Love Wins!

This is the title of my Easter season sermon series, borrowed from the book of the same name by Rob Bell. (I added the exclamation mark.) Bell's book is an important one for helping Christians to think through our faith and to explain it well to others. Bell asks good questions and is a competent guide to finding answers. He has come in for a fair amount of criticism from some quarters. Albert Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, has written a trenchant critique of Bell's work. Here is a link to Mohler's article, followed by my own response to it. I hope to contribute to a useful discussion and perhaps incite a few folks to read the book, which repays careful study.

Mohler's critique of Love Wins

Al Mohler’s Critique of Love Wins by Rob Bell

by Mark Farmer

May 7, 2011

First, a word on Mohler’s polemical method. There is innuendo from the first to the last mention of Rob Bell to end in Mohler’s article in which he lavishly praises his gifts as a communicator. The implication is that while Bell is a “genius” and “master communicator,” he isn’t really a thinker. He “uses his incredible power of literary skill and communication to unravel the Bible’s message and to cast doubt on its teachings.” In a word, Bell has done noting more than “a public relations job.”

In fact, Love Wins is a very well thought out work that grapples thoroughly and carefully with Scripture throughout. 

Mohler attributes to Bell the motive of kindly desiring to make Christianity more palatable to those who reject it. Bell’s own indication of his motives is that his aim is not to please people in order to sell a message or grow a church. It is to seek the truth. It is to seek the truth in the Bible. How does he do?

Careful students of Scripture approach each text as if reading it for the first time. They know that assuming that one has already grasped the passage in all its complexity and richness blinds one to seeing what is really there. 

When Mohler asserts, “We have read this book before,” he sets himself up for a great fall. Has he really read this book before? Has he really read and understood this book at all?

Mohler accuses Bell of omitting from his gospel major doctrines such as the cross and the resurrection, whereas Bell has an entire chapter devoted to them (and in the book discusses the other doctrines Mohler names as well). 

Mohler’s central assertion is that Rob Bell is simply reintroducing classical American Protestant Liberalism with its denial of the biblical teaching on hell that is rooted in a rejection of biblical authority. 

Here we see the explanation of all that follows. Mohler and Bell move in two different worlds of thought. When Mohler misclassifies Bell as a classic Liberal, he makes a colossal category error. Liberals and Conservatives (theologically speaking) move in the realm of Enlightenment thought characterized by an emphasis on certainty, logical argument, and clarity. Classic theological Liberals sought certainty in rational thought that excluded anything supernatural. Conservatives found certainty in an inerrant Bible. Therefore, for Mohler, “We will either affirm that every word of the Bible is true, trustworthy, and authoritative, or we will create our own Bible according to our own preferences.”

Bell, on the other hand, was educated in and lives and breathes in the realm of postmodernism where ultimate certainty cannot be found. There always remains a veil of mystery, and therefore the supernatural can in no way be ruled out as in Liberalism.  

Mohler’s critique of Bell throughout is that Bell doesn’t use Mohler’s Conservative Enlightenment approach to Scripture. But he mistakenly identifies Bell postmodern approach with Liberalism, and then proceeds to attack Bell as if Bell were a Liberal, which he is not. 

For example, Mohler writes: “H. Richard Niebuhr famously once distilled liberal theology into this sentence: ‘A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.’”  Not a single one of the points in Niebuhr’s summary is true of Bell’s book.

Love Wins is, in fact, thoroughly and deeply biblical from beginning to end. It just isn’t done in a way that Mohler grasps. 

For example, in chapter 1 Bell describes the certainty with which some Christians claim to know who is in hell and who is not. He then examines a sample of nineteen (19!) passages from the New Testament that one could refer to in answering the question of who goes to hell and who doesn’t. The surprising discovery is that these passages give a variety of answers to the question. 

Taking all of Scripture seriously does not yield simple, clear answers to the question. On the contrary, many questions are raised: Enumerating the teachings of the NT on how to be saved, Bell asks, “is it what you say, or who you are, or what you do, or what you say you’re going to do, or who your friends are, or who you’re married to, or whether you give birth to children?” (Page 15)

Mohler accuses Bell of picking and choosing his Scriptures, but he doesn’t seem to be aware that Bell’s method of writing is to begin from a wide a collection of passages and then to try to make sense of them. For example, in his chapter on Hell, Bell examines every passage in the Bible in which the actual word “hell” occurs. Mohler’s accusation is incomprehensible and makes one seriously doubt that he has read the entire book. 

Mohler accuses Bell of “reducing” the Bible to “story” and then substituting for it another story that Bell “prefers.” This assertion, too, is incomprehensible. It is the “simple gospel” as commonly believed that reduces the rich teaching of the biblical narrative to a list of propositions. And it is not what Bell “prefers” that guides his thinking (no more that is the case with any of us, of course, including Mohler), but rather some pretty rigorous thinking.

Mohler asserts that Bell believes in inclusivism, the teaching that all will go to heaven whether or not they hear of Christ or believe in him. Bell does no such thing, observing that while some Christians have held this position throughout church history, that there are tensions in the biblical passages that we should retain rather than try to force them into one clearly defined teaching. But some of those passages do point to the surprise of people being in heaven that some wouldn’t think would have that possibility, and Bell discusses those biblical passages at length in chapter 6.

Mohler accuses Bell of reviving a focus on God’s love that excludes God’s wrath and judgment, and which reduces God’s love to “mere sentimentality,” as he thinks Liberalism did. He missed Bell’s discussion on how things incompatible with heaven will not be permitted to enter there, and on the consuming fire of God directed at all that is not good. Bell gives the biblical teaching on judgment its full play, even if he doesn’t conclude that the commonly accepted idea of hell gives justice to the biblical teaching.

Rob Bell makes his very strong overall case on the basis of Scripture. Mohler’s surprisingly rebuttal case rests mostly on innuendo and on pointing out ways that Bell’s biblical discussion doesn’t arrive at the same conclusions Mohler has adopted. He fails to engage the substance of Bell’s argument.

To really make a dent in Bell’s case, Mohler needs to address Bell’s biblical argument and to show that his own position rests on a even more solid biblical base than does Bell’s. 

The central question of Love Wins isn’t whether there is a hell, or who is in it, or what it’s like, or how long it lasts, or what its purpose is. The real question Bell poses is, What is God like? In his next to last chapter, he suggests that many Christians don’t really love or deeply trust God because they believe that God would unleash his wrath on a person  they love the moment they die and never relent or allow them to learn and turn and grow and become good. (I suggest that this is also why most Christians don’t really believe in hell the way Mohler says we should. It makes us nobler, fairer, kinder and more forgiving than God himself. George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis’s “mentor,” in his Unspoken Sermons, this this all through even more completely than Bell does.) 

Bell hopes that his book will free Christians to voice the questions they have been secretly harboring and so join in the centuries-old discussion that Christians have been having all along. (He notes that even Martin Luther believed that there was no reason why God couldn’t save people after death!) “I believe the discussion itself is divine.”

Mohler, on the other hand, aims to shut down the conversation by asserting that his idea of God and the gospel and hell is the correct and biblical one.  We are to yield and submit to his authority, which he identifies with the authority of the Bible and of “Orthodoxy” (as defined by whom?). 

Mohler’s authoritarian bent is also revealed by his criticism Bell who, he says, “believes it is his right and duty to determine which story is better than another — which version of Christianity is going to be compelling and attractive to unbelievers.”

Mohler has himself chosen which version of Christianity he believes to be the best. He is a Calvinist (not Arminian), Southern (not Northern/American) Baptist (not Methodist, etc.), Evangelical (not Liberal), Protestant (not Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox), Christian. I say we all have that same “right and duty” - as Baptists have always believed and taught.

Near the end of his article Mohler has a litany of things which “we dare not...we must never” believe or think or say. Oh yes, we do dare! And, like Martin Luther, we must say what we find in the Scriptures and in our conscience, so help us God.