Bell Blurb #2

In chapters two and three of his new book Love Wins A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, Rob Bell get's into two out of his three promised topics. He tackles heaven first. Probably a good choice.

Bell immediately begins to question popular evangelical notions of heaven as a literal place. He makes his exegesis accessible, something he's particularly good at. Anyone who is really interested in what the Scriptures mean, can sympathize with Bell's desire to question more recently accepted interpretations of what the Bible tells us of heaven and hell.

The author is careful to offer much of his critique as leading questions, and I'm left with the resulting sense that he's constantly screwing up his face and asking, "WTF?" while writing this book. Is that bad? Is he wrong for doing that? No. He's doing exactly what Martin Luther and other early Reformers did. He's asking questions arising from his study of Scripture. He's responding to the pressures of unprecedented change happening in culture all around him. He's doing theology at the point of a pastoral spear, trying to answer the deepest cries of the human heart: Will I be okay? Will it all be okay, or it this it? Does God love me, or are the Kansas baptist crazies right, and He hates most everyone?

As I wrote that last paragraph, I could almost hear the lament of the Evangelical crowd that now oppose Bell . But their outcry is premature. Whatever comes of this book—and regardless, I appreciate Bell's courage because he's not dodging the tough questions—his work will be judged like that of all Christian writers who stand in a 2000 year tradition beginning with the Apostles. The vast majority of popular contemporary Christian writing will pass from the scene without causing much of a ripple in the Church. Randy Alcorn wrote a safe, middle of the road, majority evangelical view book when he published Heaven. He sold a few books. Mostly because it was an affirmation of recent theology, as reflected most popularly in the Left Behind franchise (which sold a LOT of books). As Bell tries to demonstrate, the Bible leaves a lot of room for views other than those of Alcorn or LaHaye.

Long after Bell's book, along with the others, are forgotten, the Bible will remain.

And it's Bell's continual return to Scripture that makes me think his critics too easily write off his work as an assault on the rock of established Christian doctrine (read: modern Evangelical notions of orthodoxy). But those same critics will with the same breath blast Bell and tolerate veneration of C.S. Lewis, who in his fantasy novella, The Great Divorce, takes on many of the same issues as Love Wins. Read them in concert and you will be struck by the similarities between both authors' handling of heaven, hell, and each person's final state. It's because they're swimming the the same stream, one that runs just as far through church history as that of more recent, popularized theological notions of eschatology.

BTW: just in case I might have confused you. I don't think Rob Bell's work will have the impact of Luther's. It's simply their pastoral motivation that compares. I also do not think he's an Apostle, with a capital "a". He's a small "a" like the rest of us. And I do really like C.S. Lewis, just like any decent Christian would.

Moving on to chapter three, Bell gives hell a similar treatment: setting up his exegesis with a series of leading questions, looking at select passages (yes, here the alert reader will notice he's a bit sneaky in his choice of texts, as he has been to some lesser degree with heaven), and ultimately offering a fresh take on the subject. The symmetry is satisfying.

But Bell is hard to nail down. With a healthy dose of post-modern "humility", he's happy to live with open questions. That's one of the qualities of his writing that I suspect most frustrates his critics. They desperately want him to put a stake in the ground and declare, "Yes, yes, I am a universalist! God help me, I am!" Or they want him to say, "I've finally come to my senses, and I'm convinced all of you Reformed Double-Predestinarian theologians have it nailed!"

But he doesn't do that. All he seems willing to say for certain is the heaven is real, but maybe not as plastic and pre-packaged as some have presented it. Hell is real, and that reality is horrific. And in the final analysis, the difference between one's experiencing heaven or hell is the relationship one has with God through Jesus.

His emphasis on experience, as well as his handling of the possibility of the super-rational collapse of linear time, is as deliciously post-modern as his embrace of dialectic tension. But I'd expect nothing less from the hippest hipster Christian (sorry, Ed Young).

I have to say here that I like Rob Bell. I like people who ask God the really, really tough questions, and ultimately look for answers in the Scripture without ignoring the full range of teaching the Bible fosters, something which has enriched the Church for the last couple of millennia. Frankly, I'm tired of pop theology that's as thin as the veneers on some TV preacher's teeth.

But I'm not tired of this book. I'm just not sure if I like it yet.