Rob Bell – Love Wins

So if you haven’t been on the planet lately, you may have missed the storm of controversy over Rob Bell’s newest book, Love Wins.  Nothing controversial there, but the subtitle goes a little further: A Book about Heaven and Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.   Now that’s one heck of a subtitle!

OK, so there’s really nothing all that controversial in the subtitle because it makes no claims except the claim that this issue is going to be explored.  The big firestorm began with the promo video:

The video suggests that Bell’s book is going to claim a kind of universalism, the belief that no one goes to hell but everyone goes to heaven.  (Side note: This American Life did a fascinating story on another mega-church pastor who decided he didn’t believe in hell: The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of Hell, and with it everything he’d worked for over his entire life.)  Lots of discussion began even before the book came out.  Finally the book hit the shelves, and we could all read what Bell really believed.  While I haven’t had the time to read it myself (I hope to at some point), I have kept up a little bit with some of the reaction.  Here are a couple of noteworthy responses:

1. Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, presents a classic conservative evangelical response to Bell’s ideas in this relatively short press release.  While I don’t agree with everything Mohler says about the Bible and Christianity, he is an important enough figure in today’s American Christian landscape that he can’t be ignored.

2. Martin Bashir of MSNBC presents a pretty pointed Q&A session with Bell and attempts to nail him down a little more than Bell prefers to be nailed down.  I found this video even made me squirm!  In the end I appreciated Bashir’s straightforward persistent approach.

3. Good Morning America: Bell receives a much warmer reception on Good Morning America.

If you’re looking for a helpful book or resource to dive into this question of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, I’d suggest two books.  The first is the book that my Agnostic Pub Group just finished reading: The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis.  Lewis presents a somewhat more palatable view of hell where those in hell have chosen to be there because they can’t bear the reality of heaven.  (By the way, this group continues its reading on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays at Old Chicago Pizza in Okemos at 7PM with noted atheist Phillip Pullman’s newest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.  The group includes atheists, agnostics, Christians, and every shade in between.  Come join us for some good brew and good discussion.)

The second book I’d recommend is a book edited by my theology professor while I was at Wheaton, Tim Phillips, and Dennis Okholm titled, Four Views of Salvation in a Pluralistic World.  The book includes four different authors who believe in four different ideas about who goes to heaven and who goes to hell.  Each is given a chapter to present their view and following that chapter is a response from each of the other three.  The original author then writes a response to the responses.  The book is a little dense at times and also repetitive (you hear what one author believes in his chapter, his response to the other three responses, and his three responses to the other three chapters), but well worth the time to better understand the issue at hand.

If you’re wondering where I fall in the spectrum of this book, I personally like Clark Pinnock’s “inclusivism.”  He’s perhaps a little left of center without dropping key orthodox beliefs about who God is and who Jesus is.  So what is inclusivism?  You’ll have to read the book to find out (or wait for the sermon series that is building in my mind).