Critique of Rob Bell's "Love Wins"

            Many of my normal readers will not know who Rob Bell is.  He is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  In the 12 years since its founding, the church has grown to 10,000 weekly attendees and they have a huge multi-media presence, including a very active web-based ministry and a series of very popular videos under the title NOOMA.  Even if you haven’t heard of Rob Bell, someone you know very likely has.

            I am writing today in review of Bell’s latest book , Love Wins.  I became aware of the book because of a great deal of pre-publication hype.  The Christian blogosphere was watching for the book because details were leaked before publication that Bell would be advocating a universalist position, that is, that he would advocate the idea that everyone would eventually be saved.  I took a class at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the week before publication, and, since the professor had a pre-publication copy of the book, it became a topic around the edges of the class.

            I bought Love Wins a day after its publication, and I’m going to use this space to review it.  Well, review is too strong a word.  I have some thoughts about the book that I’d like to share, and I have some thoughts about the state of the contemporary church that flow out of those thoughts.  So, for what it’s worth—my take on Rob Bell’s Love Wins.

            The first thing to say is that Bell gets some things profoundly right.  Let me just list a few.  First, I think he gets at the freeness and the joy of the Gospel very well.  I don’t always recognize the church that he is reacting against, but I do appreciate that there are many people who have felt that the church wasn’t for them, either because the church was too judgmental or because they hadn’t heard clearly that God forgives all sins in Jesus Christ.  I have no doubt that Bell has attracted a lot of people who felt marginalized by the contemporary church.  Second, he gets the nature of ‘heaven’ a lot closer to correct than stereotypical Christianity often does.  He challenges the sort of St.-Peter-guarding-the-pearly-gates image that a lot of folks conjure with a much more biblical image of a new heavens and new earth.  (Judging from his recommended reading list, he has learned this at the knee of N. T. Wright.)  Third, he has learned something of the historical meaning of Jesus.  He realizes in certain cases the political, this-worldly nature of the challenge that Jesus lays down.

            There are some things to like about Bell, but there are several things to criticize, as well.  First among my criticism is that Bell is not a good theological writer.  He approaches his task in an almost stream-of-consciousness style.  The book is filled with sentence fragment after sentence fragment, and he often chooses to portray his text poetically.  By the latter comment, I mean that he often inserts line break for emphasis.  Here’s a completely random example from page 46:

“Honest business,

redemptive art,

honorable law,

sustainable living,

medicine,

education,

making a home,

tending a garden—

they’re all sacred tasks to be done in partnership with God now, because they will all go on in the age to come.”

Now, I realize that criticizing an author’s writing style can be incredibly niggling, even petty, but bear with me.

            Theology is a careful discipline.  Theologians deal with the most ultimate of matters:  the nature and character of God, His will and purposes in the world, and, as Bell notes in the subtitle of his book, “the fate of every person who ever lived.”  Theologians (well, good theologians) deal with those matters on the basis of God’s own words.  Therefore, careful use of language is an absolute necessity.  The theologian who doesn’t use language well can’t be trusted to deal with the language by which God has revealed Himself to us and he can’t be trusted to nuance his own arguments appropriately.

            Bell communicates many powerful images, but he is not a nuanced or clear writer, at least in this book.  The book reads like an extended sermon, not a treatise on important theological matters.  While Bell may respond that that is exactly the style he was aiming for, the reality is he has encroached on areas of theology that need extended, careful exposition.

            This is nowhere clearer than in the rather cavalier way that Bell sometimes treats the Scriptures.  I don’t want to be overly critical.  As I’ve already suggested, there are things that Bell gets profoundly right.  But he gets those things right, at least, in my opinion, because he has built on the foundation of other people’s more careful work.  I mentioned that Bell cites N. T. Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, for further reading on resurrection and new creation (201).  Wright’s book is in turn a synthesis and popularization of a much larger work, The Resurrection of the Son of God.  Wright has done his homework and is able to refer readers to his more extended discussion.  However, Bell takes over aspects of Wright’s work without Wright’s nuance.  Surprised by Hope runs to 300 pages; The Resurrection of the Son of God runs to 800 (tiny print, too!).  Take all the white space out of Bell’s book and I’d be surprised if you ended up with 150 pages.  Bell desperately needs to argue the texts he utilizes more carefully, as opposed to his preferred method of just throwing together a catena of verses together and asserting Q.E.D., or, “Look, it’s just like I told you!”

            In particular, Bell’s hermeneutical approach to the prophets is unclear.  On pages 86-87, he cites 13 verses from the prophets to prove that “no matter how far people find themselves from home because of their sin, indifference, and rejection, there’s always the assurance that it won’t be this way forever” (86).  He never discusses the fact that these verses are addressed to the Old Testament nation of Israel, primarily as it stands in danger of exile because of covenantal unfaithfulness.  He never addresses that the Lord has a unique purpose for Israel that demands her preservation, namely, the coming of the Messiah.  He never addresses the complex way in which these promises of restoration flow into the work of Jesus the Messiah and the ways that Israel’s national purpose is fulfilled in Jesus.  (Yes, to my theologically adept friends, I guess I am some variety of supersessionist.)

            This lack of attention to the text reveals itself in the way Bell quotes other authors, too.  On page 106, he cites Martin Luther to the effect that God could offer people a second chance after death.  He does the same thing with Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Eusebius, Jerome, Basil, and Augustine (107).  Now, because Bell hasn’t cited any of his references, one can’t check the context.  However, he gives enough details about the Luther quote that an industrious pastor with a complete set of Luther’s Works (AE) on his shelf finds the reference in vol. 43, p. 54.  The letter in which it is contained is only 4 ½ pages long, and if anyone wants to read it in its entirety, I’ll get a copy to you.  Consider, though, this statement from the paragraph prior to the one Bell quotes.  “If God were to save anyone without faith, he would be acting contrary to his own words and would give himself the lie; yes, he would deny himself.  And that is impossible for, as St. Paul declares, God cannot deny himself [II Tim. 2:13].”  In the paragraph Bell cites, Luther says that no one would deny that God could create faith at the moment of death, but he asserts clearly, “No one, however, can prove that he does do this.”  Taking Martin Luther out of context is bad scholarship; taking the words of God out of context is bad theology, and, dare I say, false teaching.

            There’s more to criticize in Bell’s approach to the Scriptures, but let me make just one more observation.  His understanding of the Mosaic sacrificial system is plain wrong.  On page 123, he lists several examples of animal sacrifice, and in those examples he mixes up imagery from Moses and from the wider world of paganism to leave the impression that Israel’s sacrificial system worked on the basis of sympathetic magic and divination.  How someone who wants to co-opt the prophets so thoroughly for his purposes can so blithely dismiss Moses is beyond my understanding.

            Having read this muddled book, I’m not sure that Bell actually ever says that every person who ever lived will experience the joy of the Father’s presence in the new creation.  He certainly teaches that hell is experienced here on earth and that one’s rejection of God’s story will carry into God’s new creation (cf. his discussion of Luke 15 in chapter 7).  He certainly leaves open that God will allow people the ongoing chance to align themselves with his plans and purposes for eternity.  Ironically, he leaves the impression of a theology more akin to Roman Catholicism than Protestantism.  Vatican II accepted Karl Rahner’s ‘anonymous Christians’ in Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes.  And Bell’s sense of extended ‘second chances’ sounds a great deal like purgatory shed of the purgative elements.

            Much more could be said.  Much more should be said—about Bell’s confusion of Law and Gospel, of his desire for a God simple enough to fit his own preconceived notion of how God ought to be, etc.  But this is a blog, and I have other work to do.  I do hope that serious scholars will address this book.  I’ll conclude my critique with a quotation from the same letter from Martin Luther that Bell cites:

“To arrive at an answer to this question [on whether God can or will save people who die without faith] it is necessary to separate our opinion from God’s truth.  We must be scrupulously concerned that we do not give God the lie.  We must rather admit that all men, all angels, and all devils are lost than to say that God is not truthful in what he says.  Such questions issue from the innate inquisitiveness of human nature, which is loathe to reconcile itself to the fact that it is not supposed to know God’s reasons for such severe and stringent judgments” (AE 43:52).