I finished Love Wins by Rob Bell this week, and I will say right from the start that I give it 4.75 stars*. If that's going to turn you off from reading the rest of this review, so be it. For everyone else, here's what I think.
I think Rob Bell presented the various questions and perspectives of heaven, hell, and the gospel in a quite compelling and reachable way. The key word is various. It doesn't take long reading through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that Jesus invites people to follow him in extraordinary and diverse manners. That alone should tip us off that there's more than one way God finds us. Some people went seeking after Jesus; others Jesus came seeking them. I think Bell captures that in his many stories.
One major spiritual life question that I have been asking myself for a few years now is this:If there is no heaven, would I still follow Jesus and invest in the kingdom of God?
For me, this is a checkpoint question when I come to any major, or even seemingly minor, crises of faith. If I can say yes, then I feel free to move forward. If I say no, then I know I need to figure out something more. But this question isn't meant to reduce the realities of heaven or minimize the faith journeys of those who have passed on before me, but rather a check that my priorities of following Jesus are for this life and not only for the life to come.
With this context, I resonated with Bell's discussion on heaven and hell, questioning the perspective of a God who many evangelicals say is Love but also say is Wrath if the right steps of faith aren't followed before we die. Bell doesn't buy this view as God's justness; our sin only promises us death, not eternal conscious torture for finite years of sin and unfaithfulness. And Bell calls the evangelical gospel what it is: an escape route of this world to the next. That doesn't jive with Jesus' insistence on touching the lives he encountered in the present.
What really hit me about this book was the radical unfair manner God loves presented in Bell's summary of the parable of the father with two sons (aka the Prodigal Son or the Forgiving Father). As I read it in Chapter 7, I immediately saw threads of Tim Keller's book The Prodigal God. But the twist that I've never seen before in that parable is how elements of heaven and hell co-exist in the same dimension, as well as the diametrically opposed sets of stories that existed. Let's take the latter one first.
The younger son shames his father in the ultimate manner, seeking his inheritance now, thus essentially saying "I wish you were dead." His father, without hesitation, gives him his portion. The younger son squanders it, comes to his senses that he can't continue this path, and comes back to his father ready to ask to be one of his father's slaves. His father meets him, instead, and restores the father-son relationship. Bell summarizes two stories here:
Bell asks which story will the younger son trust? The father's story is a restored kingdom. The younger son's story is hell.
The older son, meanwhile, calls out his father's acts of mercy and grace to his brother, complains that he has slaved for his father all of these years and calls his father cheap for not even giving him a measly young goat for a celebration with his friends. The father, again without hesitation, tells the older son that he has everything the father has, and it has always been his. Bell summarizes two stories in this interaction:
Bell asks which story will the older son trust? The father's story is again restored kingdom, while the older brother's story is hell.
Heaven and hell together in the same place. Trusting the father's ability to restore the family is heaven. Not accepting how the father has restored the family is hell. The important piece of this parable is that it exists within the present, and it comes down to a choice: let yourself be loved by the father or say no. But in both cases, the father sought after each son and offered his love.
Bell speculates that all people will be sought after by God in similar ways, and not necessarily while we are in this life. He never dismisses the realities of hell, and gives example after example of how we already bring hell upon ourselves now. Yet with every one of those examples of hell, he presents moving stories of how God restores, glimpses of present heaven.
All in all, Bell presents a hopeful God, one that desires all people to be in a restored relationship with Him and each other. The each other part is what is most often missing in the evangelical gospel. It's an important piece of the parable of the two sons most often overlooked. The older son has no desire to seek to restore his relationship with his brother, no matter that the father has already done so himself.
Despite all of the above, what surprised me most about Love Wins is the final chapter. Having gone through many stages in my faith journey, particularly from strict, fundamentalist independent baptist rule follower to a wide-open, hopeful follower of Jesus, I often want to cast away all of my past steps of faith that I find to be coercive, rigid, and incomplete. But Bell encourages us in the final chapter to not do that at all. That no matter how much we far we have come in our faith journey, our past interactions with God were just what we needed them, at that time, in that place. We should not be ashamed of them nor despise them. Instead we should embrace how God works, and how God works in ways that are higher than our ways. It's a simple call to humility, and reverence that God is the one restoring, and we need not try to fix again what God has repaired.
* - my quarter star subtraction is based on the lack of end notes or citations in the book. While this somewhat fits Bell's writing style, citing where and how Bell uses other people's books, ideas, or concepts would have been helpful.
Post a Comment