Loves Win...The Controversy Explained

This is a response to an article written by Galli in a recent edition of "Christianity Today" regarding Rob Bell's new book "Love Wins". It's quite involved, but worth the read if you're interested in this recent "evangelical controversy"...

HELL’S BELL: PART 2

Kyle Blanchette and Jerry L. Walls

Okay, I really should not be spending any more time on the Rob Bell controversy. However, a friend at Notre Dame asked my opinion of the review by Mark Galli of Christianity Today. I read it and thought it is was as revealing of weaknesses and shortsightedness in contemporary evangelical theology as it was of problems with Bell's book. In chatting with a former student who had similar thoughts, we decided to collaborate on a few further reflections. Kyle is a recent graduate of Asbury Seminary who plans to do a PhD in philosophy. I expect you will be hearing from him before too long

Galli makes a number of observations about Love Wins, some of which are certainly on target. Let's begin with where we think Galli gets it right about Bell. On the positive side, Galli is right that Bell has an uncanny way to turn a phrase and breathe new life into old theological concepts. Bell wants to widen the vision that many Christians have of the gospel, and he does this successfully and compellingly. At many points he sounds like he is channeling N.T. Wright when he stresses God's aim to bring heaven to earth, to begin eternal life now, all without undermining the reality of an eschatological heaven and earth.

On the negative side, Galli rightly points out that Love Wins sometimes suffers from a lack of precision and clarity, which often leaves readers wondering where he is going in many passages. Given the weightiness of the issues Bell has raised in this book, readers would have benefited from more careful analysis, or at least from more references to books that tackle these issues with scholarly depth and insight. Bell has a knack for raising important and pointed questions about the implications of certain versions of orthodoxy – questions that evangelicals are often either afraid to ask or unable to answer satisfactorily - but he does not always give good answers to these questions, if he gives answers at all. When dealing with controversial theological issues such as universalism and the atonement, Bell does not always present a balanced picture of both sides of a given argument. And as many other reviewers have already pointed out, Bell's handling of biblical passages is occasionally misleading, falling short in accuracy or nuance.

Galli gets right to the point in addressing Bell's alleged universalism, which was the issue that sparked the internet wars over this book, and it is here that Galli begins to fall short in his analysis of Bell. Galli is right to charge Bell with overstating traditional support for universalism (understood as the belief that all will be saved) – while many everyday Christians have undoubtedly held to this view, it is a decidedly minority position if we are talking about the broad consensus of ecumenical statements of faith (107-108). Christian theologians throughout the history of the church have by and large rejected convinced universalism, whether in their individual theologies or in communal confessional orthodoxy (although the earliest creeds do not directly address the issue of universalism, to be sure).

Nevertheless, though Galli finds it hard to believe that Bell is not a universalist in the above sense after reading the book, the evidence from Love Wins makes it very easy for us to believe that Bell is not a convinced universalist. Yes, Bell presents some arguments for universalism. But Bell lays out the possibility of a decisive and everlasting rejection of God (due to perverse human freedom) just as forcefully as he lays out the possibility of universal salvation (103-105, 113). Near the end of his survey of various positions, Bell asks, “Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choices?” He then responds, “Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don't need to resolve them or answer them because we can't, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires.” Indeed, Bell is clear that part of what it means for love to win is for human beings to have freedom (103; 113; 116-117). In other words, Bell does exactly what Galli insists that he should have done: he stresses the possibility of eternal hell, the possibility of universal salvation, and then leaves the biblical tension unresolved. As has already been pointed out, Bell is at most a hopeful universalist.

Moreover, if Bell were to become a convinced universalist, his universalism surely would not be “barbless,” nor would it lack the crucial dimensions of judgment and repentance, nor would it “sentimentalize” the gospel by letting God's love overrun His justice, as Galli suggests. Serious Trinitarian universalists like Origen (and more recently, Thomas Talbott) do not deny the reality of judgment and hell (here and hereafter) – they simply hold that hell is not everlasting (arguing that aionios ought to be translated in another way in passages about hell) and that all will repent and come to Christ in the end. And given Galli's firm commitment to (penal) substitutionary atonement, it is more than a little puzzling why he would view universalism as necessarily sentimental and barbless. If Jesus absorbed the wrath of God, the justice issue has been settled, even if every single soul is saved. Certainly Galli would affirm that the sacrifice of Jesus was sufficient to satisfy the justice of God for the sins of the whole world; even the most dyed-in-the-wool, limited-atonement Calvinist would heartily affirm that. Wrath, after all, is just another expression of God's holy love (his anger at sin is aimed at our repentance and ultimate well being) so in the end there is no tension between God's justice and His love, even if everyone is saved.

This leads us to Galli's treatment of Bell's reflections on the atonement. He rightly notes that Bell brings forth the variety of biblical metaphors used to describe Christ's death. Bell is clear that we should not let any single metaphor dominate our understanding of what happened on the cross; each one was a creative expression of the biblical authors’ intention to communicate the vastness of what Christ has done for us and for the world (126). Galli argues that Bell's principal way of explaining the personal effects of the cross is through the moral exemplar model of the atonement, a staple of liberal Protestant theology. But while some of Bell's statements do resonate with this model (which Galli also sees as at least one aspect understand the atonement), it is highly doubtful that all of Bell's thoughts on the personal application of the atonement can be explained through the lens of the moral exemplar model of the atonement. As Galli himself observes, Bell spends quite some time explaining the Christus Victor view of the atonement, which Bell rightly points out held sway in the first thousand or so years of the church in some form or another (128). Galli struggles to see how such a view could have personal as well as cosmic implications, but in its richest forms, Christus Victor undoubtedly encompasses both the cosmic and the personal, both the subjective and the objective. Indeed, Galli's preoccupation with (penal?) substitutionary atonement as a defining mark of orthodoxy reveals the provincial way in which many evangelical Christians confuse their particular version of orthodoxy with orthodoxy itself, which is far broader in offering several possible interpretations of key doctrines of orthodoxy than many evangelicals realize.

Bell's questioning of certain versions of substitutionary atonement (it is not at all clear that Bell rejects all substitutionary theories as inadequate) is one reason among many as to why Galli finds it appropriate to associate Bell with the tradition of theological liberalism, naming in particular such thinkers as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. Admittedly, relatively recent history provides reason to worry that evangelicals will lose their doctrinal moorings and drift carelessly into liberalism of one variety or another. Many institutions have lost their evangelical identity to this movement as essential Christian doctrines were displaced by wishy-washy, “demythologized” reinventions that bear little or no resemblance to classical Christian orthodoxy. In this instance, however, the fear of theological liberalism seems to loom so large that it prompts Galli to misread Love Wins in a number of significant ways.

First of all, if Bell is a theological liberal, he is one of a very odd sort, for he affirms all of the central commitments of consensual creedal orthodoxy, such as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the Atonement, the Resurrection, a Final Judgment at the end of history, and the like. In light of this, it is hard to read this characterization as more than an attempt at guilt by association. Indeed, the fact that Galli invokes four such towering representative of liberal theology in his critique of Bell, a pastor who makes no pretense of being an academic, suggests that Bell has hit a nerve in a way that is deeply unsettling to the Reformed (and Reformed-leaning) hegemony that holds in many evangelical circles. Be that as it may, we think the comparison of Bell to the likes of Schleiermacher and Bultmann is farfetched to put it mildly. But let's address the specific points at which Galli sees Bell as drifting into the land of theological liberalism.

Galli reads Bell's comments about the difficulty for modern people to understand the sacrificial dimensions of the atonement as evidence that Bell's central aim in this book is to make Christianity palatable to the modern world. The criterion that seems to be driving Bell's hermeneutic, he says, is “what contemporary people can swallow” as if Bell, like Schleiermacher, is willing to domesticate the gospel so it will be acceptable to Christianity's “cultured despisers,” the intellectually elite of our time. But a careful reading of Love Wins suggests a far different aim. Bell instead seems to be concerned with bruised and battered sinners (like the woman he tells us about who gives him a number each week which signifies how many days since she has cut herself, pp 163-4) who have been given a deeply distorted picture of the love of God and the Christian gospel. In pointing out that modern people have a hard time relating to the sacrificial metaphor of Christ's death (128-129), Bell is not saying the death of Christ cannot be helpfully described as a sacrifice. He is simply making the claim that certain metaphors will have more power in some cultures and times than in others, which is quite clearly true.

Galli also takes Bell to be undermining plenary biblical inspiration and authority when Bell describes the sacrificial metaphor as an example of the “brilliant, creative work” of the biblical authors (129). For Galli, this is Bell's way of dismissing certain biblical truths based solely upon the inability of contemporary people to swallow it. But here as elsewhere, Galli is seeing something that is just not there. The issue of biblical authority and inspiration is not even in view in Bell's discussion. Bell's characterization of biblical metaphor as an example of creative writing does not at all entail that Bell does not believe these passages of the Bible are inspired or true (and certainly something need not be “literal” to be true). He just highlights the fact that the cultural milieu to which some of these metaphors applied is now foreign to many modern people, which makes it difficult to communicate the cross to such people using these metaphors. Again, Bell is right about this.

Beyond the charges of questioning “the relevance of substitutionary atonement and the last judgment,” Galli asserts that Bell argues that Jesus is merely the “vivid image of the eternal reality we all experience.” Galli then asks, “If Jesus' death and resurrection are merely an expression of 'how the universe works,' why all the bother? Why do we need Jesus to come and die and rise when this is something we see daily in the fabric of the universe, a knowledge that, as Bell suggests, we have instinctively sensed all along?” What Galli seems to be saying is that Bell's view of the atonement strikes at the particularity and the necessity of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But by pointing to echoes of the divine truth of redemption through death and resurrection throughout nature, Bell is not at all saying that Christ did not thereby need to defeat death for us, or that the events of Christ's life aren't the full revelation of God the Father, or that Christ isn't the unique means by which we can be saved. These are just non-sequiturs that seem to derive more from a fear of liberalism than a close reading of Bell's book.

This brings us to one of the central confusions surrounding the current discussion of Love Wins. Some contemporary evangelical theologians fail to make a sufficiently clear distinction between Inclusivism and Pluralism. Inclusivism is the view that all are saved through Christ, but that some may be saved through Hiis universal prevenient grace without an explicit knowledge of Him in this life (in a way similar to Old Testament saints). Inclusivists believe that all persons must eventually confess Christ, but that many will embrace and own Christ only in the afterlife. Pluralism is the view that “all paths lead to God,” which holds that all religions are equally true and equally valid means to some common religious reality. In Love Wins, Bell couldn't have been clearer that he is an Inclusivist rather than a Pluralist (154-155). Bell's main concern in chapter 6 of his book, as elsewhere, seems to be to show that God's saving love is extended to all, even those who never hear of Christ in this life. So when Bell says that Jesus and the New Testament don't say “how, or when, or in what manner the mechanism functions that gets people to God through him” (154), he is just giving a clear statement of Inclusivism, which has been affirmed by many orthodox believers throughout the centuries, from Justin Martyr to John Wesley. And in a move that may indeed be “a bridge too far” for many evangelicals, Bell believes that God's grace will be offered even beyond death to persons who have yet to put themselves beyond saving, particularly those who have either not heard of Jesus or who have only been presented with a garbled and distorted picture of Jesus. And it does remain puzzling why so many evangelicals are resistant to a picture of the perfect love of God that doesn't give up until there is no hope. The idea that God would make only a half-hearted attempt when it comes to the salvation of so many seems to us clearly inconsistent with the biblical depiction of God's perfectly good nature (and the biblical and theological arguments usually advanced against the idea of postmortem grace do not seem to us at all compelling).

On the whole, Galli seems to have misread both Bell's aim and his theological trajectory in Love Wins. In fact, the closest analogue to Bell here would actually be C.S. Lewis, the evangelical hero, if not patron saint. Lewis was an Inclusivist who believed that it is possible for those who have not heard of Jesus to exercise implicit faith in God through God's universal prevenient grace (see C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, ch 9; see also James Sennett’s essay “Worthy of a Better God” in The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy). Moreover, while Lewis affirmed the atonement was essential to Christianity, he insisted that no particular theory if it is, and the view he preferred was not penal substitution. And like Bell, Lewis also believed that God would never give up on someone so long as there is still hope, even if that meant pursuing them with His grace beyond death. Indeed, at the end of The Great Divorce, Lewis leaves the door open to the possibility of universal salvation in a way not entirely unlike Rob Bell in Love Wins, though Lewis did not himself believe that all will be saved. Arguably, Bells main goal in his new book is to offer a picture of God's love that is never-ending and all-embracing.

While the concern about drifting into theological liberalism is justified and reasonable as far as it goes, if evangelical theology cannot accommodate a truly convincing account of God's expansive holy love, liberalism will seem to many a better alternative than narrow, Reformed-leaning evangelicalism. A robust and biblical view of God's universal holy love does not at all lead to an abandonment of the atonement, biblical authority, biblical ethics, or any other staple of classical orthodoxy. The only real sense in which the all-embracing, never-ending holy love of God is “liberal” or “liberal-leaning” is that it is indeed given freely and abundantly to all. There is undoubtedly a hard-edge to holy love; it is irreconcilable with unrepentant sin. But many evangelicals simply locate the rough edges of exclusivity when it comes to classical Christianity in the wrong places, as if God is a holy, consuming fire only if some persons are left out of a full chance at salvation. One wonders if many evangelicals have put the error of theological liberalism in the driver's seat of their theological method – and we all know the abysmal driving record of error when it gets behind the wheel.