From an interview that Vic Cuccia did with Rob Bell. Read the whole thing on The Ooze:
You recently preached a sermon called “God wants to save Christians from hell.” I was discussing the message with a guy who after hearing this message was a bit disturbed and somehow came to the conclusion that you didn’t believe in a literal hell. Let me ask you, do you believe in a literal hell that is defined simply as eternal separation from God?
Well, there are people now who are seriously separated from God. So I would assume that God will leave room for people to say “no I don’t want any part of this”. My question would be, does grace win or is the human heart stronger than God’s love or grace. Who wins, does darkness and sin and hardness of heart win or does God’s love and grace win?
I don’t know why as a Christian you would have to make such declarative statements. Like your friend, does he want there to be a literal hell? I am a bit skeptical of somebody who argues that passionately for a literal hell, why would you be on that side? Like if you are going to pick causes, if you’re literally going to say these are the lines in the sand, I’ve got to know that people are going to burn forever, this is one of the things that you drive your stake in the ground on. I don’t understand that.
Especially when so many fail to recognize the hell that many people are experiencing today and do little about it.
Yeah, I would think it would be your duty as a Christian to hope and long and pray for somehow everybody to be reconciled to God. If you are really serious about evangelism, as I’m sure you friend would claim, and you wanted to save people from hell, then wouldn’t your hope be that everybody reconciles with God? Why would you hope for anything else? It would be your duty to long for that. I would actually ask questions about his salvation.
As if there were not enough reasons for me to have a serious man-crush on Rob Bell (I can sense Curtis getting more and more jealous by the minute).
I think that there is something powerful in what he is saying here:
The point is not, and never has been, that people are going to die and rot in hell.
The point is not, and never has been saving people from rotting in hell.
The point is, and always has been, to pursue Christ and have our lives conform with his more and more each day.
The point is, and always has been, to invite people into that pursuit, and allow Christ to work in their lives and change them in amazing ways.
I have been doing a great deal of thinking lately about the power of “the hell card”, and what it has meant through the years. I am starting to believe that the Hell Card has caused the church in America to focus too much on keeping people out of hell, and too little on developing a relationship with Christ, and the body.
Over the past year or so I have become a fan of the HBO series Big Love. For those of you that are uninitiated the show is about a Mormon family that practices polygamy. One of the most fascinating aspects of the series for me is the power that is given to the head of a fundamentalist Mormon sect. Roman, the sect’s Prophet, has the ability to bestow, or revoke a person’s salvation. That is power that carries weight.
I sometimes wonder if we, as Christians, do not crave the power that comes from being able to say to someone “you are going to hell unless…”.
There are those that will write me off as a cynic, or heretic, or heathen, or some equally bad thing just for typing that sentence, but I wonder if there is not a little truth to it. I wonder if the church over the last several centuries has not cultivated a financial and power base off this entire concept. I wonder if the evangelical movement does not have a good bit of this ingrained into its’ very core.
As we have entered the postmodern, post-evangelical era, I wonder if a good bit of the consternation that seems to be coming from the evangelical community doesn’t stem from the fact that many postmoderns do not believe in the concept of hell, and therefore no longer need salvation from that which they do not believe. This is where the power of Rob Bell’s statements at the beginning of this post begin to take on so much power for me. In this day and age it no longer matters to the world around us if there is a literal hell… and I don’t think that it should matter to us as well.
What should matter? The family down the street that is struggling to make ends meet, and is one week away from being evicted. The fourth grader in the Baltimore school system that is growing up in a home where crack is far more important than achievement. The people that work beside us that are struggling through each week dealing with divorce, rebellious kids, and family struggles. These people do not need you to save them from a literal hell, they need to be rescued from the hell that they are living in now.
A friend of mine used to refer to certain type of people that were “too heavenly minded to be any earthly good”. I wonder whether we in the church are not guilty of having our mind so set on hell to be any earthly good…
It is my belief that only as we begin to minister to and care for people in the midst of their own personal hell can we begin to “save” people from a literal, eternal hell. Only when we care for them as an act of worship, and through doing so demonstrate who Christ truly is, will people begin to realize who Christ is and embrace him for all that he is, rather than a way to get out of hell.
Filed under: church, life, ministry, reflection
Interesting thoughts Matt. Jesus warned people about hell (as has been pointed out many times), so He thought being saved from hell was a good thing for them. But He also fed them, healed them, and met their needs while pointing them to something greater–true abundant life found only in relationship with Him.
Welcome aboard Barry!
I saw a blip from western Mass and figured it might be you.
I do not disagree that Christ recognized the importance of saving people from hell, and I would agree that it is a very good thing for them to be saved from hell. What I believe that Bell is getting at (and what I believe wholeheartedly) is that salvation from hell is not the point of our faith, but it is a wonderful (though that is not strong enough of a word) benefit of our faith. I think the point (i hate using that word, but I am having a difficult time finding a more suitable word at this time) is to Glorify God and enjoy Him forever (to steal from the Westminster Catechism), and through glorifying him fully (through relationship with him) do we gain our salvation from hell…
Matt-
“…postmoderns do not believe in the concept of hell, and therefore no longer need salvation from that which they do not believe.”
Bingo. This hits the nail right on the head. I think this is connected so heavily to the “missional” model of church in that we need to start acting more like missionaries in our own backyard.
Missionaries that go to a foreign land don’t just jump in there, and start talking and acting like they would in the US and expect that people will understand them and the Good News that they’re announcing. No, that would be crazy. They understand completely that it is a different culture, and that there are certain aspects of the Biblical story, and certain ways of proclaiming the Gospel, that will ring more true for that particular audience; for that particular “context”.
So, why is it that we think that just because we’re here in America, that the Gospel/Bible doesn’t need to re-framed or re-examined in order to better speak in this new context that we find ourselves in: postmodernity?
If Postmodern people no longer inherently believe in Hell, or personal sinfulness, like their parents and grandparents did, is it automatically a bad thing? What if it’s just a new opportunity to pour through Scripture to find what other aspects we can discover that could be highlighted in order to reach a new culture with the Good News that Jesus is Lord and that His Kingdom is here, right now, and will continue to be after this life…
Let’s just move on, and actually start making a difference in people’s lives, rather than continue arguing whether or not there is or is not a literal, eternal, firey, Hell after death and over who will be there…
Barry-
I forgot one more thing I was going to say above…
“Jesus warned people about hell (as has been pointed out many times), so He thought being saved from hell was a good thing for them.”
The thing that is SO interesting to me about this, is that in most, if not all, of the cases where Jesus spoke of Hell (Ghenna, Hades, etc.) He was speaking to the religious people and not to the unbelievers…
Once I finally realized that, I stepped back and I was like “Wait a second, everytime WE talk about Hell, we say it to and about unbelievers… why? how did that happen? Why are we doing something that Jesus didn’t do, and how/when did it start?”
I’m just so lost on that, honestly. I just don’t understand where we came up with the way that we currently talk about Hell, because I just can’t find it in the Bible…
This about sums it up, I’d think “The point is, and always has been, to pursue Christ.” Well said.
In one of my theology classes in college, I actually got kicked out by the professor for “supporting heresy.” She said that anyone who could believe what I was talking about, was a heretic and going to hell.
Pretty freaky stuff, man. Luckily, that power will never rest in human hands!