I just finished Rob Bell’s controversial new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, And the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. His central idea is that hell -- understood as a destination for people of eternal, conscious, torment -- is incompatible with God’s character; hence, such a place cannot exist. None of his arguments are new (and he readily admits this), as they are arguments that we sometimes hear about salvation from mainline Protestants and liberal Catholics. Bell, however, already has a significant following within the evangelical community, and so when those arguments came from his pen, they become newly controversial.
I am starting a blog series that is not so much a direct, point by point response to any of Bell’s arguments, but rather a broader response to the kinds of conclusions he comes up with. We don’t have to go any farther than the subtitle to realize that Bell is making some spectacular knowledge claims here – about ‘the fate of every person who ever lived.’ Now of course the subtitle is intentionally obnoxious (that’s what gets people to pick up the book while they perusing Barnes and Noble), but it is not false to say that Bell is making these kinds of bold claims.
What I am sympathetic with is Bell’s attack on the traditional fundamentalist/evangelical understanding of salvation and hell. For clarity, let me summarize what I will call the evangelical hell doctrine (EHD): “All people who believe that Jesus died for their sins and was resurrected and accept this sacrifice will go to heaven, and all people who don’t believe and accept it will go to a place of eternal, conscious, torment.”
Bell’s doctrine is obviously opposed to the EHD, but what the two doctrines have in common is that they make confident assertions about how God will handle things in the afterlife. What I will argue in the coming weeks is that such claims can never be supported by Scripture; they are based on wishful thinking (or you could call it ‘hope’ if you want a fancier word), but not much more.
