intermission (2): love wins?

Rob Bell's new book "Love Wins" has been talked about day in and day out for the past couple weeks. His online promos make us ask, "What in the world is he going to say about heaven and hell?" Now, I haven't read the book yet (and doubt I will; don't have the palate for the guy), but from what I've gathered from excerpts, critiques, praises and condemnations, and from interviews with Rob Bell (as from the clip above), Bell buys into universalism. As much as he may deny it, the key point is there: God's love will win out, and people will respond to him in faith, even in death. Lots of people are loving this book, but lots of people--if not more people--are condemning it as heresy. My thoughts?

I'm no universalist. At all. There's no scriptural warrant for it. There’s an old mantra that goes: “Where scripture speaks, we speak; where scripture is silent, we conjecture.” I’m a fan of speculation as much as the next person, but speculation is fruitless without any bounds within which to speculate. At that point it becomes fanciful imagination. What I perceive Bell to be doing is fanciful imagining. He speculates, as do we all; but he does so outside the bounds of what scripture teaches. Scripture teaches hell. There’s no way around that. And scripture teaches that once you die, then comes judgment—no breath of postmortem opportunities for salvation. There’s life, and our choices and decisions in life affect our eternal destiny. Once the candle’s snuffed, the seal has been made. While I may be a bit heretical in my annihilationist perception of hell, at least there’s scriptural warrant for that; but what Bell is proposing—that all people, eventually, will be saved through Christ, won over by God’s love, thus leaving hell empty—is not just unsupported in the scriptures but flatly denied in the scriptures. And if we abandon the scriptures, and just go wild with our speculative and imaginative theology, there’s no limit to where we’ll go or what we’ll find. Good theology must have boundaries; and though the postmodern denies such a thing, that’s just the way it is (my modernist tendencies shine brightly here). Christians are free to come to their own conclusions via theological matters, but in my opinion they must come to such conclusions within the bounds of what the bible teaches. To do otherwise is to leap into uncharted and dangerous waters.

Another key point Bell makes is that of postmortem evangelism. He doesn’t say everyone goes to heaven when they die (a far liberal universalist position) but that people do go to hell, but during their stay there, God wins them over with his love. Once again, the New Testament is clear: after death, all that awaits us is judgment. There’s no second chance. Bell presumably works off a vague passage in 1 Peter, throwing context out the window and running with one interpretation and then wrapping all other eschatological passages around his specific understanding of this vague and obscure text. It’s one of the most common hermeneutical fallacies.

Some people call me heretical. They’ll jokingly call me a liberal. It’s ridiculous, really: I’m quite orthodox—sola scriptura all the way—and though I do hold some minority views on things, I hold them because I am convinced by scripture as a whole—“Let scripture interpret scripture”: don’t build a theology off a handful of verses, but read everything in greater degrees of contextual scope—and not because I just want to believe them. There are doctrinal things I want to believe in: eternal security, pre-millennialism (it’d be cool to speculate within that arena), and even Bell’s universalism. But I simply cannot, in good conscience, hold to them because the scriptures, in my understanding of them, do not warrant such a view. What we find in Bell, I think, is speculative theology wrapped in pretty lace that the immature and unsuspecting will swallow whole—and lots of people are gobbling it up. And it makes me wonder why. Because it makes sense? Because it’s scripturally valid? Because it sheds light on other things? Hell no. It’s swallowed up because it’s easy, because it’s comfortable, because it doesn’t make us worry about things. It makes it easy to “rest in God’s love” while simultaneously living a life of rebellion because we’re banking on his love to cover up our downright, obstinate disobedience. But I digress. Good night.