Love Wins

This book really resonated with me. I first read it about a year ago after learning that it cost Rob Bell his pastor job at Mars Hill in Grand Rapids. I just read it a second time, here are my notes.


It's a Mystery

When you deeply explore your faith, you cannot help but have questions. It is not wrong to have questions. It’s healthy to ask why we believe what we believe, and we should try to separate what is of God, and what is from us. Over the centuries, we’ve had a bad habit of turning speculation into dogma. Catholics have their salvation formula that involves mortal & venial sins and the sacrament of confession, as I explained in the My Story post. Most Evangelicals believe that salvation comes as a gift from God when someone repents and accepts Jesus as the truth. Both doctrines have a select few going to Heaven, and everyone else going to Hell for eternity. There is no scriptural basis for the Catholic position. But there are passages from the bible that seemingly support the Evangelical stance. However, what Rob Bell points out is that Jesus’ central message was about love, and not saving us from Hell. And the Hell that he is saving us from may be far different than what most of us have been taught. And, that Heaven may be more inclusive than what most of us believe. Bell believes the Jesus story has been hijacked by teaching that the central message is that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful & joyous place called Heaven, while the rest of humanity spends eternity in conscious torment and punishment with no chance for anything better.

Fact ... the exact way to heaven is a mystery, and the reality of heaven is a mystery. Our trust in God's goodness can relieve our worries.



Interpreting the Bible

Taking the bible literally, without understanding that Jesus spoke a lot in hyperbole and used metaphors is a mistake.

It is possible to be wrong (like the Pharisees) if you choose to take the bible too literally. It was written in a foreign & ancient culture in foreign & ancient languages (hebrew & greek).

I don’t think God meant for everyone to be biblical scholars and have it all figured out. I believe the message is much simpler than that.

Scripture lacks absolute clarity. We extrapolate dogma at our own risk.

"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John Ch14)
He doesn't say how, when or in what manner. And he doesn't state that those coming through him will even know that they are coming exclusively through him. He is simply saying that whatever God is doing in the world to know and redeem and love and restore the world is happening through him. To interpret this in an exclusive fundamentalist way, you gotta ask yourself ... are you certain? 100% certain? No room for God to mean anything else? Think of the Pharisees. And if Jesus is God, and God is Jesus, then what is stopping God/Jesus from being known in some other form, or in someone's conscience that doesn't know the Jesus incarnate story? Could there be one mountain, but many paths? This does not mean that Jesus and the cross and resurrection doesn't matter. Yes, Jesus is saying the he alone is saving everyone, but then he leaves the door way way open. Leaving all sort of possibilities, and it's not our job to define it any further... that's left to God. Trust in him.

Evangelicals cling to John 14:16, Catholics cling to Matthew 16:18. Both should stop trying to make their interpretations black & white.

The Pharisees and many other Jews in the time missed Jesus by believing that the Messiah would bring sociopolitical liberation and rid the land of the Roman occupiers. Jesus was also often critical of them for taking the laws of the OT too literally. Are some of us doing the same, right now, with our interpretation of the NT?



The Jesus Message

Like Bell, I agree that the central message that Jesus had was about Love, and not about saving us from Hell.

God so loved the world that he gave us Jesus. He loves every one of us. Jesus message was all about love, peace, forgiveness, and joy.

Is Jesus' message primarily about how to get into heaven and how to avoid hell? Is that what life is all about, a game of doing something here, to get somewhere else?

Should the story of Jesus be minimized into simply a rescue story? Rescuing us from who/what? God himself?

I believe the message God had for us was simple, it's a message of love, and God didn't intend for everyone to be a biblical scholar to understand it.

2 greatest commandments … love God, love everyone else.

Jesus talked mostly about the Kingdom of God. Which scholars believe means is a place/time when God’s reign/rule/authority is at hand. That God is ruling on earth as he is in Heaven, with the ministry of Jesus.



The Problem with Hell

Is this how it is?
If you don't believe the right way, and you get hit by a car and die, God would have no choice but to punish you forever in conscious torment in a place called hell. At one moment God is a loving and forgiving father who goes to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with you, and in a blink of an eye, he becomes a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that you had no escape from an endless future of agony. Loving one moment, vicious the next. Kind and compassionate, and in a blink of an eye cruel and relentless. He punishes for eternity for sins committed in a few short years. If there was a human dad who was that volatile we would call child protection services immediately. How is it possible to love a God like this? That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable. If this is true, then the Jesus story can be simply broken down to where Jesus came to save us from God.

Of all the billions of people who have ever lived, will only a select few "make it to a better place" and every single other person will suffer in torment and punishment forever?

Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Is this the definition of a loving God?

Evangelicals and Catholics have a predicament when trying to adhere to their Heaven/Hell formulas when dealing with the death of children. For years, Catholics solved the problem with the invention of Limbo, a place that is neither Heaven nor Hell. Evangelicals mostly believe in an age of accountability, which is somewhere around twelve. But these are man-made assumptions, it's not biblical.

Hell ... could it be our refusal to trust God? To reject God's grace, to turn from God's love? Resisting God can lead to misery.

The reality of God's essence is Love. God doesn't want to inflict pain on anyone. He extends an invitation to us, and we are free to do with it as we please. If we reject it, we bring on our own hell. We are free to do as we please. Heaven is about thriving in God's world of peace and joy.

There are all kinds of hells, because there are all kinds of ways to resist and reject all that is good and true and beautiful now, and we can only assume we can do the same in the next life. There is hell now, and there is hell later. Look at the story in Luke about rich man who dies along with Lazarus.

When someone who does not know Jesus prays to God, does God ignore them? God is Jesus, Jesus is God. Could God not choose to have multiple avenues to himself beside Jesus? Jesus is God, God is Jesus. Jesus could make appearances elsewhere on this earth or on some other planet. What is stopping God from doing it elsewhere, and doing it as a different being? God can do anything he wants. You can love Jesus, and love God, and not have everything figured out ... who goes to hell, how people get saved, etc. You can just trust in God's goodness, and that he will take care of things in a just and good way. Period.

Old Testament doesn't talk about hell.

Jesus talks about hell in the new testament about 12 times. The greek word for hell in English is Gehenna. Ge means "valley", Henna means "Hinnom". Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, was an actual valley on the south and west side of the city of Jerusalem, which was the city dump. There was a fire there, which burned constantly to consume trash. Wild animals fought over scraps of food along the edges of the heap, their teeth would make a gnashing sound. Gehenna was a place with the gnashing of teeth, where the fire never went out. Some of the new testament writers use the term "Hades", which is a Greek term for the realm of the dead. Or "Tartarus", which is a term borrowed from Greek mythology referring to the underworld.

I believe in a hell that we humans have created for ourselves here on earth, where we are riddled with hatred, violence, and intolerance. Love does win as Jesus, the Dalai Lama, and others have preached. We need more of this love, not less.

Do we really believe that God is all-knowing and yet so petty, that he created beings he knows will fail, just so that he can then despise them, and ask them try to break the code to earning his love again, which essentially amounts to a magic prayer?

So God knows those who will reject him, but he creates them anyway, just so he can hate them and punish them eternally?



Salvation

Some believe that you must say a specific prayer to go to heaven. We don't know what the exact prayer is, but the idea is to ask God to forgive you and tell him you accept Jesus and his gift of dying on the cross to pay the price of your sins. Some believe you simply need to have a "personal relationship" with God through Jesus. The problem is, we can't find the prayer in the bible, and the words "personal relationship" are not in the bible.

He gives no definitive path to get to Heaven. Is it about being born again, or being considered worthy? Is it what you say or what you are that saves you? Do we have to forgive others, do the will of the Father, or "stand firm" to be saved?

Jesus said, “no one comes to the father except through him”, but he never specified a formula. Jesus never told anyone to “ask him into their hearts” or say a “Sinner’s prayer”. He never gave altar calls. He simply invited them to follow.

Paul writes that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved”, but again, Paul is referring to a life lived in the footsteps of Jesus, seeking God’s presence—not a magic prayer to avoid Hell.

What Jesus says about Heaven >>>

> Luke 23, the man hanging on the cross next to Jesus says to him, "Remember me when you come into your kingdom," and Jesus assures him that they'll be together in paradise.

> John 3, Jesus tells a man named Nicodemus that if he wants to see the "kingdom of God" he must be "born again."

> Luke 20, when Jesus is asked about the afterlife, he refers in his response to "those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come."

> Matthew 6, Jesus says that if you forgive others, then God will forgive you, and if you don't forgive others then God will not forgive you.

> Matthew 7, Jesus says "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom, but only those who do the will of my Father."

> Matthew 10, Jesus says that "those who stand firm till the end will be saved."

> Matthew 19, a rich man asks Jesus: "Teacher, what good things must I do to get eternal life?"

When Jesus talks about "heaven", he is talking about the here and now, and the afterlife.

Heaven, and the Lords Prayer ... God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven ... possible to experience attributes of the afterlife heaven now, on earth. Maybe it’s about partnering with God to make a better world. But the exact nature of heaven is a mystery. Jesus describes it best in parables.

It's dangerous for anybody to try to pin down the exact nature of heaven, and an exact formula for how it is achieved. Jesus didn't do this, and neither should we. It's OK to dream and theorize, but it shouldn't go any further.

Jesus talks about death and rebirth constantly. He calls us to let go, turn away, renounce, confess, repent, and leave behind the old ways. He talks about life that will come from his own death, and he promises that life will flow to us in a thousand small ways as we die to our egos, our pride, our need to be right, our self-sufficiency, Lose your life, and find it he says.

Was the cross & resurrection all about a sacrificial death of Jesus to clean our sins? For thousands of years in the ancient culture that Jesus lived in, people sacrificed animals to have their sins forgiven and to keep the Gods pleased. The sacrificial death had a very real meaning. As it does today, but there is more to it. With Jesus' death, there was actually no more need for the tradition of sacrifice to continue, because Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice.

Jesus dying for our sins on the cross so that we can have a relationship with God is true, but it puts US in the center. That shrinks God's message down to something just for humans. There is more to it. Jesus' resurrection to renew, restore, and reconcile everything on earth as it is in heaven (Col Ch1), just as God originally intended it. Jesus defeated the powers of death and destruction on an epic scale. Our story is part of a far larger story, one that includes all of creation on a cosmic scope.