Rob Bell has gained notoriety within the evangelical community for his views, among other things, on Heaven and Hell. In his 2011 book, “Love Wins” (HarperCollins Publishers), the founding pastor of the Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, presents cogent, if simplistic, arguments for his views and beliefs.
The book is a relatively easy read for the casual lay person, but it might be more demanding of true believers, especially those who would be inclined to take issue with Bell’s positions.
Bell is clearly an expert on the Bible, as would be expected of a minister, but his take on many aspects of the “good book” are definitely subject to attack. Or at least that is the perspective of many who have been resistant to Bell’s thesis, which seems to be that the Biblical references to Heaven and Hell are more metaphorical than factual. He paints a picture of the two that is more suggestive of life in the here and now than in the life-after-death-hereafter that most evangelical preachers emphasize.
But Bell doesn’t stop there. He also argues forcefully that an afterlife in a burning prison for all eternity to which non-believers are consigned is antithetical to the Christian image of God. This part of his book is, perhaps, the most controversial, for it rejects the idea that only those who believe in God can be “saved.”
Instead, he asserts that God is all about love, in the sense that God offers salvation through His love. That point isn’t all that radical, since God’s love, through the gift of Jesus Christ and his ultimate sacrifice for all humanity, is a cornerstone of Christian theology. But in Bell’s view, the salvation isn’t in an afterlife existence, but in the existence we all experience while living.
Where the book is less convincing is in explaining just how that love is supposed to work. Bell suggests that just accepting this love is salvation in and of itself. It’s a nice thought, but probably would be found wanting by those who are suffering all the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune that can make life truly miserable for even the most devoted and faithful believer.
Furthermore, Bell seems to profess a view of Christianity that goes beyond “faith alone” to “accept alone,” meaning that the Heaven on Earth he believes to be God’s real gift is attainable merely by accepting this divine love.
That thought raises more questions than it answers. How, for example, is acceptance of God’s love supposed to lead to a heavenly existence in an environment where mere survival is a struggle and all manner of abuses are commonplace?
But Bell doesn’t explain how the love he believes is available to everyone translates to better lives for everyone. Instead he seems to assume that readers will reach a single irrefutable conclusion, to wit: By accepting God’s love, we’ll all “just get along.”
Nor does he really explain why religion matters at all, since he devotes much of his text to arguments that effectively discount the importance of adherence to any specific religion (or, for that matter to any religion at all). He is adamant that a God who is all about love cannot also be a God who condemns those who don’t accept his word or a specific interpretation of his word. Indeed, were he not an evangelical preacher, he could easily be confused for a humanist philosopher.
But of course he is an evangelical preacher, and he provides ample evidence of that fact with several extensive interpretations of Bible stories—all given a gloss appropriate to the point he is seeking to make. In that light, he devotes a long chapter to his take on the Prodigal Son story (from the Book of Luke, chapter 15).
Bell’s take on this parable that is attributed to Jesus is that the older son—the faithful one who stayed with his father and worked in the fields steadily while the younger son (the prodigal) went out and caroused and did nothing his father should have been pleased with—complained unnecessarily. Bell says the parable is intended to represent that God’s love is always available, just as the father’s presumably was for the older son in the parable.
It certainly isn’t an outrageous interpretation of the story, albeit the older son is usually not the main character in most sermons based on it. But Bell shows his preacher-stuff in fashioning a 30-page chapter (entitled “The Good News Is Better Than That”) around it.
“Love Wins” is at once well-considered and less than satisfying. It effectively presents a God who is too good to punish and too loving to reject any of His creatures. What it doesn’t do all that well is suggest how the love of that God can create Heaven on Earth.