Rob Bell, Love Wins
Was ever a book so eagerly awaited? Well, yes, actually, quite a few. And most of the problem with this one is there was not much awaiting visible before people formed, and published, their views of it. So much easier to judge – in either direction – if you don’t have any facts to get in the way, after all. My copy arrived yesterday. I’ve read it all, now, and intend to re-read it, slowly, and post some reflections here. It is powerfully and winsomely written, but you knew that. (‘Why can’t I communicate like Rob Bell?’ The book’s acknowledgments contain a revealing reference to the multitudinous drafts an editor worked through; perhaps with sufficient work, you could…) No book is wholly good, save those contained in the canon of Scripture, or wholly bad. This one is no exception. It contains some good ideas; some arresting images; some interesting speculations; it contains some ideas I judge to be poor; some unhelpful caricatures of opposing positions; and some speculations that are hackneyed. There are a few historical reflections in the book, some that are helpful, some that are misinformed. There are many references to Scripture, and some extended readings: some are penetrating; some rather forced. None of this is unusual; I could say the much the same about almost every book on my office shelves. Is it a good book? That depends. How does one judge the worth of a book? It seems to me that there are two possible criteria: first, on the whole, is this worth reading? Second, despite the deficiencies, is there something so significant in this book that it needs to be read? The first is easier: do the strengths outweigh the weaknesses? On the whole, despite misrepresentations or problems, does the reader come away with a better appreciation (perhaps emotionally as well as intellectually) of the issue(s) the book is intending to address? A good textbook is good on this level. It is generally authoritative; there may be mistakes, but they are few and minor. The books rarely break new ground, but almost always provide a useful and accurate map of the old ground. For the second, within the theological tradition, consider Aulen’s Christus Victor. The book had huge flaws, which beset us to this day, 80 years after the publication. Aulen’s historical claims ranged from the tendentious to the absurd; his Biblical exegesis was generally at the top end of that scale, but rarely much better. Yet he opened a question that is still driving thoughtful and worthwhile work today. The book could have been so much better – but the world, the world of academic theology, at least – would be much worse off without the book. If Bell’s book is good, and my initial – if somewhat hesitant – impression is that it is, it is good in the second sense. This is not a good guide to eschatology and atonement (the two topics focused on in most of the book), or even to theology proper (the real subject of the book). There are too many errors of interpretation, too many misrepresentations, to make it a good textbook. But it advances a thesis that is not new, and that may not even be right, but that is important and perceptive enough to be worth hearing. The thesis is something like this: our accounts of atonement and eschatology determine our theology proper, and some recently-popular accounts lead to an unacceptable – unbiblical – doctrine of God. What about the big question? Well, here goes: I can reveal that it is true: the UK cover is much less attractive than the US one. The other big question? First, the book is not primarily about the populatedness of hell, although the subject is addressed. Second, it seems clear to me from the text that Bell does not, in fact, espouse any form of dogmatic universalism. Bell asserts very clearly that every human being is presented with a choice, and that that choice is decisive for our final fate (pp.116-17). I imagine his position could be characterised as ‘hopeful universalism’: I suppose that he would be prepared to hope and pray that all human beings do in fact make the right choice, and to resist any assertion that this is not possible. He will, not, however, assert that all human beings will be saved. This conclusion seems inescapable from the text to me, but I draw it hesitantly, since I am aware that others who have read the text have come to a different interpretation. Let me offer my evidence. Bell says: …we get what we want. God is that loving....
Read MoreDivine generosity
To begin with, a little Christmas quiz. Who wrote the following? I am fully persuaded that the vast majority of the human race will share in the beatitudes and glories of our Lord’s redemption. I’ve noticed a few Methodist friends who blog following a meme asking them to post five things they love about being Methodist. Obviously, we couldn’t do it as Baptists (how to get it down to only five?!), but it has struck me that they, and others they link to, all one way or another pick up on the Arminianism of the tradition, usually by contrasting the openness of Methodist soteriology with an imagined opposing view that salvation is limited to ‘the chosen few’. Chatting with another Methodist friend, Tom Greggs, when he came up to give us an excellent paper on ‘pessimistic universalism’ last month, we began swapping notes on views on the extent of salvation amongst various Calvinists. It struck us that we could not, between us, think of a significant theologian in the tradition who was not convinced that those who God elects would far outnumber those who would finally be lost. Tom had done some research into Calvin’s own speculations about the number of the elect, which varied widely, but (he told me) in every case suggested a large confidence on Calvin’s part that there were many in his day beyond the nascent Reformed churches who God would save. I thought about the later tradition, where two factors – a dogmatic decision that all who die as infants are elect, and a postmillennial eschatology that saw a coming thousand-year period of such health and prosperity that the population of the world would vastly increase, and when virtually all would be Christian – led every theologian I know who asked the question to believe that the elect would significantly outnumber the reprobate. This seems to me interesting, because it is a position that most dogmatic Calvinists today do not hold, and this different vision of God’s generosity (or otherwise) must seriously affect their theology and spirituality. To believe both in predestination, and that God’s election is limited to a few, seems to me enormously difficult to square with a Biblical presentation of God’s character, and with the seriousness and significance of Christ’s atoning work. If this were the only option, I could understand my Methodist friends’ commitment to their Arminianism (although I probably still couldn’t share it…) The quotation I began with? A dangerous liberal revisionist theologian by the name of Charles Hodge. It is reported in his son Archibald Alexander Hodge’s Evangelical Theology, where AA acknowledges that much is uncertain about eschatology, but lists six points that he believes are certain and uncontroversial. The fifth begins: Although heaven can only be entered by the holy, yet such, we are assured, is the infinite provision made for human salvation, and such the intense love for human sinners therein exhibited, that the multitude of the redeemed will be incomparably greater than the number of the lost. My father, at the close of his long life spent in the defence of Calvinism, wrote on one of his conference papers, in trembling characters, a little while before he died, “I am fully persuaded that the vast majority of the human race will share in the beatitudes and glories of our Lord’s redemption.” …(p. 401 of the Banner edition) The five points of Dort can only be called ‘doctrines of grace’ if they assume this fundamental divine generosity; this is, to my mind, authentic...
Read MorePushing the atonement to the limit?
(What follows is a summary of a paper I’ve been meaning to write for several years now, but never got around to. If anybody is interested enough to comment, I’d be happy to know if it would be worth actually doing…) The doctrine of limited atonement seems largely forgotten by mainstream academic theology today. Actually, that is wrong – it is not forgotten, it is remembered with shame, derision, and sometimes amusement. Yet once this doctrine was seriously held by the majority of Reformed theologians. Why? They saw a theological advantage: they understood their claim about the atonement to be that it was definite, rather than limited. That is, on their scheme, Christ died to accomplish a certain fixed end, and that end is infallibly accomplished. Their basic reason for their position, however, was straightforwardly exegetical: they believed that there were Scriptures that could not be evaded that taught limited atonement. (And they believed that the Scriptures that seemed to teach universal atonement could be evaded.) Let us praise them first – rightly, they took their stand on exegesis. But I suspect that they (and their early modern Arminian opponents) gave in too quickly to the insistent demands of logic: there were seemingly-compelling texts on either side of the argument, and Calvinists and Remonstrants alike assumed both could not be right, and so sought to evade the clear teaching of one set of Scriptures. (Of course, one can believe in an atonement that is both definite and universal by becoming a universalist; this route became popular in many formerly-Calvinist traditions. The issue then becomes the need to evade the Scriptures that seem to teach clearly the reality of an eternal punishment awaiting the impenitent. Again, I suspect that exegesis too quickly surrenders to the claims of logic in these arguments.) Let me then pause at the level of exegesis: some texts seem clearly to teach that the atonement is limited in intent, and/or definite in application; others to teach that it is universal in intent, and/or indefinite in application. I take it that, for all our sophisticated advances in exegetical practice in the last three centuries, this basic impasse remains. Is there a way through it? Can we try to imagine that in fact both sets of texts are right? I do not want to propose embracing paradox, but I do want to suggest that exegetical responsibility is such that we should linger long, wondering whether the apparent logical either/or cannot be overcome, before we start our theological attempts to evade this or that part of Holy Scripture. We have learnt in the last couple of generations learnt to embrace simultaneously divergent understandings of the atonement, at least at the level of mechanism. Using language of ‘metaphor’, ‘parable’, or similar, we see differing accounts as complementary rather than competing. This is fine, however, when we are talking about simply different explanatory systems – medicine vs law court vs slave market, say. But in the case of Calvinism vs Arminianism, and particularly in the case of limited vs universal atonement, we are not dealing with incommensurate explanations, but with directly competing claims. A warm and fuzzily inclusive appeal to ‘metaphor’ will not defuse the logical problem with which we are faced. Thinking about the nature of metaphor might, however. The old story of the three blind men and the elephant springs to mind – each uses a helpful metaphor to describe the part of the truth that he has, quite literally in the case of that story, grasped. Could we begin to imagine an account of the saving work of Jesus which is in one sense universal, and in another particular, in one sense simply given by divine decree, in another made available to human response? At least on the first of these pairs, it happens that the tradition offers a minority report as to how this might work. A number of late nineteenth-century British evangelical theologians (most famously, James Orr; most interestingly, perhaps, T.R. Birks) offered what Henri Blocher and Stephen Williams have variously described as a ‘fourth view’ on the nature of hell (alongside eternal conscious torment, annihilationism, and universalism). They suggested, one way or another, that all people were affected by the death of Christ – it was in one sense universal – but that not all were saved – it was in another sense particular. The reality of the eternal fate of the unsaved was decisively different, and better, because of what Christ has done, but a binary distinction remains. This seems to me a fruitful thought, theologically. In fact, I would want to extend it further: there are accounts of...
Read MorePastoral eschatology
More thoughts on eschatology… I am fully convinced–and became so in pastoral ministry, performing funerals–that we cannot and should not speculate about the eternal fate of any particular person. God will judge, and (my other Spring Harvest soundbite) when we see God’s judgement we will be astonished by the depths of His mercy, and by the heights of His justice. The NT offers many chillingly serious warnings about the reality of God’s eschatological severity (the main reason I find universalism too easy a way out), but will never speak of any named human person in hell. (In a parable, Lazarus is received into Abraham’s embrace, ‘a certain rich man’ is condemned to suffer; the most the New Testament will say of Judas is that he will ‘go to the place prepared for him’.) Those condemned to torment are classes of people–‘the idolaters, the sexually immoral, …’–and of course any class can potentially turn out to be empty. If the NT will not speculate about the particular inhabitants of hell, nor should we. At the trivial level, this is no more than the old ‘we never know what went on in someone’s heart in the minutes before death,’ which remains true as far as it goes. But I want to take it much further than this. Too many Evangelical accounts of personal eschatology are simply Pelagian: I make decisions, and God responds to them. This has to be wrong. If salvation always coincides with visible faith, then it is because God decides to save, and as a result grants faith (see Edwards’s sermon on justification by faith for some very close analysis of this), not because I decide to have faith and thereby force God to do something different. (Almost no-one ever held that salvation always coincides with visible faith, though; the 10-20% mortality rate amongst infants in pre-penicillin Europe & America saw to that.) What determines the outcome is not what goes on in my heart, but what goes on in God’s heart, and what God does to my heart. All of which is to say that my hope of salvation for myself, or any other human being, is primarily based on what I know of God, not on what I believe to be true about me, or about them. If our level of eschatological questioning is ‘where’s grandma?’, this will not be a helpful perspective, but–as I want to keep saying–that is almost certainly not the right place to start. (How, though, in pastoral ministry to answer it? Point to the gospel promises, of course; point to the passages of Scripture that speak of God’s desire that all may be saved; and then stand with Abraham in the face of the deadly serious threats of God’s severity and ask ‘will not the judge of all the earth do justly?’ – Abraham understood doing justly as showing an astonishing level of...
Read MoreOn the lack of eschatological regret
In a public conversation with Ian Coffey (at this conference), I hit upon a phrase, quite by accident, which I’ve been musing on since. A vital theme in Christian eschatology is an adequate account of ‘the lack of eschatological regret’. That is, it seems to me a necessary part of the experience of eternal life that there is nothing we–or indeed God–look[s] back on and thinks ‘I wish it had been different’. One consequence of this, of some pastoral importance, is the suggestion that I will not regret God’s sovereign decisions concerning the final fate of my parents, wife, children, … A universalist stance is acceptable on this canon, it seems to me (even if not on several others); the older Reformed orthodoxy which suggested (on the basis of a reading of Lk 16:19ff.) that the saints in heaven would see the sufferings of the damned, and rejoice at the display of the glory of God’s justice also makes sense in these terms (and is also unacceptable for various other reasons). Most of the recent ‘soft conservative’ eschatologies just fail, however. Whether perdition is annihilation, or some form of conscious torment that is quietly ignored in heaven, unless I simply forget the relationships that have made me who I am on earth (and I don’t find Volf convincing on this point), I will still regret God’s decisions. And an eternity of regret is indistinguishable from hell, as far as I can...
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