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Tuesday, 19 April 2011 10:47

Book Review: Rob Bell's Love Wins: Part 3: Frustration and Forgiveness

rob_bell_loves_wins

After finishing Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, I now understand why many people are so upset with Rob Bell. The book is very frustrating because you can’t pin the guy down. I still don’t know if Bell is a Universalist or if he believes in some kind of limited salvation. Bell’s ambiguity on heaven and hell is reflected in his chapter “Does God Get What God Wants.” In the beginning of that chapter, Bell claims that God does get what God wants, and God wants everyone to be saved. He quotes I Timothy 2:3-4, “God our savior…desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of truth.” That seems pretty clear. But by the end of the chapter, Bell claims that God’s love must allow for human freedom. He asserts that, in the end, we are free to choose, and we can choose to deny God. “That’s how love works,” claims Bell. “It can’t be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide. God says yes, we can have what we want, because love wins” (119).

I want him to pick. Which is it, Rob!?! Universalism or limited salvation?!? PICK DAMMIT!!!!

origen Okay. Now that we’ve expressed our frustrations, we can ask, “What is the value in Love Wins?” There is plenty of value in this book, and that value is directly connected to the frustration that we feel with Bell’s ambiguity. The reason Bell’s book is so controversial is because it is challenging us to take a deeper look at the Bible. As I stated in my first post on Love Wins, Bell constantly refers to scripture to support his exploration into the topic of salvation. What position does the Bible take on salvation? It is ambiguous. Some verses refer to limited salvation, while other refer to universal salvation. You find this ambiguity, that stems from the Bible, throughout Christian tradition. For example, Origen of Alexandria looked to Acts 3:21 to propose what has become known as apocatastasis, which asserts that God will eventually restore all things. It is true that Origen was eventually condemned by the Church, but both Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus (both are considered theological heavyweights of the early Church) made arguments very similar to Origen’s. Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, arguable the two most important theologians of the 20^th century, both opened the door to the possibility of universal salvation.

karl_barth

So, one can easily find arguments for Universalism in the Bible and in Christian tradition. To accuse Bell of not being biblical, or of being against the grain of Christian tradition, is to scapegoat him. And those accusations reveal our ignorance concerning the Bible and Christian tradition.

Still, I understand why even exploring universal salvation makes us uncomfortable. We are a people who want justice and for everyone to get into heaven would be unjust. The real question is not about Gandhi getting into heaven; the real question is about people like Hitler. I mean, does Hitler get into heaven?

I don’t know.

My uncertainty about Hitler likely makes you feel uncomfortable. But I really don’t know. And I don’t know because of something Jesus did that makes me feel very uncomfortable.

Good Friday is coming up. My fellow liberal mainline Protestants tend to not like the cross. “What’s so good about Good Friday?!?” we ask. But I think it’s essential for understanding God’s love.

cross

Before Jesus was killed on the cross, a crowd turned against him. Now, please, don’t blame the crowd. The crowd was just doing what humans always do. We scapegoat. As I stated in my previous post on Love Wins, this is what humans do. We have a propensity to unite against a common enemy. Our enemy’s guilt or innocence doesn’t matter to us. What matters is that our frustrations with one another wash away as we unite against an “Other.”

Now, what Jesus does on the cross is quite remarkable – and Bell points this out. Bell quotes Luke 23 and claims that “On the cross, Jesus says, ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’” Jesus doesn’t get caught up in the spirit of revenge. Rather, he gets’ caught up in the spirit of forgiveness. After quoting Luke, Bell adds, “Jesus forgives them all, without their asking for it. Done. Taken care of. Before we could be good enough, or right enough, before we could even believe the right things. Forgiveness is unilateral. God isn’t waiting for us to get it together, to clean up, shape up get up—God has already done it” (188-189).

The people that Jesus forgave while he was on the cross – those people didn’t deserve to be forgiven. So, why did Jesus forgive them? As Bell points out, through our friend Paul’s writing in Colossians 1, “through the cross God was reconciling ‘to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (125).

Jesus forgives those who don’t deserve to be forgiven because it is how God finally reconciled God’s Self to all things. All things. That sounds pretty universal to me.

So, the answer to the subtitle of Love Wins, which is, “A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived” is that everyone is forgiven. Yes, even, as uncomfortable as this feels to write, Hitler.

Jesus does the hard work for us. He reveals that God is love and that God forgives. Our role is to participate in that love and in that forgiveness, to be shaped by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As Bell claims, “Jesus invites us to trust that the love we fear is too good to be true is actually good enough to be true…Jesus invites us to become, to be drawn into this love as it shapes us and forms us and takes over every square inch of our lives. Jesus calls us to repent, to have our minds and hearts transformed so that we see everything differently” (196).

I highly recommend Love Wins. It will challenge you. It will frustrate you. But more than anything, it will provide you with a glimpse into the challenging and frustrating love of God that includes all things.

Published in In The Beginning

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