outright wrong. Rob emphasizes both.
Without teaching and addressing individual concerns, the larger corporate
concerns (which are comprised of individuals!) will have nothing to work with;
but unless individuals put morality and understanding into practice, there is
no hope of reforming the corporate behaviors of humanity. (Now or in the life
to come post-mortem.)
In regard to the cross,
anyone who claims Rob rejects or undermines any meaning at all for what Jesus
accomplished with His death, is flatly outright wrong. Rob acknowledges
multiple meanings from scriptural testimony and insists that all should be
accepted and promoted. While it’s understandable that opponents who accept and
promote typical varieties of penal substitionary atonement should pick on Rob
for effectively denying this, they should at least mention and address the real
reason why he does so: to avoid a trinitarian heresy (be that right or wrong).
And they shouldn’t pretend he has no notion of the atonement at all.
Most of all, anyone who
claims Rob simply preaches some other God than orthodox trinitarian theism, is
flatly, bluntly, wildly, unfairly and outright wrong. Rob’s key chapter,
on which his whole book stands or falls, preaches orthodox Christology, neither
confounding the Persons of the Father and the Son (and the Spirit, although
like many popular preachers Rob doesn’t complexify things for readers by
talking much about the Holy Spirit), nor dividing the Substance; and affirming
the two natures of Christ, fully human and fully divine, acting historically as
the Son Incarnate with one will and in one person. He doesn’t go into technical
detail about this, but that’s where he stands, and that is Who he is preaching.
Rob Bell preaches Christ,
the one and only Lord Most High and Son of God; and he preaches Christ
crucified: drawing all men to Himself when He is lifted up from the earth,
giving His flesh as bread for the life of the world.
Rob takes Jesus Christ
that seriously, and he takes salvation from sin in Jesus Christ that seriously.
And Rob’s opponents, even
if they believe they have to oppose him on some points, ought to take him
seriously enough to recognize he takes Jesus Christ that seriously.
Rob insists (quoting from
John 14 even) that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the one and only
uniquely begotten Son of God, and that no man comes to the Father but through
Him.
And if someone “reviewing”
Rob, on video or in print or on the internet, doesn’t acknowledge all this-- then that is no real review of Rob Bell at all.
JRP
