So why have I approached my “review” of Rob Bell’s Love Wins with these various stories of my own faith journey? These stories illustrate, I think, some of the common baggage of Evangelical-Fundamentalism. Books like Bell’s are attractive because they encourage those of us who carry these bags to put them down and rest.
The religion of Evangelical-Fundamentalism, as I experienced it, was based on Rigid Certainty, Fear, Performance, and Defensiveness. In this context, questions such as “how could God condemn Ghandi or Anne Franke to Hell” or “how can our little group be the only ones to have gotten all this stuff about heaven and hell right” were basic existential threats. The answers on offer usually boiled down to this: “be thankful you’re one of the saved ones, stop asking questions, and keep performing if you want to stay in the club.”
For many evangelicals of my generation (mid-40’s), as well as for younger evangelicals who grew up in our “seeker-friendly” but theologically fundamentalist churches, a book like Love Wins resonates. As did Brian McLaren before him, Bell asks the questions we are afraid to ask, voices the doubts we dare not speak, and for once gives something more than the usual Four-Spiritual-Laws-approved talking points. When someone who has had experiences like mine reads a book like this for the first time, the reaction often is visceral — “I’m not alone!” “There really is more to this!” When I first read Brian McLaren’s “A New Kind of Christian” — a similar sort of category-busting book — I cried. In public. On an airplane. During a business trip.
In this sense, I am glad for Love Wins.
But why the qualification — “in this sense?” It takes a time, distance, maturity and wisdom that I haven’t yet mastered to understand that a reaction to an extreme usually starts as an over-reaction.
This is true even concerning the stories we tell ourselves about our own experiences. I narrated a few vignettes that illustrate the far edges of an unbalanced theology and church praxis. If the only choices were between Rob Bell and the Left Behind novels, I’d choose Bell in a heartbeat. However, I can also tell lots of stories about good lessons learned, about parents who loved me and softened some of those hard edges, about the priceless gift of education at a broadly evangelical college, about people freed from addictions, about brothers and sisters in Christ meeting each other’s needs, about leading worship with joy. Growth is the wisdom gained from all the bad and all the good together.
The soteriology and eschatology I once imbibed, that which produces a spirituality and missiology of Certainty, Fear, Peformance, and Defensiveness, was quite mistaken. But this doesn’t mean all knowledge, warnings, and standards are bad. If it is mistaken, even arrogant, to claim Ghandi and Anne Franke and so on must be in Hell — and it is — it is equally mistaken, even arrogant, to shy away from the reality of God’s final judgment. If it is mistaken, even arrogant, to claim certainty about the ontology of Hell — and it is — it is equally mistaken, even arrogant, to deny the finality of God’s final judgment.
Love does indeed win because the last word is God’s and God is love. Love and justice are not two sides of a coin but rather are seamless perfections of the one ousia of the Triune God. God will be “all in all,” love and justice will be one, and all the hope of goodness will be realized in the finality of God’s judgment. The final judgment is an essential part of our hope even though it paradoxically represents the cessation of hope for persons subjected to the “No” of judgment, because the “hope” of sin and evil ultimately is a violent “No” to grace and peace.