Is Protestant Theology Apostolic Theology?

“If salvation is dependent on having the right Protestant theology, how could the apostles be saved?” – Mickey Maudlin

Or, to riff off of William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

Protestant
theology

believed with exact
thought

word and contemporary
worship.

Erasing Hell: A Rational Response to Rob Bell

There has recently been a flurry of publishing pushing back against Rob Bell’s Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Francis Chan’s book Erasing Hell: What God said about eternity, and what we made up, Mark Galli’s book God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins, the book of essays Is Hell Real or Does Everyone Go To Heaven?, Brian Jones’s Hell Is Real (But I Hate to Admit It), and Michael Wittmer’s Christ Alone: An Evangelical Response to Rob Bell’s Love Wins are all responses to Bell. Bell has created a cottage industry overnight.

So what should a proper response be to a book that has caused such fury, disdain, contemplation, confusing and rebuttal? Francis Chan delivers a healthy, rational response to Bell in his book. Chan’s book is a concise overlook of conservative evangelical theology on hell with a surprising openness to mystery concerning the afterlife. Chan takes a different route than typical response books, which is appropriate in responding to a book that is as contemplative as Bell’s. He keeps away from explicit dismissal for the most part, there are a few in there that would have become heady and might have bogged the conversation down. He also keeps away from gross over-generalizations of Bell, though he does sweep him up into an oversimplified discussion of universalism at the beginning of the book.

Chan’s response to characterizations of Bell is actually pretty weak. He tries not to be academic and ends up glossing over nuances of Bell’s conversation. A response to the aura of criticism around Bell should not be tucked into a few paragraphs and a bunch of footnotes.

On the other hand, Chan’s response to the questions and assumptions Bell makes is solid. The best chapter in the book is Chan’s outline of first-century Jewish thought on hell, something that is very valid to the conversation and completely absent from Bell’s work, which does not help Bell’s work stand up to any historical or critical scrutiny (the excuse that Bell’s work is pastoral and not academic may not be able to hold up to the weight of Chan’s use of Dunn and Wright’s methods of exploring first-century Judaism).

The book does start out a bit fluffy, but the more Chan gets away from the aura surrounding Bell and how one should respond the stronger the book becomes. Additionally, Chan sets a great tone in the last chapters by trying to set down an apologetic for a conservative evangelical theology of hell while appreciating and realizing the severe limitations anyone has when discussing the afterlife. Chan tries to work with the Scriptures as best he can without reading Protestant theology into the text, though in places Chan does make some connections between judgment and hell that are not anywhere in the context of the gospels, epistles and Revelation. He should be commended for the effort.

In short, Chan’s book is a rational response to Bell because he keeps the dismissals and generalizations to a minimum and presents a solid argument while allowing for God to be judge and not humankind.

Erasing Hell
Francis Chan & Preston Sprinkle
David C. Cook
$8.99 (Amazon)

That Book Rob Bell Wrote

It took going to hell and back to get him into the evangelical time out corner, but Rob Bell has finally unseated Brian McLaren  for the coveted position of “liberal wolf in evangelical sheep’s clothing.” From flippant dismissals from fellow Midwestern pastors to bewilderment to calls of heresy, Bell has found a sweet spot for dissension and anger.

I tried to stay out of this conversation altogether, writing a while ago that worship is our vocation, not deciding who goes to hell and who does not (“Who’s the Judge?“). Maybe providentially, I was offered a pre-publication copy of Francis Chan’s Erasing Hell: What God said about eternity, and the things we made up, which is a response to Bell’s Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. So, not wanting to put the cart before the horse, I read both books over the past two weeks.

First off, Rob Bell believes in hell. He really does. If you don’t think he does then you haven’t read the book. In fact, I think Bell’s book injects one of the single most vital theological arguments on hell to the evangelical conversation to come around in a long time. The main thesis of Bell’s book is not universalism lite, as most critics have argued (more on that later), but that hell does exist. Right here, right now, in our midst.

While Bell does not couch it this way (it would be too point blank for his style), what he sets up in the majority of the book is a counter-part to an already/not-yet view of the kingdom: an already/not-yet view of hell. In arguing that hell exists right here, right now, in the gross injustice, sickness, hopelessness, rage, war, rape, disease, poverty, pillaging, natural disasters, etc., Bell makes a strong case for taking hell very seriously. Love Wins makes a very strong case for a literal interpretation of the role of the kingdom in fighting against the gates of hell and taking death, destruction and darkness head on, like Christ did.

But then there is that pesky chapter 7. Here Bell makes a case for a quasi-universalism. Possibly. I don’t really know. Chapter 7 was really hard to follow and understand. The parable of the prodigal son seemed to be taken a bit out of context, and I couldn’t really follow the logic. I think Love Wins would have been a very different book if this chapter had been more focused, or maybe left out altogether.

For those of you who have heard the warning about Love Wins, that it will lead you down the path of heresy, I don’t buy it, and neither should you. Read it for yourself. Maybe you can figure out Chapter 7!

Love Wins
Rob Bell
HarperOne
$13.79 (Amazon)

Farewell Rapture!

Like John Piper flippantly dismissing Rob Bell, I’ll let N.T. Wright say “Farewell to the Rapture“:

The American obsession with the second coming of Jesus — especially with distorted interpretations of it — continues unabated.  Seen from my side of the Atlantic, the phenomenal success of the Left Behind books appears puzzling, even bizarre. Few in the U.K. hold the belief on which the popular series of novels is based: that there will be a literal “rapture” in which believers will be snatched up to heaven, leaving empty cars crashing on freeways and kids coming home from school only to find that their parents have been taken to be with Jesus while they have been “left behind.”  This pseudo-theological version of Home Alone has reportedly frightened many children into some kind of (distorted) faith.

N.T. Wright wrote that in August 2001.

I first read it in 2004 and it has stuck with me. It’s eerie how relevant it still is today.

Who’s the Judge?

Rob Bell stirred up a quite the controversy with his book Love Wins. I haven’t read it, though I feel like I have read it through osmosis. The basic premise of the book is a questioning of our preconceived notions about judgement. Questioning is always a good thing. It is like iron, sharpening our heads and hearts and souls. Through questioning comes learning and knowledge. If we don’t have disequilibrium we will never have knowledge.

Let me repeat, I haven’t read the book. Taking a step back from the book, the response to the book has brought to the front a full spectrum of theological questions concerning judgment:

Who is saved? How they are saved? How do they exist in the afterlife?

and the converse:

Who is damned? How they are damned? How do they exist (if at all) in the afterlife?

I think that the questions of judgment stirred up in response to the Love Wins debate on both sides are adventures in missing the point.

Why? Because these questions are stated from our human perspective.  This is because our theology of judgement is from an Enlightenment perspective. In Western theology and philosophy there is an error that we fall into, as Descartes did, of proving God’s existence through our own. Descartes was a thinking person, therefore he was a being, and therefore there was a Being. This frames the basis for God’s existence in theology and philosophy on our terms.

We have done the same with the judgement debate. We say God is the judge, but then tell God what his judgement should be, as if any person actually knows what happens to a 13 year old girl who dies in the jungles of South America or Compton or Beverly Hills. We try to extrapolate and surmise we know what happens to babies or people who haven’t heard the gospel or who have backslid and any other vague salvific hypothetical we can think of.

These are good intentions, to try to assure ourselves of matters that are left to the will of God. But there is the rub: it is God’s will not ours.

It is not our role to be judge.

More importantly: it is not our role to announce the verdict over anyone. To do so smacks of hubris and idolatry, because it puts our morality and equity above God’s. In our own court of law only a judge may hand down a sentence and judgement. The defendant or prosecutor has his own opinion as to what the sentence and judgement may be, but it is only for the judge to decide. How more so should it be for God’s judgement!

It is not our role to be judge or to pronounce judgement. We have been given a great role of our own: to worship. You may ask, how does worship relate to judgement? We worship because we believe that God is the King. As Lord of Heaven and Earth we bow to his will. So, let us put away our limbos and ages of accountability. Let us put away our hypotheticals and our convoluted theological puzzles. Let us go forward and proclaim God as the one who is coming, as the Psalmist writes:

Say among the nations, “The LORD is king!
The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved.
He will judge the peoples with equity.”
Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice;
let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
let the field exult, and everything in it.
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
before the LORD; for he is coming,
for he is coming to judge the earth.
He will judge the world with righteousness,
and the peoples with his truth. (Psalm 96)

Why Business Matters to God

I never thought I would end up spending most of my working hours in the business world. It wasn’t a place I thought I’d be, and it took me by surprise. I had never wanted anything to business, much less big business, yet here I am.

I really wrestled with questions of the validity of my occupation. Business is not seen very positively these days in the church or anywhere else. We may be critical of business, but it touches every aspect of our lives. Sometimes I would despair that this necessary evil was everywhere.

I began to change my outlook on business as more and more businesses have sprung up that do not have profit as their ultimate goal. Some business could do important, meaningful and even kingdom work. You just can’t lump Tom’s Shoes in with Monsanto. Jeff Van Duzer, the dean of business at Seattle Pacific University, captures the purposefulness and godliness of business in his excellent book Why Business Matters to God. In it, he argues that business should have human flourishing as its ultimate goal. You can read my full review at The Englewood Review of Books. An excerpt:

Operating within this “messy middle” between Fall and the Kingdom requires businesspersons to approach business from a kingdom mindset. Too often, in Van Duzer’s perspective, this has meant lowering businesspersons down to second class citizens in the kingdom, whose only purpose is to make money and tithe. Businesspersons, when trying to bring God’s economy into the “messy middle,” are engaged in vocations that are pleasing to God. This means that all the cornerstones of a modern conception of business, even profit, are seen as tools to further God’s economy.