The controversy over Rob Bell's book, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011), while itself short-lived, underscores the still-explosive nature of Christianity's message and our culture's allergy to dealing seriously with the real issues of moral agency and ultimate (life / death / eternity) questions in any but a feel-good way. The very big up side is that the conversation the book has generated gets people thinking and talking about eternal issues. One hopes, fruitfully.
Two popular responses have appeared to Bell. One, Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle's Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We've Made Up (David C. Cook, 2011), reaches back into the Old Testament and Jewish popular piety of the time to paint a satisfactory, if broad-brush, picture of the background against which Jesus taught, and uses that to uphold classic consensus Christian teaching on the subject of hell and the final judgment. If you've read or seen Chan elsewhere, the tone is the same: conversational with a smattering of theological depth and a decided edge. Short on doctrine (though his sights are squared-in on orthodox Christianity), long on protreptic. All in all, it's a decent review of Biblical teaching on the subject. The one handicap, and it's a major one: Bell's writing is way more winsome and engaging than the Chan-Sprinkle alternative. Despite efforts at tugging on the heart strings, including some personal reflections, Chan ends up saying, "What if God acts in a way that I personally find morally repugnant? Well, God's the free potter and I'm just clay. I just have to deal with it and trust." This reader put the book down grateful for their efforts, but not really satisfied.
Much better is Mark Galli's God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins (Tyndale, 2011). Galli, the Senior Managing Editor of Christianity Today, does two things that Chan and Sprinkle don't quite get to. One, he deals with the question of God's nature and character apart from our experience of it, rightly taking Bell on for staying on the human-experiential plane too much. Two, he makes adequate space for the matter of mystery. Not just a sort of agnostic shrug about things we cannot understand, but a nuanced and thoughtful exploration of how God's justice fits with God's love. It allows him to make a cogent case for why universalism, even the sort of soft-core variety Bell espouses, is really terrible news and not the hopeful, liberating tidings that Bell portrays. Thoughtful Christians interested in engaging the culture should read Bell's book and at least one of the others -- if you have to choose, I'd pick Galli, for the reasons described. This is a conversation that we need to be having with the wider society, which desires to sit in judgment on God and on Scripture while excusing itself from accountability to a just and holy Divinity.
Love demands we be ready to talk about this.
Prince Frederick, 1 September 2011
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I have not read Galli's book yet, but did read Bell's and Chan's.
ReplyDeleteIn 2011 world population will reach 7 billion (vs. 3 billion in 1960). There are now approximately 2.2 billion Christians. Chan and Sprinkle seem to be saying that 4.8 billion people may be facing eternal hell.
Concepts of afterlife vary between religions and among divisions of each faith. Not all Christians agree on what happens after this life, nor do all Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or other believers. Rebirth, resurrection, purgatory, universalism, and oblivion are other possibilities...none of which can be proven.
Mystics of all faiths have more in common than the followers of their orthodox religions. True mystics realize that eternal life is here and now; it does not begin after mortal death. The age of Earth is said to be 4.5 billion years, of the Universe 13.7 billion, yet few humans live to be 100. This lifetime is a fleeting moment.
Scriptures are subject to interpretation; people often choose what is most beneficial for them.