Fifty Million Rob Bell Fans Can’t Be Wrong
In 1959 RCA releasedFifty Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong—Elvis’ Gold Records Vol. 2.1 Elvis Presley was an exceptionally popular entertainer who was also one of the most controversial public figures of the late 1950s. The title of his second greatest hits album indicates a popular sentiment: It must be right, because millions of people believe it. But this sentiment does not translate to theology. Though many church fathers and theologians throughout the ages may have believed in a particular doctrine, it’s correctness is not established by that fact alone.
Rob Bell is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and is the author of such books as Velvet Elvis, Sex God, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, and Drops Like Stars. Many evangelical Christians are familiar with his Nooma series of videos.2 Bell is influential in Emerging Church circles and is a popular speaker. Though his previous books have sold well, Love Wins is especially popular.
The twin premises of Love Wins are that God is a God of love and that the evangelical Christian view of God is too narrow. “Has God created billions of people over thousands of years only to select a few to go to heaven and everyone else to suffer forever in hell?”3 Bell asks. Love Wins challenges the traditional views concerning heaven, hell, and salvation. For the sake of brevity this review concentrates on Bell’s view of salvation.
Universalism
Simply stated, Rob Bell is a universalist. Baptist theologian Millard Erickson’s description of universalism also describe’s Bell’s views: “From time to time, however, a contrary position has been espoused in the Church, namely, that all will be saved. This position (is) known as universalism.”4 Some years ago Erickson noted this tendency in a list of trends within liberal evangelical circles: “A hope for near-universal salvation. God has not left Himself without a witness in all cultures, sufficient to bring people to salvation if they earnestly seek it.”5
Bell does not concern himself with “earnest seekers.” Instead, he arranges a list of passages from both the Old and New Testaments to describe God’s love for human beings.6 God must save everyone, reasons Bell:
How great is God?
Great enough to achieve what God sets out to do,
or kind of great,
medium great,
great most of the time,
but in this,
the fate of billions of people,
not totally great.
Sort of great.
A little great.7
Bell sees God as a failure if He doesn’t save everyone: “Will all people be saved, or will God not get what He wants? Does this magnificent, mighty, marvelous God fail in the end?”8
One could call this “God is a failure” argument “extreme pathos.” Evangelical theology answers this dilemma, “Will all be saved? The church’s usual position throughout history has been that while some or even many will be saved, some will not.”9 At least two theological arguments stand against the universal salvation espoused in Love Wins. [amazon 006204964X thumbnail]
The nature of the atonement
Bell’s view of the extent of Christ’s atonement is apparently informed by the “Moral-Influence Theory.” This view was originally developed by Peter Abelard (1079-1142), a theologian and professor at the University of Paris.10 Abelard “emphasized the primacy of God’s love and insisted that Christ did not make some sort of sacrificial payment (i.e. ransom) to the Father to satisfy His dignity. Rather, Jesus demonstrated to humanity the full extent of God’s love for them.”11
The Moral Influence Theory was further developed at a much later date by Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) in the US and Hastings Rashdall in the UK.12 Bushnell wrote, “It is not that the suffering appeased God, but that it expresses God—displays, in open history, the unconquerable love of God’s heart.”13 Lewis and Demarest summarize this theory: “At bottom, then, people are saved by the compelling power of God’s self-giving love.”14
Bell views the traditional evangelical view of salvation as “God in the end doesn’t get what God wants”15 because God “wants all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (NASB, 1 Tim. 2:4). What will be the outcome of the lives of billions of human beings?
To be clear, again, an untold number of serious disciples of Jesus across hundreds of years have assumed, affirmed, and trusted that no one can resist God’s pursuit forever, because God’s love will eventually melt even the hardest of hearts.16
This is universalism, clearly presented and concisely stated.
The means and extent of salvation
The second theological problem with Love Wins is Bell’s view of the means and extent of salvation. How far does the death of Christ extend to all human beings?
Rsearch on this topic reveals a “kindred spirit” to Rob Bell: Nels Ferré of Sweden.17 As a youth Ferré was troubled by his father’s conservative understanding of the Scriptures, especially his eschatology. Ferré eventually immigrated to the US where “he built his own theology on the central thought of divine love.”18 “It is his understanding of God’s love that governs his interpretation of Scriptures and the issue as a whole.”19 Ferré described the means and extent of a universalist salvation in these terms:
The logic of the New Testament at its highest and deepest point is the logic of God’s sovereign love… Those who worship the sovereign Lord dare proclaim nothing less than the total victory of His love. No other position can be consistently Christian. All other positions limit either God’s goodness or His power, in which case both Fundamentalism and modern Liberalism have their own varieties of the finite God.20
Bell’s conclusions are mirror-images to those of Ferré. Concerning the love of God, he writes:
Which is stronger and more powerful, the hardness of the human heart or God’s unrelenting, infinite, expansive love? Thousands through the years have answered that question with the resounding response, “God’s love, of course.”21
…
At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.22
Indeed, theologians throughout the centuries have written about universalism. Origen (ca. 185-254) probably first systematized universalism: “Origen also adopted with some enthusiasm the idea of apokatastasis or universal restoration, according to which every creature, including both humanity and Satan, will be saved.”23 But universalism is not the prevalent theological concept of salvation. Over the centuries a few writers and theologians followed Origen’s lead. Far more theologians have not.
Theological method
At this point we must ask the question, “How does Rob Bell do theology?” In the case of his universalism, Bell assembles a number of verses in an effort to support of the dominance of God’s love over all His other attributes. He then adds a number of “traditions” to the mixture and concludes that everyone must be saved from destruction.
On the one hand Bell does not consider many of the Scripture passages that obstruct his assertions. On the other hand Bell paints the opposing views in stark, evil terms. In response to some church doctrinal statements concerning the condemnation of unbelievers, Bell writes:
So, in the first statement, the “unsaved” won’t be with God. In the second, not only will they not be with God, but they’ll be sent somewhere else to be punished. And in the third, we’re told that not only will these “unsaved” be punished forever, but they will be fully aware of it—in case we were concerned they might down an Ambien or two when God wasn’t looking…24
Bell does not attempt to balance the opposing views against universalism. He makes little effort to compare and synthesize the data of the biblical passages and word studies and the biblical, systematic, and historical theology—and then determine a measured conclusion. This is not to say that Bell did not do any theological research, word studies and analysis. But his presuppositions allow no other conclusion than that Love Wins. In the final analysis, Bell’s theological method is careless and prejudiced.
What may the reader conclude from Love Wins?
Love Wins is as much a book about American popular culture as it is about theology. Bell’s underlying assumptions about salvation are probably based on the prevailing concept of “fairness,” that is, there are no losers and the authorities ensure an equality of outcomes—the authority in this case being God.
It is not unreasonable to conclude that Bell perceives the traditional view of salvation as unfair because some are saved but others aren’t. Though Bell wishes the reader to think he is defending God’s honor, in reality he creates a god who is forced to serve human beings “because He loves them.” In this sense Love Wins is man-centered, or anthropocentric. Here salvation is a right and not the gift of God.
Is Love Wins a polemic against the evangelical view of the gospel? In response to the evangelical view that some are saved but others aren’t, Bell writes:
What kind of faith is that? Or, more important: What kind of God is that?25
This belief raises a number of issues, one of them being the risk each new life faces. If every new baby being born could grow up to not believe the right things and go to hell forever, then prematurely terminating a child anytime from conception to twelve years of age could actually be the loving thing to do, guaranteeing that the child ends up in heaven, and not hell, forever. Why run the risk?26
This statement is part of his “extreme pathos,” a prejudiced opinion against conservative evangelical Christianity. One might hope that Bell is merely overstating his case for emphasis and not revealing his true beliefs. However, though he makes many other harsh statements, Love Wins is not really a polemic.
The God who is revealed in the Bible is most certainly a God of love, but He is not limited to love. This is the major error of Love Wins. He is also the God of justice, mercy, forgiveness, and grace. He is infinite in His wisdom, eternal in His being, sovereign over the Universe, both transcendent and imminent, and yet He is not limited in any way by our finite understanding of these qualities or attributes. There is much we cannot understand about our great God: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” (NASB, Isa. 55:9).
Perhaps the combination of Rob Bell’s writings, videos, personal appearances, large church and cultural influence has gained him millions of fans. But his personal popularity does not make him correct—nor does the popular culture he represents make him correct. Love Wins is poorly-done theology and a caricature of evangelical Christianity. How evangelicals wish that universalism was true! But it is not. The Bible is clear that not everyone receives salvation.
And no one’s heart breaks more for the lost than God’s.
Notes
2 Love Wins, dust jacket.
3 Quote from Love Wins dust jacket; “If you don’t have that (a personal relationship with God), you will die apart from God and spend eternity in torment in hell,” p. 10.
4 Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998, p. 1025.
5 Millard J. Erickson, The Evangelical Left: Encountering Postconservative Evangelical Theology. Carlisle (UK): Paternoster Press, 1998, p. 21. Though Erickson was describing the Evangelical Left’s openness to salvation through general revelation, Bell argues that salvation is indeed universal (p. 100).
6 Love Wins, pp. 98-103. Though the dust jacket describes Love Wins as “a deeply biblical vision for rediscovering a richer, grander, truer, and more spiritually-satisfying way,” the book consistently does not utilize standard biblical book, chapter and verse citations. Instead, Bell simply refers to chapters (Psalm 22, Philippians 4, etc.). It is frustratingly difficult to find the listed verses without the standard references.
7 Love Wins, pp. 97-98.
8 Love Wins, p. 98, author’s emphasis.
9 Christian Theology, p. 1025.
10 Alister E. McGrath, Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought. Oxford (UK): Blackwell, 1998, p. 138.
11 Christian Theology, p. 803.
12 Ibid.
13 Quoted in Gordon R. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, Integrative Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990, Vol. 2, pp. 373-374 . It must be stated that neither Abelard nor Bushnell were universalists.
14 Ibid.
15 Love Wins, p. 103.
16 Love Wins, p. 108.
17 See Nels Ferré, “The Third Conversion Never Fails,” in These Found the Way, ed. David Wesley Soper (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1951) and The Christian Understanding of God (New York: Harper, 1951, p. 228).
18 Christian Theology, p. 1028.
19 Christian Theology, pp. 1028-1029.
20 The Christian Understanding of God, pp. 246-247.
21 Love Wins, p. 109.
22 Ibid.
23 Historical Theology, p. 25.
24 Love Wins, p. 96.
25 Love Wins, p. 4.
26 Ibid.
jimfrank Bio
Jim Franklin is a native of Covington, Kentucky and is 2004 graduate of Grace Theological Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana. He earned his MA in Theological Studies at age 50. He served twenty years in the US Air Force as a supply specialist and medical technician, retiring in 1997 as a Technical Sergeant. Jim was an Adjunct Professor of English with Grace College’s Prison Extension Division from 2008 to 2011. He is currently the pastor of Flora Grace Brethren Church, Flora, Indiana. Jim is married to Alice. They have two adult sons. Jim blogs with his good friend Jeff Bowers at “The World as Best I Remember It” and comments at The American Thinker as “Van Owen.”
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Thanks for sharing your work with us on this.
For me, the burning question is why should God’s love win? Why shouldn’t His holiness win? Or His justice? Or of His other perfections? As I read the article, it occurred to me that part of the problem is that Bell (and his theological predecessors) define God’s “goodness” too narrowly. The reasoning in a few places is that if God’s love does not “win,” He is either less “good” or less powerful. But that reasoning presupposes that His goodness must be measured solely by the quantity of grace He disperses (basically the percentage of people He redeems).
If I could chat with those guys, I’d simply ask “Why?”
What if His “goodness” is revealed in the “quantity” of His own glory that He reveals?
Or, if we want to use “goodness” exclusively for what He does for His creatures, why can’t the infinite quality of His grace be the measure of that goodness? Measure the grace by what it cost Him to provide it and by the preciousness of receiving it (which depends in part on a kind of scarcity—it’s revealed to be more precious by the relative few who obtain it in contrast to the many who don’t.)
Just musing, but the point is that there are many ways to measure “goodness.”
Jim is right that Bell’s thought is deeply man-centered from the start.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
My friend and pastor, Bobby Conway, (aka, the ” http://oneminuteapologist.com/ One-Minute Apologist “) has recently released an e-book on Bell’s book as well and it can be found http://www.amazon.com/Hell-Bell-Happens-People-ebook/dp/B0052FD3FM/ref=…] HERE . It is not intended to be a deep theological response, but one for lay people who need to see the danger of Bell’s universalistic bent. It has a gentle tone, but is direct about the error. He’s a DTS and Southern Evangelical Seminary grad and has a good grasp of orthodox theology in a contemporary setting with an apologetics emphasis.
Great article!
Dan Burrell Cornelius, NC Visit my Blog "Whirled Views" @ www.danburrell.com
"The Midrash Detective"
As a Calvinist, I can’t help but notice that Bell has taken a Calvinist argument in an opposite direction. He reasons that if God desires to save everyone, but fails to accomplish His purpose, he loses. Conclusion: in the end, everyone will be saved, because in the end, love wins. (and correspondingly, God wins. He accomplishes His plan. He succeeds.)
This, of course, is the doctrine of Particular Redemption (Definite Atonement, or Limited Atonement), turned on it’s head. The correct solution is to acknowledge that God succeeds because he accomplished exactly what He intended to do, namely save His chosen people. He selected them in Eternity past, and is bringing everyone one of them to Heaven in time, without failure. God wins (yes, love wins) because God succeeds in doing perfectly and without failure what He intended to accomplish.
Bell’s argument seems to me to highlight the weakness of the doctrine of Universal Atonement, that God desires to save everyone, and Christ died to provide atonement for everyone, but only some will be saved. That does raise some legitimate questions about the nature and character of God. Should we conceive of God as failing to accomplish what He desires to do? Should we conceive of Christ as desiring the salvation of all and paying the price for the redemption of all, and yet only succeeding in in saving some?
Perhaps Bell’s book will help Evengelicals and Fundemantalists alike think more deeply about these questions. If so, it may serve a helpful purpose after all.
Cordially,
Greg Barkman
G. N. Barkman
Bell’s is kind of a sovereignty of God argument in which love (as he understands it) is the focus rather God’s glory.
You reminded me of a book just out (or maybe not yet out)
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Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
We who suffer with Christ in the present age are the biggest losers, since in Bell’s heaven the greatest sinner is the greatest winner: he got the ‘best’ of both worlds. Obeying Christ in this life earns the title “Fool!” since alongside the martyr in heaven stands the one who martyred him. Love wins, we who love the Lord lose.
But I almost find myself led to the same pity by the last line of the review, “And no one’s heart breaks more for the lost than God’s.” Since more people die in a day than there are seconds in a day, his heart is breaking all day long - and breaking badly. He definitely deserves pity. Apparently He has no glory in the judgment called death (Romans 6:23). Or does his heart “break” over that which brings Him glory? Either way, such a double-minded god likewise deserves our pity.
Perhaps this is the god Norman Geisler speaks of. When asked to summarize his Christian theology of the cross, he answered, “It is better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all.”
Bro. Steve...
I pray “God may perhaps grant them( Bell and all who supports such kind of distorted view about the trice Holy God whose Love is tough) repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they ( Bell and all who supports such kind of distorted view about the trice Holy God whose Love is tough)may escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will” 2 Tim 2:25-26.
Philiplazar, Pastor
India.
Jim Franklin
[G. N. Barkman] As a Calvinist, I can’t help but notice that Bell has taken a Calvinist argument in an opposite direction. He reasons that if God desires to save everyone, but fails to accomplish His purpose, he loses…This, of course, is the doctrine of Particular Redemption (Definite Atonement, or Limited Atonement), turned on it’s head. The correct solution is to acknowledge that God succeeds because he accomplished exactly what He intended to do, namely save His chosen people…Observation:
I have the impression it is in particular the Calvinist notion of salvation that Bell is opposing. If Greg is correct, Bell’s denial of hell presupposes that Calvinism is the message of the Bible and, although his argument is faulty, his opposition to Calvinism is understandable.
I agree that “the correct solution is to acknowledge that God succeeds because he accomplished exactly what He intended to do,” but what God intends is to save believers; it is those sinners who repent and believe that are chosen by God to be His people. At least, from my reading of the Bible, this seems to be the more Biblically correct view.
As such, I think it would be much harder for Bell to posit such an anti-scriptural position if he began on the presupposition that God’s desire is to choose believers for salvation since this more justly frames God’s revelatory character than the Calvinist premise that Bells seems to oppose.
I’m no scholar but it seems to me that, unless I misunderstood Jim’s point, if God’s character cannot be adequately and coherently understood, then we do not really know God. If such is the case, is it because God is not able to define Himself in terms we can understand and, therefore, fully rely on?
I owuld think God is the foundation upon which we define things like justice and mercy, and these things are seen clearly and adequately revealed in the life of his Son as he is presented to us in the Gospels and Acts and interpreted for us in the epistles. Such a limitation as Jim suggests makes God’s character, e.g. His love, justice, mercy, wrath, sort of nebulous, no? If we are unable to understand “these qualities or attributes” of God, then, it seems to me, we cannot truly understand God and his actions in human history.
Of course God intends to save believers. Nobody disputes that point. But many questions now arise. Are men innately able to believe? The Bible says no. (I Cor. 2:14) So how does a fallen son of Adam, deaf, blind, dead to spiritual truth, believe? Only by the prior operation of God’s Spirit. Is God’s Spirit resisted by sinful man? Always. Men love darkness rather than light. So how is this universal sinful resistance from men overcome? By the overcoming, irresistible, gracious operation of God’s persevering Spirit. Does this operation work in all men? No, for if it did, all would believe. To whom does it come? To God’s elect, chosen before the foundation of the world. By God’s Spirit, His elect are brought to faith, and God has accomplished His purpose, namely to save believers. It can happen no other way, given the Bible’s clear teaching about the depravity and spiritual inability of fallen humanity.
God is gloriously successful because He accomplishes exactly what He intended, namely to save His elect. Christ is satisfied, because every soul for whom He died is brought to faith and ultimately to glory.
It is Universal Atonement that has serious problems, which Bell has endeavored to solve by making salvation universal. If God desires (or intends) to save all men, and if Christ died for the purpose of saving all men, God has failed unless He saves all men ultimately. That is universalism.
To say that God intends to save believers, but that Christ died to save all men without exception, is to put the Father and the Son at cross purposes. To say that the atonement is universal in its scope and intention means that God endeavored to accomplish more than He was able to accomplish, unless Bell is correct, and all men are ultimately saved.
Universal atonement has problems, both logically as well as Biblically. Bell solves the problem at the expense of God’s holiness and justice, and at the expense of the clear teaching of the Bible. Calvinists solve the problem by working through the apparent Biblical contradictions between the “all” , “every” and “world” statements in the Bible to recognize that, in spite of what may seem true on the surface, the Bible does, in fact, teach particular redemption, also known as definite atonement. Christ died to save His elect, and the Spirit of God works in the hearts of the elect to regenerate them, bring them to faith in Christ, and ultimately to glory. Mission accomplished!
Universal atonement teaches God sent Jesus to die for the salvation of all men, but only some will believe. This leaves us with a God Who has failed to accomplish what He intended to do. God appears to be disappointed and frustrated. This is not the God of the Bible, and thinking of God this way dishonors Him.
The question is, whose solution to this problem is correct, Bell’s, or the Calvinist’s? Each must study his Bible to decide. There are, it seems to me, three choices. 1) Bell’s universalism. 2) Calvin’s particular redemption. 3) The in-between, inconsistent, disappointed God.
Warm regards,
Greg Barkman
G. N. Barkman
http://issuu.com/christianhistory/docs/history-of-hell?mode=embed&layou…] The history of Hell: A brief survey and resource guide
1. My main pount was this: Bell is opposing the Biblical view of hell as eternal torment on the grounds of the mistaken view of Christian salvation as taught by Calvinism.
That is, it seems to me that Bell’s book is actually objecting to Calvinism, to what he mistakenly thinks is the apostolic or early church view of Christian salvation. Rather than embrace the position that God elects specific individual to salvation and the rest God “foreordained to everlasting death”. Bell, maintaining (this mistaken view of) God’s sovereignty, decides that God chooses all - sooner or later - for salvation.
My point was not to object to Calvinism itself, but to note that Bell’s objection of hell is informed by what I believe is a faulty theological view of Christian salvation.
2. As far as your comment, “Of course God intends to save believers”, is that an accurate assessment of what Calvinism actually teaches? I realize that is what the Calvinist may claim but does that follow the logic of what Calvinism actually teaches? For example, the Westminster Confession does not state that God intends to save believers, but that he saves “some men”. Since (unless I am mistaken in my reading of the WCF 3:5), faith is not a condition of salvation but something that God chooses to give so one can be saved, would it not be more accurate to say that God intends to save those particular men whom he has chosen to save. To say God intends to save believers really, as I see it, is addressing the means, not the object: God will give them faith, make them believers (no one in reality chooses of himself to be a believer) and, thereby save them.
Or, to come to a compromise, it might be better to say that God intends to make believers out of certain men and thereby save them.
The object of salvation is certain men divinely chosen; the means is, God-given (faith in Christ); that is, God intends to save. Or, as the WCF states, “By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men…are predestinated unto everlasting life”.
As such, unless I have misread or missed something in the WCF, would it not seem that your statement is inaccurate?
If I misunderstood, please accept my apology. Any clarification regarding what you mean by “God intends to save believers” is welcome.
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