And this reality extends beyond this life.
Heaven is full of forgiven people.
Hell is full of forgiven people.
Heaven is full of people God loves whom Jesus died for.
Hell is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for.
Rob Bell
Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith
Pastor Bell's description of the inhabitants of heaven and hell are probably a little different than what you've heard of before...unless you've read or heard about his latest book, Love Wins. Love Wins has generated a huge amount of controversy in Christian circles, including the Christian blogosphere, since Bell's presentation of hell is radically different than what we've been taught from the pulpit. But how radical is it?
I can't answer the question directly, since I've not read the book yet, but given Bell's familiarity with some aspects of Judaism and how Jewish thought can be applied to the Christian worship of the Jewish Messiah, maybe I can make a guess or two.
What do Jews believe about sin and hell?
First off, for those readers who may not know, in Judaism, there is a belief in the "afterlife", which is traditionally referred to as "life in the world to come". This isn't "heaven" so much as it is the "Messianic Age", when the Messiah comes and "fixes" the world so that there is universal peace, Israel, the nation and the people, are secure, and everyone worships the God of Jacob.
According to Orthodox Rabbi Shraga Simmons, here is what Jews believe about "hell":
When a person dies and goes to heaven, the judgment is not arbitrary and externally imposed. Rather, the soul is shown two videotapes. The first video is called "This is Your Life!" Every decision and every thought, all the good deeds, and the embarrassing things a person did in private is all replayed without any embellishments. It's fully bared for all to see. That's why the next world is called Olam HaEmet - "the World of Truth," because there we clearly recognize our personal strengths and shortcomings, and the true purpose of life. In short, Hell is not the Devil with a pitchfork stoking the fires.I suppose the reference to "videotapes" is figurative, but look at what Rabbi Simmons is saying. His description of the Jewish view of "hell" or rather Gehenom, isn't that different from Bell's. For most people deserving "hell", what they get instead, is exposure to situations that cause them pain (such as looking at their video of how they screwed up their lives) with the goal not being punishment, but rather, purification. Only very, very few truly evil human beings are consigned to eternal punishment. Pharaoh is given as an example by Simmons, but it's a safe bet that Hitler is in the same fire pit.
The second video depicts how a person's life "could have been..." if the right choices had been made, if the opportunities were seized, if the potential was actualized. This video - the pain of squandered potential - is much more difficult to bear. But at the same time it purifies the soul as well. The pain creates regret which removes the barriers and enables the soul to completely connect to God.
Not all souls merit Gehenom. It is for people who have done good but need to be purified. A handful of people are too evil for Gehenom, and they are punished eternally. Pharaoh is one example.
What Rabbi Simmons describes, shows us that Bell didn't simply make up his understanding or belief regarding hell, but that he's relying heavily on Orthodox Jewish thought to form his opinion. The quote from his book Velvet Elvis, published in 2005, shows us that Bell's beliefs about hell aren't brand new and that he was thinking in this direction at least five or six years ago (and probably longer).
Collective Christianity and particularly the Evangelical world, has generated a major power surge of outrage in response to Bell's book. About a week ago, I read an amazingly lengthy (21 pages) review written by Pastor Kevin DeYoung of the University Reformed Church in East Lansing Michigan. I won't attempt to recount the review here (unlike DeYoung, I neither have the time nor the inclination to write 21 pages in blog form), and you can certainly read what he has to say at your leisure, but I did want to point out a few things DeYoung wrote:
At the very heart of this controversy, and one of the reasons the blogosphere exploded over this book, is that we really do have two different Gods. The stakes are that high. If Bell is right, then historic orthodoxy is toxic and terrible. But if the traditional view of heaven and hell are right, Bell is blaspheming. I do not use the word lightly, just like Bell probably chose “toxic” quite deliberately. Both sides cannot be right. As much as some voices in evangelicalism will suggest that we should all get along and learn from each other and listen for the Spirit speaking in our midst, the fact is we have two irreconcilable views of God.
No doubt, Rob Bell writes as a pastor who wants to care for people struggling with the doctrine of hell. I too write as a pastor. And as a pastor I know that Love Wins means God’s people lose. In the world of Love Wins, my congregation should not sing “In Christ Alone” because they cannot not believe, “There on the cross where Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” They would not belt out “Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned he stood.” No place for “Stricken, Smitten, and Afflicted” with its confession, “the deepest stroke that pierced him was the stroke that Justice gave.” The jubilation of “No condemnation now I dread; Jesus, and all in him, is mine!” is muted in Love Wins. The bad news of our wrath-deserving wretchedness is so absent that the good news of God’s wrath-bearing Substitute cannot sing in our hearts. When God is shrunk down to fit our cultural constraints, the cross is diminished. And whenever the cross is diminished we pain the hearts of God’s people and rob them of their joy.
Yeah, that last sentence seems kind of heavy handed, even to me, but that's certainly the flavor I came away with after reading DeYoung's review.
Yesterday, I wrote a blog post called Seeing Jesus Through Different Windows in which I tried to summarize my investigation up to this point, on what I've learned about Jesus the Jewish Messiah and how to understand his mission, message, and identity. As you can see from that blog post and previous book reviews I've written, there is more than one way to understand Jesus and more than one way to interpret his message. Pastor DeYoung and Evangelical Christianity may be a voice in the world of "Christiandom" but they are not, as DeYoung seems to believe, the only voice.
When I reviewed Bowman's and Komoszewski's book Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ, Robert Bowman wrote a comment on the blog post of my review stating that "We do assume that the New Testament is the proper source of Christian doctrine." and "Your review amounts to saying that your real problem with our book is that you lack confidence in the reliability of the NT writings."
I have to disagree with Bowman in that modern Christian doctrine is or should be the only lens by which we can view the Jewish Messiah and in fact, I think that artificially imposing a modern Evangelical understanding on the Jewish Messiah as he lived among men in the 1st Century C.E. in ancient Israel, automatically introduces many barriers to our getting at what the Messiah was teaching. Further, isolating Jesus the Jewish Messiah from the Old Testament (Tanakh) and every act of God that came before Matthew 1:1, makes it almost impossible to truly grasp what the author of the Christian faith was and is really trying to tell us. While Bowman told me that the "book does not presuppose the inerrancy of Scripture", in fact, if the book doesn't depend upon the inerrancy of the NT scriptures, how can it say that the NT writings unequivocally support the book's conclusions?
I know it seems like I'm picking on Evangelicals, but in some sense, both Bowman's and DeYoung's comments amount to a throwing down of the gauntlet. It's one thing for an Evangelical Pastor to preach what he believes and base his opinion on Christian doctrine, but it's another thing entirely to say that his viewpoint is the only way to see the Bible and Jesus in an absolute manner.
At whatever point I get around to reading Bell's latest book, I may conclude that I don't agree with him either, but that doesn't automatically make me right and Bell wrong. The best I can say is that we have a difference of opinion and to state my rationale for why I disagree with him. The readers can make up their own minds.
OK, I can accept that people like Bowman and DeYoung aren't injecting their perspectives into the world just because they need the exercise, and I am willing to believe they are sincerely concerned about the faithful being lead down a path to heresy and apostasy. If they really believe that Bell's book and my review (and I'm sure I'm small potatoes to guys like these...Bell, on the other hand, has a more far-reaching "voice") are dangerous to Christians, then they have a duty to speak out. I get that.
My big issue is with them acting like their perspective is the only perspective, is that they behave as if God had given only Evangelical Christians the secret password to the cryptic knowledge of the Bible and that we, the uninformed of the world, must believe them, rather than studying, looking at different understandings of our faith, praying, and coming to a more Berean-like conclusion.
The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.
11 comments:
James,
you've struck a point that I've been navigating for the last few weeks (and you cited one of the quotes that I read through). Namely: the doctrine of hell. Where did it come from?
A lot of folks have jumped on the "I love Rob Bell" bandwagon and a lot of folks have jumped on the "I hate Rob Bell" bandwagon.
I fall into the "i don't really care about Rob Bell" bandwagon myself...
The one thing I like about him is that he isn't afraid to publicize the questions that are being talked about behind closed doors.
What it came down to for me is this: To begin to understand the Bible's teaching on "hell" we have to avail ourselves first to understanding historical Judaism's teaching on it.
unfortunately, most people I know go back as far as Luther's reformation and that's it...which apparently makes Bell sound like a heretic to them.
Regardless of where we fall down on this issue we at least must be able to dialogue meaningfully.
Agreed, Jon. It seems that Evangelical Christianity isn't very receptive to taking a look at the teachings of the Jewish Messiah from the Jewish perspective of his First Century Israeli audience or considering the influences of the Tanakh as the Messiah's "source material" within its own context.
I also agree that the issue isn't really about Rob Bell so much as it is about what happens when someone goes on record as opposing the "party line", so to speak. We have beliefs and doctrines that aren't easily traced to the Biblical record (hell, the rapture) which have nevertheless become "gospel" in the church. We have to be free to question assumptions, tip a few sacred cows, and pose the questions everyone thinks about but no one wants to ask.
Bell's virtue is that he isn't afraid to ask out loud and in public.
BTW, I'm looking forward to your contributions to the "Gathering Sparks" blog.
James you should do a post with some biblical citation with it. I've been bouncing between all sorts of thoughts on when hell exists, where it exists, the biblical evidence for it, Jewish interpretation and history of "hell", etc. It's incredibly abstract and hard to pinpoint in scripture, even Revelations seems to suggest that hell is done away with. Christianity has a very black and white view of hell, as it does most matters. I think at this point in our walks most of us realize it's not cut and dry like that.
I don't know, I just keep on keepin on.
To be fair, I think there's two general groups of people in the relgious world: Those who take everything their Pastor or Rabbi teaches them as the 100% literal truth which should never be questioned, and those who try to take in the different aspects of their faith and continue to struggle with what it all means (I tend to be of the latter group as I'm sure you can tell).
It kind of scares me when I come across a person who says stuff like, "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" and they're talking about things that are highly ambiguous and misunderstood (hell, the rapture, and so on). We study and struggle through what we're trying to learn. Some things are absolutes such as the existence and nature of God (and even His nature is sometimes up for grabs), but there's a lot of doctrine out there that really needs to be questioned and not accepted blindly.
As far as doing a study on hell (you seemed to be suggesting that at one point), I'm still working through the whole deity issue, although I may be closing in on something I can accept (believe it or not). Not sure if/when I'm going to be tackling hell.
"Who Gets to Define Christianity?"
Shouldn't "the Jews" get to define it, since they started it:)?
I'm getting to that, Gene. Read my next blog post.
How about JESUS gets to define real Christianity (and the true meaning of the Jewish tradition in the OT) and communicate it via the Holy Spirit to the whole Church? That's what He promised to do. That's what Eastern Orthodox Christians believe He did and does.
Gene, Jesus and His disciples were first-century Jews, so in that sense Christianity was started by Jews, and Jesus' teachings are certainly clarified in many respects by a good understanding of His Jewish context, but the majority of the Jews of Jesus' time did not "start Christianity." Rather, they had trouble with Jesus' teachings. So in some respects Jesus teaching also represented a sharp departure from their interpretation of their own Jewish tradition. These Jews categorically rejected Christianity, and eventually booted their fellow Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah, crucified and risen from the dead in fulfillment of OT prophecy, right out of their synagogues!
Greetings, ofgrace.
I agree that, in the ultimate sense, Jesus *does* define the nature of our faith. That's not the problem. The problem is how different individuals and different Christian groups choose to understand that definition. The point I'm making with this blog post is that the definition varies, sometimes by quite a bit, depending on which Pastor, church, or denomination you listen to (just look at Bell vs. DeYoung).
As far at the definition of Christianity being communicated by the Holy Spirit to "the whole church", if that were happening in the way you describe, then there would be no differences of opinions between churches and denominations. In fact, there probably wouldn't be different denominations within Christianity if we clearly understood what the Spirit is trying to teach us. I realize that there are some churches that believe they are the only church and that they are the one, true representation of the desires of God, but that judgment is in dispute based on the number of other denominations of Christianity that exist and that view Christ, the Bible, and worship in sometimes fundamentally different ways.
Again, the point I'm making with this blog post is that, just because one Christian Pastor or group says that they have the inside track as to what Jesus "really" means, others exist that disagree or dispute that opinion. People state that the Holy Spirit has interpreted a particular thing for them, while others say the Spirit interpreted the same thing for them, but in a different way. I don't doubt that people who say these things are sincere, but would the Holy Spirit contradict itself? If not, then why do these differences of opinions exist?
Human beings, being who we are, sometimes confuse what they're hearing from God with what they *want* to hear from God. Pastor DeYoung and many, many others, view God, Jesus, and the Bible through a particular lens, based on their theology, background, education, and personality. We *all* do that. No person is completely objective, and it's our lack of objectivity (among other things) that sometimes makes it difficult to understand what Jesus really desires from his disciples. It's one thing to say "this is what I believe Jesus wants" or "this is my best understanding", but it's another thing to say "I know this thing to be true."
I am more than willing for Jesus to define himself, who he is, and what he teaches, but which one of us truly knows the totality of all that means? That's why we study. That's why we struggle with faith and understanding. The very core of our faith is relatively simple, but once you move outside of that core, there is a lot of learning to accomplish. We spend all our lives trying to understand the Jewish Messiah better. Entertaining uncertainty about some of the particulars and the fact that we may not reach all the answer within our lifetime is an act of faith.
Thanks, James. Yes, I understand what you are saying. When I was an Evangelical seeking to understand Eastern Orthodoxy, Orthodox ecclesiology was one of the most difficult sticking points for me. But, ultimately, staying where you are was proving even more difficult. I came to realize that for all practical purposes, it was a choice between accepting as dogma what a certain group of Christians had been consistently affirming (in their formal Creeds, Councils, Liturgy and Saints) for nearly 2,000 years (and noticing, btw, that this was the only interpretive framework that allowed me to accept all of Scripture pretty much on its face value in its own context and make the most sense out of my 40+ years of experience seeking God--which included sojourns in several different Protestant Christian traditions) or instead choosing the group(s) and/or teacher(s) of the hour that best suited my own limited Christian experience and convictions (IOW, basically serving as judge and jury of everyone else for myself and choosing what pleased me according to my own limited understanding of Scripture--because that's the bottom line of Evangelical ecclesiology). Obviously, I became Eastern Orthodox, and I believe it is, indeed, "the Church" in a way the diverse collective of different groups claiming the name Christian are not. This does not mean I do not recognize and appreciate the often significant overlap between the teaching of various Christian groups and full Orthodoxy, nor that I do not value or feel a kinship with the sincere faith of Christians still visibly outside the EO Church, nor that I do not expect to find signs of the Holy Spirit at work in their lives, still less that I claim to know that such will not be saved, still even less that I believe all who are visibly and sacramentally united with the Eastern Orthodox Church are or must inevitably be "saved." If I did believe any of that, I would be denying the teachings of my own Church, btw.
Sorry for all the long sentences. I hope you could follow my train of thought. I share my conviction for what it is and not at all to shut off dialogue with others. So certainly in that point you are making, we would also agree.
@ofgrace: I too am going through a search and am questioning my "religious" assumptions, though I don't believe I'll arrive at the same destination as you have. I'm certainly open to dialog (browse through some of my other blog posts that have long conversations in the comments) and believe there is much I can learn, even when I don't always agree with what other folks might say.
In my particular case, I don't believe that a church/worship expression could be directly tied with the Jewish Messiah and his Jewish Apostles if it specifically undid Judaism or claimed to replace much of what God had previously established. I suppose the direction I'm leaning toward is well expressed in the book review I wrote yesterday. There's a way of seeing and hearing the Jewish Messiah that isn't available when you can't see and hear via his context and background. I intend to pursue that avenue and see where it takes me.
No problem with long sentences. I can easily write that much in a single blog comment, but using more paragraphs makes it easier on the eyes. ;-)
It looks like the controversy over Rob Bell's book has hit the mainstream news. Found this article on Yahoo News this morning.
It seems an Evangelical Pastor was fired from his job after reading Bell's book for questioning the church's standard belief on hell. I can appreciate that the church must have standards, but since what we understand on the concept of hell and other theological information is our "best guess", that seems a little extreme.
I found this quote from the news article to be especially telling:
"Evangelical opposition to Bell is exemplified in a succinct tweet from prominent evangelical pastor John Piper: "Farewell, Rob Bell." "
I'm glad Pastor John Piper is considered to be a "prominent evangelical pastor" because I've never heard of the guy.
I also know a family who was told to stop attending a local Nazarene church because, as a matter of conscious, the family had stopped celebrating Christmas in their home. I suppose the love of Christ is in here somewhere, but given some of the hostility of "the church", I'm not sure I'd look for it in places such as those I've just mentioned.
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