Reading Evangelical literature is rarely stimulating for me, however I was recently loaned this book by a friend of mine. I decided to review it on this blog. I haven't been diving into philosophy and literature as much lately, and perhaps it is time to get back.
If there are only a select few who go to heaven, which is more terrifying to fathom: the billions who burn forever or the few who escape this fate? How does a person end up being one of the few? Chance? Luck? Random Selection?..... Having a youth pastor who "relates better to the kids?........What kind of faith is that... What kind of God is that?....
He asks "What if the missionary {Who we need to give us the message of Jesus' redemptive truth} gets a flat tire?"
Bell answers these questions through poignant story telling, a generous theology, and a highly selective reading of the Bible to arrive at a Human being and a God who are constantly in a process together, striving toward a redemptive victory for God's all inclusive love.
Bell is maybe the latest in a long line of Christian thinkers who are quite comfortable in uncertainty and ambiguity in their faith. Like the great liberal Southern Baptist E.Y. Mullins, The poet John Milton, Henry Beecher who wrote "Charity before Clarity", C.S. Lewis's Great Divorce and even the great American religious critic and skeptic William James, along with modern day "Emergents" like Brian McLaren, Bell finds a place in the universe for everybody.
It would be a mistake to call Bell a true universalist since he clearly believes in Hell. He writes of Hell:
...When we read "eternal punishment," it's important that we don't read categories and concepts into a phrase that aren't there. Jesus isn't talking about forever as we think of forever, Jesus may be talking about something else...we need a loaded, volatile, adequately violent, dramatic, serious word to describe the real consequences we experience when we reject the good and true and beautiful life that God has for us. We need a big, wide terrible evil that comes from the secrets hidden deep within our hearts all the way to the massive, society-wide collapse and chaos that comes when we fail to live in God's world God's way. And for that, the word "hell" works quite well. Let's keep it."
Though I find this extremely moving, I am in awe of Bell's audacity as he finds a way to be a modern palatable Christian without being a traditional Christian through a sincere, but clumsy re-interpretation of the Bible. There is an odd exegetical gymnastic at play here between the greek word "Aion" which in Greek can be read as ever-lasting but also can mean a period of time, and Matthew 25--which is completely re-interpreted by Bell. After blinking at Bell's mis-reading I got to thinking. One could gently comment that if hell isn't forever, then why should Heaven be? If we are to trust Bell's translation, lets apply it to John 3:16
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only son, So that who-so-ever believes in him shall not perish but have life for a period of time. (John 3:16 uses the same word "aionos")
Still, Bell does find plenty of Universal passages and stories in the Bible. The skeptic is free to observe that both views are very present in the Bible and it is a matter of emphasis. I applaud Bell for his generosity. As I read him, Bell leaves the door open for both Heaven and Hell to be as much about what humans do to each other, as what God does to us. Bell affirms hell only after he has re-defined it, and in so doing has set off a fire-storm with his Evangelical and Reformed kinsmen.
Bell is not exactly a mystic, but he he drapes the Cross, Jesus' death and life, and his dying to live, in a modern, poetic kind of mystical imagery.
There is an energy in the world, a spark, an electricity that everything is plugged into. The Greeks called it zoe, the mystics call it "spirit," and Obi-Wan called it "the force."
This is funny, but it's also quite serious. Bell has Americanized the early Christian experience:
They believed that at a specific moment in the history of the world, that life-giving "word of God" took on flesh and blood. In Jesus, they affirmed, was that word, that divine life giving energy that brought the universe into existence.... Are we the ultimate orbiter of what can, and cannot, exist? Or is the universe more open, wondrous, unexpected, and far beyond anything we can comprehend? Are you open or closed?
Presumably, Evangelical traditionalists and reformers who believe in Hell would be closed here. I am reminded of the great religious critic William James in his monumental book Varieties of Religious Experience (A good role-model for me) wrote:
In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the ever-lasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which should make the critic stop and think.... Perpetually telling of the unity of man with God, their speech antedates languages, and they do not grow old.
Bell has no clime or creed, he is tolerant of mystics but he is too American and "real" to embrace anything but a sublime mysticism of salvation, that looks to me like every other Evangelical view except that in the end it happens to be more theologically generous and thoughtful of others. A Universalism that is shrouded in American Christian Imagery may never grow old. Bell's mystical power is in the Bible he interprets and re-interprets at will to find a Jesus and God who is everything, and all that matters to us in every conceivable and non-conceivable way. He finds the Jesus he is looking for. I recommend this book to anyone looking for a softened yet highly charged Christian Protestantism.
