N.D. Wilson on Bell: Ugly

N.D. Wilson writes on Rob Bell in the current issue of Books & Culture.  I don’t agree with some of Rob Bell’s conclusions in “Love Wins” (to the extent I can figure out what he concludes), but Wilson’s piece is just atrocious.  Here’s something I sent in to B&C, but I don’t think they’ll have the space to print it.  What bothers me most about Wilson’s piece (and about a similar blog post by Jamie Smith, much as I respect Jamie), is the notion that a sense of aesthetics, a gut-sense that God just can’t be how He is portrayed by some folks, is an invalid source of knowledge.  I think that aesthetic sense, that pit you get in the stomach when something just sounds wrong, often serves as an important pointer towards truth.  Here’s the text of my long letter to B&C:

Apparently, for N.D. Wilson (“Pensive Rabbits,” July / August 2011), God is free to act arbitrarily and call it “good.”  There is no sense, it seems from Wilson’s review Rob Bell’s “Love Wins,” in which God’s inherent character might constrain the ways in which God acts.  Nor is the any sense in which the imago Dei in humans, or the subtle presence of the Holy Spirit, might prove useful as a hermeneutical lens for discerning whether some particular account of how God supposedly acts really is True.  Bizarrely, Wilson the novelist (does he write ugly stories?) decries Bell’s appeal to aesthetics as bizarre.  Never mind the vital role aesthetics has played in the development of Christian conceptions of Truth down through the millennia of Christian thought.

Could it be that when something strikes us as terribly “ugly,” that thing is splattering against the Truth of God’s image deep within us?  I felt this recently when I took a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp outside Krakow, Poland.  I was in Krakow for a theology conference on the theme “What is Life.”  I learned more during that tour of Auschwitz than I did from any of the papers given during the conference (many of which were excellent).  I suppose that, for Wilson, the visceral ugliness of Auschwitz doesn’t convey any Truth at all.  For my part, I think the bile I felt in my throat during my tour of Auschwitz was the image of God pressing against every cell in my body — literally, a “visceral” reaction, deep in my viscera — against the horror of the death camps.

This is why I think Bell is entirely right to raise the “hippidy-hipster’s” cynical “Really” in response to the stories of Heaven and Hell we so often like to tell.  A young Hindu woman, forced into sexual slavery because of her family’s debts, dies forsaken in a brothel of AIDS, never having heard the name of Jesus.  She is immediately escorted to the eternal conscious torment of Hell.  All of this ultimately glorifies God.  “Really?” Yet that is the story much of popular Evangelical soteriology would force us to swallow.  Should we all shout “Sig, Heil!”?  “Hail Victory” does sound like a catchy title for a Praise and Worship song.  Or does the naked ugliness of this story hint that it isn’t really Truth?

Wilson’s response is a strange, quasi-modalistic fideism.  If Jesus thinks “the earth is the center of the universe,” Wilson asserts in his concluding Credo, “[t]hen so do I.”  Wilson’s disregard for the other two important persons one might want to consult — the Father and the Holy Spirit — is telling.  For Wilson, God’s (or I suppose “Jesus'”) actions can be arbitrary.  There is no relation between the economic and immanent Trinity.  God does not act as God in His Triune being is — he acts as pure power.  So why bother with the Trinity at all?

Wilson’s implied modalism leads to his baffling use of the present tense concerning what “Jesus thinks.”  How can we know what “Jesus thinks” (present tense)?  We of course know some things that Jesus “thought” as described in the Gospels.  We have to employ all sorts of theological and herementuetical grids to begin to get at what those things mean for us, particularly when we try to construct doctrine.  Should we, say, hate our parents (Luke 14:26)?  What did Jesus mean by that?  And we have no idea at all what Jesus “thought” about most things during his life on earth.  The doctrines of the incarnation and the kenosis ensure that Jesus the man held many typical first-century Jewish ideas that educated people, including Wilson, don’t hold today.  Maybe even things like geocentric cosmology.  But all of this is the sort of stuff only smarmy skinny-jean clad seminarians talk about while they sip lattes in the div school cafe.  A real man like Wilson can let all that pass.

So how do we know what Jesus — or better, the Triune God — “thinks” today?  We do what believers in the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ have always done.  We exercise faith that seeks understanding.  We search the scriptures.  We use the minds and the experiences God has given us — including our innate, God-imaging sense of aesthetics — and we listen for the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit.  We look deep into the tradition of thought bequeathed by those who have gone before us in the faith.  If what we come up with seems awfully ugly, if the Spirit within us wants to retch, we keep working on it.  We don’t settle for Auschwitz when shalom is who God in His perichoretic being is.  Some of Bell’s answers are wrong, but “Really” is the right question to ask of many of the hideous God-stories we tell.