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)