Rob Bell has been attacked and castigated because of this book. After reading it, I wonder why. Certainly, messing with hell is a great way to be seen as a complete heretic in certain circles (just ask Carlton Pearson). There is only a passing mention of hell in the creed and, as Bell points out, very little in the Bible about it. So some questioning is certainly in order in a biblical and even evangelical view of things.
He's been accused of universalism, which is unfair. Bell's questioning comes from a doctrine about which we have an enormous amount of biblical and theological agreement, namely, the goodness of God that leads God to seek the salvation of all people. The central question of the book is, How can we believe in a completely loving God who seeks reconciliation with all humanity and yet hold that this God condemns those who do not readily accept his love through his Son (by name!) to eternal torture?
Hopefully, every thinking and feeling Christian has also wrestled with this question. Rather than settle on one answer, Bell explores a number of biblically supported possibilities. He describes the view that salvation is through Christ alone, but that Christ's sacrifice and love is effective enough to eventually save everyone (this is Barth's view and is not exactly the same thing as saying that God is just nice enough to accept everyone into heaven). He explores the view that people who follow the voice of conscience are responding to the eternal Word of God that was expressed in Christ through the Incarnation whether they recognize the name of Jesus or not. He also explores the view that heaven and hell are existential responses to the unmitigated presence of God--this view holds that heaven and hell are not places, but are ways that the presence of God are experienced in the next life based on our response to God's presence. Augustine and CS Lewis suggest something similar.
Bell's great contribution is to expand the concept of redemption and God's plan for saving the whole cosmos. He is drawing on the work of NT Wright here (he cites "Surprised by Hope"). This view of the resurrection makes best sense of Paul's writings and is more true to scripture than the popular understanding of heaven as a physical place of bliss inhabited by disembodied spirits.
The book is short, dense, and written for a popular readership. It seems to be a great tool to start conversation. I would hope that it would not be attacked and condemned, but rather seen as a sourcebook of possibilities for the many people who are wrestling with very important questions. Bell never seems to affirm any of the possibilities dogmatically, but the entire work is written with an air of wonder and awe for God's glory and great compassion. This spirit is strangely and tragically absent in many conversations about God's ultimate intention for humanity.
This review appears on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1STH1DKM0BT2H/ref=cm_pdp_rev_title_1?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview#R1U6R8IGXMHWW8
Hi Nathan,thanks for this review. I agree with you that the best part of the book is Bell's focus on the new creation. I appreciated that emphasis in the book. My biggest concern was what passed for exegesis, especially with regard to the gospels. I thought Bell's interpretations felt as if they were straining to make the text say something other than what it rather plainly said. Sometimes he didn't even attempt to substantiate his revisionist interpretations. I wrote a few posts on this when the book came out. And while I tried to praise the redeeming qualities of the book, I did go after what I took to be the weaknesses a bit more strongly (which probably won't surprise you). Here are the links, if you are interested. I'd be curious to hear your response to my critique of his lack of interpretive argumentation.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mattoreilly.net/2011/03/thoughts-on-love-wins.html
Enjoyed your review and hope you are well.
Matt
I'll add that I found Surprised by Hope to be much more satisfying that Love Wins. Wright handles the text of scripture masterfully. The book has some shortcomings; the exegesis is the bread and butter.
ReplyDeleteNathan,
ReplyDeleteLast summer, I read "Love Wins" over the course of a plane flight to Washington, D.C. from St. Louis. As such, I found Bell's latest work to be a quick and rather unsatisfying read on a number of theological and logical fronts. To that degree I guess I disagree in large part with your assessment of "Love Wins" and the validity of the message subsumed therein.
Bell is indeed a master at posing questions for his reader to ponder and at painting word and mental pictures to get across his point. In all fairness, I thoroughly enjoyed a previous work of his called "Sex God", a book with a weird title yet containing a number of valuable points. With that said, in "Love Wins" the word and mental picture Bell presents indicates a belief in the universal love of God without providing the equally important aspect of God's character, namely his righteousness and the need to judge sin.
Bell toes the line of universalism in "Love Wins" which is why he is able to state that he is not a universalist. However, the tone and approach of his words demonstrate a belief, or better yet, a lack thereof, of eternal punishment for the wicked and a proclivity towards universalist beliefs. God indeed loves his creation and wishes that none should perish, a point Bell rightly makes in his book. That is not the end of the story. John 3:16 does not end with just "For God so loved the world" as we all know. Rob Bell's book is fundamentally short on accurate biblical exegesis and quite long, for a short book, on presenting only a portion of what scripture actually says about the issue of sin, heaven, hell, and redemption.
I would highly recommend a couple of insightful reviews of Bell's book, one by Tim Challies and the other by Ryan Hamm available below:
Tim Challies: http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/love-wins-a-review-of-rob-bells-new-book
Ryan Hamm: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/books/reviews/25070-love-wins-by-rob-bell?start=1
Matt--I did read your review when I discovered your blog months ago. You're absolutely right, of course. Bell doesn't cite anything. The best part of the book is cribbed from NT Wright and the only way you would know is that he puts "Surprised by Hope" in the suggestions for further reading. You suggest that you would fail him if he were your student for bad exegesis. I might send him to the honor council for plagiarism.
ReplyDeleteMay I offer a half-hearted defense? The book is of a certain genre, namely, the "preacher publishing a sermon series" genre. Sermons feel very stilted when they are appropriately cited, and they bog down significantly when the work of exegesis is spelled out. Good sermons are the fruit of good exegesis, but don't necessarily show their work.
Nonetheless, Bell would have done much better to provide extensive notes in the back of the book. It would have captured the style of the book while giving thoughtful readers an idea of how he came to his conclusions.
I think his aim in the section in which he deals with passages on hell is to demonstrate that the simplistic readings we have of those passages are not the only way they might be read. Though his exegesis is hit and miss, I think he's right about this. I don't know several of the books in his suggested reading list, but my guess is that if i had read them all I would know where he found those treatments of the passages and the alternative translations. Seems to me he is right, though, about the difference between how many people understand aion and the what it really suggests. The "pruning" thing you mentioned seems like a stretch to me, too.
Michael--I appreciate the review from Relevant (a magazine founded and run by a college acquaintance of mine!). I think that it fails to recognize that Bell's imagined interlocutor is not John Piper. He's combating popular understandings of penal substitution and literal hell. Again, an academic treatment would be entirely different. The article also seems to assume that Bell has a singular argument, and I don't think he does. I think he throws out a few ideas and options suggested by scripture's plurality of witnesses on these matters. His mention of universalist or pseudo-universalist patristics is not defend universalism, but to demonstrate that universalism has always had a place, albeit a minor one, in the conversation about the scope of Christ's redemption.
Many thanks to both of you for commenting! I don't get much feedback on these things most of the time!