The Allusive Nature of Rob Bell’s Alleged Universalism

I was wondering if you would be able to help me.  It has been some time, as I suspect it has been for many of us, since I have read Love Wins.  As the dust has settled and everyone has actualized their deep need to let everyone know what they thought of it, a lingering question remains for me?  Does Rob Bell explicitly embrace or objectively state something that necessarily makes him a universalist in the book?

As I surfed the tide of the world wide web via youtube I found this video in which Rob says that he does not think that God is like that.  “That” being someone who would upkeep the punishment for 17 million years of a 17 year who rejected Christ and then died.  The video ends before the answer is completely unpacked.  Perhaps Bobby Conway is more accurate when at the beginning of this video he suggests that Bell is a “post-mortem nuanced purgatorial inclusivist.”  How he would explain that I do not know because I turned the video off after the first few minutes when he prayed God would correct Bell. 

What I should do is reread the book and scan it with this specific question in mind.  What I did do was quickly scour the chapter “Does God Get What God Wants.”  In that chapter I found this statement:

“Will everybody be saved,

or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choices?

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.” (p. 115)

This statement only reaffirms my first impression about the book.  Love Wins is not about universalism. It is about participationist soteriology.  It argues that choices we make actually form us and that the sum of the choices make us someone who is either compatible or incompatible with heaven or more explicitly the kingdom described and embodied by Christ.  So will some people who make Christ conforming choices without knowing Christ be in heaven?  “Those are questions … we simply respect.”

But with your help I could see something I did not before.  So if you would be willing and you remember reading something that renders universalism undeniably present in the book, please share and include a page number.  Would be much obliged for the help.

Thanks. 

Jesus/Religion Guy

In response to this,

all of this from Rachel Held Evan's blog:

"Best Response to Jeff Bethke’s Jesus/Religion Video:
I read a lot of fantastic responses the now-famous “I love Jesus, but I hate religion” video. But I must say, my favorite response of the week came from Bethke himself. In an email exchange with Kevin DeYoung, Bethke responded to DeYoung’s criticism with this: 

“I just wanted to say I really appreciate your article man. It hit me hard. I’ll even be honest and say I agree 100%. God has been working with me in the last 6 months on loving Jesus AND loving his church. For the first few years of walking with Jesus (started in ’08) I had a warped/poor paradigm of the church and it didn’t build up, unify, or glorify His wife (the Bride). If I can be brutally honest I didn’t think this video would get much over a couple thousand views maybe, and because of that, my points/theology wasn’t as air-tight as I would’ve liked. If I redid the video tomorrow, I’d keep the overall message, but would articulate, elaborate, and expand on the parts where my words and delivery were chosen poorly… My prayer is my generation would represent Christ faithfully and not swing to the other spectrum….thankful for your words and more importantly thankful for your tone and fatherly like grace on me as my elder. Humbled. Blessed. Thankful for painful growth.” 

A guy who can respond to criticism with that much openness and that much humility gets nothing but respect from me."

I found this both inspiring and convicting.  Hope I can respond this way if I find myself in a similar situation. 

Long Live the King

Those close to me know that since my seminary journey concluded I’ve drifted towards and have become convinced by the New Perspective on Paul.  Of the many things that it has changed in my thinking is my former belief that Paul’s primary soteriological agenda is to get individuals to merely put their faith in Jesus so that He can save their souls. 

Because James’s Dunn has argued, I think convincingly, that Paul speaks of “works of righteousness” not as the moral effort referred to by James chapter 2, but rather ethnic boundary markers erected by an identity barren postexilic Jewish faith, this has liberated me to ask deeper questions about the nature of the participationist faith Jesus calls us to.   Instead these works of righteousness refer to the (chiefly) circumcision, Sabbath observation, and food regulation.  So when Paul condemns works of righteousness, he is not attacking the moral effort that forms us but specific identity markers that Jews had put in place to remind gentiles that they were insufficiently Jewish.

Alas a large problem for the early church of mixed ethnic backgrounds was the looming question what exactly does it mean to be the people of God?  Do the gentiles need to be circumcised?  Do gentiles need to follow kosher food laws?  You can imagine the racial tension that might have crept up in those early communities. 

Two things consistently strike me as I now read the epistles.  1. How often when Paul speaks of “works of righteousness” “being saved by faith”—immediately this discussion is followed by questions of ethnic relationship.  Thus faith in Jesus is not a magical confession leading to double imputation, but rather a confessional starting point that justifies and begins our journey of participation in the community of God. 2.  How often Paul moves from this discussion to a call for the church to be whole, one, unified or most popularly “reconciled.” 

Thus as we theologize about the New Testament and more specifically Paul we must confess that one of the loudest themes of the cross and primary objectives of atonement is not just the salvation of the individual sinner, but also the reconciliation of God’s good creation—played out in the instance of the church between the ethnic relationship between Jews and gentiles. 

So on this, a day when we remember the Reverend Dr. MLK, I thought it appropriate that my devotional reading from Ephesians should yield this, 

Ephesians 2:11-22

So on this day we celebrate a saint who practiced the reconciling vision of the cross better than most.  Long live the vision of the King.  Double entendre intended. 

Proud Pastor

We are in the last week of the advent season, which at UBC is the week of love.  As is sometimes the case, I struggled to shape the sermon around the theme because of the abuse of the word love in our culture.  I settled on Psalm 89, which is the alternative reading from the Hebrew Bible. 

The text thrust me into the idea of covenantal faithfulness.  I shared about the difference between our cultural conception of the feeling of love or being in love and the Hebrew idea of hessed/emet.

On Tuesday this last week I got a call from the guidance counselor at the middle school that we work with through several of our outreach programs.  She explained that they had three students whose families needed help with Christmas because another church was unable fulfill its commitment.  I explained that most of our congregation was gone because of Baylor’s schedule, but that I’d check with the rest of the staff.  We unanimously agreed to give it whirl.  The guidance counselor dropped off the information on Tuesday afternoon and we were overwhelmed by the list of 41 presents.

Our idea was to shape the need of the families as an opportunity to respond to the idea of love.  So in the last few moments of the sermon I explained the situation and gave directions for people to help if they were able.  Katie, made individual slips of paper that listed the gift needs, which she hung on our tree for people to grab in the lobby after the service.  I explained that the presents needed to be bought and wrapped in 24 hours.  We were skeptical, but hopeful.  Most people were getting ready to travel.  Christmas budgets had been spent.  We figured money and time were commodities in short supply.

By the time I got out into the lobby after the service I found a line of people asking what they could get because all the slips were gone.  Katie suggested we make a sign that asked for gift cards to restaurants and local grocery stores. 

On Monday afternoon I headed into the office to get some work done before we jetted for the holidays.   I was greeted by this … our hallway wall lined with presents.

Undoubtedly the best moment of this Christmas Season for me. 

So proud of UBC.  They never fail to give.

This is love embodied.  This is the practice of incarnation.

Merry Christmas

Christmas moment

Last years enthused Christmas-present-opener-moment went to my son Roy for this ...

with much joy in heart, he opened an Imaginext Toy Story 3 Trash Dump.  

This year we have a new winner.  Lilli is an avid collector of baby dolls.  Since Lindsay has not given her free reign over her baby sister Mabel, Lilli received a Bitty Baby from Santa Clause. 

One Question for the NT Wright

I think Tom Wright’s work is incredibly helpful. However, after reading Justification, if given the chance, I would ask him about one comment. On page 252, the second to last page, Wright writes,

“Finally, as is already clear from above, this lawcourt verdict, implementing God’s covenant plan, and all based on Jesus Christ himself, is announced both in the present, with the verdict issued on the basis of faith and faith alone, and also in the future, on the day when God raises from the dead all those who are already indwelt by the Spirit. The present verdict gives the assurance that the future verdict will match it; the Spirit gives the power through which that future verdict, when given, will be seen to be in accordance with the life that the believer has then lived.”

As I made my way through the book it struck me that this is primarily a debate about the rejection of imputed righteousness. Chasing the trajectory of imputed righteousness, Wright examines (among others) Augustine and argues that his appropriation of imputed righteousness shifted the lawcourt metaphor to a medical one … “a kind of remedial spiritual surgery, involving a “righteousness implant” which, like an artificial heart, begins to enable the patient to do things previously impossible.” (p. 91).

This is also why it makes sense for Wright to write a book called After You Believe, which is essentially an overlay of Nichomachean Ethics on Paul while redefining Aristotle’s telos from Aristotelian happiness to something like life in Christ. Participationist soteriology is deeply concerned with conformity to Christ through the habituated practiced of the will. Said differently … discipleship. Since righteousness is not imputed it must be developed through practice.

Here's more.  Wright asserts that, “And at that judgment seat the verdict will be in accordance with one’s ‘works.’” (p. 108) The judgment seat will be a scene the character is squeezed and we get to see who we are. We will have worked to become something. And also why it is meaningful for Wright to point out “ ‘salvation’ and ‘justification’ have been tossed around as mere synonyms, both being thereby denied their proper force.” (p. 170) For Wright they are not the same. But if all that is true the initial statement strikes me as inconsistent.

If justification is about entrance into the community of God (assuming the ecclesiological badge) and not a “medical metaphor” then it would follow that there is plenty of room to fail once inside of the community. Why would that pronouncement necessarily be the same?

Given Wrights theological genius and exegetical ability I assume I’ve misunderstood him on the point raised in the initial quote. Any thoughts would be welcomed.

necessity

I really don't like the inspirational/glance-at-my-picture and feel bad about your life campaigns that are often found on facebook.  That said this image was gripping, probably because I feel like the ladies on the right. I love Christmas.  I love lots of presents and I love all the cliche culturally manufactured moments that surround Christmas.  I want to be Clark Griswold. 

Anticipating criticism, someone will probably object that these are exploited orphans who serve the purpose of making photos like this more poignant.  Granted, but let's acknowledge that some version of both parties in this picture exist.  One having something to do with the condition of the other.  

Do I think all you dirty capitalist Americans (that was sarcastically pejorative) should fight Christmas consumption.  No, I'm one of them.  I just hope you carry this reality in your heart and include it in your Christmas imagination.