I just finished a book a few weeks back by Rob Bell called Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Boy, oh, boy is this a controversial book.
As you may or may not be aware, folks in the evangelical community are all up in arms because the perception was that Bell was taking a universalist position on the afterlife. For those unaware, the church has been fighting back and forth for centuries about the nature of the after life (i.e., who goes to heaven, who goes to hell; what exactly is heaven, what exactly is hell). For at least the recent past, three positions have been articulated: exclusivism (i.e. only Christians get in), inclusivism (i.e., Christians and some other people get in) and universalism (i.e., everybody gets in). Now, I am totally uneducated about who has held the majority position over the course of church history, but I do know a two things: (1) the loudest group of Christians presently endorse an exclusivistic perspective (I was gonna say majority of Christians, but I am not sure if that is true) and (2) there have been people in all three camps throughout the course of church history.
Now before some of you get all angry about exclusivists being the loudest, and possibly majority, group, I want to say something. I am pretty sure that a good number (if not the majority) of exclusivist Christians are exclusivist not because they really like the idea that most of the people who have been born and will be born are going to burn in hell. I am pretty sure they are exclusivist because their read (or the read of people they deeply respect and trust) is that, that is what the Bible teaches. In their view inclusivism and universalism are attempts to compromise the gospel to make it more palatable to the world. They take very seriously the warnings across the new testament about false prophets and manipulation of gospel. Warnings like 2 Timothy 4:3
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
And I will tell you something true, Mr. Bell's book did scratch my itchy ear. You see for a very, very long time I could not stomach Christianity. I could not stomach it because it seemed very much like a country club with ridiculous entrance standards; specifically, like what we like, dress how we dress, think how we think or burn in hell for all eternity. Of course they wrapped their invitation in words about love and acceptance but I saw through that bull to the purple kool-aid. And let me tell you what, I was not about to drink it.
So Mr. Bell's writing, his invitation to draw near to the gospel without having to draw the same conclusions as the people I knew was unquestionably part of my path to God. Certainly the existence of universalism at all, provided me a path toward God. But the question then is: Am I actually drawing closer to the real God? The Creator of the Universe? Or am I drawing closer to a god that I am fashioning from concepts I already like? Can I "put up with sound doctrine" or am I "gathering teachers" to scratch my itchy ears?
And here is my take. At the center of the Bible is a tension - a tension between who God is and what He wants and the apparent outcome. On the one hand, you have an omnipotent, omnipresent, omnipowerful God, Creator of the Universe, who is love and wants every person who ever lived to return to Him. On the other hand, you have mention of hell, judgement, wheat and chaff, weeping and gnashing of teeth, and of a rebel army that fights with Satan in last war in Revelation. These two things are very, very difficult to reconcile. If you reconcile them by saying - "Oh well, God is all powerful, his love is unending, he will pursue people until he gets them even into the after life" you are over looking some very explicit warnings about how you live this life, the image of judgment and the clear picture that not all will come to the party. If you reconcile them by saying - "Clearly, I can tell you that "those people" who didn't do or say this or that thing, in this or that way are lost and going to burn" you are over looking who God is, and minimizing Him into a genie or mechanism that acts right in given circumstances. I think we ought to realize that if God says He wants something, there is a good chance He is going to get it.
So what I think is that the itch we all have is for reconciliation of that tension. We don't want to sit with dissonance - we want some preacher to resolve it for us. We want a prayer or book or philosophy or an approach to resolve it.
So be careful brothers and sisters. Be wary of people who tell you what you want to hear! Who have bumper sticker phrases which claim to resolve tensions that the Scriptures leave open. God is complicated! Or more accurately God is deep and rich and broad and wide and incomprehensible in His fullness. Yes, take seriously His warnings about this life and life to come. Take seriously His commands to obey and to reach out and tell others about Him. But also hold on to the knowledge and the hope and the truth that He is mysterious and all-powerful. That compassion and mercy are His to determine. As it says in Exodus 33:19
I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.
Doesn't leave much room for us to decide who is in and who is out, does it?
