Michael Dowd
Is Hell Dead? – Rob Bell: TIME magazine cover
The following is cross-posted from TIME magazine’s “Holy Week” issue cover story. It is written by Jon Meacham, and can be found on the TIME magazine website, here.
As part of a series on peacemaking, in late 2007, Pastor Rob Bell’s Mars Hill Bible Church put on an art exhibit about the search for peace in a broken world. It was just the kind of avant-garde project that had helped power Mars Hill’s growth (the Michigan church attracts 7,000 people each Sunday) as a nontraditional congregation that emphasizes discussion rather than dogmatic teaching. An artist in the show had included a quotation from Mohandas Gandhi. Hardly a controversial touch, one would have thought. But one would have been wrong.
A visitor to the exhibit had stuck a note next to the Gandhi quotation: “Reality check: He’s in hell.” Bell was struck.
Really? he recalls thinking.
Gandhi’s in hell?
He is?
We have confirmation of this?
Somebody knows this?
Without a doubt?
And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?
So begins Bell’s controversial new best seller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Works by Evangelical Christian pastors tend to be pious or at least on theological message. The standard Christian view of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is summed up in the Gospel of John, which promises “eternal life” to “whosoever believeth in Him.” Traditionally, the key is the acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God, who, in the words of the ancient creed, “for us and for our salvation came down from heaven … and was made man.” In the Evangelical ethos, one either accepts this and goes to heaven or refuses and goes to hell.
Bell, a tall, 40-year-old son of a Michigan federal judge, begs to differ. He suggests that the redemptive work of Jesus may be universal — meaning that, as his book’s subtitle puts it, “every person who ever lived” could have a place in heaven, whatever that turns out to be. Such a simple premise, but with Easter at hand, this slim, lively book has ignited a new holy war in Christian circles and beyond. When word of Love Wins reached the Internet, one conservative Evangelical pastor, John Piper, tweeted, “Farewell Rob Bell,” unilaterally attempting to evict Bell from the Evangelical community. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says Bell’s book is “theologically disastrous. Any of us should be concerned when a matter of theological importance is played with in a subversive way.” In North Carolina, a young pastor was fired by his church for endorsing the book.
(See TIME’s photoessay “A Brief History of Hell.”)
The traditionalist reaction is understandable, for Bell’s arguments about heaven and hell raise doubts about the core of the Evangelical worldview, changing the common understanding of salvation so much that Christianity becomes more of an ethical habit of mind than a faith based on divine revelation. “When you adopt universalism and erase the distinction between the church and the world,” says Mohler, “then you don’t need the church, and you don’t need Christ, and you don’t need the cross. This is the tragedy of nonjudgmental mainline liberalism, and it’s Rob Bell’s tragedy in this book too.”
Particularly galling to conservative Christian critics is that Love Wins is not an attack from outside the walls of the Evangelical city but a mutiny from within — a rebellion led by a charismatic, popular and savvy pastor with a following. Is Bell’s Christianity — less judgmental, more fluid, open to questioning the most ancient of assumptions — on an inexorable rise? “I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian,” Bell says. “Something new is in the air.”
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Ok so the only thing I wish to really make a comment about is the idea that if everyone goes to heaven in the end for whatever reason. . . how this means in any way that we don’t need God or the cross or the church. What if Jesus died on the cross for everyone and that is the reason why we can all be with him in heaven some day. And what if when Jesus said “God forgive them, for they know not what they do” while he was dieing on the cross was God in the form of a man (Jesus) forgiving all those who are against him and all those who shame him and persecute him. And aside from these possibilities, I still don’t understand how us all being able to go to heaven means that we don’t need God in our lives. What if everything in the Bible is a teaching upon a life better lived in Joy and peace and in Love, for everyone, and how that kind of life is dependent on God and Jesus playing a part in our lives. What if the Bible is some how Gods Ultimate Guide to life the universe and everything. Why not?
My reading of Bell’s book still left me with the possibility of hell . . . not because God wants to punish, but we do have free will, and we can choose to reject God. Bell says God has made it possible for us to respond to his love and just can’t see why most won’t eventually come around. He wants to shout this from the rooftops. Along with Bell’s book, I’d recommend UM bishop William WIllimon’s book “Who Will Be Saved?”. He calls us to take another look at salvation and what it means, and then, if you read it, suggests some startling possibilities . . . not quite as much from the rooftops, and not as easily readable, but very good and food for much thought.