Quick-review: Love Wins

I have written a much longer thing about this book for other purposes, but really just want to make a few much briefer comments here.  This is partly because it won't be a "quick" review if I don't, and partly because of Jon Dyer's timely article "Let not many of you presume to be bloggers" which was posted at the height of the blogging frenzy about 'Love Wins'.

What is Bell trying to do with this book?  I think it's this: soften the edges of the 'traditional' view of judgment so as to make the Christian faith more appealing to non-Christians and less problematic to Bible-believers.  And if we're honest, who has not been tempted to do so?  We're all looking for the way to make it more...well, comfortable.  But from an evangelical position, such a wish cannot be the dominant force in how we look at what the Bible has to say.  Which leads to a number of concerns about the book - all of which I give as provisional, in that it is possible I have not read the text closely enough, and perhaps were Rob Bell here to comment he would show me how I have erred.  However, as it stands right now, what bothers me is this:

1. It's pretty dull.  It promises to deal with the biggest question facing humanity, but manages (for me) to make that unexciting.
2. Contra Tim Keller's maxim that we should present the opposing view as well as we possibly can, Bell presents the 'traditional view' as something incoherent, positing concepts that are complementary or held in tension as competing and irreconcilable.
3. On the plus side he does ask some useful questions which probably many Christians struggle with and we need to develop better answers for them.
4. The most infuriating thing is how checking out his argument is routinely obscured: no footnotes, no interaction with other interpretations, not even complete Bible references.  This is very worrying when bearing in mind younger Christians who might struggle to followup many of his (controversial and sometimes tenuous) claims...
5. ...which is very important for when he fires off a magazine of verses to prove a point but without context - eg.in pulling together many texts to show God's justice is always corrective (p.85ff) he largely draws on verses promising restoration after the Exile: texts which neither refer to eternal punishment nor even, by and large, to individuals who were corrected, as most of them died in Babylon.
6. Is he a universalist?  Maybe, but having given several reasons for presuming most people will be saved (ie.  hell is an offputting idea, God's love beats any other criteria for deciding how God might react to sin, God's judgments are always restorative) he then leaves the door wide open to assume pretty much everyone will be saved, maybe even post-mortem (p.76).   Or maybe not (p.115) as, having led us up to edge of universalism, he basically says "But who knows?  And we don't have to decide".
7. There are also, sadly, many unqualified assumptions and interpetations of Biblical texts (pp.26, 51, 85 for example) that are occasionally quite odd.
8. Again, on the plus side, he does eventually emphasise the cross - but even here in a way that suffers from vagueness.

I'm really loathe, in light of the outrage its publication caused, to be harsh - and indeed have cautioned against hard responses to Rob Bell on several occasions.  But it really isn't a great book.

Interestingly, my wife pointed out a paragraph in an unrelated blog written by someone who has moved away from the 'traditional' view.  It's interesting because of its gut-reaction factor: the writer was concerned about the apparent kidnapping of a small child that had just occurred:

And I cried in the kitchen, pouring out cereal, and (my husband) quietly admitted that it is in these times that he really, really wishes there was eternal, conscious punishment, the worst of any hell, for men like this because anything else seems not-enough for what that poor boy might be going through, for even the act of making a child ask for his mama and then keeping him from her is a sin beyond any I can fathom.

Hell is a hard thing to contemplate, and like CS Lewis many of us would remove the doctrine if it lay in our power to do so.  But that is hardly the last word or the only deeply felt and authentic response to it, as that quote shows.  And it certainly isn't the way to govern how we interpret the Bible.