Review: “Love Wins” by Rob Bell, Part IV: The Robbellian View of Man
Posted by thetenthleper in Book Reviews on March 9, 2011
At the start of the book’s fourth chapter (“Does God Get What God Wants?”), Bell quotes doctrinal statements from several unnamed churches’ websites. The first round of quotes has to do with the fate of the unsaved: “The unsaved will be separated forever from God in hell.” Another: “Those who believe in Jesus will be sent to eternal punishment in hell.” And finally: “The unsaved dead will be committed to an eternal conscious punishment.” “All this,” he writes, “on a website. Welcome to our church.” (pp.97-98) He continues:
“Yet on these very same websites are extensive affirmations of the goodness and greatness of God, proclamations and statements of belief about a God who is ‘mighty,’ ‘powerful,’ ‘loving,’ ‘unchanging,’ ‘sovereign,’ ‘full of grace and mercy,’ and ‘all-knowing.’ This God is the one who created ‘the world and everything in it.’ This is the God for whom ‘all things are possible.’ I point out these parallel claims: that God is mighty, powerful, and ‘in control’ and that billions of people will spend forever apart from this God, who is their creator, even though it’s written in the Bible that ‘God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth’ (1 Tim.2). So does God get what God wants?” (pp.98-99) And again on page 100 he asks: “Will all people be saved, or will God not get what God wants?”
As the quotes above indicate, he seems to believe that this definition of Hell is irreconcileable with the idea of an all-powerful, all-loving God. History is tragic if it all ends with billions of people “suffering infinitely for the finite sins they committed in the few years they spent on earth…” It means that God simply gave up his pursuit of sinners. (p.104) This idea of Hell also doesn’t make for a very good story. ”Telling a story about a God who inflicts unrelenting punishment on people because they didn’t do or say or believe the correct things in a brief window of time called life isn’t a very good story.” (p.112)
Bell’s challenge to the popular view of Hell appears to be rooted in his conception of God as the Father of every person. For instance, imagine a person gets hit by a car and dies later the same day. If they didn’t believe in Jesus, and God was forced to send them to unending, conscious torment in hell, then “God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony. If there was an earthly father who was like that, we could call the authorities. If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately. If God can switch gears like that…that raises a thousand questions about whether a being like this could ever be trusted, let alone be good. Loving one moment, vicious the next. Kind and compassionate, only to become cruel and relentless in the blink of an eye. Does God become somebody totally different the moment you die? The kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can.” (pp.175-176)
I’m in full agreement with Bell that this view of God is a caricature. Happy, loving, and in full pursuit of us, only to become a severely vicious and angry God…all because we stop breathing. That is the view of God often presented in our culture, even if only subtlely. But while I do agree with Bell that this view is inaccurate, I disagree with him on why. At least I think I do. Citing verses like Malachi 2:10 and Acts 17:28, Bell observes that the “writers of the scriptures consistently affirm that we’re all part of the same family. What we have in common- regardless of our tribe, language, customs, beliefs, or religion- outweights our differences. This is why God wants ‘all people to be saved.’ History is about the kind of love a parent has for a child, the kind of love that pursues, searches, creates, connects, and bonds. The kind of love that moves toward, embraces, and always works to be reconciled with, regardless of the cost.” (p.101)
It sounds like Bell’s criticism of the caricature God two paragraphs up is that a loving God suddenly becomes wrathful. He argues that our heavenly Father isn’t that unstable. My criticism with the caricature though is that it assumes we all have a Father-child relationship with God. I argued in Part III that by nature we are God’s enemies and thus we don’t have that Father-child relationship. The important difference here is that in the interpretation I’m advocating, God’s wrath isn’t something that begins suddenly upon death. We are all by nature sinners, and as those who have descended from Adam (every human being), we deserve God’s wrath. The state of spiritual death we’re in is the backdrop of God’s love and mercy. That love is seen in the context of the Hell that we deserve. The love of God and the wrath of God are not two mutually exclusive ideas, but two realities we must come to terms with. The greatest demonstration of this love (the cross) involves the outpouring of God’s wrath, just not on the people who deserved it but on the one person who ever lived that didn’t.
In Numbers 21, the story is told of the Israelites complaining yet again as they wandered through the wilderness. Same old complaint: “Egypt was better. Following God is lame.” As punishment, God sent among the people fiery serpents who began to bite the people of Israel so that many of them died. Realizing the folly of their ways, they repented and begged Moses to pray on their behalf. Moses did so, and the Lord listened. He commanded Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.” (Numbers 21:8) If any Israelite was bitten by a serpent, they only had to look at the bronze serpent on the pole and they would be healed. Now everyone and their pet iguana knows John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”), but we tend to forget about John 3:14-15- “‘And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’” In Numbers, it was people who were perishing that needed to look upon the serpent. And in John 3, Jesus is comparing salvation to that incident. We often interpret “For God so loved the world” to mean “God loved the world SOOOOOO much”, but that’s not the function of the word translated “so.” That word in Greek (outōs) means “thus” or “in this way.” ”In this way, God loved the world…” As perishing people were healed by looking at the bronze serpent, so Hell-bound sinners will be healed by looking at the Son of God. God did not send his Son to condemn the world, because the world already stands condemned now (John 3:17-18, 36).
Connected with this thought is the doctrine of God’s fatherhood. Bell paints God’s pursuit of sinners as a father’s pursuit of his children. Granted, there is a sense in which all human beings are children of God (Acts 17:28). But what he doesn’t mention is the different ways in which that term is applied to God. Just as the word “church” can have different meanings depending on context (the worldwide Church or a local body of believers), so does “Father” when applied to God. He is Father to his one true Son, Jesus. He is Father to the people of Israel (Exodus 4:22-23, Deuteronomy 14:1, Malachi 2:10). And as we’ve seen, he is Father to all created things (Acts 17:28-29, Luke 3:38). But God’s fatherhood is displayed in far more intimate terms in the New Testament than just Creator-creatures. To those who have looked on the Son and been healed, he has given his Spirit to live in them. God’s children are those who are led by the Spirit and who, by that Spirit, cry out to him “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:14, Galatians 4:6). Those who believe in Jesus are given the right to become children of God (John 1:12).
God sent his Son into the world not to pursue children but to pursue sinners so that he might make them his children. So for God to allow anyone to suffer an eternity apart from him isn’t the same as saying that he’s abandoned his children. While it’s true in one sense that all men are God’s children, there is a far deeper and more important sense of God’s fatherhood found in Scripture which very clearly does not apply to every person. Some men have God as their father. Others have the devil as theirs (see John 8:44, 1 John 3:10). Sonship in its most important sense is something which has its beginning in salvation and is distinctive of believers in Christ (John 1:12, Ephesians 5:1, Philippians 2:15, 1 Peter 1:14, 2:10, 1 John 3:1).
What’s the moral of all this? The moral is that God is not the kind of Father who children come to only to be kicked out onto the streets for their rest of their lives because they didn’t agree with him on something. The picture in the Bible is not that people come to God’s door but that they’re running from it. And God goes on the hunt to save some. The “some” he saves are those who respond to his call to turn to him. Not all people make that response. A question that every believer should ask themselves is this: “Which is unfair- Heaven or Hell?” The beauty of the Gospel is that it is spectacularly unfair. People will often claim it’s unfair that we’ve inherited the guilt from Adam’s sin. Sure, it stinks. Because he sinned, he doomed us all and we come into this world as fallen creatures. We reap the reward of our representative head. Lame. But is it? The good news is that this same logic applies to our salvation. God sent Jesus into the world to save sinners by becoming a new representative. Just as we’re sinners because of Adam, now we’re righteous in God’s sight because of Jesus (Romans 5:12-21). Think of that: God looks on you and sees Jesus’ perfect life. Not bad. It’s not fair that a perfect man suffered the wrath of God for imperfect people. It’s not fair that we get rewarded for his perfect life. But who’s really going to complain? We shouldn’t wonder how a loving God could send people to Hell. We should wonder how a just and holy God could send anyone to Heaven.
I say it all because it’s an important perspective to keep in mind when dealing with the topic of Hell. I don’t know for sure if all this is stuff that Bell would disagree with, but on page 104 he does write: “Is God our friend, our provider, our protector, our father- or is God the kind of judge who may in the end declare that we deserve to spend forever separated from our Father?” Regardless of whose question this really is (Bell’s or if he’s just playing devil’s advocate), it presents a view of God’s fatherhood which is inconsistent with Scripture, which in turn makes Hell harder to understand. 2 Thessalonians 1:9 says of those who do not know God that they “will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”. Bell’s view of man makes it easier to see eternal torment as the result of an abusive Father. But God is not the bad guy. He’s the good guy who redeems bad guys. Bell’s picture of love seems to be: “God won’t allow anyone to go through that.” But the biblical picture of love is knowing that Jesus went through that and for his enemies. In other words, God’s love is greatly demonstrated in the quality of the people he saved rather than the quantity (Romans 5:8). That’s love.
This understanding of God’s fatherhood also colors Bell’s discussion (and his understanding, it seems) of Hell and its duration. That’s next.
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Originally Posted by myinnuendo999
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