I know I’m behind the curve.
Rob Bell’s book Love Wins was released March 15. In spite of some Christian chains not handling it, HarperOne had an initial run of 100,000 and the book spent considerable time on the Best Seller list. Bell, from Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI, at least injected the subject of hell back into the conversation.
Encouraged by HarperOne’s success with Love Wins, look what else showed up this summer. With a six digit marketing budget is Erasing Hell: What God said about Eternity by Francis Chan. Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today, follows with God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins. Also Is Hell Real? Or Does Everyone Go To Heaven? a compilation from Tim Keller, Albert Mohler Jr. and other well-known evangelicals.
What’s at stake?
On the Mars Hill site, an answer is given to the question: “What does Love Wins say about heaven and hell?”
Those who reject the invitation [of eternal life] experience a purifying “fire” of judgment in hell, yet there is hope. We live in the hope that the redemptive work of Christ is beyond what we can ask or imagine. Love Wins helps us have a biblical imagination that leaves room for the hope of the redemption of all….
Time magazine’s issue released for Easter had on its cover “What if there’s no Hell?
Inside, Jon Meacham writes, “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.’“ Such ideas have been heard before; perhaps what is new is the inability of many to see when their teachers have “turned to fables” (2 Tim 4:4).
The book in brief
Bell defines hell as both here and now and also a future process for those who die before they have yielded to God’s love. Hell isn’t forever since, by Bell’s definition, the Greek word translated “forever,” doesn’t mean that (p. 31). It is Bell’s belief that God will get what He wants (p. 98). Every sinner, Bell imagines, having endless chances to turn to God, will realize that Christ’s death for all means that he is already reconciled to God; he just needs to believe God’s story. In the end, “God’s love will eventually melt even the hardest hearts” (p. 108).
I felt I was walking through a carnival house of mirrors, where doctrines are so distorted I no longer recognize them. Bell uses these distortions as if they are the real issues. No wonder his own conclusions are so dangerously dismorphic.
In One Minute After You Die, Erwin Lutzer quotes Gordon Kaufman of Harvard Divinity School: “I don’t think there can be any future for heaven and hell.” Lutzer comments, “Admittedly, hell is an unpleasant topic. Unbelievers disbelieve it; most Christians ignore it…” (p. 97).
Universal longings
We know that Scripture plainly states the Lord is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet 3:9). But does Scripture actually teach that all will be saved? Meacham, in the Time article, writes:
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.
Likewise it would be easy to dismiss Love Wins out of hand, state the obvious orthodox position, and claim the high ground. I’ve seen articles like this in the past months. But in doing so, we don’t even attempt to answer some serious issues raised in this book full of questions—more than 300 of them! True, some of them are irreverent and irrelevant. In the book’s video teaser, he asks:
Millions and millions of people were taught that the primary message…is that God is going to send you to hell unless you believe in Jesus. And so what gets subtly sort of caught and taught is that Jesus rescues you from God. But what kind of God is that, that we would need to be rescued from this God? How could that God ever be good? How could that God ever be trusted?
This may be the sloppy way the gospel has been presented to many, but how simple it would be to quote one verse in answer to this distortion (unless Bell wants to discount the true gospel in order to introduce “another gospel”).
The Word declares: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:19). Note! This truth is not alienating but reconciling in its effect.
Questions that hide the truth
Again Bell writes: “Has God created millions of people…who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God?” (p. 2). Bell might better have asked, Could a loving God consign the abused and persecuted to live forever in the same place with their unrepentant abusers and persecutors?
Other questions seem to be intentionally confusing rather than clarifying. Talking about what determines if a person goes to heaven, he asks, “Would he have to perform a certain rite or ritual? Or take a class? Or be baptized? Or join a church? Or have something happen somewhere in his heart?…What about people who have never said the prayer and don’t claim to be Christians, but live a more Christlike life than some Christians?” (pp. 5-6). Is Bell blurring the lines to suggest there are other ways to be saved?
But Bell goes farther: If “all we have to do is accept and confess and believe, aren’t those verbs? And aren’t verbs actions?…Does that mean, then, that going to heaven is dependent on something I do?
How is any of that grace? How is that a gift? How is that good news?” (p.?11).
Is this designed to throw everyone off the gospel trail? Does he really not understand the myriads of verses that call sinners to repent, believe, come, trust—in other words, to obey the gospel? Doesn’t he understand that a gift, to be a gift, must be received? And is God being gracious if He takes people to heaven when it’s the last place they want to be?
Bell also asks questions where God is all but silent. For example, What about those who have never heard? Of course, there are some things we can say beyond “We don’t know.” We know that “the Judge of all the earth” shall do right (Gen 18:25). We know that the Light “gives light to every man coming into the world” (Jn 1:9). We know this Judge has stated the reason why people perish: “The light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (3:19). The “blackness of darkness forever” is both a condemnation and a choice.
But a few of Bell’s questions deserve to be addressed. Here I will select two.
Sin in time, suffer forever?
He asks, “Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?” (p. 2). A few observations are in order, beginning with this: if, in this world, the crime of a moment, like murder, can justly cost the perpetrator the rest of his earthly life, what of crimes of high treason when committed against the government of the universe?
We must also ask: If killing a citizen is more serious than killing an animal, and killing a policeman is more serious than killing an ordinary citizen, and killing a head of state is more serious than killing a policeman, “Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot?” (Heb 10:29).
Bell’s question is similar to asking about those held at Guantanimo Bay: If a combatant is unrepentant and determined to continue hostilities when he is released, can we afford to end his incarceration?
Would heaven be an escape?
Another question Bell poses is this: “How could someone choose another way with a universe of love and joy and peace right in front of them—all of it theirs if they would simply leave behind the old ways and receive the new life of the new city in the new world?” (pp 113-114).
The tragic fact is that they do, and God tells us they will. “He who is often rebuked, and hardens his neck, will suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy” (Prov 29:1). And Jesus warned: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I say to you, will seek to enter and will not be able” (Lk 13:24).
How could Balaam preach the word of God and die with the enemy? How could Lot’s wife hold the hand of an angel and perish? How could Judas kiss the Door of heaven and go to his own place? And how ever could men crucify God’s Lamb?
Spiritual blindness is willful blindness. Our Lord applied Isaiah’s words as only He could: “Their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them” (Mt 13:15). After the Lord healed the man born blind in John 9, “some of the Pharisees…said to Him, Are we blind also?” (v 40). No, responded the Lord, He could heal blind people. Their problem, He said, was that they were pretending they could see, and as long as they pretended, they could not be helped.
Bell should also have asked: Is love—even divine love—guaranteed to be returned? Was our Lord’s lament over Jerusalem mere drama when He cried, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem…How often I was willing to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Mt 23:37)?
Although hell was not made for men, it can be the only option for those who “will not” have that Man to reign over them. We should thank God even for hell. It shows us He takes people’s choices very seriously. And such a place should spur us to make every effort in pleading with our fellow men now to “flee from the wrath to come” (Lk 3:7).