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DEBATE: Has Rob Bell cooled the fires of Hell?

1:02pm Saturday, 24th September 2011

Every couple of years, one book sets off a firestorm among Christians: this year it is a book about Hell appropriately enough. Rob Bell’s Love Wins has been a best seller off the back of protests by conservative Christians. John Piper, recently in Australia for Oxygen conference tweeted “farewell Rob Bell” drumming him out of evangelical Christianity

BAD READ Bell’s book kills off Christian mission says Marty Foord

There’s no doubt about it, Rob Bell puts the hip in Christian discipleship he’s cool without having to try. But his latest book Love Wins has provoked a storm of controversy. Before its US release the blogosphere ignited over its pre-release leaks. When it appeared big names from Brian McLaren to Tim Keller felt the need to say something. The furore led to Rob Bell’s appearance on Time magazine’s cover.
Why the ruckus? In Love Wins Rob Bell rejects the traditional understanding of hell. He calls it “misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread” of the gospel. Fighting words indeed. Rob Bell replaces the traditional hell with something more like purgatory: salvation is possible after death. He doesn’t explicitly say that all will be saved but gives the impression it’s very likely.
It’s impossible to summarise faithfully Love Wins in a review of this length. So I’ll cut to the heart of its argument. Rob Bell is repulsed by the idea that God could allow people to suffer in hell forever without any hope of escape. He thinks “torture” like this is incompatible with God’s love. Rather, if “God desires all people to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4) then surely God must get what he “desires”, the salvation of all.
Rob Bell’s “better story” is that God loves all and in Christ has forgiven everyone already.
Humanity is called to recognise this and turn from their own “hell” of rejecting God whether now or after death. No one lacks access to Jesus, because he can be mysteriously present in any culture or religion even when his name is not. What is spectacular about Love Wins is Rob Bell’s uncanny ability to ask questions in a way that tap into the nerve of his generation. This pastor can communicate.
However, for me Love Wins was ultimately unconvincing. Why? Again, I can’t mention all the reasons here. Let me give two. Firstly, Rob Bell’s use of Scripture at times is frankly dreadful. He funnels ideas into texts that are absent and quotes others well out of context.
He even makes the classic word study fallacy: he examines all the Scriptural occurrences of the word “hell” (unsatisfactorily to me) but
then fails to mention the many verses that unpack the concept of hell without using the word. An example is: “They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might,” (2 Thess. 1:9, NIV).
Moreover, Rob Bell attempts (unsuccessfully for me) to show that the Greek NT word aion often translated “eternal” doesn’t actually mean this, especially in Matt. 25:46. But in this verse the Greek text doesn’t use aion but aionios which does mean “eternal”:
Then they will go away to eternal (aionios) punishment, but the righteous to eternal (aionios) life. (Matt. 25:46, NIV).
Rob Bell produces no text that explicitly teaches post-death salvation, an idea so central to his argument. I think he attempts the impossible: erasing a traditional hell from Scripture. It’s too ingrained in the biblical narrative.
In my experience, most people who reject the traditional hell do so because they reject Scripture’s
supreme authority. I don’t think Rob Bell can have his cake and eat it.
Secondly, the major theological problem for me lies in Rob Bell’s understanding of God. He does not grasp how God’s love, anger, and justice harmonise. He thinks God is so loving he couldn’t pour out eternal anger on sin. But God’s anger arises from love. When parents love a child, the more the child rebels against them, the more hurt and angry they become. How much more our heavenly Father! What makes God divine in Scripture is that he is uncreated and thus infinite (Acts 17:24-25; Rom. 1:20).
God who “dwells in unapproachable light”
(1 Tim. 6:16) is provoked to infinite anger at human sin (Mark 3:29) precisely because he is eternal and his love for humans is eternal.
Indeed, the full extent of God’s love for us is seen in Christ who suffered infinitely for sinners.
What unutterable love!
God cannot be unjust. If a person kidnaps a child, justice can’t be done until the child
is returned to its parents. In Scripture, hell is not “torture” it’s justice. Hell is like the return
of a kidnapped child to its parents. It’s like the return of stolen property to its owner.
Hell is good because it restores divine justice.
I can’t fully grasp how it’s good because I’m not God. How dare I try! Rob Bell tries, and in the process distorts the Gospel.
In the end, Rob Bell’s “better story” diminishes God’s love and devastates Christian mission. Why take the gospel to people who already have Jesus in their culture and will likely be saved in the end?
Marty Foord is Lecturer in Systematic Theology and Church History at Trinity Theological College in Perth

GOOD READ These questions about God need to be asked says Benjamin Myers

Love Wins is a book about God. It raises the question: what kind of God do Christians believe in? That’s an important question in a world where so many of us - both within the church and without - have been hurt by bad theology. Perhaps we were taught that God has two different personalities: God can
switch back and forth between vengeance and mercy, so that we never quite know what to expect. Or perhaps we were taught to think of God as a watchful policeman, always ready to hand out infringement notices whenever we step out of line. Then again, maybe we grew up feeling that God is more “pure” than ordinary human experience, so that parts of our lives - especially those non-spiritual, bodily parts - are disgusting and offensive to God.
There’s nothing trivial about bad theology.
A diseased picture of God will inevitably produce its symptoms in our thoughts and feelings, in the way we live and relate to each other, and in our whole way of looking at the world. Family life, sexual life, friendship, work, leisure, creativity: all these facets of our lives are deeply shaped by the way we think about God. I often meet people still nursing wounds from the theology they imbibed as young children, people who are recovering from the worship of a “bad god”. Rob Bell is writing for people like those. And his point is simple: Jesus shows us what God is like; Jesus shows us the triumph of God’s love for the whole human race.
Thus Bell raises the question whether human rejection of God might finally be overcome by God’s love; whether hell might turn out to be empty; whether all, in the end, will be saved. The blithe assumption that salvation is only for “us”, he thinks, is an evasion of the universal significance of the gospel. If Christ’s resurrection doesn’t somehow affect every single human being, then we haven’t really grasped the meaning of the resurrection.
You might compare it to a legal system: it either applies to everybody, or to nobody. A legal system is not the sort of thing that applies to just some members of a society. In the same way, Christ’s resurrection is significant either for everyone, or for no one. As Bell puts it, Jesus is “as narrow as himself and as wide as the universe”. He is the exclusive way to salvation, yet he includes all humanity within himself.
Some evangelical commentators have questioned the orthodoxy of Bell’s position - especially his emphasis on the universality of salvation. But the most striking thing about his approach is its deep indebtedness to Eastern Orthodox tradition. The Orthodox churches have always emphasised the universality of Christ’s work: not only his death and resurrection, but also his descent into hell. The Orthodox liturgy proclaims that hell was emptied by Christ: “Hell’s gatekeepers trembled before you; you raised with you the dead from every age”. In another part of the liturgy, Orthodox Christians sing, “Rising from the tomb, you broke the bonds of Hades and destroyed the sentence of death, O Lord, delivering all from the snares of the enemy”.
The leading contemporary Russian theologian, Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, explores all this in his recent book, Christ the Conqueror of Hell (2009). He shows that, in Orthodox tradition, Christ’s descent into hell has a universal significance. Christ breaks the power of hell and releases all its captives. “Christ’s saving of the dead and the exodus from Hades were not one-time events that occurred in the past, without significance for the present. These are events that transcend time, whose fruits were reaped not only by those who were imprisoned in hell before Christ’s descent, but also by future generations.”
Rob Bell seems to be referring to this Orthodox tradition when he argues that “at the centre of the Christian tradition since the first church there have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins”. Once you see Christ’s death, descent and resurrection from an Orthodox perspective — as something universal, even cosmic, in scope, as something that reaches every human being without exception — then the real question becomes: how could anyone ultimately escape the reach of God’s love?
Archbishop Hilarion argues that the universal scope of Christ’s work doesn’t necessarily mean that all will be saved. But it means that even hell itself is no longer a place of separation from God. Christ has penetrated into the depths of hell, flooding its darkness with the light of love. Hell has become a site of divine activity, a venue of divine love. "If I make my bed in Hades, you are there" (Psalm 139:8). Thus the torment of hell can only be understood as the torment of love. Hell’s power is abolished, but someone might still reject God to such an extent that even love becomes a torment, a painful “scourge”.
This Eastern Orthodox tradition is conveniently ignored by those critics who accuse Bell of heresy. As though it’s a heresy to suggest that love is stronger than vengeance! As though Eastern Orthodoxy is not sufficiently “orthodox”! As though the Christian creed confesses anything positive about hell — except that Christ “descended” there before rising again!
From the perspective of Christian tradition, I don’t think there are any grounds for questioning the orthodoxy of Love Wins. As far as I can tell, Rob Bell really just presents the gospel: he tells of God’s victorious love, a love revealed in Jesus Christ, a love that is stronger than death.
The hostile reaction to Bell among North American evangelicals reminds me of the way some people responded to the great Reformed theologian, Karl Barth. Barth placed so much emphasis on God’s grace that his critics called him a universalist. But in Barth’s view, both universalism and its denial are errors. The important thing is to uphold the absolute freedom of grace: if grace is free, then we should neither deny nor affirm universal salvation. It’s not our decision to make — “salvation belongs to the Lord!” (Psalm 3:8). Barth thought the ferocious condemnation of universalism exposed something pathological in the Christian mindset. And so when he was accused of promoting universalism, he replied: “Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free …, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might prove to be empty!”
If that is our greatest anxiety - that God might turn out to be too gracious - then perhaps we ought to heed Rob Bell’s celebration of triumphant love, universal love, a love “as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart that no one else knows about”.
Or to quote one of the great theologians of the Orthodox tradition, St Isaac the Syrian: “Like a handful of dust thrown into the sea are the sins of all humankind compared with the mercy and providence of God”.
If that’s true, then we can be sure of one thing: in the end, love wins.
Benjamin Myers is Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the United Theological College.