This is the sermon I gave on May 15, 2011. I think it is important enough to post here on the blog. It gives an interpretation of the meaning of the current flap in evangelical Christian circles over Pastor Rob Bell's book Love Wins and its suggestion that there is no hell.
Nota bene: This sermon begins with a spoof, a parody of how I imagine a conservative evangelical pastor reacting to Rob Bell. My actual view of the matter follows.
We’re facing a crisis folks. It’s a crisis that threatens to undermine the Christian faith altogether. A Christian pastor has written a book that he calls Love Wins, and in that book—can you believe it?—he says that there is no hell! This guy, whose name is Rob Bell, has the unmitigated gall, the unspeakably bad judgment, the gross misunderstanding of Christianity, to suggest that there is no place of eternal torment for people who do not accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior during their life on earth. O the scandal! The affront to Christian people! The threat to the salvation of those souls misguided enough to believe what Bell says! Bell has taken away all reason to be Christian! Christianity is how we save our eternal souls from an eternity of anguish, right? The only way to avoid damnation is to believe in Jesus, right? If there’s no hell, anything goes! This guy Bell has got to be stopped! We have to shut him down or all is lost! May the Lord Jesus Christ move Bell to repentance. If Bell won’t repent, may God smite him, may God strike him down, may God send him straight to that hell that he denies! That’ll show him. Then he’ll know, won’t he?
Now, in case any of you have any doubt about it, let me assure you that I’m being completely facetious here. As most of you I’m sure know, I agree with Bell. I am a Christian universalist, as are a lot of progressive Christians today. It is true, however, that an evangelical pastor named Rob Bell has set off a great kerfuffle in evangelical circles by claiming that there is no hell. He’s the pastor of Mars Hill Church, not the one in Seattle but one in Michigan that draws something like 7,000 people every Sunday. It is also true that a lot of evangelicals are reacting to Bell and his book in pretty much the way that I was lampooning at the start of this sermon. They very much want to drum Bell out of the evangelical fold as a dangerous heretic.
Moreover, this flap in evangelical circles has been getting a lot of press lately. It is the cover story of the April 25, 2011, issue of Time magazine. It’s that article in Time that is prompting this sermon. You see, I was a little put out when I read it. Here’s what’s going on as I see it. A few, so far a very few, evangelical Christians are starting to tumble to some of the things that the rest of us Christians, us much maligned mainline, liberal Christians, have gotten for a very long time now. Like God is a God of love for all people and that the old notion of a hell of eternal torment for people who aren’t Christians is incompatible with a God of love and just doesn’t make any sense. When a few of the right-wingers start to tumble to some pretty obvious truths about Christianity, they get tons of publicity about it, and we don’t get mentioned at all. The only mention of the mainline denominations in the Time article refers to us as “declining.” Yet what I think we’re seeing in the flap over Rob Bell’s denial of hell is evidence of a major dynamic in Christianity today.
Ever since the nineteenth century there has been a fundamental split in American Christianity. It isn’t a split along denominational lines. It isn’t even a split between Protestants and Catholics. It’s not easy to put labels on the split, but for purposes of convenience only I will call the two sides liberals and conservatives. What follows here is greatly simplified, but I think it accurately outlines in general terms at least how American Christianity got to be split the way it is.
The split came about in the nineteenth century as a result of two major developments in the life of Christianity and in the life of western culture generally. The first of those two developments was the rise of what is called the higher biblical criticism. This is the approach to the Christian faith and to the Bible in particular that treats them as subject of intellectual inquiry the same as any other subject of intellectual inquiry. The higher criticism began in Germany in the early nineteenth century. It developed into the kinds of criticism you hear me using around here all the time—form criticism, linguistic criticism, historical criticism, and so on. The higher biblical criticism seeks to understand the Bible as an historical document. It probes the circumstances of the creation of its different parts, the cultural and religious assumptions out of which it grew, what its linguistic nuances are, and so on. Higher criticism doesn’t necessarily deny a divine inspiration for the Bible, but it doesn’t treat the Bible as sui generis, as a unique kind of thing to which the tools of human intellectual inquiry don’t apply. Many Christians, especially in the United States where the culture had already long had a strong anti-intellectual bent, saw the higher biblical criticism as a threat to the faith and rejected it outright. That rejection led to the creation of true Fundamentalism in the early twentieth century. American Christianity split between those who accept the higher biblical criticism and those who do not.
The other development that led to the split was the advent of Darwinism. A great many American Christians, probably a substantial majority of them, saw Darwin’s theory of evolution as a profound threat to the faith. They still do. Darwinism is incompatible with the Bible only if you see the Bible as accurately reporting the facts of creation and of history, which it doesn’t; but most American Christians insisted, and insist, that it does. So the split in American Christianity gained the additional dimension of being a split between those Christians who are willing to let science be science and develop its scientific truths according to its own methods and to let faith be faith and develop its spiritual truths according to its own methods on the one hand and those who saw an irreconcilable conflict between the two on the other.
Today the kind of evangelical Christianity that Rob Bell comes out of is the dominant form of the conservative side of the split in American Christianity. That kind of Christianity insists that the Bible is literally, factually true and that, basically, God wrote it so it cannot contain any error. That kind of Christianity sees the function of Christianity as being the only means of avoiding hell and gaining heaven after death by believing in Jesus. It sees Christianity as the only truth, and traditionally it has seen all people who aren’t Christians as damned for eternity because of their failure to accept Jesus Christ. For example, the article quotes R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as calling Bell’s book “theologically disastrous.” For Mohler, denying that non-Christians spend eternity in hell so undermines the basis of the Christian faith that it is “theologically disastrous.” Mohler adds: “When you adopt universalism [the belief that all are saved]…then you don’t need the church, and you don’t need Christ, and you don’t need the cross. This is the tragedy of non-judgmental mainline liberalism, and it’s Rob Bell’s tragedy in this book too.” Do you hear what he’s saying? The only function of Jesus Christ and of his death on the cross is to get Christians, and only Christians, into heaven. Mohler names the split I’m talking about. He sees it as being between people who think like him, i.e., the conservatives, and mainline liberals who don’t think that the primary purpose of the church is to get Christians, and only Christians, into heaven.
Mainline liberal Protestantism, the kind of Christianity Mohler condemns, has been having a rough time of it lately. Membership in the mainline churches has been declining for several decades, and most (but certainly not all) of the growing, energetic Christian congregations are on the conservative side of the split. But I am convinced that Rob Bell is one sign that, despite their numbers, despite their energy, despite their money, and despite their well-oiled publicity machine, the future does not belong to the conservatives. Some of them, like Rob Bell, are starting to tumble to the truths that we maligned mainline liberals have known for a long time. That God loves and saves everyone is the truth to which Bell has tumbled. There are other positive developments. The Episcopal Church is starting to get it about the equality of gay and lesbian people. So is the ELCA Lutheran Church, which recently approved the ordination of gay and lesbian people. Just last Wednesday the Presbyterian Church USA removed an article from its constitution that was a barrier to the ordination of gay and lesbian people. Many other examples of a major shift that is under way in American Christianity could easily be found and cited.
Time quotes Bell as saying “I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian. Something new is in the air.” Maybe it’s new to him, but we’ve known that supposedly new way of being Christian for a long time. Friends, the tide is turning. The biblical literalism that is the foundation of conservative Christianity is intellectually and spiritually untenable. We mainline liberals have known that truth for a long time. At last the contradictions and problematic morality inherent in literalist, exclusivist Christianity are starting become clear even to some committed evangelicals. So indeed some Christians are facing a crisis today, but it’s not us liberals as the conservatives claim. It’s the conservatives themselves. The intellectual and spiritual weakness of conservative evangelicalism is finally becoming clear even to some of them. The Holy Spirit is at work, opening hearts and minds and leading people away from the narrow, judgmental, exclusivist kind of faith that far too many people believe represents true Christianity. It’s only a beginning. The arc of history bends slowly, but it is bending; and it is bending in the right direction. At last. Amen.
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