Through a Glass Darkly

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:

• The hardline restrictivist soteriology that fueled the postwar Evangelical coalition’s missions energies betrays our inward moral sense as well as the Bible’s account of justice.  A soteriology that can’t systematically account for children who die in infancy, or the mentally disabled, or pious Jews exterminated by Hitler, or peasants who died on Cambodian killing fields without hearing of Jesus, and on and on …  it all flies in the face of the Biblical narrative of justice for the oppressed. 
• The “Liberal / Evangelical” divide is a product of a bygone time — and it is good that this time has passed.  The coalition that birthed Christianity Today is dissipated.  Thoughtful “evangelicals” today are post-liberal and post-conservative — maybe post-capital-E-Evangelical. 
• Post- / progressive- evangelicals don’t raise questions  just because we want to make the gospel attractive.  We do it because we have become better educated and we care about truth.  We do it because the system passed down from the first generation of Christianity Today’s editors, at crucial points, simply doesn’t withstand even modest scrutiny.  We do it to improve in our discipleship of the mind and in our doxological proclamation.  A by-product of this is that the gospel becomes more attractive — or, better, the beauty inherent to the gospel becomes clearer.  Truth is beautiful.
• Retreating into the bunkers of a presumed quasi-denominational orthodoxy isn’t an option.  The Fundamentalists and Neo-Evangelicals were able to do this for a while in the 20th Century because information traveled much more slowly.  Today everyone can fact-check instantly.  Today everyone — at least every American middle-class evangelical — can travel the world and actually meet human beings who live and think outside our little bubble.
• Genuine “orthodoxy” is generous, and generous orthodoxy is the only path to unity.  The essential narrative of generous historic orthodoxy includes God’s judgment of sin and the exclusivity of Christ.  It does not, however, presume to explain in detail, for all time, how to harmonize the universalistic and particularistic strands of Biblical eschatology.  Great “evangelical” scholars from C.S. Lewis to Leslie Newbiggin to N.T. Wright to Richard Bauckham to Alister McGrath have recognized this.

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.

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.