An art exhibit at Pastor Rob Bell's church explored aspects of peacemaking, that vocation that was blessed so memorably by Jesus. One woman wove into her piece a quote from Gandhi, the peacemaker whose thinking and actions were so influenced by Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.
Bell noticed a piece of paper that a church member had attached to the work: "Reality check: Gandhi's in hell."
Bell wrote Love Wins as a rebuttal to that statement, lovingly reexamining the dizzying and confounding mix of Biblical messages about "salvation."
For his trouble, he has been vilified by John Piper and many other evangelical leaders, who ultimately side with the smug and snide writer of the anti-Gandhi note.
There are emotional reasons for such leaders to take the narrow view of whom a creator God would reward and punish. Humans have a tribalistic nature that was apparently placed there from the outset. Study after study has shown that humans enjoy joining one group in order to battle outside groups.
So if you want to build a big, passionate church, you will generally need to create a sense of "us versus them." The fact is that many people enjoy the notion that the "out group" will burn in hell. (Think of Eric Hoffer's observation: Not every mass movement has a god, but every mass movement has a devil.)
But Rob Bell's critics protest that the Bible is on their side. They argue that their scripture clearly states that all persons are in a state of sin and deserve to be separated from God forever -- unless they hear and receive a message of good news through Jesus Christ. To their minds, this leaves Gandhi and Siddhartha Gautama out in the cold, weeping and gnashing their teeth forever.
This is indeed Christian orthodoxy, and its contemporary defenders argue that Bell "cherry picks" Bible verses that take a rosier, more sentimental and lenient view of divine justice.
For his part, Bell catches them in their own cherry picking. In Love Wins, he shows the tangled, contradictory views of salvation within the Bible. He shows Jesus attempting various analogies at various times regarding "who's in and who's out." Even Paul, the emblem of evangelism, seems at times to imply at least the possibility of universal redemption, in which all creation shall be restored and every knee shall bow before truth as Paul defined truth.
Critics claim Bell is a damned universalist who dismisses hell entirely. They miss the point. Bell in fact takes hell very seriously, but only as a concept in which human error and evil eventually yield to the full force of cosmic justice, not as a silly concept in which God thirsts to see every last Buddhist squirming in everlasting torment.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. -- Matthew 23:13-15
The critics of Bell are modern Pharisees, holding biblical authority up as an idol without caring much for the character of the biblical message. They are traitors to Jesus -- but within their faith tradition they have the upper hand.
Consider that many passages in the Bible imply that the earth is flat. We now can say that the world is fairly round, without negating the larger wisdom of the ages stored in the Bible.
In the same way, the Bible's view of salvation and punishment should be understood in terms of what was known and unknown at the time. If Paul had been able to pull up the wisdom of the Buddha and Lao Tzu on the Internet, and if Paul had been able to see the Dalai Lama on a speaking tour, I suspect Paul would have found common ground with those figures and framed his message of redemption accordingly.
But Providence did not leave that fate to Paul. He left that to today's Christians. Yet many of the supposedly orthodox leaders merely parrot the approach of the Pharisees that Jesus condemned. Their narrow, outdated, "flat-earth" approach to salvation, within our pluralistic times, proves themselves far more mean-spirited than Jesus or Paul ever intended.
Jesus called his followers to be in the business of discipling an entire world in his teachings, not to be in the business of converting people in all nations to the Pharisee-like form of civil religion that American evangelical thugs accommodate.
Christ's central idea was that a truly Christly life is a richer and more abundant life than what "those who are in darkness" are experiencing. Here, many Christians become agnostic about what Jesus said; failing to see themselves living larger than the competition, they smack their lips in expectation of eventually seeing the competition burn forever. They'll be damned if Rob Bell lets any of the competition off the hook, and they'll be damned if anyone's about to give credit to the wisdom of anyone from another faith tradition.
Here is the peculiar reality: Many, many evangelical leaders -- pastors and theologians -- secretly side with Bell, but they can't say so publicly. Privately, they concede it's ludicrous that God would incinerate those who seek divine truth according to whatever light is available to them; they leave plenty of room for Gandhi and the good Samaritan and the humble tax collector and the strong-willed Roman centurion to achieve "eternal life," whether or not they knew to "confess Jesus of Nazareth as sole lord and savior."
But these persons are ultimately cowards: They say such words privately, to assure you they are not as unreasonable as the John Pipers of the world. But they would never break publicly with a John Piper, or rebuke Piper in the way that Piper has condemned so many of those who offer a more "generous" orthodoxy. That makes Rob Bell, by comparison, a very brave Christian leader, and an all-too-rare one.
The fact is that Christian faith may only be a generation away from irrelevance, in an era marked by a wondrous intersection of ancient faiths and philosophies and the newest psychological insights and scientific discovery. If Rob Bell and his small band of supporters do not succeed in rescuing Biblical wisdom from the accretions of an obsolete orthodoxy, Jesus may well find himself isolated.
Rob Asghar is the author of Lessons from the Holy War: A Pakistani-American Odyssey.
Follow Rob Asghar on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rasghar
Rob Bell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rob Bell Stirs Wrath With New Views On Old Questions - NYTimes.com
David Lose: The Rob Bell Controversy: Does Anyone Go To Hell?
The negative characterization of the “Pharisees†in this blog is incorrect although common. The Pharisees represent Rabbinic Judaism. Their view is misrepresented They are used as “straw men†in polemics.
Jewish and Christian concepts of the need for “salvation†and the concept of “hell†are a point of difference. Hindu and Jew have much in common. The Jewish mystical tradition is similar to that of Hindu. The concept of “salvation through faith†is not Jewish. Hindus have a share in the world to come.
John Chapter 3 is the passage in which Jesus tells teaches the God-given way of salvation--a passage in which he instructs a Pharisee who thinks all his study and good works have gained him heaven, when in fact they haven't. So in his mercy Jesus tells him how to gain heaven--that one must be "born again"--(btw being 'born again' are Jesus words for it -its not the invention of 20th c evangelical church). One must be 'born again' through putting ones faith in Jesus as being Savior and Messiah. Did Ghandi do that or did he believe in something else? -- he believed in something else-- in other gods. So since he did not embrace the way of salvation Jesus made for humankind but rejected it (and rejected Jesus) he therefore chose a destiny other than the one Jesus promises to those who follow and his embrace Him as their Messiah. So Bell's congregant is right even tho it seems to be the tone of how it was said that has people upset with. Wrong tone or not, his conclusion is correct unless Ghandi had a death bed conversion. Ghandi rejected Jesus--who is, after all, God. He therefore took the postion that he didnt want to spend eternity with God. That left him only one other place to go.
But as you acknowledge, Bell's critics have orthodoxy on their side. And I would ask you: what makes you a better interpreter of the Bible than Paul, or, for that matter, John Calvin or Jonathan Edwards?
Oh, and your point that Paul's views might be different had he been exposed to the wisdom of the Buddha et al is silly. Do you think Paul was not familiar with any non-Christians of sterling character and humane views? He did not need to read the words of the Dalai Lama to know that such people existed.
One facinating additional voice I'd add to this Mix is the theologian/writer Andrew Perrimen.
He suggests very convincingly, that the problem with those who believe in a judgmental Hell, is not that they should take it more figuratively, but that they should take it MORE LITERALLY.
The word Jesus used for Hell is "Gehena" which was literally the "Valley of Hinnom." In Jeremiah 7:30-33 this is where the Babylonians threw the dead jews they killed. Literally Jesus was warning them of this judgement on Israel, from another Pagan culture, this time the Romans. This judgetment of Rome did occur, and eventually, according to historians thousands of dead bodies from Jerusalem were indeed thrown into the velleys around the city, likely including or even mainly Gehenna.
See:
http://www.postost.net/2011/03/tim-keller-gets-lot-right-gets-hell-badly-wrong
and see:
http://fromdamascustoemmaus.com/hell-on-earth-the-jewish-war-and-gehenna/
Of course, if we are honest we will recognize that nearly all of us, no matter how well-intended, harbor some degree of resentment and ill-feelings toward others. But that simply means we have work to do. Our central task is to do our best to expunge those negative attitudes from ourselves, not to use them as the basis of a theology.
read Psalm 119 written by King David-- -read it and tell me what you think David's attitude towards his word is--and attitude inspired by the Spirit. This is the longest Psalm in the Bible, several pages-and the only topic throughout the entire thing is great perfect and wornderful God's word is.
People like you have been spouting this nonsense for two-thousand years, you're just one more in a long line of dreamers who wish for Christianity's demise, but will be wishing till your last breath. The TRUTH is that Christianity has never in its history had more rapid growth than in the last 100 years and that's a fact. Africa has gone from 5% to 50% in the last century. Christianity is exploding in China and will have over 300 million Christian by 2100. American Christianity, if you look at its timeline has always been 75% or higher of the population. In fact, the percentage is higher today than fifty years ago. You're just plain wrong but will never be intellectually honest enough to admit it.
Christianity is thriving like never before, I would love to see you dispute this with numbers, and the idea that you know "Many, many evangelical leaders" was my laugh for the day.
We do have only One Maker and He alone is able to make the provision for us that we need because no one else can and we do need to confess that truth in order not to be found to be a liar since there are no liars found in heaven.
Love for Ghandi should not be taking us away from knowing the truth. No one is above the truth of God's word.
Christian teaching is a cosmic truth. God did not create the heavens and earth without giving us His true word. If we accept Yeshua, we accept God. If we do not accept what Yeshua says, we do not accept what God says because Yeshua did not speak of His own initiative. He only said and did what God told Him to say and do, so seeing Him is seeing God.
There is no other God, there is no other truth and there is no other way to heaven. There is also no other way to avoid being sent to hell with the demons because it is demons that prevent people from knowing the truth.
Mohandas Gandhi
I do believe Jesus, and I also think God knows who belongs in heaven. I am more concerned with making sure that I live up to what God asks of me than I am with making others like me.
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9689
The assumption behind the idea that Ghandi is in heaven because of his good deeds is that good people go to heaven. Ghandi was a good person. The problem with this is that good people do not go to heaven. Only perfect people go to heaven. One thousand good deeds do not cancel out one sin and that sin still needs to be paid for - eiether by Jesus at the cross or in hell.
We make the same mistake as the Pharisees we we assume that people are righteous in the sight of God by the good things they do. People are righteous in the sight of God only by faith in Jesus. He isn't impressed by our good works, be it helping the little old lady cross the street or liberating all of India. Our sins still need to be punished and the only punishment for sin is death. This is why Jesus died on the cross - to take the punishment that sinners like you and me deserve. It becomes a "great transfer": Our sin is credited to his account and he is punished on the cross, while his righteousness is credited to our account and we enjoy eternal life with God in heaven.
But the "great transfer" only occurs if we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. If Ghandi did this then he is in heaven.
A little humility does go a long way. But thinking that one is a righteous person and deserving of eternal life is the height of arrogance. I am well aware of my own sinfulness and shortcomings. I don't deserve heaven. I deserve to go to hell. So do you. The point is that Jesus offers us both a way out of our predicament by taking our punishment for us.