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.
Quoted in USA Today (of all places!):
Richard Mouw, president of the world’s largest Protestant seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary based in Pasadena, Calif., calls Love Wins “a great book, well within the bounds of orthodox Christianity and passionate about Jesus.The real hellacious fight, says Mouw, a friend of Bell, a Fuller graduate, is between “generous orthodoxy and stingy orthodoxy. There are stingy people who just want to consign many others to hell and only a few to heaven and take delight in the idea. But Rob Bell allows for a lot of mystery in how Jesus reaches people.”
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:
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.
Here is a helpful snippet from Carl Braaten, a Lutheran theologian whom I admire. This is from his book That All May Believe: A Theology of the Gospel and the Mission of the Church.
The church has never solemnly promulgated an eschatological dogma. Some eschatological sharpshooters claim to know how everything will turn out in the end. I am an eschatological agnostic. There is a Chinese proverb that says, “To prophesy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.” There is simply no magnum consensus in Christian tradition on how things will turn out in the end.
For those getting hot and bothered about the Rob Bell flap, this might be a useful reminder. In fact, I heartily recommend this book, which is a very readable and balanced discussion of Church, mission, theology and culture. For a bit more detailed discussion, see Braaten’s chapter on “The Uniqueness and Universality of Jesus Christ” in Braaten and Jenson, eds., Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 1, as well as the chapter on Eschatology: The Content of Christian Hope written by Hans Schwarz in Vol. 2 of that treatise.
Schwarz makes a very strong case against universalism: “The origin of the notion of a universal homecoming goes far beyond the Bible and seems to be anchored in a cyclic view of history…. Universalism contradicts the New Testament insistence that our response to the gospel determines for us the outcome of the final judgment” (pp. 575-78). And yet Schwarz notes that, particularly in the descent of Christ into Hell,
Without circumventing the salvific power of Christ, the church evidently affirmed that hope that those also could be saved who had not encountered Christ during their lifetime on earth. Yet it never dared to declare that therefore everyone will eventually be saved, nor did it define how someone could be saved through Christ’s descent. Our reflection today must show a similar restraint. While we fervently hope and pray that all humanity will be saved, we cannot take for granted that it will be so or outline a way in which God will reach this goal. We know that the saved will be saved only for Christ’s sake. (p. 579)
Braaten sounds what is perhaps a more hopeful note than Schwarz:
At this point I often like to quote Gustaf Wingren: ‘That everyone should be saved is not an assertion of fact that has any biblical support. But it is something one can certainly pray for…. No one has arrived. So, while we are in the process of moving toward the goal, we can pray what we cannot assert.’ To let our prayers rhyme with God’s intention to save all is appropriate to faith in the living God who loves sinners and the godless. The salvation of those who do not believe in Christ in their lifetime is ultimately a mystery that we cannot unveil by speculation. Meanwhile, we would not limit our hope born of love and active prayer that God will win in the end.
Perhaps the careful hopefulness of theologians such as Schwarz and Braaten can help us avoid the extremes in our present debates about eschatology.
Recently I attended an event sponsored by a para-church organization that was aimed at evangelizing children and their parents. The main attraction was a ventriloquist. He was a skillful ventriloquist and his schtick was pretty funny. By the end of thirty minutes, he had most of the audience on his side.
If you’ve ever been to this kind of evangelistic event, you will recognize what happened as his routine began to wind down. Slowly he became serious. It was time for the illustration, the connection between ventriloquism and the gospel.
“I speak for my ventroliquist dummies,” he said, “but before God, no one can speak for me or for you.” He continued with the dilemma: “God is perfect and he can only let perfect things into his heaven. But if you’ve done even one wrong thing, you aren’t perfect.” Then, the product / solution: “Now, God sent Jesus to die for you and so he has done everything necessary for you to get into his heaven. But he has left one thing up to you — only you can do this one thing.” And, the pitch: “You need to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Only you can do it. Your parents, your grandparents, your church — they can’t do it for you.” Finally, the close: “Let’s bow our heads and close our eyes while we pray. Maybe you want to pray these words….”
I don’t use the language of sales — dilemma, solution, pitch, close — to demean this man’s character. He seemed to be, and I think he was, earnest and sincere in his desire to share the gospel. Yet this language fairly describes, I think, the techniques that were employed.
Maybe “techniques” aren’t so bad. All communication employs some methods, tropes and techniques. But what if the drive to simplify the technique distorts the message?
Driving home from the event, I reflected on the message distilled into this exercise of technique.
“Only perfect things can get in to God’s heaven.” How distant is the idea of “getting in to God’s heaven” from the Bible’s vision of creation and new creation, of God’s purposes for the “very good” of each person and this world, of the physicality of the Resurrection! The Gospel is good news precisely because — and only when — it unveils God’s transformation of this created world.
“God left one thing up to you….” How vastly alien to the Biblical Gospel! You and I on our own have gotten it all wrong. We have bound ourselves to the addiction of sin. The Gospel is good news precisely because — and only when — we realize that God did everything because we could do nothing.
“Only you can do it — not your parents, your grandparents or your church.” How utterly foreign to the Biblical ekklesia, the “body of Christ,” the authority given to loose and bind, the great cloud of witnesses of the saints through the ages! Yes, God calls each of us to respond with repentance, faith, worship, and good works. But it is not all about you or me as individuals. It is all about participation in Christ through participation with the Church. The Church is the bearer of the Gospel’s good news precisely because — and only when — the individual sinner is enfolded into the community that is engrafted into the vine of Christ.
This is the Gospel: new creation! This is the Gospel: God did it because you cannot.! This is the Gospel: Christ lives in and through the Church because you cannot do this yourself!
This is the invitation: you are invited to participate in the Church, joined to Christ by the Grace of God, in the life of the new creation.
Scot McKnight’s post today on the Rob Bell controversy is a must-must-read, both for its take on the topic in general and its exhortation to how we should discuss the topic. I reproduce it below.
I stood in horror watching the blogosphere light up last week, but my horror was not simply over the accusations made against an author whose book was not even yet available nor just over those who were denouncing Rob Bell for what they were absolutely certain was universalism. No the horror was that there was a volley of posts put up about hell. It looked like a tug of war between Love Wins! and Wrath Wins! Is this what we need? the way to proceed? the way to find resolution?
My horror, then, was three-fold: first, the image of God that is depicted when hell becomes the final, or emphatic, word and, second, the absence of any context for how to talk about judgment in the Bible and, third, the kinds of emotion expressed: we saw too much gloating and pride and triumphalism on both sides. I felt like those who watched the sinking of the Titanic and who didn’t cringe at the thought of thousands sinking into the Atlantic to a suffocating death. They were instead singing and dancing to a jig that they were right or had been predicting the sinking all along.
If there is an eternity, and I believe there is, and if there is a judgment, and I believe there is, then let us keep the immensity and gravity of it all in mind and refrain from flippancy, gloating, triumphalism — and let it reduce us to sobriety and humility and prayer. When Abraham faced the prospects of the destruction of Sodom in Genesis 18, he didn’t gloat that he was on the safe side but supplicated YHWH for mercy for those who weren’t. We need more Abrahams.
I have myself weighed in on this Eternity.Life debate in my book One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow, so I don’t want to weigh in again or repeat what I have already said. Instead, I want to set this discussion into a slightly different context: the image of God that jumps from the pages of the Bible in passages that might be called final triumphant grace. I will put it this way: there are passages that sound univeralistic, that sound like somehow God will reconcile all things in the End, and that if we don’t occasionally sound universalistic we are not being as biblical as God — and as Jesus and Paul. Yes, these passages are not the only ones to consider, but — let this be said — neither are they cushioned or cautioned or cornered off by Jesus and Paul so they don’t give the wrong impression. What the Bible is talking about here is that God’s grace will win. God will make all things right. I’m not a universalist but I want this language to be the way I talk about these topics. So, here goes:
I begin with Jesus, whose parable of the Prodigal Son should make us stop in our tracks, from Luke 15:28-32:
28 “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. 29 But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. 30 But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’31 “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’”
And now to Paul, beginning with 1 Corinthians 15:20-28:
20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23 But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 24 Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27 For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. 28 When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.
And especially Colossians 1:15-20:
15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
And this line from James:
Mercy triumphs over judgment (2:13).
And, once again, I don’t consider these to be the only passages that have to be considered. But let this grand and glorious vision of hope and triumphant grace and putting things to rights be in our minds and on our lips and in our emotions whenever … whenever … whenever we talk about final matters.
To talk about wrath apart from this depiction of the grace-consuming God is to put forward a view of God that is not only unbiblical but potentially monstrous. And, to put forward a view of God that is absent of final judgment, yes of wrath, yes of eternal judgment, is to offer a caricature of the Bible’s God.
No one should begin to talk about hell without spending fifteen minutes in pausing prayer to consider the horror of it all.
I find some people can get intoxicated on wrath and it can lead them in a triumphalist dance of anger. And I find some who get intoxicated with a flabby sense of grace. Isn’t it better to get lost in the dance of God’s good and triumphant grace and of making things right? If we are to be intoxicated, let it be from imbibing the hope and grace of God’s love which will both win and be right in the End.
Remember the supplications of Abraham. Every.Time.
In Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions About Sex and Desire, Boston University Professor of Religion Jennifer Wright Knust seeks to demonstrate that the Bible is far less clear about sexual ethics than most religious conservatives claim. This effort only partially succeeds.
Knust adeptly dismantles the proof-text approach to using the Bible to construct sexual ethics. Some readers who have never studied the Bible carefully might be surprised by some of her observations. People who know the Hebrew Bible only through Veggie Tales, for example, might be shocked to learn that the Patriarchs, sexually speaking, often were not very nice men; or that the Levitical and Deuteronomic law codes were soft on divorce, unfair, by modern standards, to women, and tolerated concubinage; or that the later Israelites mixed worship of God with worship of the more licentious Canaanite gods. Similarly, people who are unfamiliar with the details of the Jesus’ teachings on marriage and the family might be confused by Jesus’ statement that his followers must “hate” their parents (Luke 14:26) or his apparent teaching the there will be no marriage in heaven (Matt. 22:30). And St. Paul’s ambivalence — perhaps even squeamishness — about sex and marriage in 1 Corinthians 7 is notoriously confusing, particularly for anyone trying to construct a “Biblical perspective on marriage.”
Knust highlights these and other oddities and conundrums in the Bible’s various narratives, laws and exhortations concerning marriage and sex. This provides a useful and readable catalog, if one that very often that is transparently selling very modern, feminist readings of the text. At times this modern-critical-feminist lens simply distorts good scholarship, as with Knust’s unequivocal conclusion that the “love” shared between David and Jonathan was homoerotic.
None of these things are surprising, however, for anyone who has actually made some effort to study the Bible. Knust writes as though she is revealing unmentionable secrets and breaking some sort of code of silence, but that simply is not so. For example, I remember delighting to learn, as a teenager, that our Sunday School chorus “His Banner Over Me is Love” employed a metaphor from Song of Solomon that was unequivocally and graphically sexual (“he invites me to his banqueting table….”) (see Song of Solomon 2, which also includes a rich variety of other sexual images — “his fruit is sweet to my taste” (v. 3), “his left arm is under my head, and his right arm embraces me” (v. 4), “do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires” (v. 7), and “he browses among the lilies” (v. 16)).
More importantly, Knust fails to set her observations into the broader context of the narrative of redemption and the life and practice of the Church. Her hermeneutic seems to be merely deconstructive within the presuppositions of strong feminism. She never sets the various Biblical texts within the framework of the life of God’s people through history, except perhaps to suggest that Israel and the Church have gotten sexual ethics completely wrong.
Even this failure can provide a useful lesson, because it is precisely the same failure that renders proof-texting meaningless. Knust is correct to point out that the Bible cannot be used as a blunt weapon in today’s culture wars — at least without the context of a robust ecclesiology. It is also helpful to examine whether the Church has truly been faithful in its appropriation of the Biblical texts for the construction of ethics. Often it has not.
But with all their failures and inconsistencies, both Israel and the Church bear witness to very long and rich traditions of privileging the full expression of human sexuality within the context of covenantal marriage between a man and a woman. These traditions are rooted deeply in the Biblical narrative as well as in the Bible’s specific laws, commands and warnings regarding sex. If we cannot merely offer simplistic, legalistic answers to the questions asked about sexuality, gender, and equality in our historical and social context, nor can we merely and equally legalistically wipe away the heart of our community’s tradition based only on the not-very-new observation that the Bible is often culturally messy. If anything, in our times, we need a renewed turn back towards the Church as the family in which unmarried and married people practice a joyful purity that bears witness to the goodness of who we are as created beings, male and female, in the image and likeness of the Triune God.
On Science and the Sacred, John Wesley Wright has been reviewing Conor Cunningham’s book Darwin’s Pious Idea. Here is part of Wright’s excellent summary:
Cunningham argues that to remain science, science must remain empirical, not metaphysical. Science will not bear the weight of explaining all existence without collapsing in on itself in irrationality. Science must remain open to other, more basic realms of rationality; it cannot offer an account of all existence. If science attempts to become a theory of everything, it ironically loses the very matter that it seeks to investigate – and the reason for doing science and even the scientist herself! Here is where the paradox enters: such a reductive naturalism ultimately shows that in itself, matter is literally nothing. Therefore reductive naturalism points past itself to the Christian understanding of creation ex nihilo. Ironically, the new atheists point to God, the Creator of all that is from nothing.
My friend Ross Hastings offers an excellent BioLogos post on unity, which is reproduced below.
1. United in the faith
We are, I trust, united theologically in the main things that are the plain things—that is, around the essentials of the faith which are developed and more fully expressed in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (AD 381), which includes the affirmation “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible,” without saying how!
That God created must unite us as we dialogue over how God created.
There is much diversity in the history of the church as to how the world was created. Augustine, for example, believed in fiat creation, but was convinced that Genesis 1 could not be literally interpreted for the simple reason that a twenty-four hour day was too long. Why would God need twenty-four hours to create the animals if they were created ex nihilo or even out of other dust?1
1851-1921. Influencial Calvinist theologian and prominent professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, known best for his intellectual defense of the inspiration of ScriptureIt may come as a shock to many in the Reformed tradition that the theologian best known for his defense of the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures may also have been open to creation by means of divinely supervised evolution.2 I am speaking of B.B. Warfield. To make any viewpoint as to the “how” of creation a matter for determining Christian fellowship is frankly divisive and sectarian or uncatholic.
Whilst we may be convinced we have the best theory of origins at present, and whilst we may be convinced that we are the most intellectually honest or scientifically rigorous, or that we understand the genre and history and authorial intent of Genesis 1 most appropriately—important as these factors are—I venture that the level of certainty due to the nature of the science and the hermeneutics and the theology in this field, is a level of magnitude below that of the creedal assertion that God created and that he in his providence is sovereign over and at work creatively and redemptively in creation.
We Protestants have enough divisions and schisms as it is—we don’t need another one based on the speculative matter of how God created. Rather we must unite on the basis of the fact that the triune God is the Creator. There isn’t a viewpoint represented in the dialogue on origins that doesn’t have some problems associated with it, problems that need to be worked through. Acute curiosity, robust research and careful scholarship in these areas are consonant with the creational or cultural mandate and the command to love God with our minds.
Dialogue between persons of different persuasions is healthy and good—in fact necessary for advancement in the field. But it requires an irenic and peaceful spirit along with an inquiring mind. I feel a particular need to exhort against accusations in the midst of this dialogue that disparage a person’s integrity with regard to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. These “how” discussions between serious minded evangelical believers are not about the authority and inspiration of Scripture, but on appropriate interpretation of Scripture. The Scriptures are authoritative as and only as they are properly interpreted.
Borrowing terminology from Jamie Smith3, another way to say this is that we must distinguish between theology type 1 and type 2. Type 1 is confessional theology, which is pre- and supra-theoretical and which must inform all the disciplines of knowledge, including science. Theology type 2 is more theoretical and speculative.
The first is the rich and unambiguous confession of the church’s faith down through the centuries, expressed in creeds like Ephesians 4 and the ecumenical Creeds rooted in the revelation of God in His Word and affirmed by the historic church. This theology should shape Christian theoretical investigation of the world, including science, and indeed theology type 2. It is when Christians elevate their work in the theology type 2 area to the type 1 category that damage is done to unity and catholicity and therefore the mission of the church. Of course theology type 2 will always be interacting with, shaped by, and subject to theology type 1.
One of the reasons why I devote time to this issue is that it is a very important for missional reasons. First, because our unity in Christ, as the body of Christ around essential issues, is hugely influential for our mission, as Jesus expounds it in his great prayer in John 17, and as I have stated, I feel compelled to call the church to unity on the essential tenet of Christian faith that God is Creator and that he created the universe. There are times when I am tempted to write off others of a persuasion that seems to me unscientific and/or hermeneutically naïve, but I cannot.
The rub here is that commitment to cherished principles comes into conflict when this happens: on the one hand, a commitment to a process of seeking knowledge in this area through the use of fearless reason and research, albeit grounded in faith and tempered by faith and creedal commitments; on the other hand, a commitment to the unity of the body of Christ grounded in the essentials of the historic, orthodox, Trinitarian creeds of the church. This latter principle must win for the serious scientist Christian.
Of course, that immediately distances us from the secular scientific community, who often may not understand that they too have faith commitments that influence reason. It will certainly distance us from evolutionism as an ideology or completely dysteleological (goalless) evolution.
We cannot be one with people of this persuasion in an ecclesial sense, though we will still engage lovingly and humbly with them as image bearers and scientists. We must also see them as people designated by God for the new humanity in Christ. But we are speaking here of an organic and creedal basis for unity that on the one hand includes every Christian devoted to Christ and the essentials of the faith, irrespective of their views on Genesis 1, and that, on the other hand, delimits perspectives outside of this relationship and these commitments.
On these grounds, I would suggest the following very practical exhortations for maintaining the unity and advancing Christ’s mission through his church:
- Terminating the positions of professors of colleges or seminaries who express perceived problematic views on origins whilst still committed to the authority and inspiration of Scripture and these Creeds, and indeed to the denominational or widely evangelical distinctives of these, is sectarian;
- Establishing schools where teachers or even students are required to profess one view in this arena is counter to the mission of Christ and therefore sectarian;
- Accusing opponents of compromising the Deity of Christ publicly on the Internet because they may differ on origins of creation is malicious and a move that grieves the heart of our Great High Priest and his desire for his church to be one, that the world might know him through it. It is after all intended to be the one new humanity, the harbinger of the kingdom of God—the community in which persons can dialogue well and even agree to disagree about non-essential matters.
- Caricaturing the position of others or falsely representing them is grievous to the Spirit, and inhibits the mission of the church.
- Uninviting preachers who are committed to evangelical orthodoxy because we discover they hold one of these views in this arena of secondary theology, grieves the Spirit also.
But there is a second concern of a missional kind. It has to do with how we present the gospel. Making literal six-day creationism a condition for saving faith or conversion is adding to the gospel in a way that has possibly been the greatest stumbling block in the way of thinking people for over a century since this viewpoint became popular in American evangelicalism. The Church has all too often buried its head in the sand with respect to scientific reality and we can ill afford a repetition of the crisis that occurred in the wake of the Galileo affair.
Notes
1. St. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (translated and annotated by John Hammond Taylor, S.J.; 2 vols.; New York: Newman Press, 1982), 1.125-50.
2. In his class lectures, Warfield comments, “I do not think that there is any general statement in the Bible or any part of the account of creation, either as given in Genesis 1 and 2 or elsewhere alluded to, that need be opposed to evolution. The sole passage which appears to bar the way is the very detailed account of the creation of Eve … We may as well admit that the account of the creation of Eve is a very serious bar in the way of a doctrine of creation by evolution.” Warfield was clear that the origin of the human soul could not be accounted for by evolution. His position in sum seems to be that he did not consider evolutionary theory convincing but stayed open to the possibility that it might be true. “The upshot of the whole matter is that there is no necessary antagonism of Christianity to evolution, provided that we do not hold to too extreme a form of evolution. To adopt any form that does not permit God freely to work apart from law & wh [??]. does not allow miraculous intervention (in the giving of the soul, in creating Eve, &c) will entail a great reconstruction of Xian doctrine, & a very great lowering of the detailed authority of the Bible. But if we condition the theory by allowing the occasional [crossed out, sic.] constant oversight of God in the whole process, & his occasional supernatural interference for the production of new beginnings by an actual output of creative force, producing something new ie, something not included even in posse in preceding conditions, — we may hold to the modified theory of evolution and be Xians in the ordinary orthodox sense.” Warfield, Lectures on Anthropology (Dec. 1888), Speer Library, Princeton University. Quoted in David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), 118.
3. James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004).
TG Darkly Podcast #5: Humanity as and In Creation
Here is the TG Darkly Podcast. You can download the file or listen using the controls below.