Eager Apollos

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I hate books like Love Wins. It seems like every few years, or so, the evangelical church gets bored and searches for fodder for indignation and protest. A few years back it was The Da Vinci Code, a poorly written fiction book which sole purpose was to help past the time on long plane flights or bouts with constipation. Had the church not fallen all over itself to create a controversy, The Da Vinci Code would have been lining the shelves of used bookstores, collecting dust among the other unknown titles in the mystery section in a matter of weeks. But instead preachers condemned it, parishioners protested it, scholars debated it, films and documentaries were made, books (that couldn’t have been more than a hundred pages) were published to counter the “claims” of the book that could have been clearly seen as false by anyone with 4 hours and a library card. But enough of that, on to Love Wins.

I think John Piper must have gotten a commission for fueling the controversy that sent this book to the top of the NY Times best seller list. Piper tweets three words and this book that should have never entered my radar becomes the new boundary of determining whether someone is christian or not. When these kinds of books are published, its a kind of endurance game for me. I try to hold out and not read them for as long as I can in the hopes that the fever pitch will subside and I would have saved a few hours of time to read a book that was worth my while, but no such luck this time.

Admittedly, Rob Bell made himself an easy target with this book. The tagline leads one to believe that this will be a thesis driven position paper on the nature of heaven, hell, atonement, and other related topics. The problem is that Bell doesn’t write thesis driven books. He is an entertainer at heart which makes him a good preacher and a good writer for a specific purpose. He writes more for effect. He weaves words in to sentences and sentences into paragraphs for the purpose of evoking an emotion from the reader, not to clarify positions.

Bell also has a specific audience in mind. He is writing to those who are burnt out, steamrolled or are some way or another victims of the church. The examples he uses are indicative of this. So, if you are a reader that is not one who fits in either of these categories, you are not go to like Bell’s book. If you picked up Love Wins to read about what the sum total of scripture and historical theology has said about hell and you are a christian that has enjoyed your time in the church, then you won’t have any idea what is going on between the covers of this book. Again, Bell, in part, did this to himself. The tagline should have been less definitive. Something like “meandering musings on the dark side of exclusivism and lazy pluralism in the mainstream church” would have been much better, because the book doesn’t amount to much more than that.

I am going to dispel some myths about the book right now. Love Wins is not a manifesto of Bell’s new found universalism. Nothing is clearly stated in the book, but if you read between the lines you will see that Bell thinks that people go to hell and stay there. Also statements like, “Do I believe in a literal hell? Of, course,” (pg. 71) are a clue.

The other myth is that Bell thinks that regardless if one hears the gospel or not that all will go to heaven. When Bell talks about people having experiences with Jesus that aren’t immediately clear to christians he is talking about, for example, Muslims that have dreams of Jesus and eventually figure out its the Jesus of the NT. He is not talking about a Hindu that utters the sacred sound of “OM” and that being equivalent of accepting Jesus into your heart.

These myths aside, what is true is that Bell’s treatment of scripture is mostly underdeveloped and sometime awful. I can think of two or three times that his interpretation was just wrong. The vast majority of the time Bell’s interpretation are inline with orthodox views, but he mishandles them. I say mishandles because I think Bell believes (for the most part) what most Christian believe but he is emphasizing certain aspects of theology in order to get people to see his point. Pastors do this all the time from the pulpit and with a pen. They aren’t being thorough because space and time are finite and congregants have to eat lunch. Other times I think Bell is just wrong or leaving too much out and that can be misleading. This is a fair critique and thats is on Bell.

If you want a blow by blow of what is good and bad in Love Wins, I recommend Scot McKnight’s 9 part series on his blog (Links below). It’s short and he deals fairly with Bell. McKnight isn’t out to firebomb Bell to show his “reformed” buddies that he is still one of the guys.
http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscr…
http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscr…
http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscr…
(part 7 has links to part 1-6, but not part 8 and 9 which I included separately)

The obvious question is “why did I give the book a three star rating, when I clearly resent having to read the book?” Because, Bell presents a version of the gospel that is bigger than simply going to heaven and he presents it well. As you read Love Wins you get the impression the gospel is huge, all encompassing and ubiquitous or in Bell’s words “cosmic.” I finished the book with a sense of the gospel that was inspiring and hopeful the point of being overwhelming. Nobody would disagree with this and Bell effectively presents this to his readership which consist by those who have been victimized by the church. My hope would be that those who read the book would catch this vision of the gospel and go to a church where they can hear what Bell leaves out, forgets or gets wrong. Which is all one can hope for from any book of this caliber.

All the controversy surrounding this book was completely overstate and unwarranted. Nothing in this book places Bell on the outside the community of God. Or stated another way, while I disagree with some of what Bell says in this book I would still take communion with him at church. And it infuriates me that Bell’s faith was question so severely.

In sum, Love Wins is full of bad exegesis, half truths, and includes a few wrong interpretations. Bell wins points for rhetorical effectiveness and a vision of the gospel that is passionately presented and cosmic in nature. Love Wins is not the a case for universalism or pluralism, but it does critique the view broadly held by evangelicals on these topics. Critique being something with which the evangelical church has always been comfortable.

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Below is a video review of the two events that CA put on over Spring Break. One was the Mission to Mexico. Matt took a team of 32 people down to build two houses for families in need of them. While Matt was driving south of the boarder, I took a group of students to Lebanon, OR, for a leadership retreat which we called Momentum. I hope you enjoy the videos!

Last Year CA did a Prayer Walk at the beginning of every quarter. Prayer Walks, while a rewarding activity, were never a door buster, so I decided to shelf the idea completely. This past fall quater the student leadership noticed I didn’t do a prayer walk and decided for me that I would doing one at the beginning of this winter quarter.

Prayer walks are time to mediate, reflect and ask God what CA’s mission on campus is supposed to be. While this could be done in the warmth and comfort of your own home, it is good to get out on campus and to actually see the places and people we are trying to reach.

The handful of us prayed over students and staff. We prayed over the buildings the classes that go on in them. We reflected on the ministries that CA currently puts on and whether we need to change or create new ones. We also just listened, hoping for insight.

We walked around the campus and prayed for about an hour. It was cold but it was time well spent.

Three weeks ago, Libby gave birth to our son Atlas Ezra Beck. Atlas was 8lbs. 3oz. and was 20.5 inches long (I am told people like to hear the stats). Atlas has made an impression on everyone that has met him but the most impressive thing about him seems to be his name.

Most people are jazzed to hear that his name is Atlas. “Nobody is going to mess with him on the playground,” they say. Some know that Atlas is not simply a reference to a collection of maps but to a Titan who is charged with holding up the sky.

Atlas was apart of a group of gods called the Titans which rebelled against another group called the Olympians, the most famous of which was Zeus. The Olympians won out and Zeus punished many of the Titans by various means and the sky became Atlas’ responsibility.

With a punishment like this “Atlas” has come to mean “to suffer” or “to endure.” Either way you take it, the meaning seems to be an odd, stark and rather negative name for anybody. Which is why we named him Atlas Ezra.

Ezra was charged with helping establish the exiled Jews back in the city of Jerusalem. In this case it isn’t surprising that Ezra is short for Azaryah which means “God helps.”

Most people walk around with little or no knowledge of what their name means. Generally, a name is just an identifier, a way of distinguishing ”me” from “you.” I am sure Atlas will be no different. His name will be like the air he breaths, a subliminal preservation. He will probably walk through his day to day life without ever giving it much thought. But my hope is that when difficulties come he will remember his name. He will know that he may have “to suffer” and “endure,” but that his hope is that “God helps.”