Author: David Opderbeck

Flags from over twenty different countries lined the church steps and snapped in the crisp autumn breeze.  A display of African spears and hand drums graced the atrium.   A preacher wearing a jacket screen printed with an image of the globe strode to the pulpit.  It was time again for the annual missions conference.

We were treated to exciting stories of sometimes dangerous work in exotic places, where thousands of tribes people were coming to Christ.  There were charts and statistics and terms like “10-40 Window” and “people group.”  These were marshalled to support the electric claim that in this generation the task of world evangelization could be completed, if only we would pray and give and go.  The completion of that task would speed the return of Christ:  “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.”  (Matt. 24:14).

But Christ could not yet return because there were people groups who had not yet heard the gospel.  Without hearing the gospel, these groups were “lost” — that is, bound for Hell.  And until they heard the gospel, the prophecy of Matthew 24 would remain unfulfilled.  Both the souls of these “unreached people groups” and the timing of Christ’s return therefore urgently depended on us.

After these missions conferences, most of us would pray, for a while; some would give, many generously; and here and there, a few would go.  Occasionally, someone I knew would abruptly quit his or her job and head off to the mission field.

I prayed, and I gave (though not as generously as I ought), but I never went.  And because I never went, I knew that I was a second-class Christian, at best.  I had graduated law school with honors, I had gotten married to a wonderful Christian woman, I was working at a large corporate law firm, I was generally honest and free of obvious sins, I was active in every Church committee imaginable — including chairing the committee that put on the annual missions conference — but, I knew, none of it was adequate.  Millions upon millions of unreached people were dying every day, and I was fiddling while they burned. 

Only occasionally did we glimpse the difficult reality of the actual mission field.  There were many stories of disappointment, failure and heartbreak, and very few of triumph, when the conversation turned to real people and real families who went.  Some came back psychologically spent and broken.  Some persevered. 

As I participated in the missions conference year after year, the world both changed and remained the same.  The Church, in some parts of Africa and South America, really did grow explosively, and began to take on an indigenous second-generation quality, warts and all.  In other places, such as China and the Arab world, progress remained painfully slow.  Throughout much of the world, poverty, war, disease and injustice continued to claim countless millions of lives.  One thing became perplexing and obvious:  God seemed to have purposes and timetables, for individual missionaries, peoples, nations, and the parousia, that the missions conference couldn’t handle.  Somehow, I felt, there must be a better way to think about God’s mission and our role in it.

For a serious Evangelical kid in the 1980’s, Youth Group was the setting that mattered.  We met every Friday night in the dusty church gym.  Those were good times in so many ways — wholesome friends, volleyball, a space free of drugs and other evils that were already beginning to consume kids in the high schools.

Our youth pastor at the time, Pastor Knutsen, was an intense man who wore a bad hairpiece and led worship choruses using a banjo.  He often talked in gruesome detail about his multiple surgeries for some obscure digestive tract ailment.  And he literally scared the Hell out of me. 

Pastor K had been deeply influenced by Charles Finney.  I doubt that he knew this.  He was of course not an immediate disciple of Finney, who preached during the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century.  But Pastor K often echoed Finney’s notion of true versus false repentance.  If your life wasn’t right, Pastor K said, then you probably have not really surrendered it to Christ.  Christ is savior and Lord.  If Christ is really your Lord, you will not think the wrong things, dwell on lust, make out, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or enjoy worldly entertainments.  If Christ is really your Lord, you will want to serve him in missions and evangelism, and you will read your Bible and believe whatever it says.  If Christ is really your Lord, you will defend your faith against all the onslaughts of the world, and particularly against false liberal Christians.

Being a sensitive and introspective person, it was not hard for me to find ways in which I had failed to live up to Pastor K’s standards, no matter how hard I tried.  And I tried hard.  I only listened to Christian music.  I openly shared my faith in school.  I argued with my science teachers against evolution (I vividly recall one such argument about the lack of mutations in fruit flies).  I didn’t drink or smoke.  I was sexually utterly naive.

But there was always something.  Once in my Senior year in high school I decided to go fishing instead of attending the evening service at church.  Here it was:  I had failed again to live up to perfection, and so I probably was not really saved.  As a sort of penance, after I got home from fishing I read through the entire book of Job and wrote up an amazingly complex, and if I recall it correctly, quite brilliant outline of the text. 

Since certainty was eluding me based on my conduct, just about every time there was an altar call, I responded, even if only quietly “in my heart.”  And there were many, many altar calls.

Part way through high school, a new young pastor, Pastor John, took over Pastor K’s role as youth director.  Pastor John’s soteriology (of course I didn’t know that word then) was rather different than Pastor K’s.  At the time, the so-called “Lordship Salvation” controversy was raging through Evangelical-Fundamentalism.  Pastor John went to the leading “Free Grace” seminary, which taught that so-called “Lordship Salvation” was really a diabiolical theology of salvation by works.

Sometimes I found Pastor John’s altar calls soothing — I didn’t have to worry about perfection after all!  But usually I found myself on the horns of a dilemma:  either Pastor K or Pastor John was right, I reasoned.  If I chose the wrong one, I’d be damned.  Either I would not work hard enough to justify the claim that Jesus really was my Lord, or I would try to earn my salvation through works and thereby forfeit salvation by grace alone.

This was torture.  I became highly attuned to the nuances in the altar calls of various preachers who would visit our church or who I would hear on the radio or at Christian rock concerts, and I would respond accordingly, so as to cover all the bases.  My obsessive-compulsive personality grabbed on to this impossible conundrum, and I flagellated myself with it day and night, often resulting in very deep and very dark nights of the soul. 

I was rewarded by our system — I was a very, very good kid, President of the Youth Group, chaste boyfriend of the prettiest girl in church, a model for the parents of wayward sons and daughters.  But internally, most of the time, I was dying, guilt-ridden, confused, and profoundly insecure.

It was late July in New Jersey. By early evening, the day’s stifling heat and humidity had given way to a soft breeze.   For many twelve year old boys, this was the golden hour, a time to play barefoot wiffle ball or hide-and-seek.  For me, it was time for our family’s bi-weekly pilgrimage to the Summer Bible Conference at the Gospel Church.

Inside the church building, the crisp air conditioning, mauve carpets and polished pews bespoke comfortable suburban affluence.  This week’s preacher was a Conference regular, Dr. David Breese, an imposing, beefy man with a shock of dark Grecian-formula hair, a booming bosso voice, and a vocabulary stocked with ten-dollar words.  Anticipation and delight of a sort that must once have been reserved for Gnostic initiates crackled through the room. 

During the ensuing hour, Dr. Breese unraveled the twin mysteries of the Bible and geopolitics.  Daniel’s sixty weeks, the Beast of John’s Apocalypse, the State of Israel, Godless Soviet Communism, the United Nations’ designs on world government, the idolatry of Roman Catholicism and the apostasy of the World Council of Churches, the European Community’s secret reconstitution of the Roman Empire, nuclear conflagration, hippies and rock and roll and drugs and sex, the Four Horseman and Armageddon – all of it made sense in a grand narrative of consummation and judgment.  We were the terrifyingly privileged generation chosen to observe so many of scripture’s prophesied signs line up before the Rapture of those who had entrusted themselves to Christ.  It was spectacular religious theater, a Key to Understanding Everything, a palpable sense of heightened reality unavailable to the lost mass of ordinary humanity.

Dr. Breese’s presence, vocabulary, and knowledge of world affairs appealed to my sheltered, understimulated pre-teen lawyer’s mind in the making.  I drank it up.  I was certain about how the world would end, that it would be soon, and that the great mass of human endeavor was a blind, distracting charade.

But my gut, even then, told me something was wrong.  First there were discrepancies and mistakes – and even what seemed to be misrepesentations – in the various “end times” presentations I heard through my teen years.  Things like the “ten nations of the European Union, which clearly correspond to the ‘ten horns’ of Daniel” – when there were already twelve EU nations and more poised to join.  Or the ways in which Russia, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Iran seemed to play interchangeable roles as the “Gog” and “Magog” of Ezekiel, depending on what was in the news at the moment.  Or the venom towards Roman Catholics, who seemed to say many of the same things about Jesus we were saying.  Or, perhaps most vexing of all, the way in which our “Christian Nation,” the United States, the most powerful nation in the world, seemed to play no part at all in consummation of history.

On the heels of these technical difficulties followed deeper existential concerns.  If we really believed the Rapture and Tribulation were immanent as the preachers claimed, why did most of our congregation wake up and head to ordinary, comfortable, middle-class jobs in the morning?  Why did we continue “marrying and giving in marriage” if the end was near?  Why did we attend school, watch TV, play baseball, vote for Nixon and Ford, fight communists, or build new church buildings in New Jersey?  If the pretribulation-Dispensational chiliastic view of history were correct, then life was meaningless except as an effort to save others from the swiftly coming horrors of judgment, Tribulation, and Hell.  And worst of all — what if I wasn’t really among the saved few after all?  What if my conversion wasn’t really good enough?  What if my doubts about this picture of the “end times” signalled a basic failure of faith?

I sat uncomfortably on a hard metal folding chair in a musty room at the mountain conference center.  I was fourteen, away from my family for the first time.  The previous night was a blizzard of skits, games, flirting, and practical jokes.  I was exhausted, still a bit shy, but having fun on my first “snow camp” youth group retreat.  Now it was time for the devotional.

The speaker was a middle-aged emergency medical technician from a big city.  I was transfixed as he described the pathos of accident victims who had died despite his best efforts to give aid.  There was the young man who was impaled on the steering column of his car, desperately trying to push his way off as his last breaths escaped.  “I pleaded with him to receive Christ,” the speaker said, “but he just kept fighting for his life with fear in his eyes.”  Then there was the boy who laying dying of his injuries in an emergency room.  The speaker reported the boy’s last cries :  “ ‘oh, the pain, the pain!’”  The speaker was certain that the boy felt the flames of hell licking about him in those last moments.

The speaker paused as the flames of hell seemed to simmer under my chair.  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an EMT, it’s that life is fragile, life is short.  You all think you’re immortal, but you’re not.  Death will come like a thief in the night.”  The room grew warmer.  “What would it feel like to be burned alive for eternity?  Eternity never ends.  No relief.”  My vision was tunneled onto the speaker as he moved towards the close.

“Some of you think you’re safe because of your parents, or because you said a prayer when you were young,” he continued, “but you aren’t living for Christ, and you’re lost.  You need to be sure.  You need to know you’re saved from the horrible fire of hell.”  I listened as he cataloged my sins:  listening to rock music, playing games that involved sorcery like Dungeons and Dragons, lusting in my heart after girls.  He was speaking to me, alone, the only person in the room.  “The question is, do you have the guts to stand up in full view of all these people and proclaim your allegiance to Christ?” 

 I did.  I stood up.  I begged God to save me.  And I felt . . . the same.  I tried to feel relieved, joyous, clean.  But I wondered – did I really repent unto salvation this time?  I’d prayed and expressed faith when I was younger, after all, but that wasn’t good enough to keep me from rock music and other sinful pursuits.  Did I really know now, was I really sure?

When I got home I threw away my expensive collection of Dungeons and Dragons books.  I stacked all my rock albums in a pile and demolished them with a sledgehammer so that no one else could become corrupted by them.  And I paid very careful attention in church.  What I heard was as intoxicating as it was frightening.

I’ve just about finished reading Rob Bell’s controversial new book “Love Wins.”  From my perspective, it is an important, beautiful, and frustrating book.  In some ways, I’m glad that this elephant in the room now must be acknowledged.  Yet in some ways, I wish it had been a different book, with more theological depth, and a more careful account of justice and judgment.

My full “review” will proceed over the course of at least a few posts.  As you will see, it will comprise  more of a “reflection” than a “review.”  I hope to offer some personal experiences that might help explain why some people, including me, appreciate the questions Bell asks.  I hope also that this “narratival” approach to a “review” will model something that I think is important in this conversation:  when we are trying to grasp eternity and God’s judgments, analytical categories ultimately will fail us.  We are dealing with mysteries — things not yet fully known or revealed — which require reverence, confession, and humble faith.

Nevertheless, for those who need some analytical talking points, here are a few of my summary impressions. 

     — Is Rob Bell a “universalist?”  It’s not clear from the book.  He has stated flatly that he is not a “universalist” and we should credit that self-definition charitably.

    — Do I care whether Rob Bell is a “universalist?”  Not really.  Most of the argument about this so far, as far as I can tell, has been about who gets to define or own Evangelicalism.  If I start to care about who defines or owns Evangelicalism, I get very anxious and upset.  I will never define or own Evangelicalism.  That’s not my job.  And, therefore, I don’t care — or at least I choose not to care — about the debate over who defines or owns it.

     — Is Bell’s theology in this book “orthodox?”  I don’t know.  Define “orthodox” — and don’t forget that all of us who self-define as “evangelical protestants” are at best heterodox in our theology of ecclesiology, apostolic succession, the sacraments and salvation as developed in the early Church that birthed what we consider “orthodoxy.”   The Bishops who assembled at Nicea, Constantinople and so on to hammer out their conciliar documents would not have recognized anybody who today self-identifies as “evangelical protestant” as a genuine, orthodox, Christian — not even close.  By our self-definition we “protest” the authority claimed by those Bishops and their putative successors.  Be careful where you point the finger of “heresy”:  from some perspectives (Trent not the least), the anathemas point back to Luther, Calvin, and you and me.

     — As far as I can tell Bell doesn’t stray beyond the basic Creed (Nicene, Apostle’s).  He doesn’t seem to be saying anything that hasn’t been said for decades in the broader Christian community, including by C.S. Lewis and by the relatively conservative Catholic Popes and Orthodox Bishops of recent generations. 

     — Nevertheless, can you find a kind of universalism in Bell’s book that arguably strays beyond orthodoxy defined in a certain way — or at least, beyond a robust Biblical Christian faith situated in the historic Christian tradition including the various streams of the Reformation?  Yes, I think you can, and I wish much more care had been taken in this regard.  In my judgment, many of the questions Bell asks and many of the correctives he offers for some of us are important and helpful.  Yet, the terrible enormity of sin, the gravity of God’s judgment, the reality of the hardness of the human heart, the Biblical picture of a final judgment and the theological and philosophical imperative of a final judgment, the glory of the atonement, the “blessed hope” of the return of Christ the King and Judge who will vindicate his people by permanently excluding and destroying evil in all of its structural and personal embodiment, including evil persons who spurn God’s grace and persecute his people — all of these are indespensible components of the Christian story. 

     — The problem is that Evangelicals too often have told a story that is dark, nihilistic, hopeless, and empty.  A story in which the God on offer does indeed seem monstrous.  A story in which God really doesn’t seem to give a damn about suffering and violence and oppression.  A story in which victims and losers and the impoverished, disabled, infirm, uneducated billions of the world have no real shot at justice and redemption.  A story in which pretty much nobody but us right-thinking Evangelicals is “in.”  A story in which Christian spirituality consists mostly of manipulation, endless striving after unattainable goals, and salesmanship.  Jesus had lots of things to say about stories like that — none of them kindly.  “White-washed tombs” and “brood of vipers” were the sorts of things Jesus said about people who told those kinds of stories.  He in fact sometimes warned those kinds of storytellers that they were destined for Hell.  If Bell points some of this out in ways that sting — let it sting. 

So that is my bullet-point summary.  Now on to some narrative.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been wrestling with what “universalism” really means and what I think about it.  Here are some thoughts.

“Universalism” is the belief that everyone will be saved. 

Though I wish that this were true, I do not believe it for at least four reasons: 

(1) it is not what scripture seems to teach.  Yes, I am aware of the tension in scripture between universal and particularist passages.  But whereas the universal passages can be understood within the context of particularism, in my judgment the converse is not also true.

(2) it seems to contradict the broad Christian tradition.  The Fifth Ecumenical Council’s anathemas against Origen seem to preclude universalism generally.  Yes, I am aware that some particularly in the Eastern Orthodox tradition understand these anathemas as relating primarily to Origen’s particular metaphysics.  Yes, I am aware that Gregory of Nyssa, arguably a universalist with a non-Origenist metaphysic, was called the “Father of the Fathers” by the Seventh Ecumenical Council.  But in addition to this specific Council there are many writings by other Fathers and Doctors of the Church that emphasize a dual outcome eschatology.  A dual outcome eschatology is the basic historic teaching of the Church.

(3) it seems to contradict reason.  A “necessary” universalism would require the limitation of Divine and/or human freedom.  Divine and human freedom are required for reason to be, in fact, “reasonable.”  A “contingent” universalism would require the belief that all human beings will, in fact, eventually choose salvation.  Such a belief contradicts substantial available empirical evidence, as discussed in point (4) below, and such a major contradiction is unreasonable.

(4) it seems to contradict experience.  There is substantial empirical evidence that some (many) people are not “saved” and do not choose “salvation.”  “Salvation,” of course, refers not just to the afterlife, but to the manner and quality of life here and now.  It is not at all difficult to find multitudes of examples of people who clearly and stubbornly choose death over salvation.  For example, in one of my classes last year, a local prosecutor did a guest lecture on the problem of child pornography.  The people that perpetrate these horrific crimes are choosing death.  They have hardened themselves against the good to such a degree that they choose to film themselves committing multiple acts of  rape and sodomy upon small children and even babies.  History suggests some of these monsters will remain monsters to the grave.

It seems clear to me, then, that the four sources of theological authority — scripture (as primary), tradition, reason, and experience — all seem to speak against what I have defined as universalism.

But what about the “hope” that everyone will be saved?  I appreciate the hopefulness expressed in some contemporary theologians such as von Balthasar and Alfayev, as well as in Barth and his evangelical interpreters such as Bloesch, Braaten, Bauckham and Hart.  These theologians suggest that we cannot teach dogmatically that everyone will in fact be saved, but that we can hope and pray that this might be so.

Presently I think this sort of “hopeful universalism” — a label that in my view ends up confusing things — is at the same time persmissible, required, and incorrect. 

I think the hope that everyone will be saved is incorrect because scripture, tradition, reason and experience teach us that not everyone in fact is or will be saved.  The reality of human nature and of God’s love and justice are that some (many) have persisted and will persist in their howling rejection of the good.  It is futile to “hope” for that which cannot be.  Therefore I cannot hope that everyone will be saved in the sense of concluding that the salvation of each last individual person will in fact become actualized.

Yet the hope that everyone can be saved is permissible and required with respect to any individual person or groups of people with whom we might have influence.  We never give up in prayer.  We never give up in proclaiming the good news of freedom in Christ.  We never give up in participating in God’s mission to rebuild shalom.  We never give in to the despairing thought that anyone, anywhere, ever, is outside the scope of God’s love and grace.  We never presume to judge who God saves.

This blend of realism — in the end, not everyone will in fact be saved — and hope — I hope that every last person would be saved and I will not presume against God’s grace and love towards anyone — in my judgment is the proper “evangelical” posture.  It can become an uncomfortable posture, particularly if, like me, ambiguity makes you uncomfortable.  It can also become an uncomfortable posture if, like me, you are painfully aware that you have not participated fully and sacrificially in God’s mission of redemption.

Two basic things are required as a result of this discomfort:  greater trust in God and greater commitment to God. 

Trust:  If I must sadly acknowledge that not everyone will be saved but I am not able to make the judgement about who falls into either category, that means I must leave that judgment to God and trust Him to do what is perfectly and precisely good, loving, just and right.  This means leaving to Him all the hard cases, such as my own disabled son, and not presuming to judge exactly who is “in” or “out.”  It means giving up the illusion that I, or my church, or my theology, controls God’s judgment.  It means that God, and only God, is God.

Commitment:  If I must recognize that an essential and fundamental aspect of God’s redemptive action in this world involves the holistic missional work of the Church, and I am blessed to be part of the Church, then I must rededicate myself to that mission, including the sending and preaching of the Gospel into the uttermost parts of the earth.  Is this mission what my life really is all about?  Or am I really interested in a theology that makes things much easier for me?

This is where I stand — I can do no other.

Richard Mouw clarifies and amplifies his thoughts on Bell on his own blog.  He offers some wise thoughts and helpful references to C.S. Lewis and Billy Graham.  Mark Baker-Wright, who works at Fuller, offers his own very useful comments on why people worry about the labels used by gatekeepers.