In his book, Love Wins, Rob Bell can’t be mistaken as anything but an evangelical Christian, as he’s got passage after passage of Scripture references to back up his teachings. He theorizes that we make our own heaven and hell here on earth. He talks about the time he took a trip to Rwanda. As he walked down the street he saw child after child with missing limbs from the genocides. You see, the best way to humiliate someone is to cut off the limb of a loved one. That way, the victim and the victim’s family will always be reminded of the violence they endured at the perpetrator’s hand. Bell says that when he’s asked if he believes in hell, he responds with a question: “Have you sat and talked with a family who just found out their child has been molested? Repeatedly? Over a number of years? By a relative?”
He tells stories of crimes against humanity and the hell that people inflict on each other, be they genocide or simple indifference to one another, he says, “I tell these stories because it is absolutely vital that we acknowledge that love, grace, and humanity can be rejected. From the most subtle rolling of the eyes to the most violent degradation of another human, we are terrifyingly free to do as we please. God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it. We have that kind of freedom, that kind of choice. We are that free. We can use machetes if we want to.”
One the flipside, Bell talks about how we can choose heaven too, here, on earth, and it’s this absence of the idea of someplace else that seems to have his fellow evangelical Christians in an uproar. I think it’s because we want to believe in a sort of “spiritual judicial system.” We want to believe the system works, that for this life we’re on trial and then when we die, we get what we had coming—gold streets and jeweled crowns, or fire and torment. We truly want to believe that God is just and gives people what they deserve. But that’s not what the Bible teaches about love and grace, is it? The very definition of love given to us in II Corinthians is anything but fair. If God’s desire is for all mankind to come into oneness with God, and if God doesn’t accomplish what God set out to do, what does that say about God’s omnipotence? And if God is not omnipotent, then what would be the point of belief in God if God is a failure just like all the rest of us?
Bell talks about life as being dimensional and how he doesn’t believe that God is limited to this piddly little existence we call life to turn the hearts of men toward God. God’s love is that big, that perfect. It transcends dimension. It transcends everything we think we’ve got figured out about consciousness. Because if God is perfect, and if God’s love is perfect, and that in the end we believe that God wins, and if God is love, then Love Wins.
There is so much more that I’d like to write, but if I write too much, I might lose your interest. The main thing I want to leave you with is that being a Christian or having faith in God is not synonymous with the belief of a God like you’ve been told about, or the one I’ve been told about. If you simply cannot reconcile an “unconditionally loving God” with one who will torture you forever in hell because you don’t respond the right way, then you’re not alone. Not all Christians believe this and you don’t have to believe it to be a Christian (paraphrasing Rob Bell). With that said, I will end this post with another excerpt from Love Wins, because there is no way I could say it any better myself.
Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his Son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God.
Beautiful.
But there’s more. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.
If there was an earthly father who was like that, we would call the authorities. If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately.
If God can switch gears like that, switch entire modes of being that quickly, that raises a thousand questions about whether a being like this could ever be trusted, let alone be good. Loving one moment, vicious the next. Kind and compassionate, only to become cruel and relentless in the blink of an eye.
That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can.
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.
[…]
Listen. We’re told a better story. Because the good news is better than that.
1 comment:
Love your stuff. TSN
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