Riding Along

I have been following along with Rob Bell for nearly a decade.  I first "met" him through his series of short videos called Nooma, a phonetic pun on Pneuma, the Greek word for spirit or breath.  Then I watched his longer presentation called Everything Is Spiritual, with a youth group, then I read a few of his books, and listened to his sermons from Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids Michigan.
I guess you could say I became a bit of a fan of Rob, because I really did like what he said about things, and I definitely enjoyed his hipster/geek persona, and the self-conscious way he would nerd out about things.  I admired his success as a pastor, a preacher and a communicator.  At the same time though, I was never really in awe of Rob, I mean, he didn't seem to operate on a higher plane than me, he was just sort of like a slightly more popular peer.  He was not a great thinker and amazing writer like Eugene Peterson, or C.S. Lewis, and I could sort of always see that most of what he said, most of the really energized, creative things, were just sort of translating the work of a Peterson or an N.T. Wright into the common vernacular of a younger, American, post-christendom.  He did that really well, and I needed that.
For a while Rob represented a fairly safe stream of orthodoxy and evangelical faith.  He always seemed to me to stay in the Christian tradition, sort of reaching for some dusty ideas that had been stored in the basement and cleaning them off and saying, "Will you look at this?"  Pretty much what Wright, Brian McClaren, Shane Claiborne and even Tony Campolo do as well, I like all of them.  Then something happened.  Rob wrote this little book called Love Wins, which was notable for it's investigation of the scriptural, historical and theological development of what we believe about Heaven and Hell.  None of it was new to me, I had studied it in seminary, and so was unsurprised by any of Rob's conclusions or discussion.
Other people within the Body of Christ had, shall we say, a different reaction.  Rob Bell became one of the first people in quite a while that I heard openly being called a heretic.  This was utterly absurd to me, having read the book and having become familiar with Bell's work and preaching.  There was nothing heretical about it.  He challenged the notion of an eternal hell, which honestly is not very strongly supported in Scripture, and he leaned towards a sort of Christian Universalism that is very much in line with the thought of Karl Barth, C.S. Lewis, and... well... me.
It goes like this: God is too good and loving to let any of his Creation go to waste.  What we cannot do through our own will and faith, God will do by grace. It can be sound biblical reasoning, it leads to perhaps the most sane theology you will find, but it does leave you kind of hanging out there without a real hammer to bring down on the reprobate.  Many pretty solid theologians have seemingly railed against this line of thinking.  H. Richard Niebuhr said, "A God without wrath has brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment by the ministry of a Christ without a cross." Which does raise the question of whether or not this approach has just gone soft with modern liberal sentiment.  Except for the fact that it is not modern, or liberal, or particularly controversial in the history of the Church.  As with many theological ideas there is a tension to be held between the holiness of God and the grace of God, both of which are defining characteristics of the God we find in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Testament.  The tension, the balance is that God is love.
What Bell says in Love Wins and what many others have said throughout the history of the Church is that we should not try to hem that in or try to control what it means, but rather we should set it loose.  Augustine said, "The truth is like a lion; you do not have to defend it. You set it loose, it will defend itself."  Many religious types have often used that quote as mic drop moment, but I don't think they really understood what it meant when they came after Rob Bell for abandoning the faith for daring to say that God's love conquers all, which is precisely the very core of the Gospel.
The problem is that this whole idea kicks a lot of Pharisees in the shins, and it also takes away the big stick that religion sometimes tries to hold over the heads of all those sinners out there to keep them in line.  There was a lot of judging and name calling and even some protesting about a book called Love Wins, that told us the same thing that the Bible from the Song of Songs to 1 Corinthians 13 has been telling us: Love is stronger than death, love never fails, the greatest of these is love.  It was rather troubling to me, as a pastor, and just as a Jesus follower to hear so much venom being poured out against a fellow pastor and Jesus follower for having the audacity to say that maybe God has a better plan for sinners than eternal Hell fire, which honestly I've always hoped is true.
Rob talks about the peculiarity of this experience in his latest work: Everything Is Spiritual II. You can watch in on Youtube if you have a couple hours, I would recommend it, if for no other reason than to hear a man who has experienced the venom of his own religion turning on him talk about how he dealt with it, (that happens in the second hour) and how he still seems to take Jesus pretty seriously, even if he has now been exiled from the evangelical church into the "spiritual" land of Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love), and Deepak Chopra.  Rob, for better or worse, now represents the Christian faith in Oprah-land (which may be Babylon or it might be the land of milk and honey, I'm not judging).  I think he has some scars from his time in the Church, but hey don't we all.