My Emergent Letters to Friends: Learning to Trust God

My Emergent Letters to Friends: Learning to Trust God

“can anything be less plain than the intent of our speech

as versus the composition of the correctness of our speech?”

– skinhead

Hey skinhead,

I have to disagree with what you’re saying about Rob's views on heaven, hell, love, etc. after watching his livestream from NYC. I think he would even say that he doesn't agree on the traditional views of these things. And not even going off what Kevin Deyoung said but in just reading quotes from the book itself, mocking a God who would send someone to literal, eternal hell if they got hit by a car w/o believing in Jesus.

And so, though I appreciate your response to my emails I have to disagree & point out that Rob neglects major chunks of scripture in order to try and make points in the book. It's grievous to me to read and hear the things he's saying and I lovingly want to caution you to see that what he's saying in many places in the book are unbiblical and even mock the God of the Scriptures:

"Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way according to the person telling them the gospel, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would insure that they would have no escape from an endless future of agony." – from Love Wins by Rob Bell

Thanks again for your emails.

- your brother in Christ

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Dear brother, Hi! -

I have yet to read Rob's book but am very familiar with his convictions having been engaged with his ministry the past dozen or so years. After a third reading of the Rob quote above I would give him a pass by saying the following: he’s not questioning the eternal torments of hell and its reality as it would seem on the surface. But that he’s saying that when that time of finality comes in a person’s life it will be finally and solemnly at that free-willed being’s rejection of all things Christ. Here’s my summary of “Love Wins” for which I’ll give to Rob partial inspiration and to the Lord the greater portion of inspiration:

“We are to over-expound and over-preach the hope and the grace that is in God as we preach the solemnity of the horrors of hell found in this life as it is in the next without Christ.

Furthermore, this message isn’t simply for others, but it is for us to know too - of the hope and grace that is in God and is ours both now, as heaven touches earth through Jesus, even as it will be ours later, in heaven.

That we as Christians do not live with a gospel that has become an evangelical-evacuation policy from earth, but with a gospel that is every-much as good news to us, as to those around us, in this present day of the here-and-now because of the presence of the Kingdom of God enacted at the Cross and through the Holy Spirit in response to Christ's atonement on the Cross.

As is the solemn reality and responsibility of the hell we deliver to people around us by living unChrist-like; or the hell that non-Christians live in each day in their brokenness apart from Christ; or the hell that humanity is experiencing at its own hands, when the love of God through Jesus is not being lived, shared, breathed and experienced.

Ultimately, the last book of the bible, Revelation, shows us in exquisite grief the finality of mankind rejecting the love of God when love doesn’t win; as well as the finality of God’s resurrection (and resurrected kingdom) because love did win.”

- skinhead

But asked another way, I think the broader reading of Rob is more to the point that my fellow classmate Scot McKnight has earlier observed these past several weeks in the links that I have sent to you:

Link 1 - My horror, then, was three-fold [to the evangelical response to Rob Bell's book, LOVE WINS]: first, the image of God that is depicted when hell becomes the final, or emphatic word to the world [as evangelicals missionize the Gospel]; second, the absence of any context for how to talk about judgment in the Bible [in the evangelical kit of 'Becoming Saved']; and, third, the kinds of emotion [we are seeing] expressed [to Rob's book, which isn't pretty]. We saw too much gloating, pride and triumphalism on both sides of the LOVE WINS issue. I felt like those watching the sinking of the Titanic but who didn’t cringe at the thought of thousands sinking into the Atlantic to a suffocating death. We were instead singing and dancing to a jig that we were right or had been predicting the sinking all along.

Link 2 - To talk about wrath apart from this depiction of the grace-consuming God is to put forward a view of God that is not only unbiblical but potentially monstrous. And, to put forward a view of God that is absent of final judgment, yes of wrath, yes of eternal judgment, is to offer a caricature of the Bible’s God.

No one should begin to talk about hell without spending fifteen minutes in pausing prayer to consider the horror of it all.

Further, I find some people can get intoxicated on wrath and it can lead them in a triumphalist dance of anger. And I find some who get intoxicated with a flabby sense of grace. Isn’t it better to get lost in the dance of God’s good and triumphant grace and of making things right? If we are to be intoxicated, let it be from imbibing the hope and grace of God’s love which will both win and be right in the End.

- Scot McKnight

By way of summary, and as I’ve repeatedly have said in the past, the enigma that is Rob Bell can be a slippery-sloop to those who chose to listen selectively (and this is truth of both sides - both of his detractors and well as of his supporters). He too easily can mean whatever we wish him to mean. And maybe I think of Jesus when I write this too. For his listeners also had all types of responses to his messages as well.

And so I think I get Rob more than I had in the past, in his cynicisms, his irreverent apologies and statements, in his quirkiness that comes with an impassioned heart and soul, and a mind overwhelmed with speaking God better to the misunderstanding lost masses. He's willing to bend on exact statements to allow his congregants and audience to become further engaged with the ministries and the minitrations of Jesus and Jesus' flesh-and-blood fellowship on this side of heaven. He's willing to entertain extra-biblical suppositions and questions to raise the awareness of both personal and corporate introspection, trusting in the Spirit's overall leading to teach and to guide in questions of mis-understanding and mis-statement.

But it is still my and your responsibility to cut through his words to get to the sense of the argument (as versus just dumping on him as a brother in Christ). The quote you gave is hard to defend in-and-of itself but then again, I don’t wish to. Nor do I wish to defend Rob. I stand with him, I pray for him, and I treat him in love as my brother in Christ as we and many other emergent Christians re-learn God’s heart for the lost and for our fellowship of brothers and sisters.

Too, when I get a chance to read LOVE WINS I’m sure I’ll see a lot of similar statements just like there were in his past books. Still, I know that Rob believes in the evangelical doctrines of Hell, Heaven, Sin, Judgment, Jesus. So the fight isn’t there. The fight is over evangelicalism's words and formulaic statements of correctness that have lost the heart of God in their zeal for the truth of God, and for which postmodernistic books and writings wish not to similarly evidence. You have an austere evangelical readership wanting correct, specific statements as versus a "mellow" emergent body of believers wishing to lovingly retell the gospel to a non-Christian world through relational and service ministries about Jesus; a world that is totally unfamiliar with the centuries-old church dogmas and doctrines that have overtaken the evangelical church, and have removed the life and heart of God in the process.

Doctrines? Yes, if they are biblically received. But no, if they are more important than the people that those doctrines minister to. I'm all for correct doctrines but I'm also for allowing people to express their fears and misunderstandings and to allow for further personal expressions of God. We can correct their (and ours) misunderstandings later through biblical study, but it is more important first to find the heartbeat of God and to resurrect it into the pulse of dying mankind. Let us do the hard work of ER first and then later get the whole man healthier over a process of time and involvement, benevolent engagement and practice, faithful living and endeavor, merciful love and living.

So then, in order for us as evangelicals to be able to read postmodern/emergent writings it will require that we put away our theological formulas, our compendiums of exact scientific speech, and re-double our encryption efforts to hear and read Rob’s (and others) words for the intent that is being conveyed. It’s not easy to do and after 12 years of listening, investigating, questioning I think have adapted enough now to do it. And by “adaptation” I don’t mean that I’ve left my doctrinal heritage or legacies but that I’m re-learning how to better speak my heritage in more relevant forms and fashions using postmodernistic methods that are highly creative and deeply personal and loving to the non-Christian, non-churched audience.

Peace,

skinhead