The Grace Notes

Love Wins by Rob Bell: Chapters 7-8

in case you missed it:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapters 3-4
Chapters 5-6

Chapter 7: The Good News Is Better Than That

Here Rob Bell gives some insights into the story of the prodigal son (and his brother), and how God’s version of the story was better than either son’s self-deceived versions of either “his badness is his problem” or “his goodness is to his credit.” Good stuff.

Bell also goes back to the popular but questionable notions of the afterlife where “God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell.” As I’ve mentioned already, I agree that those notions are wrong, and I think they are misrepresentations even of traditional theology.

But Bell continues to sound not-so-untraditional: “We are free to accept or reject the invitation to new life that God extends to us. Our choice.” So what happened to all the questions at the beginning about people in specific circumstances who maybe don’t get what seems like a fair chance to accept or reject?

Chapter 8: The End Is Here

Bell never really goes back to address those kinds of questions. With two pages to go he concedes that he hasn’t really forgotten about all the judgment sounding passages in the Bible, from the guy who misuses his treasure and is “thrown outside into the darkness” to the wedding guests who are told “I don’t know you” to the weeds that are harvested and “tied in bundles to be burned.” Yes, Bell emphasizes God’s love and grace and corrects many corrupted culturalized views of Christian theology, but even as he suggests that hell might not be a real place, that “all” will be saved, that people might be able to change their minds after death, that Jesus might save people who don’t know he’s saving him… Bell still suggests that people will reject God and choose the judgment of, well, hell.

So where was the controversy again? Is Rob Bell not a “universalist” after all? Or does he still think all that judgment is temporary corrective stuff, even though he didn’t mention it again at the end when he talked about God’s love giving people the freedom to reject it? Is he just asking controversial questions without claiming to provide all the answers? Not that there’s not necessarily a place for that, but the ending just seemed kinda… anti-climactic. Oh well. It’s still a thought-provoking book with a heart for discerning the truth about God and a concern for people who have heard corrupted teachings about it all, both in the church and outside of it. But read at your own risk.

Love Wins By Rob Bell: Chapters 5-6

in case you missed it:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3-4

Chapter 5: Dying to Live

Bell describes Jesus’ death and resurrection. He critiques certain descriptions of the sacrifice as being overused, and I really like the multiple angles he gives to the most important event in history, summarized as:

What happened on the cross is like…

a defendant going free,
a relationship being reconciled,
something lost being redeemed,
a battle being won,
a final sacrifice being offered…
an enemy being loved.

If your cultural background is such that the battle metaphor of the conquest over death doesn’t resonate with you, try the “redemption” metaphor from the “world of business and finance and economics,” or the “justification” from the “world of courtrooms and judges and prosecutors and guilt and punishment.” (Maybe the Life of Pi narrator who thought it “didn’t make any sense” just needed to hear it from another angle.) The cross is so “massive and universe-changing” that it can be understood through a variety of perspectives. Beautiful and inspiring stuff.

Then Bell talks about all the symbolism of death leading to life. Good stuff. Almost traditional stuff, even. In fact, the whole chapter is so non-controversial it almost feels like the bookends about Eminem wearing a cross (“Did Eminem stumble upon this truth?) are stuck there to keep things a little edgy.

Chapter 6: There Are Rocks Everywhere

OK, now that Jesus’ death and resurrection are firmly established, Bell is ready to step on some traditional toes and suggest that through this Jesus might save some people who don’t look like traditional Christians. He references the story of Moses striking the rock to give water to the Israelites, and Paul’s interesting statement in 1 Corinthians 10 that “that rock was Christ.”

Christ is mentioned nowhere in the story. Moses strikes the rock, it provides water, and the people have something to drink…

Paul, however, reads another story in the story, insisting that Christ was present in that moment…

Jesus was there. Without anybody using his name. Without anybody saying that it was him…

Bell extrapolates from this story that Jesus can be involved without people knowing he’s involved, which is how he explains the verse I’ve always thought was the toughest hurdle for non-traditionalist salvation doctrine: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14) Bell cleverly explains that Jesus doesn’t say that “those coming to the Father through him will even know that they are coming exclusively through him,” so that’s how people can only be saved through Jesus but it still be possible for people from other religions to get into heaven. And let’s not forget Jesus’ cryptic words from John 10: “I have other sheep, which are not of this pen.”

Hmm.

It reminds me again of C. S. Lewis – this time in The Last Battle, of a passage that confused me as a child for its un-traditional vibe:

The Glorious One [Aslan] bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me…. Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him…

Hmm.

In general, I’m with Bell on a lot of it: Christians focusing too much and too narrowly on whether or not people are “getting in,” the idea that we might be surprised at who is there and who isn’t (“I never knew you!”), the idea that only God knows who is truly saved, etc, etc. And while I would never rule it out as a logical or theological impossibility, I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of… Jesus as a secret agent.

Can you really go from Christ being present in a rock (could it just have been a metaphor?) to arguing that Christ saves people who don’t know him? Sure, “Father, forgive them” even though they didn’t ask for it… but can you really follow Christ without knowing you’re following him? I don’t know.

next up:
Chapters 7-8

Space Atlas by James Trefil

Space Atlas is a cool collection of images and information about the universe, focusing mostly on the objects in our solar system but also featuring galaxies, black holes, pulsars, and other space stuff. I loved its up-to-date nature, with a lot of maps and images that have only been gathered by probes in the last couple of years. The text also has a lot of introductory-level explanations of a lot of space-related material, from the theory of relativity to how we calculate distances to dark matter and all kinds of other things.

I’d heard a lot of this stuff before but it was nice to get a refresher and to see where a lot of the science has gone in even just the last few years. There’s a conception that we haven’t done much in space since landing on the moon over forty years ago, and while it’s true that human exploration hasn’t really progressed, our exploration and understanding of the universe has increased a whole lot, thanks both to probes we’ve sent to other planets and fancier telescopes we’ve built on earth and put in orbit. (For example, the book says black holes weren’t even confirmed to exist until the 80′s!)

I’m also fascinated by how much we still don’t know about the universe. It seems like each planet in our solar system has some unique quirk (rotating the wrong way, for example) that confounds scientific theories of how the whole system came to be. And I love the whole concepts of dark matter and dark energy – our gravity equation doesn’t seem to work within some galaxies, where things that don’t seem to have enough mass to stick together are sticking together anyway, or between galaxies, where things that should be sticking together are flying apart, so, hey, there must be a whole bunch of invisible mass and energy out there that’s 19 times greater than all the stuff we can actually observe! That’s actually not too far from theology. If you like being awed by the wondrous detail of the universe, this book is a good place to start.

Love Wins By Rob Bell: Chapters 3-4

in case you missed it:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2

OK, now we’re getting to the good stuff! In Chapter 3 Bell offers his Biblical interpretation of hell. A summary of (my interpretation of) his main points:

1. Whenever Jesus uses the word “hell,” he uses a word referring to the town garbage pile. The “gnashing of teeth” was the wild animals fighting over scraps of food. (This is interesting, though Bell curiously does not explain the “weeping”.)

2. The other references to “eternal” punishment use a word that could be translated as something more temporary.

3. The references to such punishment are also always in the context of redemption and correction – for example, in 1 Timothy when Paul hands people “over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.”

In conclusion, “When we read ‘eternal punishment’ … Jesus isn’t talking about forever as we think of foreer. Jesus may be talking about something else, which has all sorts of implications for our understandings of what happens after we die…”

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Love Wins By Rob Bell: Chapter 2

in case you missed it:
Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Here Is The New There (Heaven)

In Chapter 2 Bell seeks to dispense with many of the popular notions of heaven that have crept into modern American Christianity, which is often hard to fully separate from the pop culture images of pearly gates and clouds and harps and whatnot. We read things like Revelation to remind ourselves that heaven is less about things like that and more about things like God’s throne and angels and not crying and yeah there’s some sort of feast in there somewhere but it’s still generally thought of as this vaguely fuzzy dream-like “other” place in some sort of alternate dimension that we get to by leaving Earth forever.

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Love Wins by Rob Bell: Chapter 1

I’m about two years late to the Rob Bell Controversy Party, so I’m going to make the most of it by blogging my long-winded reactions to every chapter, which I don’t expect many people to read anyway, but it will at least help organize my thoughts. I’m coming to this book with a fairly neutral opinion of Bell, having read and enjoyed Sex God and seen and enjoyed a few Nooma videos a few years back. I’m also coming to this book with a belief that the Bible does not state that everyone makes it to heaven, but I have a vague notion that Bell is claiming that the Bible may in fact state something like that, though I am not sure how strongly he is claiming that without reading the book, and I am attempting to come to it with as open of a mind as possible.

So, then, let’s begin Love Wins by Rob Bell.

Chapter 1: What About the Flat Tire?

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Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle

I enjoyed many of L’Engle’s novels as a kid (A Wrinkle In Time, Wind in The Door) and this non-fiction work caught my eye in the library. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith And Art is a relatively short book with scattered thoughts from the author on what it means to be a writer, a Christian, and a woman. Many of her thoughts are good and profound, although many of them were not new to me – what makes Christian art “Christian”, be it writing, music, or painting? Can a non-Christian produce art that glorifies God? God likes to chooses unqualified people. We forget how to have faith like a child. There is no conflict between science and religion. It was good to revisit some of those concepts, and it was also insightful to peek into some of the inspirations for her writing. Anyone interested in creating art for the glory of God would probably enjoy flipping through this book.