We know one thing about Rob Bell as a result of this chapter; he knows and reads N.T. Wright. For those who don’t yet know Wright and might be interested in meeting him, check out this handy flow chart.
Back to Love Wins.
This is a book about heaven, hell and the fate of every person who ever lived.
And this is a chapter about heaven.
Bell clearly demonstrates where he stands on the issue of the nature of heaven. He convincingly (at least to one/me who holds roughly the same view as Bell on this issue) argues against a view of heaven that involves disembodied souls floating around on clouds playing harps. Instead, Bell argues for a heaven that is much more “earthy,” the kind of heaven you would expect from heaven meeting earth.
Along the way, he also makes some interesting observations about God’s justice and anger that many who reviewed the book before they read it might find surprising. Things like:
It’s important to remember this the next time we hear people say they can’t believe in a ‘God of judgement’ … Yes, they can. Often, we can think of little else. Every oil spill, every report of another woman sexually assaulted, every news report that another political leader has silenced the opposition through torture, imprisonment and execution … we shake our fist and cry ‘Will somebody please do something about this?’
Same with the word ‘anger.’ When we hear people saying they can’t believe in a God who gets angry–yes, they can. How should God react to a child being forced into prostitution? How should God feel about a country starving while warlords hoard the food supply?
Not leaving us to think that all the world’s problems are out there, Bell points out:
… [we] find ourselves thrilled by this promise of the world made right, [but this promise] brings with it the haunting thought that we each know what lurks in our own heart–our role in corrupting the world, the litany of ways in which our own sins have contributed to the heartbreak we’re surrounded by…
Then Bell shifts and presents the idea that heaven is at least partially confrontational:
But heaven also confronts. Heaven, we learn, has teeth, flames, edges and sharp points. What Jesus is insisting with the rich man is that certain things simply will not survive in the age to come. Like coveting. And greed.
More specifically, Bell mentions 1 Corinthians 3:12-15, where Paul speaks of Christ as the only real foundation and what humans chose to build on top of that foundation. Saying that:
Some in this process [of the fire-like removal of what should not be there] will find that they spent their energies and efforts on things that won’t be in heaven-on-earth.
Paul makes it very clear that we will have our true selves revealed and that once the sins and habits and bigotry and pride and petty jealousies are prohibited and removed, for some there simply won’t be much left. ‘As one escaping through the flames’ is how he put it.
So there is confrontation, destroying of things that don’t belong and the realization that we are more flawed than we ever imagined. And this is in a chapter on heaven. There is plenty in this chapter on the splendor of our future of heaven-on-earth, but space is not taken here to elaborate.
For those who have never been exposed to non-Platonian views of the Christian heaven, this chapter might be groundbreaking. Other than that, if orthodox understanding of heaven is the goal, Rob Bell is at least shooting in the right direction. He ends the chapter with a summary of what he presented:
There’s heaven now, somewhere else. There’s heaven here, sometime else. And then there’s Jesus’s invitation to heaven here and now, in this moment, in this place.
