It is easy to criticize a book like Rob Bell’s “Love Wins.” Books like this, which are written for rhetorical effect and popular impact, usually aren’t very well grounded Biblically or theologically. As Scot McKnight noted in his series of posts reviewing Love Wins, there are plenty of important nodes of Biblical interpretation and theological inquiry at which Love Wins, at best, is shallow and confused.
All of this, I think, is quite unfortunate. The questions Bell raises, even if he raises them using unfair, leading rhetoric, represent critical theological inflection points at which mainstream evangelicals in America continue to feel the weight of fundamentalism’s withdrawal from the broader Church and culture.
Here is what I see as some of these key inflection points:
Christology: What does it mean that Christ is the incarnate Son who died for the sin of the world and rose again victorious over sin and death? And what does it mean that the incarnate Son is the pre-existent Logos, through whom the universe was created and in whom the universe holds together?
Protestant fundamentalism lacks a Christology in which Christ could be any sort of active agent outside the walls of the fundamentalist’s own social / religious network.
Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring the implications of a robust Christology for relations with non-Christian religions and for the theodicy problems presented, for example, by the unevangelized, the mentally disabled, and apparently virtuous practitioners of other religions.
Pneumatology: What role does the Holy Spirit play in the world outside the Church? Does the Holy Spirit work in culture generally, or only in the Church, or primarily in the lives of individual Christians? Is the Holy Spirit’s work always or typically visible and recognizable?
Protestant fundamentalism, in its non-Charismatic versions, views the Holy Spirit primarily as the agent of individual conversion and guidance. In Charismatic / Pentecostal versions of fundamentalism, the Holy Spirit typically is linked primarily to the health and wealth of the individual believer.
Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring whether and how the Holy Spirit precedes the proclamation of the Gospel and influences culture in both visible and hidden ways.
Ecclesiology and Sacramentology: What role does the visible Church play in the economy of salvation? When the visible Church prays for the salvation of the world (as in many traditional liturgical prayers), does that prayer truly effect anything in the history of salvation? When the visible Church practices the Lord’s Supper / Eucharist, does that practice enact anything with respect to God’s plan of salvation?
Protestant fundamentalism approaches the practice of prayer and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper primarily individualistically – prayer is directed towards changing individual people and Communion is a personal remembrance only. Protestant fundamentalists who engage with culture tend to do so through the venue of power politics.
Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring how the Church, as the instrument of God’s salvation, affects culture and history through its practices of liturgy, prayer, and the Eucharist, often in subtle ways.
Missiology and Eschatology: What is the function of the Church and of individual Christians in relation to the world? Why is care for the poor and oppressed a primary hallmark of the Church and of Christian faith in the scriptures? How does the Biblical theme of God’s concern for the poor and oppressed relate to God’s plan of salvation and to the equally Biblical themes of sin, retribution, and atonement? Should most individual Christians continue to practice ordinary occupations, raise families, and participate in broader civic life, or in view of the state of the world and of Christ’s return should most or all Christians withdraw from the world and focus primarily on evangelism?
The missiology of protestant fundamentalism focuses almost entirely on effecting individual conversions. In the post-war missions boom among protestant fundamentalists, this approach was fueled by dispensational premillennial eschatology, in which a primary motivation for missions was to rescue a small remnant from the approaching Tribulation (and, paradoxically, to speed the Lord’s return).
Outside protestant fundamentalism, Christian theologians are exploring the robustness of the Biblical concept of “salvation,” the connections between the meaning of the doctrine of election and the Bible’s teachings about the God’s concern for the poor and oppressed, and the implications of the Biblical emphasis on physicality and resurrection for the eschatological future.
It’s important to note that when I say “Christian theologians are exploring…,” I mean Christian theologians working within the broad framework of creedal orthodoxy. Of course, there also are theologians in various Christian polities who are radical pluralists and who seem unconcerned at all about the confessional claims of the creed. But I am speaking of the leaders of the Catholic and Orthodox churches (including some great scholarly Popes and Bishops), of Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican thinkers who have contributed to volumes on Nicene faith, of Pentecostals teaching in historically fundamentalist schools, and of evangelicals teaching in many of our colleges and seminaries.
It’s also important to note that when I say “Christian theologians are exploring,” this does not represent only a recent development. All of the nodes I mention above have been the subject of theological inquiry for centuries. It is true that the challenges of modernity have accelerated many of these questions, but that is not surprising – modernity was and is a challenge, as were each of the various cultural and intellectual settings in which Christian faith has been expressed in the past.
The question is, how will we who identify as broadly evangelical respond in this moment? Can we use this as one opportunity to enter into the bigger theological conversation?