Mark Galli’s CT review of Rob Bell’s book, on the whole, seems balanced and decent. Maybe it’s a bit too balanced and decent.
I think Galli is right in his basic conclusion that the Gospel is shown to be even more robust and more beautiful when we take account of the full Biblical witness to judgment. Indeed, a crucial part of the “good news” — even a crucial part of the Cristus Victor model of the atonement — is that Christ’s victory judges and destroys evil. A primary reason we ought to long for Christ’s return is that evil will be exposed, judged, and defeated forever. Justice is an essential part of the good news. Judgment is an essential part of justice.
But it’s this very issue of “justice” that prompts the questions Rob Bell has had the courage to raise. Galli acknowledges that Bell raises important questions, but Galli himself seems afraid to give them voice. Instead, he whips out the “L” word (“Liberal”) — the Evangelical equivalent of an F-bomb — which he kinda-sorta applies to Bell, and then mumbles past the questions.
Here are some realities I wish Galli had acknolwedged:
- The hardline restrictivist soteriology that fueled the postwar Evangelical coalition’s missions energies betrays our inward moral sense as well as the Bible’s account of justice. A soteriology that can’t systematically account for children who die in infancy, or the mentally disabled, or pious Jews exterminated by Hitler, or peasants who died on Cambodian killing fields without hearing of Jesus, and on and on … it all flies in the face of the Biblical narrative of justice for the oppressed.
- The “Liberal / Evangelical” divide is a product of a bygone time — and it is good that this time has passed. The coalition that birthed Christianity Today is dissipated. Thoughtful “evangelicals” today are post-liberal and post-conservative — maybe post-capital-E-Evangelical.
- Post- / progressive- evangelicals don’t raise questions just because we want to make the gospel attractive. We do it because we have become better educated and we care about truth. We do it because the system passed down from the first generation of Christianity Today’s editors, at crucial points, simply doesn’t withstand even modest scrutiny. We do it to improve in our discipleship of the mind and in our doxological proclamation. A by-product of this is that the gospel becomes more attractive — or, better, the beauty inherent to the gospel becomes clearer. Truth is beautiful.
- Retreating into the bunkers of a presumed quasi-denominational orthodoxy isn’t an option. The Fundamentalists and Neo-Evangelicals were able to do this for a while in the 20th Century because information traveled much more slowly. Today everyone can fact-check instantly. Today everyone — at least every American middle-class evangelical — can travel the world and actually meet human beings who live and think outside our little bubble.
- Genuine “orthodoxy” is generous, and generous orthodoxy is the only path to unity. The essential narrative of generous historic orthodoxy includes God’s judgment of sin and the exclusivity of Christ. It does not, however, presume to explain in detail, for all time, how to harmonize the universalistic and particularistic strands of Biblical eschatology. Great “evangelical” scholars from C.S. Lewis to Leslie Newbiggin to N.T. Wright to Richard Bauckham to Alister McGrath have recognized this.
I feel like Galli and CT are too keen on preserving an anachronistic coalition at the expense of real progress towards a “moderate” center. That’s too bad.