What the Hell? - A review of chapter three of Love Wins

Okay, really?  This is the chapter that got people so fired up?  What the hell, people? 

First off – if anyone is still claiming that Bell has denied the existence of hell, he hasn’t.  So stop saying it. When you repeat it you’re only repeating a baseless slander.

There are individual hells,
and communal, society-wide hells,
and Jesus teach us to take both seriously.

There is hell now,
and there is hell later,
and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously. (Love Wins pg. 79)

There is heaven in the here and now (or there can be if we will see it and make it) and there is hell here on earth, and humans are very good at making that.  But beyond the hell we create for ourselves in the here and now with our selfishness and depravity, there is the hell of separation from God in what comes after this life.  And Bell doesn’t deny that either. 

What he does say is that forever may not be forever.

Bell argues (and argues from scripture) that Hell may not be the eternal conscious torment that so many have taught.  Bell argues that the awful fury of God’s righteous wrath isn’t poured out just so that the wicked will spend billions and billions and then billions more years more in sulfurous torment, but is instead meted out for the purpose of reconciliation.

Gasp!

The dominant theme in scripture is restoration to God.  That’s what the book (the collection of books) is about – the way that the ever loving God has set out to restore his lost and broken family. 

It comes up again and again and again.  Sins trodden underfoot, iniquities hurled into the depth of the sea.  God always has an intention.

Healing.

Redemption.

Love.

Bringing people home and rejoicing over them with singing. (Love Wins pg. 87-8)

But before you start shouting UNIVERSALIST and throwing stones at the supposed heretic, you should recognize two things.

ONE - Bell never says (at least not in this chapter, I haven’t read the entire book yet…) that everyone will be saved.  In fact he pointedly acknowledges that that redemption and love that God is so keen to offer to everyone can be refused.

I tell these stories because it is absolutely vital that we acknowledge that love, grace, and humanity can be rejected.  From the most subtle rolling of the eyes to the most violent degradation of another human, we are terrifyingly free to do as we please.

God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it. (Love Wins pg. 72)

And TWO – If you reject Bell as a vile heretic based on this, you’re also going to have to pin that label on and throw stones at the venerable C.S. Lewis who held a very similar view of hell.  Lewis believed that “humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle (Mere Christianity, pg. 156)” and that it is up to each one to accept or reject that salvation, even from within the torments of hell.   The difference between Lewis and Bell is that Lewis is more pessimistic about the eventual repentance of those in the torments of their own hell.  Bell, “ has more faith in the ability of some to eventually repent, that is the only real difference between them—and it is a belief about people not about God and God’s desires.”

Finally, it is objected that the ultimate loss of single soul means the defeat of omnipotence. And so it does.  In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat.  What you call defeat, I call miracle:  for to make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.  I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.  I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man “wishes” to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good.  They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved just as the blessed, forever submitted to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free. (The Problem of Pain, pg. 127-8)

This is the “jacked up theology” people have been screaming about?  What the hell?