The New Atheism
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 54, No. 1 – Fall 2011
Managing Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III
By Rob Bell. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. 202 + xi pages. Softcover, $22.99.
Rob Bell, long-time pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, and provocateur extraordinaire, provides another controversial, popular-level book in the vein of Velvet Elvis (2006) and Sex God (2008). Ever the deconstructionist, Bell continues his usual approach, begun in Velvet Elvis, of thought-provoking questioning. However, Bell is no religious anarchist. Rather, as he writes in the first chapter, “this isn’t just a book of questions. It’s a book of responses to these questions” (19). For this, he is to be commended. Rather than hiding his own certitude behind the veneer of “just asking questions,” Bell is an honest deconstructionist, signaling his intention to reconstruct, replacing what he is convinced is false with what he is certain is true. Specifically, he contends that the story of Jesus’ love triumphs over all other stories and that the oft-told stories of God’s judgment are misguided.
Surprisingly, there is much good in Bell’s book, as he raises some excellent questions, pressing evangelicalism in some areas in which fidelity to the Scriptures is often lacking. Pastorally, in an ecclesiological culture poor in Kingdom language and understanding, Bell repeatedly emphasizes Jesus’ words about its nearness, refusing (as did Jesus) to relegate it to a coming age; evangelicals would do well to heed his call to the message of the present reality and availability of the Kingdom. In a Baptist ecclesiological paradigm where a vote is considered a right, many lose sight of that fact, thinking that it is their Kingdom. Further, in bringing the Kingdom approach to bear on the individual level, Bell reminds us that eternal life, as depicted in the Scriptures, is not simply life that lasts forever, but is also a state of life lived with the God the Eternal One. He writes, “Eternal life doesn’t start when we die; it starts now. It’s not about a life that begins at death; it’s about experiencing the kind of life now that can endure and survive even death” (59). This proper emphasis brings eternity to bear on everyday life where marriage, and parenting, and neighbors exist, which is exactly what Jesus intended when he inaugurated the Kingdom. Scripturally, a relationship with Christ is not about punching a ticket to “get to heaven” (cf. 178–79) but about life with Christ. Bell also properly situates ethics within the context of these eschatological realities (46), noting that our understanding of what the Kingdom is will drive how we live in the world, something the people of Heritage Park Baptist Church hear weekly. Finally, Bell is right that people—both individually and corporately—create living hells in this life through abuse (7), genocide (70), human trafficking (78), and other evils that human beings perpetuate against each other. In addition, by the choices they make many “choose to live in their own hells all the time” (114). In all these cases, Bell accurately portrays the scriptural realities regarding the kingdom, eternal life, and living hells.
But Bell only gets these things half right as he curiously falls into a sort of Ramist logic which insists on either-or, precluding the sort of both-and approach that fans of the postmodern epistemological move like Bell ostensibly embrace. For Bell, it seems that kingdom here-and-now precludes looking towards a greater kingdom that is coming, eternal life here-and-now excludes the greater eternal life that is coming, and hells of our own making as a result of sin preclude a greater hell that is coming. His commitment to this sort of logic shows up again in chapter seven, “The Good News Is Better Than That.” There, Bell is unwilling to hold in tension that God both judges sin and rescues us from His judgment of sin through the work of Christ “so that He might be both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:26). If true, it can be said, contra Bell, that Jesus rescues us from God (182). In other words, in orthodox thought, God rescues us from God. This may be untenable in a strictly Ramist logic, but in a world in which the paradoxical incarnation of the Word of God turns all such logics on their head, it is true, nonetheless. Further, in this process, Bell rejects the historic orthodox understanding of divine simplicity—that God’s essence cannot be reduced to any one thing or attribute—and instead embraces the rather recent understanding of God as essentially love (177), a concept that grew out of nineteenth-century, European Protestant Liberalism.
Bell’s argument is also troubled by two general methodological problems: his selective use of history and his atomizing hermeneutical approach. First, Bell confidently and consistently posits that there are those in the mainstream of Christian history who have held to his views. In chapter four, “Does God Get What God Wants?,” he writes, “At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God” (109). He points to Origen, whose apokatastasis—the restoration of all things, and thus universal salvation—was a perspective that was influential in the East, being picked up in whole or part by the Cappadocian fathers, but was ultimately condemned (even in the East) at the fifth ecumenical council, Constantinople II (553 AD). He also curiously lines up Jerome, Augustine, and Luther as supportive of his view that in order for God to “get what God wants,” everyone will be saved (106, 107). Here, Bell selectively appropriates historical figures (some wrongly) in order to garner support for his particular position.
Bell’s approach to Scripture is comparably selective. In fact, his atomistic approach to the Scriptures ignores context, which should be the greatest determiner of meaning. A few examples should suffice. First, he takes multiple Old Testament texts that promise restoration to Israel and decontextualizes them, applying them to all people. Whatever “Israel” means, that question is paramount in understanding these texts. Second, in keeping with his embrace of apokatastasis, based on Ezekiel 16 and Matthew 11, he offers that there’s still hope for Sodom and Gomorrah. In this particular instance, Bell claims that since Jesus condemns Capernaum, there must be hope for Sodom (83–85). But, in a passage about judgment, Jesus’ intent is pretty clear: it will be worse for Capernaum on judgment day than it has been for Sodom, precisely because they reject Him. In other words, what they know about Him and do with what they know about Him matters quite a bit. Third, in what amounts to prooftexting, Bell lifts many verses from the gospels, including John 6, 10, and 12, in order to persuade his readers that all people will be saved through Jesus Christ. He specifically employs John 12:48 in order to persuade us to embrace nonjudgmental attitudes about the eternal destiny of people because “Jesus says, he ‘did not come to judge the world, but to save the world’” (160). Although Bell is right that Christians are not judges, the theological argument of the book is muted by the very next verse that indicates that judgment is, indeed, coming: “The Word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day (John 12:48).” Fourth, decontextualization allows Bell to argue for a broadness in salvation that amounts to Christian pluralism, an “exclusivity on the other side of inclusivity” (155). Taking John 14:6 as his starting point, he writes “what [Jesus] doesn’t say is how, or when, or in what manner the mechanism functions that gets people to God through him” (154). In this, he once again ignores context, for in the same chapter Jesus Himself gives faith as the “how” by which people come to God through Him. Overall, the broader context of John, informed by such verses as John 3:18 and 3:36, which indicate that salvation comes to those who believe, while judgment “remains” upon all who do not believe in Christ, is ignored. The common thread in all these examples is Bell’s refusal to embrace a God that judges sin, which is not surprising considering that his burden from the beginning is to re-tell the “Jesus story” in such a way that “Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy” can be heard anew (viii). Without a doubt, this is a noble goal. However, if getting to “God’s retelling of our story” (173), requires the fragmenting of the Scripture—an ironically modern approach—in order to retell it, then many Christians will reject it, choosing instead to read the Scripture with the pre-commitments of the early church, which believed that the Scriptures must be taken as a whole, a whole whose story teaches both that Christ came “because of our salvation” and that He would come again “to judge the living and the dead.” Bell’s story is different.
