“Love Wins” by Rob Bell

I confess that I came to this book with far from neutral feelings. I did not want to read it, but a friend had lent it to me so I felt that I had to. I planned to get through it as fast as I could. I started reading it shortly after my friend gave it to me, but had to stop after about twenty pages: Rob Bell’s writing style is not my favourite. (I’d read most of Velvet Elvis quite a while ago, but had forgotten about his penchant for one-line paragraphs, (bad) prose-poetry, and anaphora. I have to be honest: I really revile his writing style.) At any rate, I came back to the book again a couple of days ago as I wanted to get the thing finished and give it back to my friend. So I decided to read it through in a night. I got through 120 pages, read another 60 the next night, and then finished it up this morning.

Cue the one-line paragraph: I actually sort of enjoyed it.

Of course, there were several points in the book that set off alarms for me: “We shape our God, / and then our God shapes us” (184). This sounded a wee bit too Feuerbachian for my taste, but at the same time, given the context of the statement, I had to agree with him at least partly. God’s revelation to us is filtered through a hermeneutics we inherit from our upbringing, culture, location… We don’t shape our God out of nothing, but we do shape our God in terms of how we respond to his revelation to us. The phrase does not reflect upon the work of the Holy Spirit in channelling and fortifying that revelation, which I suppose is where it goes most wrong, but it’s a useful way of thinking about the sad reality that we, as fallen creatures, pervert our perception of the divine.

Anyways, that was just one of the unsettling bits — and I think that this book is probably best understood as deliberately “unsettling.” Some elements are much more unsettling — disconcerting, even — and I think the conversation about those is very worthwhile. On the whole, Bell makes it clear that that is one of his aims: to unsettle us a bit. And that’s okay in my books. In terms of the accusations that Bell is a universalist or a heretic, I’m not sure how fair those are. They might be fair if Bell had set out to write a theology of heaven and hell: I don’t think he has done that (though the book has been marketed that way to a certain extent). He spends a great deal of time expositing several theologies of heaven and hell and he doesn’t really come down to rest on any one in particular. Areas where Bell strays into heterodoxy need to be marked in plain sight, as they have in other publications (I’ve heard Mark Galli’s book God Wins is very good in this respect).

If anything, this would be the major fault of the book — and of Bell’s style in general: its failure to cite sources, to distinguish ideas. Of course, it’s the most “postmodern” characteristic of the whole book: a failure to deal properly with history. As I was reading, I found myself saying: ah, so that’s Dallas Willard-lite; that’s N.T. Wright-lite; that’s Brian Walsh-lite; that’s Brian McLaren-lite (who might be described as already Dallas Willard-lite… making Bell a kind of Dallas Willard-lite-lite). It would have been incredibly helpful for Bell to mark out here and there just who his interlocutors are. Name them and claim them, as it were. If he had done that, not only would his own claims be more readily visible, but also he would have made the conversational-mode of the book obvious. It’s a claim he makes again and again — dialogue, conversation, etc. But there’s only one voice at work here:

Bell’s voice,
Broken
Into single
Lines. As though he submitted
the whole
manuscript
via texting.

Discerning through the mix of opinions, I would suggest that the central claim Bell himself makes is that “everybody is already at the party / Heaven and hell / here / now”… This idea, of course, has a rich history that can be traced back at least to the poet and artist, William Blake, who described a very similar set of ideas in his 1794 text, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Interestingly, the other major interlocutor upon whom Bell seems to draw, C.S. Lewis and his Great Divorce mentions Blake’s work in the opening Preface where he reminds the reader that what follows is a thought-experiment and not a theology. A similar disclaimer might have been useful for Bell’s book). Bell is not denying (though the phrase taken out of context seems to suggest as much) the metaphysical reality of “heaven” or “hell.” Instead, he is suggesting that Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection have inaugurated the “party,” which is to say they have changed the nature of heaven-earth relations, such that “heaven” and “hell” are subordinate concepts to this fundamentally changed reality. The reconciliation of heaven and earth is not something that will “happen” when we get to heaven: it is already happening. Like the process understanding of salvation, justification, sanctification, and glorification (i.e., Jesus justified us at Calvary; he is sanctifying us now; and we will enter glory in the future), the understanding of heaven and hell Bell wants to get across is one in which (to borrow Willard’s phrasing, which Bell nearly does several times) the eternal kind of life starts now. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom in which God’s reign is made manifest — something that can start to happen now, though the life after death after life (Wright’s phrase) will see this rule as it truly is. Hell, by contrast, is the rejection of God’s rule — again, something that can start to happen now.

I would probably need to read the book again to get a really clear sense of “where it goes wrong” — I may just read a couple of the more vitriolic reviews to do that. I confess that I continue to find Bell’s writing style grating and irritating and that the “image” he portrays is similarly problematic for me: I confess these things in order to acknowledge the bewildering fact that Love Wins moved me. It made me excited about heaven — a heaven in which my failings and entangling sin will be stripped away and in which I will be welcomed by my saviour, Jesus, and his people. It made me excited about what Bell describes as “the good news that is better than that” — it clarified why this new reality (moreover, a new reality that is “new every morning,” continually being renewed) is indeed good news. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing — though it isn’t that long, I would at least recommend reading the chapter on Heaven and the second-to-last chapter on “The Good News is Better Than That.” They accomplished something good in me, which suggests to me that the Holy Spirit was using them to work on my heart a little.

P.S. I was recalling my reading of the first bit of the heaven chapter and remembered Bell’s use of the famous painting of the cross spanning the gap between heaven and earth, hanging over an abyss of fire. It’s pretty weak. He says that the problem with the painting is that it depicts heaven and hell as happening someplace else. Except that, the painting is obviously a metaphor. It’s not meant to literally depict heaven or earth or hell. His point that heaven and hell are usually thought in overly spiritualized terms is a good one, but I think that the object of his critique is ill-chosen. Generally, I did find Bell’s “critiques” a bit weak — and these have often come up as sites for attack in critical reviews.