A recent Review cartoon mocked both, the missed prediction of the end of the world, May 21, and that annoying voice on your global positioning system (GPS). The stereotypical doomsday prophet carried a sign that said: “recalculating”.
I wonder if evangelical Pastor, Rob Bell would like to do some recalculating. It seems he’s missed a large portion of his evangelical constituents in his recent book Love Wins. There he holds out the possibility of “universalism.” This is the belief that God’s love will win at the end of time. Everyone will wind up in Heaven regardless of what they’ve believed, who they’ve followed, or how they’ve lived. On the topic of Hell, he is clearly ambiguous. (What an oxymoron!)
He appeals to post-moderns big time, those who rebel against modernism’s definite answers for everything, based on reason and what’s observable (science). Post-moderns love discussion, mystery, and ambiguity (philosophy). There are 92 questions in Bell’s first chapter alone.
He selectively quotes “supportive” Scripture, like Romans 5:18: “Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all…”. However, Bell fails to quote verse 17, which defines "the all" in verse 18: “For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!”
It's only those who receive God's gift of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ who experience eternal life.
Universalism also takes the edge off Jesus’ Great commission to, “Go into all the world and make disciples…” (Matthew 28:19-20). Why would we send our best people and hard-earned dollars to deliver this Good News of Jesus to the ends of the earth if love wins in the end? Why would many of our brothers abroad risk their lives to tell their countrymen about Jesus if there is no hell? None of us would sacrifice much unless…there’s a painful price to pay for rejecting Jesus.
If you say the Bible doesn't teach Hell is real, then where do we draw the line between what is literal and what is symbol? Which Scriptures are we allowed to rip out simply because we don’t like them? Won’t we end up with “smorgasboard spirituality” on the order of the ancient idolaters who mixed, matched, and morphed all the gods they could find to fit their fancies, instead of fitting themselves to the will of the loving God who made them?
God gives everyone a way out of this awful place called Hell. It’s simply through loving Christ (see Romans above). Hell was not made for man (Matthew 25:41). It’s the place man chooses to go when He doesn’t want to live under God’s love and leadership. If we show we don’t want to live under God in this life, then why would God sentence us to live under Him for eternity?
Historically Christian theologians have taken four positions on our eternal destiny: literal Hell fires, spiritual Hell (separation from God with its consequent emotional suffering), annihilation, and universalism. The Scriptures line up to support them in that order, with annihilation and universalism having scant support in the Bible.
And yet there is a contrary scriptural trend that suggests, as Jesus puts it, that the gates of hell shall not finally prevail, that God will wipe away every tear — not just the tears of Evangelical Christians but the tears of all. Bell puts much stock in references to the universal redemption of creation (2 Cor 5:17-20). In Matthew, Jesus speaks of the "renewal of all things"; in Acts, Peter says Jesus will "restore everything"; in Colossians, Paul writes that "God was pleased to ... reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven. Jesus has sheep that are not of this flock…I must bring them in (Jn 10:16). He will have us call people from the East…North and we must bring them in…(Isa )"
One of my biggest problems with Love Wins is the same issue I take w/ those who condemn Christians, Jews and the Bible for embracing a God who is a God of justice. They don’t say they’re against His justice. They say they’re against His violence toward all these innocent people in the Older Testament who are victims of Israelite aggression and expansion.
The problem is the people the Israelites are told to “totally destroy” (ten times just in Joshua 10) are terribly wicked people who had been warned to change or suffer the consequences.
All through the Bible there is a pattern of wickedness, then God’s warning, usually through the prophets, then judgement if the warning is not heeded. If the warning is heeded by repentance, then God relents. His love and grace always wants to give people an escape from judgment. But His justice won’t allow that out unless there is real repentance from evil to good, from man’s sinful ways to God’s right and healthy ways.
Liberals and atheists have always wanted it both ways. They want a God who is all and always love. But they don’t want to live in a world without justice, spelled “judgment.” That would be a incredibly chaotic, dangerous world.
If there is judgment in this life, why not in the next, especially when the Bible says there will be judgment in the next. If people persist in wanting to live their lives without God in this life, why would He sentence them to live their lives with Him for eternity? That wouldn’t reflect His love.
The nature of Hell is another question. Historically Christian theologians have taken the four following positions on out eternal destiny: literal Hell fires, figurative Hell fires (separation from God with its consequent emotional, relational suffering), annihilation, and universalism. The Scriptures line up to support them in that order, with annihilation and universalism having scant support in the Scriptures.
If you say the Bible doesn't really say what a lot of people have said it says, then where does that stop? If the verses about hell and judgment aren't literal, what about the ones on adultery, say, or homosexuality? Taken to their logical conclusions, such questions could undermine much of conservative Christianity.
Then there’s the edge universalism takes from Jesus’ Great commission: “Go into all the world and make disciples…” (Matthew 28:19-20). Why would we send our best young missionaries and dollars to take this Good News to the ends of the earth if love wins in the end? Why would we risk persecution in some countries and rejection or ridicule in ours to tell those who don’t know Christ in a saving way about the Good News of salvation only through Him? We wouldn’t unless there’s a price to pay in the end for rejecting Him.
A CASE FOR HELL BY Rich Nathan of the Columbus Vineyard
Time Magazine called Rob Bell, "The hipper-than-thou-pastor" which immediately raised the question for me: "How can I get that label?" Perhaps I could wear hipster glasses like Pastor Bell? Or more probably I need a complete personality transplant so that I, too, can be a "hipper-than-thou" pastor? (Those of you who know me, stop snickering!)
So what did I think of the book?
First, Rob Bell is not saying anything about eternity in this book that hasn't been said by mainline and liberal pastors for a few centuries. The issues in the book have been thoroughly explored, discussed, and responded to seemingly forever. For those the least bit familiar with theological conversations over the past couple of hundred years, you might be tempted to yawn and say: "So what's all the fuss about?"
This is one of those "man bites dog' stories that the media loves. The hype isn't so much about what Rob Bell is saying in Love Wins! (it's all been said before); rather, it is more about who is saying it. Rob Bell is identified with the evangelical wing of the church and the media loves "controversy in the evangelical community."
The good news about Love Wins! is that Rob Bell is getting everyone, inside and outside the church, to talk about eternity and, in particular, to talk about hell. That's an amazing accomplishment in a celebrity-obsessed culture whose major interest recently was in learning who designed Kate Middleton's wedding bouquet. Breaking through the wall-to-wall 21st century clutter to get people thinking and talking about heaven and hell is quite an achievement.
Bell is a good writer. He has some memorable phrases such as "exclusivity on the other side of inclusivity," and "There's heaven now, somewhere else. There's heaven here, sometime else. And then there's Jesus' invitation to heaven here and now, in this moment, in this place."
His style is congenial to young adults and those deeply affected by post-modernity, who prefer questions and dialogue to answers and assertions. Bell asks lots of questions in Love Wins! - a lot of questions! I counted 92 questions in the first chapter alone.
*
So, is there reason for concern? Why has Love Wins! generated so much criticism?
Perhaps it is because Bell is very selective in his survey of church history. He quotes a few theologians to support the position that he drives towards throughout the book which is everyone, or nearly everyone (Bell is ambiguous here) will be saved in the end - hence the title Love Wins! He suggests that everyone may have a second, or third, or twentieth, or millionth chance to be saved post-death, or that perhaps everyone is serving the hidden Christ even though they thought they were serving Buddha, or Krishna, or no god at all throughout their lives. Bell suggests these as possibilities, but he doesn't mention, not even in a footnote, that the overwhelming majority of Christian theologians have historically rejected these possibilities.
Bell is also very selective in his use of scripture, and, even then, shapes his interpretation in a predetermined read. I could cite many examples, but just to illustrate, he quotes a universalistic-sounding passage, Romans 5:18: Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all... However, Bell fails to quote the immediately preceding verse, Romans 5.17, which defines "the all" in verse 18: For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ! (Romans 5.17). It's only those who receive God's grace who experience justification and life.
The problem with the selective use of scripture and church history is that one almost always ends up echoing the "spirit of the age." For 21st century Americans, tolerance, inclusivity, and pluralism are our ideological preferences (it could be otherwise; we could prefer fascism, patriarchy, or slavery). Because of his selective reading of scripture, Bell ends up sounding like a cheerleader for culture, and not as a prophet who, with sufficient distance, offers a shattering critique of culture. Only the Word of God coming from another world provides a Voice that is not a mere echo of culture. Rob Bell doesn't speak with that Voice in Love Wins! He clothes his views in religious language, but he really ends up saying what every progressive person in America has been saying for decades.
Moreover, Bell assumes his conclusion. Love, of a certain type, without judgment, without ferocity, without vengeance - wins! And hell is mostly or entirely empty. But how does he know that? Why is Bell's definition of love better than mine, or yours, or anyone else's?
Indeed, how do we know that God loves us anyway? Looking at the world, it is not intuitively obvious that God is love, at least not for child soldiers in the Congo or their victims. It's not obvious that God is love for those being trafficked as children, or beaten by a family member, or tortured by a brutal government. How do we know God is love? We know because in the words of the children's song, "Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so..."
I know and believe in the love of Jesus because the Bible tells me so. But I know and believe that God's love is of a certain type, jealous, holy, capable of wrath and vengeance (Romans 12.9; 2 Thessalonians 1.6-10), because the Bible tells me so. And I know and believe in hell where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth" for the same reason - because Jesus tells me about it in the Bible, and not because it is intuitively obvious.
Finally, Rob Bell's approach to God's judgment cuts the nerve that drives world missions and evangelism. If you really think that apart from hearing and believing the gospel, there is a very good chance that people will nevertheless be ultimately saved, will you still sign up to take this message to uncomfortable places and people? Really? Why leave families, friends, careers, churches and homes if, in the end, everyone will ultimately enjoy the presence of God forever? Indeed, why make anyone uncomfortable (them and you) by challenging someone's beliefs, if salvation is not at stake? Why preach the gospel at all?
For the Apostle Paul the answer was obvious: Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible...I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some. I do this all for the sake of the gospel, so that I might share its blessings (1 Corinthians 9.19, 22.23).
This book will have enormous appeal to those "in recovery" from very strict conservative evangelical and fundamentalist churches and families. But whatever the many strengths of Rob Bell's book, its ultimate failing is that no one who believes Bell's message will ever exert themselves in the gospel's service like the Apostle Paul did. Such people are apparently not needed in 21st century, if after all, in the end, Love Wins!
Hell and Human Dignity by Chuck Colson
Do Our Choices Make a Difference? Breakpoint.org
May 16, 2011
Unless you’ve been on vacation in the Himalayas, you have no doubt heard about the controversy surrounding Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.
Arguably, Bell’s tome is the first controversial Evangelical book of the Internet age: It was promoted by a “trailer” that appeared on many websites and dissected and condemned on countless more. Bell may enjoy the distinction of being the first person ever excommunicated via Twitter: one well-known writer tweeted “Farewell, Rob Bell.”
There are certainly important theological questions raised by Bell’s book, including whether anyone goes to hell forever.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat understands this well. In a recent column Douthat, a devout Catholic, writes that doing away with eternal punishment “is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane.”
The impetus behind this impulse is understandable: In the wake of incalculable human suffering, talking about hell seems cruel and the idea of eternal punishment for wrong beliefs doubly so.
The problem, Douthat reminds us, is that attempts to make God seem more “humane” also “threaten to make human life less fully human.” That’s because, he writes, “to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices.” If we can’t say “no” to God’s offer of heaven, none of the other choices we make in life have any real meaning, either.
Douthat’s point is reminiscent of something James Schall, a professor at Georgetown, wrote in his book, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs. Schall began by noting that C. S. Lewis once said that “we have never met a mere mortal.”
Schall continued, human “lives are not insignificant. They are risks... We like to be optimistic and suggest that no one loses his soul. But if this is so, it is hard to see how anything is of much importance. If nothing we do, say, or believe can really make any difference, what is [the source] our dignity? We may do what we want with impunity. Surely this is not the order of God for our good.”
And it’s not. And that’s the problem with efforts to dull the hard edges of the Christian message. Attempts to justify the ways of God to men often only wind up interfering with God’s plan for man.
It’s hard to square our belief in free will with the belief that, ultimately, nothing we do when we’re able to exercise it has any bearing on our eternal destiny. In some way we become like the denizens of an ant farm: no matter how much we burrow, it doesn’t change where we’re going or not going, for that matter.
It may make us feel better to believe that everyone goes to heaven. But what happens to the concept of justice? Is not God a God of justice?
Like Douthat, I understand Bell’s objection to the presumptuousness of some Christians. Instead of making declarations about the eternal destiny of people we’ve never met, we ought to be working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.
Folks, beware. This book is high on the New York Times bestseller list. Books like this are obviously appealing. But that doesn’t make them true.
Religion—TIME, Holy Week, 2011
Pastor Rob Bell: What if Hell Doesn't Exist? (I believe this was ChristianityToday.com in May 2011)
By Jon Meacham
As part of a series on peacemaking, in late 2007, Pastor Rob Bell's Mars Hill Bible Church put on an art exhibit about the search for peace in a broken world. It was just the kind of avant-garde project that had helped power Mars Hill's growth (the Michigan church attracts 7,000 people each Sunday) as a nontraditional congregation that emphasizes discussion rather than dogmatic teaching. An artist in the show had included a quotation from Mohandas Gandhi. Hardly a controversial touch, one would have thought. But one would have been wrong.
A visitor to the exhibit had stuck a note next to the Gandhi quotation: "Reality check: He's in hell." Bell was struck.
Really? he recalls thinking.
Gandhi's in hell?
He is?
We have confirmation of this?
Somebody knows this?
Without a doubt?
And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?
So begins Bell's controversial new best seller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.
Works by Evangelical Christian pastors tend to be pious or at least on theological message. The standard Christian view of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is summed up in the Gospel of John, which promises "eternal life" to "whosoever believeth in Him." Traditionally, the key is the acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God, who, in the words of the ancient creed, "for us and for our salvation came down from heaven ... and was made man." In the Evangelical ethos, one either accepts this and goes to heaven or refuses and goes to hell.
Bell, a tall, 40-year-old son of a Michigan federal judge, begs to differ. He suggests that the redemptive work of Jesus may be universal — meaning that, as his book's subtitle puts it, "every person who ever lived" could have a place in heaven, whatever that turns out to be. Such a simple premise, but with Easter at hand, this slim, lively book has ignited a new holy war in Christian circles and beyond. When word of Love Wins reached the Internet, one conservative Evangelical pastor, John Piper, tweeted, "Farewell Rob Bell," unilaterally attempting to evict Bell from the Evangelical community. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says Bell's book is "theologically disastrous. Any of us should be concerned when a matter of theological importance is played with in a subversive way." In North Carolina, a young pastor was fired by his church for endorsing the book.
The traditionalist reaction is understandable, for Bell's arguments about heaven and hell raise doubts about the core of the Evangelical worldview, changing the common understanding of salvation so much that Christianity becomes more of an ethical habit of mind than a faith based on divine revelation. "When you adopt universalism and erase the distinction between the church and the world," says Mohler, "then you don't need the church, and you don't need Christ, and you don't need the cross. This is the tragedy of nonjudgmental mainline liberalism, and it's Rob Bell's tragedy in this book too."
Particularly galling to conservative Christian critics is that Love Wins is not an attack from outside the walls of the Evangelical city but a mutiny from within — a rebellion led by a charismatic, popular and savvy pastor with a following. Is Bell's Christianity — less judgmental, more fluid, open to questioning the most ancient of assumptions — on an inexorable rise? "I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian," Bell says. "Something new is in the air."
Which is what has many traditional Evangelicals worried. Bell's book sheds light not only on enduring questions of theology and fate but also on a shift within American Christianity. More indie rock than "Rock of Ages," with its videos and comfort with irony (Bell sometimes seems an odd combination of Billy Graham and Conan O'Brien), his style of doctrine and worship is clearly playing a larger role in religious life, and the ferocity of the reaction suggests that he is a force to be reckoned with.
Otherwise, why reckon with him at all? A similar work by a pastor from one of the declining mainline Protestant denominations might have merited a hostile blog post or two — bloggers, like preachers, always need material — but it is difficult to imagine that an Episcopal priest's eschatological musings would have provoked the volume of criticism directed at Bell, whose reach threatens prevailing Evangelical theology.
Bell insists he is only raising the possibility that theological rigidity — and thus a faith of exclusion — is a dangerous thing. He believes in Jesus' atonement; he says he is just unclear on whether the redemption promised in Christian tradition is limited to those who meet the tests of the church.
It is a case for living with mystery rather than demanding certitude.
From a traditionalist perspective, though, to take away hell is to leave the church without its most powerful sanction. If heaven, however defined, is everyone's ultimate destination in any event, then what's the incentive to confess Jesus as Lord in this life? If, in other words, Gandhi is in heaven, then why bother with accepting Christ? If you say the Bible doesn't really say what a lot of people have said it says, then where does that stop? If the verses about hell and judgment aren't literal, what about the ones on adultery, say, or homosexuality? Taken to their logical conclusions, such questions could undermine much of conservative Christianity.
What the Hell?
From the Apostle Paul to John Paul II, from Augustine to Calvin, Christians have debated atonement and judgment for nearly 2,000 years. Early in the 20th century, Harry Emerson Fosdick came to represent theological liberalism, arguing against the literal truth of the Bible and the existence of hell. It was time, progressives argued, for the faith to surrender its supernatural claims.
Bell is more at home with this expansive liberal tradition than he is with the old-time believers of Inherit the Wind. He believes that Jesus, the Son of God, was sacrificed for the sins of humanity and that the prospect of a place of eternal torment seems irreconcilable with the God of love. Belief in Jesus, he says, should lead human beings to work for the good of this world. What comes next has to wait. "When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage," says Bell. "So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are." He is quick to note, though, that his own speculation, while unconventional, is not unprecedented. "At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church," Bell writes, "have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God."
It is also true that the Christian tradition since the first church has insisted that history is tragic for those who do not believe in Jesus; that hell is, for them, forever; and that love, in the end, will envelop those who profess Jesus as Lord, and they — and they alone — will be reconciled to God. Such views cannot be dismissed because they are inconvenient or uncomfortable: they are based on the same Bible that liberals use to make the opposite case. This is one reason religious debate can seem a wilderness of mirrors, an old CIA phrase describing the bewildering world of counterintelligence.
Still, the dominant view of the righteous in heaven and the damned in hell owes more to the artistic legacy of the West, from Michelangelo to Dante to Blake, than it does to history or to unambiguous biblical teaching. Neither pagan nor Jewish tradition offered a truly equivalent vision of a place of eternal torment; the Greek and Roman underworlds tended to be morally neutral, as did much of the Hebraic tradition concerning Sheol, the realm of the dead.
Things many Christian believers take for granted are more complicated than they seem. It was only when Jesus failed to return soon after the Passion and Resurrection appearances that the early church was compelled to make sense of its recollections of his teachings. Like the Bible — a document that often contradicts itself and from which one can construct sharply different arguments — theology is the product of human hands and hearts. What many believers in the 21st century accept as immutable doctrine was first formulated in the fog and confusion of the 1st century, a time when the followers of Jesus were baffled and overwhelmed by their experience of losing their Lord; many had expected their Messiah to be a Davidic military leader, not an atoning human sacrifice.
When Jesus spoke of the "kingdom of heaven," he was most likely referring not to a place apart from earth, one of clouds and harps and an eternity with your grandmother, but to what he elsewhere called the "kingdom of God," a world redeemed and renewed in ways beyond human imagination. To 1st century ears in ancient Judea, Jesus' talk of the kingdom was centered on the imminent arrival of a new order marked by the defeat of evil, the restoration of Israel and a general resurrection of the dead — all, in the words of the prayer he taught his disciples, "on earth."
There is, however, no escaping the fact that Jesus speaks in the Bible of a hell for the "condemned." He sometimes uses the word Gehenna, which was a valley near Jerusalem associated with the sacrifice of children by fire to the Phoenician god Moloch; elsewhere in the New Testament, writers (especially Paul and John the Divine) tell of a fiery pit (Tartarus or Hades) in which the damned will spend eternity. "Depart from me, you cursed [ones], into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels," Jesus says in Matthew. In Mark he speaks of "the unquenchable fire." The Book of Revelation paints a vivid picture — in a fantastical, problematic work that John the Divine says he composed when he was "in the spirit on the Lord's day," a signal that this is not an Associated Press report — of the lake of fire and the dismissal of the damned from the presence of God to a place where "they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever" (Rev 20).
And yet there is a contrary scriptural trend that suggests, as Jesus puts it, that the gates of hell shall not finally prevail, that God will wipe away every tear — not just the tears of Evangelical Christians but the tears of all. Bell puts much stock in references to the universal redemption of creation: in Matthew, Jesus speaks of the "renewal of all things"; in Acts, Peter says Jesus will "restore everything"; in Colossians, Paul writes that "God was pleased to ... reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven."
So is it heaven for Christians who say they are Christians and hell for everybody else? What about babies, or people who die without ever hearing the Gospel through no fault of their own? (As Bell puts it, "What if the missionary got a flat tire?") Who knows? Such tangles have consumed Christianity for millennia and likely will for millennia to come.
What gives the debate over Bell new significance is that his message is part of an intriguing scholarly trend unfolding simultaneously with the cultural, generational and demographic shifts made manifest at Mars Hill. Best expressed, perhaps, in the work of N.T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, England (Bell is a Wright devotee), this school focuses on the meaning of the texts themselves, reading them anew and seeking, where appropriate, to ask whether an idea is truly rooted in the New Testament or is attributable to subsequent church tradition and theological dogma.
For these new thinkers, heaven can mean different things. In some biblical contexts it is a synonym for God. In others it signifies life in the New Jerusalem, which, properly understood, is the reality that will result when God brings together the heavens and the earth. In yet others it seems to suggest moments of intense human communion and compassion that are, in theological terms, glimpses of the divine love that one might expect in the world to come. One thing heaven is not is an exclusive place removed from earth. This line of thinking has implications for the life of religious communities in our own time. If the earth is, in a way, to be our eternal home, then its care, and the care of all its creatures, takes on fresh urgency.
Bell's Journey
The easy narrative about Bell would be one of rebellion — that he is reacting to the strictures of a suffocating childhood by questioning long-standing dogma. The opposite is true. Bell's creed of conviction and doubt — and his comfort with ambiguity and paradox — comes from an upbringing in which he was immersed in faith but encouraged to ask questions. His father, a central figure in his life, is a federal judge appointed by President Reagan in 1987. (Rob still remembers the drive to Washington in the family Oldsmobile for the confirmation hearings.) "I remember him giving me C.S. Lewis in high school," Bell says. "My parents were both very intellectually honest, straightforward, and for them, faith meant that you were fully engaged." As they were raising their family, the Bells, in addition to regular churchgoing, created a rigorous ethos of devotion and debate at home. Dinner-table conversations were pointed; Lewis' novels and nonfiction were required reading.
The roots of Love Wins can be partly traced to the deathbed of a man Rob Bell never met: his grandfather, a civil engineer in Michigan who died when Rob's father was 8. The Bells' was a very conservative Evangelical household. When the senior Bell died, there was to be no grief. "We weren't allowed to mourn, because the funeral of a Christian is supposed to be a celebration of the believer in heaven with Jesus right now," says Robert Bell Sr. "But if you're 8 years old and your dad — the breadwinner — just died, it feels different. Sad."
The story of how his dad, still a child, was to deal with death has stayed with Rob. "To weep, to shed any tears — that would be doubting the sovereignty of God," Rob says now, looking back. "That was the thing — 'They're all in heaven, so we're happy about that.' It doesn't matter how you are actually humanly responding to this moment ..." Bell pauses and chuckles ironically, a bit incredulous. "We're all just supposed to be thrilled."
Robby — his mother still calls him that — was emotionally precocious. "When he was around 10 years old, I detected that he had a great interest and concern for people," his father says. "There he'd be, riding along with me, with his little blond hair, going to see sick folks or friends who were having problems, and he would get back in the truck after a visit and begin to analyze them and their situations very acutely. He had a feel for people and how they felt from very early on."
Rob was a twice-a-week churchgoer at the Baptist and nondenominational churches the family attended at different times — services on Sunday, youth group on Wednesday. He recalls a kind of quiet frustration even then. "I remember thinking, 'You know, if Jesus is who this guy standing up there says he is, this should be way more compelling.' This should have a bit more electricity. The knob should be way more to the right, you know?"
Music, not the church, was his first consuming passion. (His wife Kristen claims he said he wanted to be a pastor when they first met early on at Wheaton College in Illinois. Bell is skeptical: "I swear to this day that that was a line.") He and some friends started a band when he was a sophomore. "I had always had creative energy but no outlet," he says. "I really discovered music, writing and playing, working with words and images and metaphors. You might say the music unleashed a monster."
The band became central to him. Then two things happened: the guitar player decided to go to seminary, and Bell came down with viral meningitis. "It took the wind out of our sails," he says. "I had no Plan B. I was a wreck. I was devastated, because our band was going to make it. We were going to live in a terrible little house and do terrible jobs at first, because that's what great bands do — they start out living in terrible little houses and doing terrible little jobs." His illness — "a freak brain infection" — changed his life, Bell says.
At 21, Rob was teaching barefoot waterskiing at HoneyRock Camp, near Three Lakes, Wis., when he preached his first sermon. "I didn't know anything," he says. "I took off my Birkenstocks beforehand. I had this awareness that my life would never be the same again." The removal of the shoes is an interesting detail for Bell to remember. ("Do not come any closer," God says to Moses in the Book of Exodus. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.") Bell says it was just intuitive, but the intuition suggests he had a sense of himself as a player in the unfolding drama of God in history. "Create things and share them," Bell says. "It all made sense. That moment is etched. I remember thinking distinctly, 'I could be terrible at this.' But I knew this would get me up in the morning. I went to Fuller that fall."
Fuller Theological Seminary, in Pasadena, Calif., is an eclectic place, attracting 4,000 students from 70 countries and more than 100 denominations. "It's pretty hard to sit with Pentecostals and Holiness people and mainline Presbyterians and Anglicans and come away with a closed mind-set that draws firm boundaries about theology," says Fuller president Richard Mouw.
After seminary, Bell's work moved in two directions. He was recovering the context of the New Testament while creating a series of popular videos on Christianity called Nooma, Greek for wind or spirit. He began to attract a following, and Mars Hill — named for the site in Athens where Paul preached the Christian gospel of resurrection to the pagan world — was founded in Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1999. "Whenever people wonder why a church is growing, they say, 'He's preaching the Bible.' Well, lots of people are preaching the Bible, and they don't have parking problems," says Bell.
Mars Hill did have parking problems, and Bell's sudden popularity posed some risks for the young pastor. Pride and self-involvement are perennial issues for ministers, who, like politicians, grow accustomed to the sound of their own voices saying Important Things and to the deference of the flock. By the time Bell was 30, he was an Evangelical celebrity. (He had founded Mars Hill when he was 28.) He was referred to as a "rock star" in this magazine. "There was this giant spotlight on me," he says. "All of a sudden your words are parsed. I found myself — and I think this happens to a lot of people — wanting to shrink away from it. But I decided, Just own it. I'm very comfortable in a room with thousands of people. I do have this voice. What will I say?"
And how will he say it? The history of Evangelism is in part the history of media and methods: Billy Sunday mastered the radio, Billy Graham television; now churches like Bell's are at work in the digital vineyards of downloads and social media. Demography is also working in Bell's favor. "He's trying to reach a generation that's more comfortable with mystery, with unsolved questions," says Mouw, noting that his own young grandchildren are growing up with Hindu and Muslim friends and classmates. "For me, Hindus and Muslims were the people we sent missionaries off to in places we called 'Arabia,'" Mouw says. "Now that diversity is part of the fabric of daily life. It makes a difference. My generation wanted truth — these are folks who want authenticity. The whole judgmentalism and harshness is something they want to avoid."
If Bell is right about hell, then why do people need ecclesiastical traditions at all? Why aren't the Salvation Army and the United Way sufficient institutions to enact a gospel of love, sparing us the talk of heaven and hellfire and damnation and all the rest of it? Why not close up the churches?
Bell knows the arguments and appreciates the frustrations. "I don't know anyone who hasn't said, 'Let's turn out the lights and say we gave it a shot,'" he says. "But you can't — I can't — get away from what this Jesus was, and is, saying to us. What the book tries to do is park itself right in the midst of the tension with a Jesus who offers an urgent and immediate call — 'Repent! Be transformed! Turn!' At the same time, I've got other sheep. There's a renewal of all things. There's water from the rock. People will come from the East and from the West. The scandal of the gospel is Jesus' radical, healing love for a world that's broken."
Fair enough, but let's be honest: religion heals, but it also kills. Why support a supernatural belief system that, for instance, contributed to that minister in Florida's burning of a Koran, which led to the deaths of innocent U.N. workers in Afghanistan?
"I think Jesus shares your critique," Bell replies. "We don't burn other people's books. I think Jesus is fairly pissed off about it as well."
On Sunday, April 17, at Mars Hill, Bell will be joined by singer-songwriter Brie Stoner (who provided some of the music for his Nooma series) and will teach the first 13 verses of the third chapter of Revelation, which speaks of "the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God ... Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches." The precise meaning of the words is open to different interpretations. But this much is clear: Rob Bell has much to say, and many are listening.
A Case for Hell
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: April 24, 2011 NYTimes online
¶ Here’s a revealing snapshot of religion in America. On Easter Sunday, two of the top three books on Amazon.com’s Religion and Spirituality best-seller list mapped the geography of the afterlife. One was “Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back,” an account of a 4-year-old’s near-death experience as dictated to his pastor father. The other was “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived,” in which the evangelical preacher Rob Bell argues that hell might not exist.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
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¶ The publishing industry knows its audience. Even in our supposedly disenchanted age, large majorities of Americans believe in God and heaven, miracles and prayer. But belief in hell lags well behind, and the fear of damnation seems to have evaporated. Near-death stories are reliable sellers: There’s another book about a child’s return from paradise, “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” just a little further down the Amazon rankings. But you’ll search the best-seller list in vain for “The Investment Banker Who Came Back From Hell.”
¶ In part, hell’s weakening grip on the religious imagination is a consequence of growing pluralism. Bell’s book begins with a provocative question: Are Christians required to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being Hindu? The mahatma is a distinctive case, but swap in “my Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist neighbor” for Gandhi, and you can see why many religious Americans find the idea of eternal punishment for wrong belief increasingly unpalatable.
¶ But the more important factor in hell’s eclipse, perhaps, is a peculiar paradox of modernity. As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn’t have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round of soul-searching over how to reconcile with God’s omnipotence with human anguish.
¶ These debates ensure that earthly infernos get all the press. Hell means the Holocaust, the suffering in Haiti, and all the ordinary “hellmouths” (in the novelist Norman Rush’s resonant phrase) that can open up beneath our feet. And if it’s hard for the modern mind to understand why a good God would allow such misery on a temporal scale, imagining one who allows eternal suffering seems not only offensive but absurd.
¶ Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.
¶ Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.
¶ In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.
¶ The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.
¶ As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death ... salvation or damnation.”
¶ If there’s a modern-day analogue to the “Inferno,” a work of art that illustrates the humanist case for hell, it’s David Chase’s “The Sopranos.” The HBO hit is a portrait of damnation freely chosen: Chase made audiences love Tony Soprano, and then made us watch as the mob boss traveled so deep into iniquity — refusing every opportunity to turn back — that it was hard to imagine him ever coming out. “The Sopranos” never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.
¶ Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 25, 2011, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: A Case for Hell.
