Bell’z Hellz

I’ve been skimming Rob Bell’s Love Wins yesterday and today, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out what all the commotion is over.  Yes, I get it: hell is one of those foundational religious concepts whose imagery is so deeply soaked with our historical faith that – at least initially – it can be hard to imagine what Christianity would like like with out it…

But c’mon.  Have you watched Bell on his Nooma videos?  Have you really picked up the guy’s vibe from his books?  This is pretty soft stuff.  Yes, conservative naysayers call him a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing (“the WORST kind”) but all I read are the same frustrations I have: I don’t want my friends doomed to a concept of hell that I can’t buy into myself!

What I read in these pages are the natural questions that arise from that dissatisfaction.  Much of that dissatisfaction comes from the very notion that Christians have any business at all judging anyone, given our spotty, often sad and sordid history:

When one woman in our church invited her friend to come to one of our services, he asked her if it was a Christian church.  She said yes, it was.  He then told her about Christians in his village in eastern Europe who rounded up Muslims in town and herded them into a building where they opened fire on them with their machine guns and killed them all.  He explained to her that he was a Muslim and had no interest in going to her Christian church.

But we’re the ones with “the answer,” right? And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love…

I think what pisses off a lot of folks is that Bell talks about “hell” in terms of “hyperbole,” using “hell” as a sort of allegory for “hell on earth” – children mutilated with machetes, raped women, genocide, torture… “Do I believe in a literal hell?” Bell asks.  ”Of course.”  And he indicates to the hells we create here on earth.  Evangelicals want an eternal, ethereal hell where the soul is tormented for rejecting Christ.  Doesn’t matter how one lives or what one does – whether one was kind or lived with love, compassion, grace or selflessness – only that one said the words (or thought the thoughts) “Jesus, forgive me, come into my heart…” even though those words — and that very concept — have no occurrence in the New Testament.

Bell writes:

We need a loaded, volatile, adequately, violent, dramatic, serious word to describe the very real consequences we experience when we reject the good and true and beautiful life that God has for us.  We need a word that refers to the big, wide, terrible evil that comes from the secrets hidden deep within our hearts all the way to the massive, society-wide collapse and chaos that comes when we fail to live in God’s world God’s way.

And for that,

the word “hell” works quite well.

Let’s keep it.

I’m not going to spend a lot more time going over this book.  As I’ve said before, lots of other folks have written more (and better) analyses.  I’ve never met Bell, but I get the feeling he’s a nice guy.  He’s got a generous heart and it shows in his writing.

Now my critique: in his other books I’ve read (Velvet Elvis, Sex God and this) I get the distinct feeling that I’m being written to as a high school senior.  The font on the page is big.  The layout is scattered, poetic – lots of returns, creating stanzas spread across the paper.  A bit melodramatic.  A bit indulgent?  Maybe.  It’s certainly accessible, and that accessibility is probably why Bell’s book sales are as high as they are.  He’s creative – I don’t want to knock him for that.  But I never feel like I’m the audience he’s speaking to.  I was in a young adult Bible Study a few years ago (I was probably 28 or 29) and we were watching the Nooma videos, and we had some good discussion from them, and like I said before – I like the guy… but the videos felt more geared toward high school students.  So with Bell’s books.

That’s not a slam, but it’s interesting.  There are thousands of critiques of Bell online, attacking him – especially for this most recent book.  Bloggers, pastors, theologians and pseudo-theologians are going after Bell’s book as if it’s a serious piece of theological work.  It isn’t, and I don’t think Bell would ever argue that it is.  It’s a conversation starter.  It’s a Gen-Y conversation starter.  And more power to him, for creating it!  But going after Bell with heavy theological artillery is like The UTNE Reader critiquing Reading Rainbow for being sophomoric.  If we’re going to start weighing every piece of writing by some kind of (supposedly) objective, intensive rubric, then fundamentalists will need to answer for their crappy salvation tracts, dangerously ahistorical theology and hermeneutics, and dozens of poor and lazy translations of biblical texts.  And that’s not even a good comparison.  Again, Bell’s book isn’t presented as a piece of dogma or a theological treatise.  It’s an attempt at wrestling with information and material that has been around us, in our churches, in our history, in our canon, in our hearts, and – yes – even in the midst of our orthodoxy – for thousands of years.  By choosing easier answers, we wounded ourselves, and we wounded the world around us.