Tag Archives: Rob Bell

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Seeing the Big Picture: A Review of Rob Bell’s Love Wins

It's a nice corner, though, right?

Years ago, when I would discuss certain issues with my father, at some point he would accuse me of “not seeing the big picture.” Typically, what he meant by this was that in the process of arguing my side or seeking to understand the purpose of doing some specific thing or considering some concept in a specific way, I had lost sight of the inherent reason for, or reality of, the situation. “You’re focusing on only a tiny little corner of the painting, son. You’re not seeing the big picture.”

I hated it when he would say that, mainly because he was right. It was a true assessment. I had lost sight of the big picture in order to defend or explain one small detail. It was like trying to put together a puzzle one piece at a time, but with no thought to the picture on the box – the end result. The goal.

I was continually reminded of this while reading Rob Bell’s newest book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Most folks are aware that before this book even hit shelves last spring, the Internet was ablaze with Christians – some well-known, many unknown – attacking what they believed to be an intriguingly disguised case for Christian Universalism, which, on a basic level, is the belief that all human beings will ultimately be reconciled to God and be saved from hell. Of course, the book has had its defenders, but what I found so unsettling was how quick some folks were ready to pass judgment on the book before they even read it! The spark that lit the fire was the video promo for the book, which many people believed was evidence enough that Bell had slid too far down the slope of heresy. Take a look for yourself…

There you have it. Rob Bell practically says it all right in the promo. No need to read the book – the guy leaves room in heaven for Gandhi! Can you believe it? Who’s next? Che Guevara? Hitler? bin Laden?

Hide yo' kids!

There are two problems with this assumption that Bell is a universalist and that Love Wins is merely a faulty manifesto of non-biblical ideas from the fringes of “emergent” psuedo-Christianity.

See? They won't even let them into the store to buy Bell's book!

First, to assume that because Bell is not ready to count Mahatma Gandhi as one of the damned he must be a universalist is like assuming that because I sympathize with the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank I must therefore be an anti-Semite. The conclusion requires a jump that would shatter all Olympic records. Sure, if you take the two-minute sound-bite as the whole argument, it is easy to discredit Bell. However, as he points out at more length in his book, whether or not Gandhi is in hell is not the point. The real point is how quick Christians are willing to stand in place of God when it comes to matters of who gets in to heaven and who doesn’t. Time and again in the scriptures we are reminded that it is Jesus Christ who will be the final, ultimate judge of this world. Christians are not the judge, and despite the way in which some people speak and conduct themselves, neither do they sit on the jury.

The second problem, that which concerns the outright rejection of the book, is that what Bell has written in Love Wins is not an argument for the non-existence of hell at all; however, the only way to know this is to… wait for it… read the actual book! Those that do read despite the forewarnings of becoming corrupted by a contagion of heresy (I finished the book a few days ago and, so far, I’m feeling fine) may be surprised to discover that only one of the eight chapters is concerned with hell, and at no point does Bell reject the existence or concept of hell. Instead, they will find that Bell is not offering universal reconciliation as the “right” way to understand God’s will. Instead, all he seems to be encouraging is for Christians to consider why it is they believe what they believe, and what those particular beliefs reveal about their concept of who God is. In other words, Bell is not arguing one little corner of the picture, but trying to get his readers to step back and take in the whole thing. If anything, he wants us to remember that believing in God means starting with the big picture – that God does indeed love us. All of us. Even with all our confusion and misdeeds and mistakes and dark secrets, he loves us. Not despite our imperfection, but rather in light of it.

Peer into the face of demonic heresy!

Make no mistake, Love Wins is concerned with theology. It is a challenging book, and it does offer a paradigm shift when it comes to how we think about God and our relationship with him. But if there is any reason to read the book, it is not so we can have answers for people wondering why God lets some people into heaven but sends others to hell. As Bell continually reminds his readers, God is so much bigger than these concerns, and his love is much, much greater than the way in which so many Christians have grown up thinking about it. What is most important, and the reason I believe people should read this book, is it forces us to consider the world – our friends, our enemies, our ancestors, our children, our children’s children – no longer from our limited, human perspective, but from God’s eternal perspective. It is a point of view that can be hard to fathom, but this is nothing new. God once spoke through Isaiah the prophet, saying, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways.”

For many years, I was guilty of considering salvation from a very limited, corner-of-the-painting perspective. My understanding of salvation in Christ was akin to a business deal. Sure, most of the work is done for me, but, at some point, I have to close the deal lest the relationship never be officially forged and the benefits rendered null and void. I think a lot of us have viewed “coming to Christ” or “getting saved” or being “born again” in this way, where some form of the Sinner’s Prayer constitutes our signature on the contract that is drawn up and offered freely by Jesus H. Christ, Esq. Heaven becomes that primo retirement plan waiting on us after we slogged our way through this labor-intensive life. As for hell, well, maybe if those folks had just worked a little harder. After all, it’s not as if they weren’t warned that they could be downsized at any moment, and, c’mon, who wouldn’t want a pension this valuable?

Available now wherever books are burned...

What a joyless, impotent way of thinking about my relationship with a holy God, the creator of all things. There were years when I walked church aisles time and again because, in essence, I was afraid my signature had been too illegible.

Whether you’re a Christian who thinks you’ve got a pretty good handle on who God is, or a person who has rejected belief in a God because the people who profess him seem so small-minded, I think we all need to step back and consider the bigger picture. God is so much bigger than the pundit preacher they’re interviewing on CNN or Fox News. He is so much greater than the moral absolute at the heart of a candidate’s political platform. He is so far beyond the scrawled opinions of the picket signs.

And we can know him. We can know this God. All it takes is a willingness to look past our own limited views of him. We’ll find him waiting there for us with open arms. We’ll find him here. We’ll find him now.

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Living with Mystery

A relevant graphic, or the guy who eventually became The Riddler?

It is not a convenient thing to live with questions. The modern culture in which we live does not cotton to mystery in place of cold, hard facts; it does not hold an appreciation for uncertainty. We want answers, definitions, explanations that connect A to Z. It is usually not very popular to connect A to V and state that the rest of the path may remain unknown. If physical effort in a person’s life is composed of growing stronger and more capable of handling the tasks set before him, then his mental effort is geared toward furthering an overall understanding of the world in which he lives and the purposes for which he strives within it. This is not unique to a certain culture – it is a fundamental aspect of humanity. Given a choice, we would much rather know than wonder.

This is why to live as a Christian is, essentially, counter-cultural. At the very heart of the life of a Christian and the mission of the Church is that sometimes-inspiring-but-often-annoying word that serves as the axis upon which everything turns: faith. If you grew up going to church, or found yourself attending a youth group at some point during your adolescence, or have simply visited a local congregation from time to time, you’ll hear this word again and again. Sometimes there will be someone, a teacher or a preacher or a fellow worshipper, who will feel confidant enough to define it for you. Even the writers of the Scriptures attempt to define it, one of the more famous being the first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Book of Hebrews: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” When I was in high school, one of my Sunday School teachers told me that the Greek word for “hope” means “certainty.” He translated the verse, “Now faith is being certain of what you are certain is going to happen, and certain about what you don’t know.” It always sounded ridiculous to me, but for a time, I believed it. Hope, and as an extension, faith itself, meant certainty. There was no question, no mystery. As a Christian, what I believed became cold, hard fact.

It didn’t take long for this assertion to fail me. Deep down, I knew there was no way to prove what I believed and exactly how I was supposed to go about this life of faith. If I couldn’t prove it, then I could never be certain. Thus, faith melted back into mystery. I came to realize that the little definition verse out of the Book of Hebrews was not meant to insist on certainty, but to instill confidence in the midst of uncertainty. That was the rub – the real definition. Confidence within mystery.

On the road of life, there are questions and there are answers...

Christians may not realize it, but acceptance of mystery and teachings on what authentic faith looks like have been waning in the Church. A lot of congregations may pay lip service to the reality that the Christian life cannot be outlined all the way from A to Z, but they operate as if it can. And a lot of folks are not comfortable with questions. Many believe that faith is all about certainty, and if you are struggling with understanding or accepting some characteristic of God or some doctrine of the Church, you have a lack of faith. Your faith is weak. Why is this? Is it not because of our human nature, that admitting we don’t know something, or we don’t (yet) understand something is not a comfortable thing to do?

Behold the face of evil (whose vision has apparently been corrected).

Case in point: One of the big topics of conversation within the Western Church over the past few months has been Rob Bell’s newest book, Love Wins. Before this book even hit shelves, bloggers lit the match of controversy by claiming that Pastor Bell was a universalist – that he believes there is no hell, or at least that, when all is said and done, no one will end up there. Many believed, before even reading it, that his new book provided proof of this. There are a lot of folks in the Church who have avoided reading the book because they assume the agenda is to reason away the existence of hell. Some have even gone so far to say that they are not surprised in this alleged revelation about Bell; his earlier books are full of questions regarding some of the basic tenets of the Christian faith. For crying out loud, the subtitle of his first book was “Repainting the Christian Faith”! Obviously, this guy is on a path to heresy, watering down the Gospel message with his reimagined metaphors and questions.

I’m reading Love Wins right now. So far, I’m a fan. Rob Bell isn’t erasing hell any more than he is redefining heaven (both single chapters in a work that is focused on much larger concepts). What he is doing is asking questions. He’s leaving room for wonder. He’s concerning himself with the nature of faith itself – that while we can’t always know exactly how things are going to work out, we don’t have to cover up this reality. Instead, we can do our best to examine what we do know, and focus our lives toward the truth in which we hope for. In other words, Bell’s book is upholding the belief that questioning and re-examining is a healthy discipline, while pretending as if everything about the Christian life is clear and practical and in accordance with our culture is detrimental and only succeeds in producing Christians who may appear relevant but actually possess no real foundation to their professed beliefs.

It is important to remember, also, that while Christians must learn to live with a sense of mystery – an understanding that not all questions can be answered – we must also not fail to engage these questions. Just because a question cannot be fully, definitively answered does not mean we don’t attempt to answer it. Living with mystery does not mean brushing off all the difficult ideas because we suspect we will never arrive at a full understanding. This attitude exists not in people who embrace mystery, but people who are afraid of it. It comes from people who want all uncertainty brought to light, and if they encounter something that seems unsolvable, they are quick to say, “Oh well, I guess it’s just a mystery. We’ll understand it when we get to heaven.” This doesn’t mean they have examined the idea and come to a point of true acceptance; this means they want to forget it, erase it from their life.

What if Moses had pulled that one?

It all boils down to fear. Too many Christian live in fear, and the thing we fear most is uncertainty. Uncertainty means doubt. It means a lack of answers. At times, it means a wringing of the hands. It means questions and debate. It means disagreement. It means endless patience. It means, ultimately, that our comfort is not God’s number one priority. Dr. Roger Olson calls the people who have learned to live confidently amidst the questions, “reflective Christians.” In his book Questions to All Your Answers, he writes:

Reflective Christianity is culture-shaping Christianity. It encounters the world and presents the Christian message as a viable competitor against all the other worldviews and philosophies and spiritualities in the marketplace of ideas. It is unafraid of the hard task of critically thinking through and sometimes against what is already believed and taught and making it intelligible to honest seekers after truth. It is also self-critical Christianity that does not make idols out of traditional beliefs or personal feelings or favorite styles of worship but subjects them all to the test of truth and lets the chips fall where they may.

I suspect that a lot of non-Christians who have, at some point in their lives, rejected the Church because of what they felt was close-mindedness, or overly dogmatic sermonizing, or a disconnect from logic and reason, may be rejecting a skewed, self-centered version of the life of faith.

The real life of faith is much roomier than a lot of people think, or are comfortable believing. It embraces seekers after the Truth, is patient with their questions, respectful of their doubts and confidently dedicated to encouraging more and more reflection. It is the only way we will cultivate an authentic awareness of all the glory and wonder that exists between A and B, and B and C, and C and D, and so on all the way to Kingdom come.