A New(?) Perspective on “Love Wins”

To many of us in the Evangelical world, Donald Miller’s review of Love Wins was timely. (http://donmilleris.com/2011/04/01/my-review-of-love-wins/) Pretending to mistake an out of print romance novel from the early 1980’s for Bell’s book, Miller expresses surprise that the always critical John Piper would read that kind of thing, and declares that he and Piper “ARE SO BESTIES NOW!” In his always-engaging prose, Miller encourages his readers to be glad that the main character ends up with the dentist in the end, since the chiropractor “was two-timing her anyway.”

Miller’s review is satire at its best. It encourages those of us who are prone to get hot under the collar to take a deep breath, have a laugh at all the controversy, and hopefully read the real Love Wins more intelligently and more charitably. The review is cheeky without being offensive, and pokes fun at the Evangelical tendency to create tempests in teapots. After all, everyone knew this would happen. From the first news of Piper’s now-infamous tweet — “Farewell, Rob Bell” — Love Wins has been a hot topic of discussion in the Evangelical world.

I hope to borrow something of the spirit with which Miller posted his fake review. Unfortunately, I think most of the serious reviews of the book to date have been largely unhelpful. Of the several available, most show a marked tendency to a particular side of the theological spectrum. Conservative reviewers are less than charitable, and Bell’s friends are overly forgiving. As a case in point, consider the ungenerous review by as intelligent a person as Tim Challies: http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/love-wins-a-review-of-rob-bells-new-book?page=1 — co-written with Aaron Armstrong. Or the very thorough but equally short-sighted one by Kevin DeYoung of the Gospel Coalition: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/files/2011/03/LoveWinsReview.pdf.

Rob Bell is often maligned as unclear, ambiguous, and incoherent, but much of the anxiety over Love Wins seems to discuss the question of Bell’s role. “You can’t criticize him too much,” some protest, “after all, he doesn’t really claim to be a theologian. He’s more of an artist, a poet.” Let’s think about this for a moment. Is it really fair to call him an artist? Really? Love Wins doesn’t have “A Novel” under the subtitle, nor does Bell identify himself with any commonly understood definition of what art is. He claims to be trying to tell the truth, and while we all appreciate the humility with which he does so, labels like “artist” can’t really free him from the obligation to do his best at it. I like to imagine that he wouldn’t disagree with that sentiment.

Those on the other side of the fence respond by attempting to cast Bell as a systematic theologian. Kevin DeYoung writes, “This book is not a poem. It is not a piece of art. This is a theological book by a pastor trying to impart a different way of looking at heaven and hell. Whether Bell is creative or a provocateur is beside the point. If Bell is inconsistent, unclear, or inaccurate, claiming the ‘artist’ mantle is no help.” (Page 3) A good point, but maybe both sides misunderstand what Bell is all about. In reading the first chapter of the new book, I constantly found myself saying, “Gee, this sure sounds a lot like N.T. Wright.” A couple chapters later all I could think was, “This is just C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in a different package” (both are listed in Bell’s “Further Reading” section). Yes, he seems to go farther than Wright and Lewis do (maybe…?), but in the end, Love Wins reads a lot like a translation, a paraphrase, a simplification of other, more advanced or out of date books on the afterlife. What Bell is, is a good communicator. He takes complex ideas, boils them down to a level people can understand without much difficulty, and frees them from the dry academic packaging in which he found them. True, he paints a good enough picture that it isn’t always so hard to mistake him for an artist, and the ideas he paints are often good enough that one could certainly take him as a theologian, even if the best ones usually aren’t his.

Which brings us to the most important point. Rob Bell does not claim to know exactly what happens after death. He remains agnostic on that point. And he does so quite clearly and obviously. The central passage, around which I think the whole book turns, comes at the end of chapter four. Bell gives a brief description of several of the major views on heaven and hell which have held sway throughout the history of Christianity. After each, he clearly admits that all sides have their good points, and help to explain something. Yes, even the traditional “two worlds, one chance to choose” view of things. (Page 104-106) He says:

“Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don’t need to resolve them or answer them because we can’t, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires.” (115)

And at the very end of the chapter, he at last clarifies the meaning of the book’s title. The chapter is called “Does God Get What God Wants.” He states that God is great enough to save all people if he wants to, which is a fairly standard universalist argument. BUT, he then he goes on to speak about the free will of each person. He says that we each ultimately long for heaven, even if we sometimes choose hell:

“And to that,

that impulse, craving, yearning, longing, desire –

God says yes.

Yes, there is water for that thirst,

food for that hunger,

light for that darkness,

relief for that burden.

If we want hell,

if we want heaven,

they are ours.

That’s how love works. It can’t be forced,

manipulated, or coerced.

It always leaves room for the other to decide.

God says yes,

we can have what we want,

because love wins.” (118)

So we have a situation in which each person is allowed to decide for him or herself where eternity is spent. That’s disappointingly uncontroversial, but that’s the meaning of the title. God’s love wins, because it is big and generous enough to let each of us choose our fate, even if that fate is hell.

What then, is the purpose of the book? Well, to translate and to paraphrase, as was already mentioned, but also to minister. Bell frequently talks about the psychological effects of believing in a great god who would condemn billions to eternal torment. And we have to admit, that is a tension traditional theology has not really been able to resolve. After all, how many times is every pastor asked those kinds of questions throughout her or his career? So Bell suggests that the corrective is a dose of ancient history: lets all properly understand the ancient Jewish and early Christian conception of eschatology and the two worlds. Also a bit of generosity: let’s all admit that no one really knows exactly what happens after death, admit that the Christian tradition contains lots of different views, and work to ensure that no one will prove hardened enough to resist the captivation of God’s love. He hopes to free people of baggage, and resolve a tension that may have kept many out of the church. Some would say he pushes this quest too far. Maybe he does, but more on that later.

“Wait a minute,” a lot of disapproving observers will say, “sure Bell says he accepts the reality of hell, but only after he’s re-defined it as a place we make for ourselves here on earth. Isn’t re-definition just a clever form of denial?” (See Challies’s and Armstrong’s review). The crucial point here is that he doesn’t re-define hell at all. He remains agnostic about exactly what heaven and hell look like, remember? It is also essential to bear in mind that in the book’s first chapter, Bell largely adopts N.T. Wright’s view of eschatology. The ancient Jews and early Christians did not hold to a sharp distinction between this world and the next, between this life and the afterlife, between this world and the world of the supernatural. Instead, heaven and earth “overlap and interlock” in a number of significant ways. (N.T. Wright, Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope) It is our call, then, to begin to do the work of God’s kingdom, hoping that it will eventually come “on earth as it is in heaven.” In this light, it isn’t at all surprising to hear Bell suggest that there is heaven now and there is heaven after death, and that there is hell now and hell after death. And it is not surprising that he urges us to make choices to bring heaven about, both in this life and the next:

“There are all kinds of hells, because there are all kinds of ways to resist and reject all that is good and true and beautiful and human now, in this life, and so we can only assume we can do the same in the next. There are individual hells, and communal, society-wide hells, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously. There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.” (78)

Similarly, there is plenty of talk about judgement, which will probably surprise some:

“[The Gospel writers’] description of life in the age to come is both thrilling an unnerving at the same time. For the earth to be free of anything destructive or damaging, certain things have to be banished. Decisions have to be made. Judgements have to be rendered. And so they spoke of a cleansing, purging, decisive day when God would make those judgements. They called this day the ‘day of the LORD.’ The day when God says ‘ENOUGH’ to anything that threatens the peace…, harmony, and health that God intends for the world.” (37)

This is what Wright describes as God finally “putting the world to rights.” Even Wright (no heretic or universalist, he) rejects our simplistic image of hell as a scary torture chamber in which a red devil with a pitchfork makes people scream for eternity. This is an image found in Revelation, a book steeped in apocalyptic language, and perhaps best not taken literally.

Is Rob Bell a universalist? Who knows? Maybe. He says he isn’t, so it seems only right to take his word for it. That said, there are a lot of strong hints throughout the rest of the book that he favors the “unlimited chances” interpretation, in which people may always choose to accept God’s grace after death. He at least fervently hopes this is the case. Regardless, that’s not what the book is about. Charitable hermeneutics demands that we interpret what is unclear in the light of what is clear. What is clear is that Bell believes heaven and hell to be real places, which stretch through this life and the life to come. He believes that our choices in this life are vitally important in the life to come, though he could be clearer about why and how they matter. He believes that God is holy and cannot tolerate impurities in his presence, and so makes judgements and pours out his wrath against what is impure. And he believes that beyond that, we don’t know much.

In so far as Love Wins is a translation of other ideas from better theologians, it is a very good book. He does what a good pastor should in taking the complicated ideas of academics and boiling them down into something readable and, at times, almost beautiful. Unfortunately, it would be similarly unfair to let Bell off the hook for the book’s many problems. Just as the critical try to make the book answer questions about the type of theological category Bell fits into — questions it isn’t really trying to answer — the generous ignore several points of ambiguity, inconsistency, and a lack of exegetical rigor. There is a frustrating absence of footnotes, citations, or anything else that might indicate where Bell’s often unorthodox readings of biblical passages come from. It’s fine to have a radical interpretation of a Bible passage, but it isn’t really fair to leave readers without any supporting evidence for it at all.

While the hope that God’s love will eventually win everyone is understandable, it does go against the beliefs of the vast majority of Christians. In his masterful book Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright devotes only one small section to judgement, in which he suggests that rejecting God and being judged for it must be a possibility. He also rejects the “torture chamber” view of hell, and suggests that those who cease to reflect the image of God in them will eventually begin to dehumanize themselves, “beyond hope but also beyond pity.” He acknowledges that no one knows a lot about the exact nature of the afterlife. Most refreshingly, he is unambiguous:

“The last thing I want is for anyone to suppose that I (or anyone else) know very much about all this. Nor do I want anyone to suppose that I enjoy speculating in this manner. But I find myself driven, by the New Testament and the sober realities of this world, to this kind of a resolution to one of the darkest theological mysteries. I should be glad to be proved wrong but not at the cost of foundational claims that this world is the good creation of the one true God and that he will at the end bring about that judgement at which the whole creation will rejoice.” (183)

This is the biggest problem with Love Wins. It asserts agnosticism, then hints strongly at universalism, seeming to affirm without really affirming, and thus tries to free itself from the burden of proof. No wonder unfavorable reviewers feel cheated, even deceived.

But do they do the book any more justice? Consider the example of C.S. Lewis. John Piper speaks highly of Lewis, quotes him in many of his books, and credits him with the major insights that led him to write Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. (see the preface: http://www.desiringgod.org/dg/id86.htm) Yet it seems clear that Piper would disagree with most or all of Lewis’s teachings on the afterlife. Lewis was an inclusivist at the very least. He accepted that all people can be saved by the grace of Jesus, regardless of their formal creed or the language they use to express religious belief. If we take The Great Divorce seriously (and I realize one might question how much of Lewis’s view we should assume it represents), then he may have been something close to a universalist. The book envisions a hell and a heaven whose gates are never locked, which people can leave and return to. Napoleon is so deep in hell that it takes ten thousand years to reach his house. Others are close enough to a bus stop that they can board a shuttle and start their journey into heaven. What do we make of this? It makes us wonder why Lewis can play a central role in Piper’s spiritual growth and continue to be cherished by him today, while Bell, for leaving the door open to the same possibilities, is marginalized. No doubt Bell is not of the same calibre as Lewis, but it would be rather unreasonable to allow for a kind of debit-and-credit system, in which “false doctrine” is forgiven for apologetic good behavior.

Love Wins has tapped in to Christian fears and doubts about life after death, and the discourse it has provoked has been frustrating. Bell’s enemies (I wish I could just call them “opponents”), in their anxiety over doctrinal uniformity, refuse to read charitably. They take what might be read as strong hints of universalism and ignore the explicit statements that those questions are not what the book considers most important. Bell’s friends embrace him as a necessary gadfly of the church, but fail to be perturbed by inconsistencies and exegetical laxness. In short, this conversation has become a shouting match, and it needs to be tempered by a strong shot of charity and careful reading.

Rob Bell is indeed a necessary gadfly of the church. He challenges views we have become comfortable with, and makes us really think about what we believe. He translates complex ideas for the seekers, and tries to free people from their psychological baggage about Christianity. These are terrific objectives, and we need to have very very good evidence before we allow that effort to earn him the label of heretic. Still, when all is said and done, if one wants to learn about “heaven, hell, and the fate of every person who ever lived,” there are many better books.

It’s Time to Start Paying Attention

The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins. Oxford University Press, 2002. 336 pages. $14.95 (U.S. Price).

According to Philip Jenkins, Christianity is no longer a western religion. In fact, by 2050, only one Christian in five will be a non-Latino white person. But despite the staggering growth of Christianity outside North America and Europe, new developments in global Christianity barely register on the western consciousness. Not only is the west no longer the most important center of our faith, but we don’t realize that our era has passed.

Jenkins is a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University. He has done extensive work on the history of Christianity, and his predictions about the future are based on current demographic research. If he is right — and he openly acknowledges that it is always difficult to predict the future — then Christianity is poised to remain the world’s largest faith for decades to come, and actually increase its numerical lead over Islam, the second-largest religion.

Jenkins’ book offers crucial information on Christianity in the third world. He tells us that fellow Christians outside the west are usually conservative, relying on literal interpretations of the Bible, and very open to ideas of the supernatural: spiritual warfare, faith healing, and prophecy. These are ideas which people — even Christians — in the west have an increasingly hard time accepting and incorporating into their usual religious practice. The amazing success of the Pentecostal movement in the past few decades is evidence of the willingness of African, Asian, and Latin American Christians to interpret the Bible literally and hold to socially conservative values. Similarly, the areas of the Roman Catholic Church which have enjoyed the most success in the global south are the growing charismatic movements.

Amazing as this success is, Jenkins does not ignore that there are potential problems. Especially in nations like Sudan and Nigeria, which are poised to become some of the world’s most populous nations by about 2050. In these nations, Christians and Muslims exist in about equal numbers, neither having a clear majority. As the two faiths grow and launch missions into the other’s territory, Jenkins suggests that the possibility of religious warfare is strong. Far from being a thing of the Middle Ages, religious conflicts between Christians and Muslims have happened, and are happening today in nations like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sudan. Christianity is also bound to occasionally clash with governments, especially in Islamic or very secular states.

The Next Christendom makes some surprising claims: Christianity is not in trouble as a world faith; colonial missionaries were in some cases not as harmful to native societies as we have sometimes thought; Nairobi, Buenos Aires, and Seoul are poised to replace Rome, Paris, and New York as the world’s largest centers of the Christian faith; and many others. Though Jenkins is an Episcopalian, he is also an academic. He is a credible voice, and his book is fair and balanced, not to mention filled with enough interesting case studies to satisfy any trivia buff. While it offers encouragement for the future flourishing of Christianity, he does not ignore that the future may indeed hold troubles and times of conflict or persecution. It is perfect for anyone trying to understand the current mission field, since it helps us to realize that in a very real way, our society is now being seen as a mission field for flourishing churches in the global south. But at the same time, there is still much work to be done in other countries, and the book suggests that mission efforts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are likely to find fertile ground for the message of the Gospel. It is a call to sit up and pay attention: to begin to understand the societies in which missionaries are living and working, and as a result to better understand the broad world outside the west.

 

The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible — Scot McKnight

Scot McKnight, a professor of religious studies at North Park College in Illinois, has written a book that will no doubt cause some confusion. The question is whether the confusion is of the right kind; whether it provokes thought and conversation. He is aware that the idea of one final and all-encompassing way of interpreting the Bible has caused numerous problems in modern Christianity, sometimes leading to arrogance, and a Church that is unloving and increasingly irrelevant. He wants to help correct these problems, and so encourages readers to think of the Bible as telling a story — actually the Story, in which we are still living and moving the Plot forward.

Hence the confusing title. As the inside flap of the jacket says, “Parakeets make delightful pets. We cage them or clip their wings to keep them where we want them.” McKnight suggests that many of us try to do this with the Bible as well: we make it less than what it is. Rather than God’s inspired Story, we see the Bible as the key to a systematic theology, or containing nuggets of “blessings,” or bits of wisdom. And he suggests that careful exegesis is the antidote.

If “exegesis” is a big, scary word, just think of it as a fancy way of saying “careful reading.” We need to prayerfully read the entire Bible, and receive what it has to tell us about God’s work in the world: from the creation, to the ministry of the people of Israel, to the coming of Christ, and so on down to our own day.

God spoke in Moses’ days in Moses’ ways, and

God spoke in Job’s days in Job’s ways, and

God spoke in David’s days in David’s ways, and…

God spoke in Jesus’ days in Jesus’ ways, and

God spoke in Paul’s days in Paul’s ways…

and we are called to carry on that pattern in our world today. (pg. 27-28)

We all “pick and choose” when it comes to the Bible, the book’s second chapter tells us. Our mandate, then, is not to follow every commandment in every circumstance (after all, most of us don’t have too many qualms about eating pork or charging and paying interest…), but rather to discern which commandments will allow God to speak in our days in our ways, for our chapter of the Story.

It is at this point that McKnight makes his readers wonder what standards he holds to. Is everything up for grabs, or are there some things that can’t change? He suggests that more and more young Christians are rethinking traditional teachings on sexual ethics. It is the responsibility of the community of believers, he says, to determine whether the traditional interpretation of New Testament teachings on sexuality still apply today in the same way they did in the first century. He even suggests that our Great Tradition of interpretation might not be so infallible as we have sometimes supposed, and might sometimes seem unrealistic and unsatisfying.

Then he tells us why we can’t just say anything we want. Any reinterpretation of biblical commands, we are told, must be rooted in sound exegesis and prayerful deliberation on the part of the Community (the Church). It won’t do just to blow with the currents of culture, we have to invest serious time, effort, prayer, and discussion before making any big changes in how we live or interpret scripture (and so the traditional teachings on sexuality are probably quite safe).

McKnight does indeed invite some confusion in encouraging us to rethink how we read the Bible, but it is, as Alan Jacobs calls it, a “productive and enabling confusion.” It may feel like McKnight, in challenging some traditional hermeneutical approaches, and in tackling some of the big issues facing the Church today (the entire last section of the book is devoted to the question of women in ministry), has pulled the rug out from under us. But he hopes that the confusion can quickly be replaced by a more fulfilling and realistic approach to exegesis.

The Mother Tongue: English And How It Got That Way — Bill Bryson

This is something of a new direction for the KickAtTheDarkness blog, as it is the first book reviewed that does not deal with spiritual or theological subjects.  But it would be a shame to fall into that old criticism of Christians, that they are so heavenly-minded that they are of no earthly good.  Plus variety is the spice of life, and readers of Bill Bryson’s other books will know what an entertaining writer he is.

Bryson, a former journalist, is primarily a travel writer, but has undertaken projects on a number of other subjects as well, including a thick book of popular science  ambitiously titled A Short History of Nearly Everything.  Perhaps a future title for the KickAtTheDarkness blog.

It is rare to find a book that deals with a potentially dry subject (such as the history of language) so well that it is hard to put down.  The Mother Tongue is that kind of a book.  While some reviewers have complained that Bryson gets the occasional fact wrong, the concerned reader can tell where potential problems lie.  One of the great benefits and disadvantages of the books is that it lacks proper citations.  A benefit because the reader isn’t barraged with bulky footnotes or parenthetical references to scholarly tomes, but a disadvantage because it leaves several points in the books where readers are left wondering if Bryson is on solid historical ground. Of course for most of us, having a few small factual errors in our minds is nothing new, and Bryson does cite a number of credible sources in a smooth and unobtrusive way.

The books is part linguistic study, part sociological analysis, and part biography, with descriptions of many of the language’s more interesting founders and contributors profiled.  This is part of what makes the books so rich: descriptions of Noah Webster, early Germanic monarchs, and the early editors of the Oxford History of the English Language, combined with conjectures on the nearly universal appeal of the language in the modern world, and the origins of many of the words and expressions we use every day, often without really knowing their meaning.

Beyond that, the book is so crammed with facts that readers feel they are constantly in danger of becoming nerds, with suspenders and large glasses materializing out of nowhere.  Every chapter contains many fantastic distractions from its main point.  Bryson has perfected the art of the tangent, and weaves them so effectively into the fabric of the book that they are barely noticeable.  When the reader finally does realize the main point of the chapter hasn’t been touched on for quite some time, the rabbit trail has become to entertaining and educational that it is difficult to care.   Chapter 13, “Names,” gives a history of British names and their often unintelligible pronunciations.  But not only are odd names highlighted, so are facts about those who wore them, and these are often fascinating.

For those with real jobs and things to do (I read the book as a student during summer break, which may tell you something…), it is not a long book, at a little over 200 pages.  The print is large and the words are small and understandable, so no one is left behind by an intimidating vocabulary.

The one unfortunate trait of the book is one over which Bryson had no control: it is dated.  Originally published in 1990, some of the facts are inaccurate simply by virtue of being old.  The first chapter, for example, puts the number of English speakers in the world at 300 million, while the more recent  wikipedia.org article gives a total of more than 610 million.  Readers can’t help but think it is time he released a new edition, or at least added a nice foreword with a few factual updates.

It is somewhat surprising that a writing style originally used in travel books is so well adapted to popular scholarship, but that simply points to Bryson’s effectiveness as a writer.  His keen observations of the world serve him well in researching a book on our language, and his wit and prose style combine with this keen eye to produce a truly entertaining book.

“Surprised by Joy” — C.S. Lewis

Steve Bell once commented that for him, exploring the music of Bruce Cockburn was like being found after a period of wandering.  He remembered being told by his parents as a child, “if you get lost, go back to the last place you remember seeing us, and we’ll find you there.”  After a period of spiritual aimlessness, Cockburn’s music was that last place he remembered “seeing” God.

My story has taken a similar turn, requiring an intellectual and spiritual return to a familiar place.  Surprised by Joy is Lewis’s autobiographical account of his journey from “Christianity to Atheism, to Pantheism,” and back to Christianity again.  It carries a deep resonance for me, as a Christian in the middle of university life, faced on all sides (though less explicitly than my evangelical upbringing may have led to me believe) with intellectual challenges to the Christian faith.  Lewis’s intellect is formidable, and the fact that he has “been to the other side” gives his story a certain credibility.

Maybe the most appealing characteristic of the book is its departure from the normal style of Lewis’s apologetic works.  If the book is an argument for Christianity, it is one in the form of a story, and a story richly told.  Experience is often a better teacher than pure reason, as the spiritual autobiographies of of men like Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Leo Tolstoy and, more recently, Phillip Yancey indicate.  Their stories are steeped in literature, more inclined to use the novels of Dostoevsky or Norse mythology as proof-texts than a theological treatise.  We are told of experiences such as Lewis’s lifelong attraction to the occult and other neo-pagan forms of spirituality, as well as the spiritual impacts of becoming an intellectual snob or the awakening of sexual desire.  Yet Surprised by Joy is unique in that it also factors in explicitly rational issues.  Lewis, as an Oxford student and tutor grappled with issues of the purely rational kind on a daily basis.  In this sense, the book is true to life, and exposes the false dichotomy between “reason” and “experience.”  All of us experience both worlds on a daily basis.  Even for Lewis, who tried to live up to the rationalistic ideal of his time, the fateful turn came when he began to incorporate the richness of his imaginative life with that of his academic.  Before this transition, “the two hemispheres of [his] mind were in the sharpest contrast.  On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other, a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’”  The greatest change came when the wall between the two began to crumble.

Even when the story does take an intellectual turn, it is not to expound answers to the usual apologetic questions like the problem of suffering, or the historical reliability of the Gospels.  Lewis struggled with issues perhaps more applicable than those to our time, such as religious pluralism (on what grounds do Christians think that their religion happens to be exactly correct, while others are pure superstition?), or the “enlightened” view that Christianity is the spent force of a less sophisticated time (what he calls “period-snobbishness”).  His answers to these questions may surprise some, but they ring with intellectual honesty and a heartfelt desire to be true to his reason as well as his imagination.

It is true that the book may hold some difficulties for readers of his other works.  While Lewis was writing specifically for the layman in his apologetic books, Surprised by Joy pulls less intellectual and stylistic punches, and requires a little more of the reader.  It is filled with allusions to writers and thinkers most of us born in the last half of the twentieth century won’t recognize.  Since the spiritual progression related in the book is tied so closely to Lewis’s intellectual life, and his progress up the eductaional ladder, it is necessary for him to include many of the concepts and ideas that influenced him, which in turn requires the reader to grasp them as well.  But whatever difficulties there are in the reading are well rewarded.  It is a frighteningly well-told story, humming with almost living prose.  The book allows the reader the best of both worlds: Lewis’s rich imaginative life and his brilliant intellect, which combine to form what is, probably unintentionally, Lewis’s most convincing argument for the Christian faith.

“The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God – Getting Beyond the Bible Wars” — N.T. Wright

In this short book, N.T. Wright outlines a visionary model dealing with the term “the authority of Scripture,” and its role within the Church, a role he seems convinced the Bible is not being allowed to properly play.  The implicit claim seems to be that the so-called “Bible wars,” in which conservatives and liberals resort to name-calling and “guilt by association” tactics rather than relying properly on charitable dialogue, unpacking the shorthand “authority of Scripture” to examine what that concept really means, have inhibited a view of the Bible in all its richness.  He writes,

Shorthands…are useful in the same way that suitcases are.  They enable us to pick up lots of complicated things and carry them around all together.  But we should never forget that the point of doing so…is that what has been packed away can then be unpacked and put to use in the new location.  Too much debate about Scriptural authority has had the form of people hitting one another with locked suitcases.  It is time to unpack the shorthand doctrines, to lay them out and inspect them. (pg. 24-25)

The term “locked suitcases” is particularly apt, and plays implicitly on the unwillingness of many Christians to think deeply about what is meant by the “authority of Scripture.”  The threat of liberal Christianity, in the mind of the Evangelical, is so great that the absolute inerrancy of the Bible must be asserted for Christianity to survive in any meaningful capacity.  On the other side of the fence, the parts of the Bible that seem incompatible with postmodern concepts of justice, and the narrow dogmatism that those passages occasionally engender in the more conservative members of the faith lead some to reject the usefulness of the entire Bible in guiding the Christian to a moral life. 

            Wright does not explicitly tackle issues of inerrancy, which seems a wise decision in a book that seeks to transcend the Bible wars: assertions of total inerrancy alienate “non-fundamentalists,” while anything but such assertions makes enemies of conservatives.  Instead he undertakes a detailed “unpacking” of the term “authority of Scripture” and, in a fascinating and gripping chapter, outlines the attitudes towards the Bible of the Church historically, and attempts to point out “where we went wrong.”  For Wright, narrative is the key concept, and the Bible, for him, is predominantly a narrative of human history, God’s role in it, and where we hope to end up.  As a first step, he points out that a proper understanding of the Bible’s authority is as a vessel through which God’s authority is exercised: “scripture itself points – authoritatively…away from itself and to the fact that final and true authority belongs to God himself, now delegated to Jesus Christ.  It is Jesus, according to John 8:39-40, who speaks the truth which he has heard from God” (24).  The Bible, then, is not a list of rules or a reference book of true doctrines (though Wright does not ignore that it contains both), but an authoritative story, which must be understood in its proper historical and cultural context and recognized for the rich narrative that it is before its authority can be properly recognized in the Church.  This is a vast over-simplification of a much richer book that cannot but compel one to agree with the endorsement of it given by Open Source Theology: “anyone interested in the discussion on the authority of Christian Scripture should read and discuss this book.”  Wright’s prose is lively and compelling, and the clarity of insight secures Wright’s place as one of Christianity’s most essential voices.  Here we have a unique diagnosis of the problem, and the most helpful prescription yet for restoring vibrant faith in effective churches, based on a correct understanding of the authority and role of the Bible.  In line with neither John MacArthur nor John Shelby Spong, Wright’s clear vision should strike readers as the most obvious and effective way forward, freeing us of the strict literalist dogmatism of the one, and the “toothless Christianity” of the other.  This is truly an essential book.

McLaren Vs. MacArthur, Part 1: MacArthur

            Emergent leader Brian McLaren roused the fury of conservative theologian John MacArthur with comments regarding the issue of Hell and life after death.  We see in this disagreement two men on polar opposite ends of the theological spectrum: McLaren proclaiming that Christ’s message is more multi-faceted than traditional Christianity has made it; and MacArthur, who feels orthodoxy is so threatened by the emergent movement that he was prompted to write a book entitled The Truth War.  But is there a happy medium between these two thinkers, each with his own virtues and shortcomings?  Could each play a role in the bettering of the Christian tradition, and help to discover its role in the 21^st century?

 

            One of McLaren’s statements explains why he doesn’t like the conversation about who gets in to Heaven: “I have a problem when people ask me [about who goes to Heaven],” says McLaren, “because it assumes that the primary…message of Jesus was a message about how to get to Heaven.”  MacArthur’s response is rather shocking:

“[Salvation from Hell] is the reason He came.  The only reason He came.  He didn’t come to fix life here, He didn’t come to eliminate poverty, He didn’t come to eliminate slavery….He came to save people from eternal Hell, and if you understand that eternal Hell is eternal, as opposed to life, which the Bible says is a vapour…then you understand how silly it is to think that Jesus came to fix something in somebody’s life for the little moment that they live on this earth….You look at the life of Christ, He didn’t even fix the world that He lived in.  He never ever…assaulted one social institution that was out of whack, not one. So He never had a social agenda: He cared for people, He fed people, sure, but He fed them once, and He didn’t feed them every day, in fact He refused to create that kind of welfare state.”

MacArthur, for all his training and his emphasis on sola scriptura seems to have missed a few key passages of the New Testament!  What about the 2000 times (as Bono is so fond of pointing out) that the Bible mentions caring for the poor and oppressed in this world?  As Evangelicals, we are fond of pointing out the passage in which Jesus says that the way to be saved is to be “born again” (John 3:1-21), but, as Shane Claiborne points out in his book The Irresistible Revolution, we do not place much emphasis on the passage in which Christ tells the rich young man that if he wants to inherit eternal life he must “sell all he has and give to the poor” (Matt. 19:16-22).  It would seem that the idea of caring for the poor plays (or at least may or can play) a larger role in the process of salvation than MacArthur is willing to admit.  He also seems to forget about such passages pregnant with social implications as Matthew 25: 31-46: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (v. 40).  Interestingly, this saying comes in a passage about who will be saved at the end of days!  I do not want to advocate social action as a substitute for repentance or acceptance of God’s grace, but it would seem that MacArthur should admit that the concept of salvation is at least a little more nebulous than we sometimes make it.

            There are other statements from MacArthur that transcend mere oversight; they are downright troubling.  If MacArthur took to trouble to study his medieval history, he would understand how dangerous the idea of radical separation of this life and the next can be when taken to the extreme.  The idea that life is cheap, that this life is significantly less important than the one to come, has laid the groundwork for some of the biggest atrocities in the history of the church.  A case in point: a 13^th century crusade in France against a heretical group known as the Albigensians.  As the papal army advanced on the city of Carcassone, the Albigensian stronghold, one of the knights asked the papal representative if the army should exercise some restraint about who they kill, as there might be some orthodox Christians living in the city.  The papal legate replied, “kill all, kill all, for God will know His own!”  The army proceeded to sack the city, killing men, woman, and children, Albigensian, orthodox and Jew.  This vivid story should be sufficient warning about the consequences of the idea that God cares little or not at all for this life, and that the job of the Christian is to save the soul and not to worry about the body. 

           

It is true (and both McLaren and MacArthur would do well to keep this in mind) that Jesus did indeed emphasize “how to get to Heaven,” even in conjunction with His teachings on the poor and oppressed.  It seems evident that both eternal salvation and the sort of compassion that inspires one to take on social ills are valid and essential manifestations of God’s love for us.  To deny either is to present an incomplete picture of what Christ wanted to accomplish with His ministry.  In denying McLaren’s emphasis on the social component of the Gospel, he is not just disagreeing with “emergent quacks” who have no grounding in real theology.  N.T. Wright, Bishop of Durham and one of the foremost theologians of our time, strongly agrees about the importance of social action for the Christian in his book Simply Christian.  Whatever McLaren’s shortcomings, his seems the more helpful voice on this particular issue, and MacArthur’s ideas seem either misguided or dangerous.

 

*All quotes from McLaren and MacArthur are taken from MacArthur’s interview on The Way of the Master, May 28, 2007.  It can be heard at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG3VNrfJsLI