Love Wins

 I recently read “Love Wins” by Rob Bell. I thought it was pretty good and not really all that heretical. (Though I still don't know if the person who said it was heretical was being serious or not.) The basic idea of the book is the question of heaven and hell and of how they inform and are informed by our ideas about God. I'm going to explore some of the points he brought up, in whatever order I feel like.

The biggest idea is that ultimately, we get what we want. God's forgiveness is such that nothing we've done in our past needs to keep us from entering into joy. If we want to live into God's kingdom, He's not going to stop us (and I would argue quite the opposite). Likewise, if we want to be cruel and prideful and separate from God, He will allow us to make that choice. At least sort of, and this is one of the places where it gets complicated, because the claims are made both that God will let you go off your own way if you want to and that God will try every trick, so to speak, to get you to repent and return to Him. And I believe that both of these are true, and I also see them as possibly in conflict. How is God supposed to keep trying to get you to come back if He's also leaving you alone when you want left alone? The best I can figure is that God is aware of and responds to all our mixed desires, so maybe at the same time, a person's conscious thoughts can be saying “leave me alone” while the silent cry of their heart is “please rescue me,” and surely God is able to know about both of those and to act o that information. This is why I lean very strongly towards universalism. I have trouble imagining that anyone really truly wants to be alone in the dark.

At the same time, I do think that saying we get what we want might be an oversimplification. If what I want is specifically to dominate and exploit other people, I'm not ultimately going to be allowed to do that. I'm perfectly free to be the kind of person that would dominate and exploit other people, given the chance, but in the end, I think the chance to do that kind of thing won't be available. Bell sort of got at that idea too, with a description of how someone like that might be allowed into heaven but not allowed to do any of the cruel things they might want to do, so for them it would be a place of frustration and anger, even though it would be only their own twisted desires making it so (and presumably, help in overcoming those desires would be available through God's grace). That goes along with a sort of “natural consequences” idea I've heard from a friend. We've talked several times about the parable of the sheep and the goats, and they see it as maybe not so much Jesus saying “You go here; you go there,” but more of people sorting themselves out by the kind of people they've become through the way they've chosen to live; that the sheep-y place would seem best to the sheep-y people and the goat-y place would seem best to the goat-y people. And that makes some amount of sense to me, though it still seems to carry a sense of finality I'm not sure about; can a goat notice that this isn't such a great place and try to change things? Does God still hang out in goat-town to show the way home?

Part of my concern is that if it's up to me to make sure I'm not damned, I figure I'm pretty screwed. I don't think I'm a horrible person, but I don't trust myself to make the right choices even when I try to, let alone the times when I just don't try. If my ultimate fate depends on my being good enough, clever enough, compassionate enough, honest enough, or selfless enough, I'm in trouble. Any hope I have comes from believing that God will be there to catch me. This puts me in a strange position of believing both that our decisions don't determine our ultimate fate and that our decisions matter enormously, both to us and to the world. The sense I have is that, even though I think I'll ultimately be saved, I also expect that I'll be called to account for my choices, and I am definitely apprehensive about that. I've made enough mistakes that I don't think it'll be pleasant, but it's more like a dread of having a long walk in freezing rain to get home than of being thrown into a lake of fire. You don't enjoy it while it's going on, and when the wind chills you to the bone you might regret not wearing a warmer jacket, but you know it will end and you just have to endure.