YouthWorker Journal always has been good at fostering healthy dialog in a professional spirit. It is, after all, a professional journal. We recognize that Rob Bell is a significant voice in the world of youth ministry, and that’s why we’re inviting a number of voices, including yours, to join in the conversation about Love Wins here on our website. We’re grateful to Tony Myles and Benjamin Kerns for helping us get the conversation started. To read our publisher’s response to the book, click here.
Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
By Rob Bell
HarperOne, 2011, 224 pp., $22.99, HarperCollins.com
This book, as with any book, is incomplete. Perhaps that alone is one thing its author and critics would agree about. Where they would deviate is that Rob Bell contends our dominant perspectives on heaven and hell are questionable; and it’s time to bring some overlooked, ancient ideas to the table. Critics have pushed back that while there’s great gain in considering heaven and hell in the here and now, elevating a present mindset over an eternal mindset is similar to seeking nutrition from seasoning rather than the main course.
More than enough has been written about the content of this book by people who have read it, haven’t read it or merely read reports about the book. As a reviewer for YouthWorker Journal, it’s my intent to share a non-denominational review of what a reader may not gain in reading this book. This review will not go into great detail regarding who is right and who is wrong in the arguments about heaven and hell, although I am tempted to point out the irony of how heretical many of us can be in the tone and ways we charge the other side with heresy.
Let’s talk about a book.
It is difficult to read Love Wins slowly, because aside from any commentary founds on blogs and news channels, the book itself promotes a cunning agenda that sucks you into it. The backside cover slyly questions the love of God for torturing people in hell because they didn’t respond to Him in the right way while on earth. Some will view this as a comedian spewing profanity and shouldn’t be heard; others will tune in because while the thoughts are edgy and naughty, the listener resonates with how the comic views life. To be fair, this is more than a teaser because the author repeatedly asks this question in some form all throughout the book.
As a manuscript, there aren’t many thoughts shared that aren’t in some way familiar. At first, I thought this was from experience, as I attended Mars Hill Bible Church for a season and have had some intentional conversations with the author who also pastors Mars Hill. This bears mentioning because the content of Love Wins is a thread of thinking he’s been offering during the years in bite-sized portions. As it stands, most people who read this book will consume it all at once as they would a drink from a fire hydrant.
The upside of this approach is that it’s easier to recognize how the familiar shows up in each chapter, and by familiar I refer to the way our world thinks. The author utilizes the thought patterns of that which is common—fallen humanity and its understanding of how God should work—to try to speak about God’s original and the already-but-not-yet normal. You may recognize this approach with youth who often begin theological conversations by saying, “Well, I just feel…” or “I just think…” to ascribe characteristics to God rather than letting Him have the final, beyond-our-understanding word.
Bell’s sentences begin in more profound ways, however, and he offers much to the church at large to consider about how our someday thoughts about heaven cloud our current opportunities. He argues, “Heaven comforts, but it also confronts.” Certain things will not last in the life to come, such as coveting and greed; and living that out now only creates a literal hell on earth. The author says, “There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.”
In contrast, Bell argues that much of what Jesus said about heaven needs to be understood inter-dimensionally, yet what Jesus taught about hell is to be taken more historically. Heaven is painted more with eternal overtones, while hell is sketched as a first century trash heap. Whether this is sound or heretical theology, it is inconsistent writing that demands Jesus means many things on one topic yet only offers one layer to His other teaching.
The author’s most notable contribution within the book is what he asks on behalf of the reader. It may seem thought provoking, such as “Gandhi’s in hell?” yet, what kind of question is that? What bothers me about such moments in this book isn’t their alleged heresy, but the fact that anyone could have written its mirror image by reversing the questions. For example, “Maybe Gandhi is in hell?” or “Does God get what He wants…only when He loves? Or could He get what He wants when He exercises His role as judge, too?” Consider how easy that is on a literary level, and yet how irresponsible it could become theologically.
The meta-narrative of the book continually puts our traditional sense of God on trial, and plenty of Scripture is used as bricks that feel more like trampolines. It will be tempting for the emerging generation to gravitate toward this concept of gauging eternity based on our sense of morality, however what the book truly misses is a closing paragraph that yields to God. A broken world will not fully comprehend how heaven and hell work, but we can be in relationship with the Savior who does (and calls the final shots, including any with which we may disagree).
If I had the chance to interview Rob, I would ask, “What questions won’t you answer directly, and what are your answers to those questions?” That isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, which is why I recommend you read this book in a theological community of people to whom you can propose these atypical questions without feeling insecure, yet know how to wrestle in appropriate ways to discover the answer. Dialogue about the implications of emerging thought patterns to help us remember what we have forgotten, such as how heaven is not merely an escape from this world, but is intended to affect how we live here on earth. Likewise, question your questions while probing the nature of a common mentality that wonders, “If it’s only mentioned a couple of times in the Bible, is it really that important?”
The first sin began with the question “Did God really say…?” yet we are challenged by God in our current state to “Test everything, and hold onto the good.” Bell’s book will be on the best-seller list for a long while, but it won’t outsell the greatest book of all time. If his book doesn’t become the new canon but does take us deeper into the Book, then perhaps that is one way in which love wins…as does holiness. After all (and please note that I am ending with a question), isn’t God both?
Click here for Benjamin Kerns’ review.
