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We review the deeply moving, deeply frustrating "book about heaven, hell and the fate of every person who ever lived."
Love Wins is a difficult book to review. Not because it’s hard to read, or hard to understand or even takes a long time to read. It’s difficult to consider because how you respond to the book will likely be almost entirely dependent on what your experience with the Christian faith has been.
Rob Bell has always been an excellent communicator to those damaged by expressions of Christianity. Velvet Elvis was all about finding space to ask the most vital faith questions; Sex God was a book for everyone who’s ever thought that “True Love Waits” was woefully simplistic; Jesus Wants to Save Christians was written for anyone who was sick of the Christian message being co-opted by tired political rhetoric; and Drops Like Stars was for people who suffer and wonder where God is in their pain.
Love Wins is a book for people who have been hurt by Christians and who have formed opinions about Jesus based on those hurts, rather than on a Savior who loves them unconditionally and pursues them relentlessly. It’s a book about trying to correct the wrong stories Christians and non-Christians have heard about hell, judgment and God that have made them unable to love Him. In the moving first few chapters, Bell wonders how someone who has been hurt, horrifically abused or exploited by people claiming to be Christians can ever have a right view of Jesus.
Valid questions.
But Love Wins doesn’t stop with those questions. The front cover says it’s about “heaven, hell and the fate of every person who ever lived,” and that’s exactly what the book tries to do. Bell wants to challenge these things, even if it means upending some closely held beliefs along the way.
A tale of two books
Love Wins has some of the most moving passages about heaven, hell and God’s love I’ve ever read. After establishing a group of grounding questions in Chapter 1 (pretty much every question you’ve ever asked about salvation and who gets “saved”), Bell moves into his description of a vital heaven that is both already and not fully come into fruition. It’s basically N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope (which I heartily recommend for more on the topic) without the page count. Bell simply says the goal of the Christian life is to work toward becoming fully redeemed, restored and reconciled people; people who are ready and eager to begin their ministries as “priests and rulers” (Wright’s term) of a New Earth. Bell rightly points out that heaven isn’t somewhere we escape to—it’s a fully realized expression of God’s love and presence that comes to earth to “make all things new.” It’s Good News, and reminds us that what we do with our lives matters because we are being changed and molded. It also reminds us we are called to be people working in Creation and in the lives of others to bring the fullness of God’s Kingdom to earth.
Similarly, much of Bell’s chapter on hell is equally prescient. He argues hell is necessarily a reality, because so many of the evils we see and experience have no other name. He suggests the future hell will be when God says “enough” and banishes all injustice and evil from the restored and reconciled New Earth—that just as people can choose hell or heaven on this Earth by their actions and engagement with the mission of Christ, so are the future realities dependent on choice.
It’s in the chapter on hell that it becomes apparent the book might have some shaky foundations. For as much as Bell bases his ideas on heaven and the call to Kingdom participation on strong scriptural, contextual and theological underpinnings, he stretches and squeezes Scripture, Church history and doctrinal consensus to meet his needs in subsequent chapters. Even though he’s so often excellent at reading and reacting to the different genres and styles in Scripture (his referral to Genesis 1 as a “poem” comes to mind), he seems to not afford the same measure of literary criticism to Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 10 that “it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for you.” Somehow, Christ’s seemingly obvious hyperbole and metaphor is literally interpreted by Bell as a promise that “there’s still hope” for Sodom and Gomorrah. And his usage of the Psalms to “prove” that God’s ultimate desire and will is for all to be reconciled to Him is curious, since Bell is usually so careful to distinguish between genres of Scripture like poetry and wisdom literature. It’s not to say that truth can’t be gleaned from the Psalms—it’s just difficult to use poetry to provide absolute statements without a lot of unpacking.
Perhaps most problematically, Bell really only emphasizes all of the verses where God talks about His love for the world, and where Jesus, Paul and other writers point to God’s unceasing love for all of humanity. He often skirts over and seems to minimize the remarkably uncomfortable passages in the Old Testament (and a few in the New) that show a wrathful God, a jealous God and a God whose holiness demands a sacrificial system that seems bizarre to us. It’s the “Old Testament God” that Richard Dawkins pokes at in The God Delusion: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Of course, Dawkins' skewed vision is not the god of the Christian faith, but Bell’s seeming refusal in Love Wins to wrestle with the explicit difficulties in the biblical text seem as shortsighted as Dawkins’. It would be easy to imagine a new Christian assuming Love Wins is an all-encompassing view of God, and then being dreadfully confused when they read Judges for the first time. Bell’s summation is at least as non-holistic as Mark Driscoll’s “My Jesus beats people up” image. It’s disappointing to see Bell fall into the same trap as Driscoll and some of his contemporaries, when the complexity and paradox in the character of God seem to be overlooked in the chase to gain points.
