We're All Seeking the Same Savior - A Review of Chapter 6 of Love Wins

We're all seeking the same Saviour,

We're all seeking the self-same Lord.

We're all claiming the same cleansing,

We're all finding our peace restored.

General John Gowans

I can understand why this chapter – chapter six of Rob Bell’s Love Wins - might upset some people If someone were to read this chapter without careful attention to what he is actually saying, or if they were reading it with an already prejudiced attitude.  I’m sure that they would find something in it that’s not really there.

That’s what I’ve been discovering as I’ve compared the  hullabaloo about this book with the actual content of the book.  The hullabaloo is about something that’s not really in there -UNIVERSALISM.

It’s sentences like “Jesus is bigger than one religion” (Love Wins pg. 150) that get people all twitchy. 

No one comes to the father except through me… (John 14:6)

I used to think of this as a very exclusionary statement (and that is because that’s how much of the evangelical community teaches it…) but I’m starting to see it in a much broader way.  And I really like the way Bell describes it.  Jesus is as exclusive as himself and as inclusive as containing every single particle of creation... (pg. 155)

If this is Universalism it’s not a wishy-washy, it doesn’t-matter-what-you-believe-so-do-whatever-the-hell-you-want (though, again, that’s how much of the evangelical world teaches it)

No one can enter into the presence of the father, except through the person of Jesus.  But what is the process? What is the form?  Is it a specific prayer?  An altar experience?  Is it a specific creedal statement of faith?  A confession of Jesus as Lord?

Okay…

But what about Matthew 25- the parable of the sheep and the goats?  There’s no confession of Jesus as Lord in that story. In fact, those that are ushered into the kingdom prepared for them are not even sure they’ve ever met Jesus…

Do you remember the character Emeth from C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle?  Emeth (whose name is "truth" in Hebrew) was a devoted follower of the cruel and evil god Tash – but is granted salvation by Aslan who welcomed him with these words:

...all service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. 

Does Aslan (the Christ of the Narnia series) welcome Emeth because he’s a Universalist (in the evangelical disparaging use of the word)?  Because it really doesn’t matter what one believes or because it doesn’t matter what religion on follows?   No. Aslan growled to shake the earth at that suggestion.

Not that he [Tash] and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the service  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 knew it not, and it is I who reward him. (The Last  Battle,  pg. 205)

In a letter to Joan Bennett, written in 1939, Lewis wrote:

I think that every prayer which is sincerely made even to a false god or to a very imperfectly conceived true God, is accepted by the true God and that Christ saves many who do not think they know Him. For he is (dimly) present in the good side of the inferior teachers they follow. (Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W H. Lewis  pg.247)

No one comes to the Father except through me.

It is Jesus who is saving the world. There is no other way. He is the door, but that door is open to everyone everywhere.