Love Wins: A Critical Review

Nothing but a good bit of heresy to make one begin blogging again eh?  Heh heh… but really, this is a serious and much needed critique of Rob Bell’s newest book “Love Wins”.  I read it yesterday after my dear husband brought the book home to use in his Revelation research paper and, although I am glad to have familiarized myself with the error so that I might be helpful to my brothers and sisters in Christ who find themselves confronting such theologies, it was a rather exhausting endeavor.

Not exhausting in the intellectual sense of the word.  In fact, in that arena I found myself little challenged by Mr. Bell and his work.  It was indeed written for his target audience, which is this America so riddled by the ADD phenomenon that no one has the time or patience to sit and work through anything with real substance.

Most of his sentences…

Look
Like
This.

I think he’s trying to emphasize his points this way, but it got annoying after about the fifth time.

There are a few select cases where he actually has a paragraph longer than four lines.  If you don’t want to think much or concentrate too hard, this is the type of book for you.  On the other hand if you have any sort of brain and actually enjoy a good mind work out you, like me, might be peeved by his literary style.  It really is twaddle for adults.  Kudos to Mr. Bell for knowing his target audience, and shame on him for encouraging their minds to turn into useless piles of mush.

Putting aside my distaste for his literary abominations, let’s get down to the real reason why I’m reviewing Mr. Bell’s book: the theological implications of his writing.  There is a reason why I brought up his ability to understand and communicate with his target audience – he’s very good at it, which makes him dangerous.

He knows who will be reading his book, and he talks directly to those people.  I was able to identify two particular groups who Mr. Bell was targeting throughout his work.  First I will tackle the less obvious group, but the one to which I happen to belong.  This is the group of  Christians who understand their role as theologian (Yes, you are a theologian!) and take it seriously, who are reading his book for the purpose of knowing what the opposition to the Gospel has to say and how to defend against it.

To us he directs subtle, but nevertheless glaring attacks.  Such things would pass by unnoticed to other readers, but are plainly obvious to those of us to whom they are directed.  His goal, it seems, is to get under our skin, rile us up, make our responses emotionally charged and therefore not as tenable.  He makes such remarks as: “the woman who wrote Hebrews”; he claims to be proclaiming nothing new, but only the historic, orthodox Christian faith and he repeatedly refers to the “Genesis poem”.  Such remarks, beside being shoddy scholarship, are simply not worth my time.

There are other, more dangerous heresies he is spouting that must be addressed.

For most of the book, however, I found it difficult to directly address many of these issues because Rob Bell does not match the traditional systematic theological debates of the Reformation.  He talks in a very postmodern way, making it difficult for more traditional scholars to pin him down on any one point.  He is very “squirmy”, as my dear husband puts it.

Most of his assertions are made in the form of questions.  This works in his favor in two ways:
1. It teaches a particular theology without explicitly condemning other theologies.
2. It inhibits those who are seeking to point out the flaws in his logic.  (Oh and trust me there are many… too many to list in one post…)

Quite ingenious really… and also annoying.  Fortunately, he slips.  Near the end of his book he finally gets right down to it.  Having avoided making any direct judgments on anyone for over a hundred pages, he waits until his relationship to the reader has been sufficiently soldered, then he breaks the golden rule of our age: “Thou shall not judge.” And he does just that.

I would like to point out this particular passage to you for this reason: The rest of his book appears to be so innocent and harmless, but this highlights the true spirit in which it was written.  It is interesting that the one person he judges in the entire book, the only one he calls to account… is God Himself.  Sound familiar?  It is the same old refrain we have heard since the Fall… “God YOU put this woman here with me.”  Our sinful nature always wants to accuse God and place on Him the responsibility for our own transgression.

But don’t take my word for it… Here is the accusation straight from the source:

“And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.”

“…at the heart of it, we have to ask: Just what kind of God is behind all this?

Because if something is wrong with your God,
if your God is loving one second and cruel the next,
if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years,
no amount of clever marketing
or compelling language
or good music
or great coffee
will be able to disguise
that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.”

And that is truly the heart of Rob Bell’s book.  Our God, the God who died to save us, the God who took upon Himself all of our sin… is cruel, traumatizing, unlovable.  This is what Mr. Bell thinks of God.  And so… he has created his own god, more to his liking.  Rob Bell’s god is a lot of things, but he’s not the God of the Scriptures.* That God, clearly, is One that Mr. Bell despises and cannot love.  This is the classic song of Satan, the world and our own fallen nature.

The second and most obvious group to whom Rob Bell writes are those poor souls who have been burned out on the evangelical protestant churches and are looking for the next best thing.  These are people who kind of heard the Gospel, but have not experienced the richness and beauty of the historic Christian doctrines.  They have been given a weak faith, infiltrated by heterodox teaching, and so things don’t seem to fit together quite right.  They’re looking for answers and a way to make this puzzle we call faith fit into their post-modern worldview.  Which, of course, is what the church growth movement led them to believe they could do.  And, of course, it failed because… it’s simply not possible.

Rob Bell disagrees.  He says it is possible, and so he goes about reconstructing Christianity to solve these questions.  Now, his target audience has some legitimate questions.  It is obvious that things aren’t really the way they should be, and the questions Rob Bell asks (most of them) are legitimate and important questions for us to answer.  Questions such as:

What about the age of accountability?  Do we have to say a specific prayer to be saved?  What about cheap grace?  Is that really fair?  What if the missionary gets a flat tire?  Is someone else’s eternity resting in your hands?

All great questions, stemming from a reformed understanding of Christianity.  This is the Christianity in which Mr. Bell and many other Americans have been raised; I know this because he references his upbringing specifically in the book.  And whatever it was… it wasn’t Lutheran!  All joking aside… this is his target audience, he knows them, he knows what they need, and he’s giving it to them.  Marketing school 101: Know your target audience, ask them what they want… give it to them.

This is why he is so dangerous.  He is going to take thousands of people down into his error with him because he has an audience and he knows how to play them.  The people this book is directed toward are hurting, burdened and vulnerable.  They have been given a law-centered gospel and it has left gaping holes in their heart.  This is a real problem, and it needs addressing.

Unfortunately, Rob Bell answers all their questions and, at first, his words will be applied as a soothing balm to their spiritual wounds.  Equally unfortunate is the sad reality that Mr. Bell’s antidote to the problems of reformed, Baptist, pop-American, Christian theology is not really a cure at all.  In fact, it’s the flip side of the same exact coin.  And I can prove it…

In fact, Mr. Bell makes my job quite easy in this respect.  For all of his harping on the Arminian understanding that you need to “make a decision for Jesus” (which is NOT true by the way!!) he spouts the same sort of filth.  He polishes it up and gives it a new name, of course, but it’s the same law-oriented message that YOU have to do something to have a relationship with God.  Page 136 from “Love Wins” says this:

“When we say yes to God, when we open ourselves to Jesus’s living, giving act on the cross, we enter in to a way of life.” 

Umm… yeah… same exact theology, same legalistic reality, same gaping hole.  After the excitement of having their ears sufficiently scratched, people are going to begin to realize this.  His audience will begin to feel the pangs of emptiness once again, because his is a gospel that does not fill.  Drinking of this water will cause you to thirst again, and you will be right back where you started, empty, broken and lost.

The Gospel simply is this… “It is finished.” There is nothing left for you, or me or anyone to do to be saved.  In this, Rob Bell and I agree wholeheartedly.  Christ has done it all.  This does not mean, however, that this grace, this gift, cannot be rejected because, as Rob Bell also would contend, it is not a gift if you have to work for it and it’s not a gift if it’s being forced upon you.

This is, in the words of Mr. Bell, a tragic reality.  It is possible to reject the good gifts of God and, in our fallen nature, that is exactly what all of us immediately do.  We have all been forgiven; salvation is given to all of mankind, but we all reject God and His love.

There is no age of accountability.  We are accountable for our sin of rejection and our rebellion from the moment of conception.  The wages of sin is death, and babies die.  We are all accountable.  So what makes the difference then?  If we are all accountable for our sin, and there is nothing at all we can do to earn salvation (including saying a prayer or making a decision) then how does the Gospel mean anything?  How is God’s salvation for everyone given to me personally?

Calvinists would say that it is by the doctrine of election that those are chosen who would be saved, that God arbitrarily decided before our birth which of us was created for eternal life and which of us was created for eternal torment.  There is absolutely nothing anyone can do to change their eternal destiny, whether good or bad, because God is sovereign. Do I even have to say how that leaves a gaping hole in our heart?

No.  God is not arbitrary.  He is not mean or malicious.  So how is it decided then?  It is decided by faith.  Those who receive God’s gift will enter into their inheritance; those who reject it will perish.  Notice the first is a passive verb, we are receiving.  The second is active, we are rejecting.  Receiving is contingent on the one who is giving the gift; after all you cannot receive a gift that has not been offered to you.

Another way of saying it is that we have to trust in Christ and His life, death and resurrection for the forgiveness of our sins.  Where does trust originate?  In us or in the one in whom we trust?  Normally we do not trust strangers, why?  Because they have not done anything to earn it!  We trust people because of what they have done and how they have handled their relationship with us.

We can only receive a gift if someone else has given it, and we can only trust if the other person has earned our trust.  We can foolishly reject a gift or refuse to trust, but we cannot force either to happen.  When eternal life is the end, it is all because of what God has done.  When damnation is the verdict, it is our fault, our own fault, our own most grievous fault.

Yes, God gets all the credit and none of the blame.

Perhaps this concept is difficult to swallow, and it is, because our minds are so shallow and weak when considering such eternal truths as God and faith.  Yet, even without fully understanding, we believe.  We believe because we have heard the Word of God, and the Holy Spirit has worked in us supernatural faith through this Word.  We believe because we have been given this faith through Baptism – which is God’s work, not ours.   We believe because our Lord strengthens us in our faith and forgives our sins in His gift of Holy Communion.  We believe because God has proven Himself trustworthy, always ready and willing to forgive our sins in confession and absolution.   We believe because God has made a decision for us.

Yes oh Lord!  Let it be so.  Amen.

*If you disagree with me here because he uses the Scriptures (even going so far as to examine the original languages) you might find this review helpful in fleshing out some of his “Exegetical Gymnastics”.  I would do so in my own post… but there is so much to review and so little time…  It is not a Lutheran source, but decent nonetheless.