Jason,
“Love Wins” is the most inspiring and popularly useful book I’ve read in awhile! But the Bible is the only book so great that I can make time for a review longer than the book. You must have loved “Love Wins” even more than me! I would love your take. After you’re done, could you condense it to a scholarly journal length review for those of us who have families?
Probably! 
Usually I’ll write out something at length and then do a condensed version afterward.
Also, I thought I unlocked the thread yesterday when I was done; but apparently I only locked it again (after it was already locked for posting the current entries!) My bad! I’ve made sure to unlock it this morning.
A few days ago I ordered Amazon’s last copy of Cry of Justice and 3 copies of Love Wins 
I look forward to reading them both. So far I’ve read up to about post 90 of your review 
I wondered who ordered that! 
Hopefully Zon will order another one from my distributor for stock. But even if they don’t, it won’t really take a week to ship.
(Also, people can order really reallllllllly cheap promotional copies being sold online by people who got one for free years ago. I don’t get a single cent from it, but they should be perfectly fine hardback copies with dustjackets, and it does help my Amazon sales score. )
Btw, for those who don’t know Rob’s chaptering, this Monday will be comments on the chapter from hell.
…I mean the chapter about hell!
I’m running a bit behind schedule today (Monday 5/23); so it may be this afternoon or even tomorrow before I put up the next part.
The good news is that this is not (yet) because it’s that long–my initial impression is that it’ll be shorter than previous entries. (And there was much rejoicing! )
The bad news it that this is because I am lazy-- er, wait, no scratch that…
The good news is that this is because I got distracted (…yes, that’s better, let’s go with that then, shall we? )
One thing I was distracted with was learning that one of my favorite early-20th-century Christian authors, G. K. Chesterton, grew up in what amounted to a Unitarian Universalist household, although of the non-dogmatic sort; it was from this that he fell away into agnosticism. But he continued to respect more doctrinally chewy universalists like George MacDonald (though he seems to have still classified MacD as “vague” as to doctrine, which tells me he wasn’t reading closely enough even in his later years when he wrote concerning his final conversion to Roman Catholicism. 
)
I may write up something on this eventually; he still doesn’t talk much about universalism, but his ‘three stages of conversion’ is interesting and reminds me of what happens when people become Christian universalists (or indeed just about anything else–in GKC’s case, Roman Catholic, though first it was high Anglican.)
The other thing I’ve been distracted with, was editing up and posting a Cadre Journal entry this morning on A Trinitarian Argument From Salvation – which some readers here may recall eventually arrives at (and at least suggests) universal salvation.
(A slightly earlier version of the argument, as well as a similar argument from trinitarian theism to universalism, instead of from salvation to ortho-trin, may be found in this thread.)
That sounds interesting 
Well, and yesterday I was busy with DualCitizen’s new thread; so it looks more like the next entry will be Thursday. 
(I did get some work done on it, but not nearly enough to putt in yet. 
)
Well, the review of the hell chapter is finally finished (no it isn’t as long as some of the other parts, I’ve just been busy with ‘work’ work and writing elsewhere); I’ll be posting it tomorrow morning most likely, after I’ve edited it a bit.
Hopefully I can get the next part done more quickly. I recall having fewer problems as I moved through the book, and that means less to talk about that the book can’t say just as well. (Or better. 
)
Part 6: Fishy For Hell
By the way, this chapter is (unlike my review) the only chapter in the book without a clever/colorful/descriptive/multi-word title. (Rob calls it only “Hell”.) I suspect this is because–
OH, SO THIS IS WHERE HE’S GOING TO DENY HELL EXISTS, IS IT? AND/OR REFUSES TO TAKE HELL SERIOUSLY!?
–he takes hell very seriously.
HA, WE–! UH… WAIT. WE HAVE TROUBLE BELIEVING THAT. HOW CAN HE TAKE HELL SERIOUSLY IF HE DOESN’T ACCEPT IT BEING MAXIMALLY FINAL?!
How can anyone take Satan seriously unless he’s on equal par with God? Which was the point of the Manichees and other God/Anti-God cosmological dualists. (Or rather the neo-Manichees; the original Manichees insisted that the devil was only created and wouldn’t be triumphant against God!) Also, it was the point of Satan in his rebellion and in his temptation of humanity: to be like the Most High!
But he isn’t, and he won’t be. Yet trinitarian Christians (and almost all non-trinitarian Christians for that matter) still take Satan seriously. Just not as seriously as we take God.
Put very briefly, that’s Rob’s point. It’s a point he shares with almost all Christians, including with other trinitarian Christians. He just doesn’t share how they go about taking-evil-seriously-but-not-as-seriously-as-God.
Put very briefly again, Rob agrees with them that where sin exceeds grace super-exceeds for not as the sin is the grace. He disagrees with them by not turning around later and claiming (in effect) that where grace exceeds sin super-exceeds for not as the grace is the sin.
Fortunately, he talks about this sort of thing later (though not quite the same way I just did).
Unfortunately, he decides to talk about first, and I quote, “every single verse in the Bible in which we find the actual word hell.”
WOW–IN A POPULAR NON-TECHNICAL BOOK HE’S GOING TO TALK ABOUT EVERY VERSE IN THE BIBLE THAT TALKS ABOUT HELL?!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! No.
WOW–IN A POPULAR NON-TECHNICAL BOOK HE’S GOING TO MAKE A CHEAP RHETORICAL POINT ABOUT THE WORD ‘HELL’ NEVER APPEARING IN THE BIBLE?!
Your second guess is better.
I understand why he thought he had to try this topic since, y’know, “The Bible” and all. But since the word “hell” is often used to translate “sheol” (for example), then if he was really going to (and I quote again) “show you every single verse in the Bible in which we find the actual word ‘hell’”, he should have shown us, as he specifically said, every single verse in the Bible in which we find the word actually translated as ‘hell’.
BUT SHEOL/PIT ISN’T ALWAYS TRANSLATED AS HELL!
As if that keeps him from referencing a few verses where sheol/pit is rarely if ever translated as hell… {snorf}
Since he himself includes references to such verses, though, then either he has to show us all such verses, or else he fails his promise to, and I quote again, “show you every single verse in the Bible” on the topic. Meaning his promise was only a shallow rhetorical trick.
UNLESS HE ACTUALLY DOES REFER TO ALL 63 VERSES FROM THE NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION REFERRING TO SHEOL/PIT/GRAVE, PLUS ALL THE OTHER TERMS AND THEIR EQUIVALENTS…?
Which he does not.
Rob has some reasonably good points to make here. But they’re likely to be obscured, for people who know more about the Bible than he’s expecting or for people who read commentaries from opponents who know more about the Bible than Rob’s target readers.
He couldn’t be satisfied with some examples for his good points; probably because even Rob knows there’s more to the case from the non-universalist side than that. So he has to try to convince his reader that he’s shutting down their side of the case completely. Look!–right there!–it’s every single verse! He just showed them to you, didn’t he!? And hell, “hell” isn’t even a real word in Hebrew or Greek! [size=150]Flawless–Victory!!![/size]
Nonononono, don’t look up the contexts, or find a computer program online or something, he just showed you all the verses! He said so! Trust him: he knows what he’s talking about!
When Rob’s opponents nuke him from orbit for trying to hide his non-scholarly approach from critique behind his popular audience, while he himself makes claims he expects his audience to take seriously as if he was a scholar, and even outright and intentionally misleads his audience: things like this are why.
BUT THERE WERE GOOD POINTS HERE, TOO?
Sadly mired in his cheating. But yes. He could have even made the points a little better than he does!
“First, we consistently find affirmations of the power of God over all of life and death, [and] of God’s presence and involvement in whatever it is that happens after a person dies, although it’s fairly ambiguous at best as to just exactly what it looks like.”
WAIT–DIDN’T ROB IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER LEAN HARD ON THE UNAMBIGUITY OF ALL THE EARTHY CREATIVE THINGS HAPPENING AFTER DEATH, BACK WHEN HE WANTED TO MAKE A POSITIVE POINT IN FAVOR OF HIS OWN IDEA?
Yes; and I have to say it does look like he’s appealing to obscurity here for purposes of avoiding having to recognize anything like, for example, the final verses of Isaiah. Not that those couldn’t be discussed and dealt with, but that would take time and effort and might lose his non-technical audience. It’s simpler and easier to just cheat in his own favor here… I mean, uh, broadly summarize.
MAYBE HE’S DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN WHAT HAPPENS IMMEDIATELY AFTER DEATH, AND WHAT HAPPENS IN THE DAY OF THE LORD TO COME, AFTER THE RESURRECTION?
I wish I could think he was making that distinction. But when he writes, in regard to this same first point, that “very little is given in the way of actual details regarding individual destinies”, then the scope looks broader than any such distinction.
Still, he has a worthwhile point here. There’s even a hidden extension that (surprisingly) he doesn’t mention: the Biblical statements about God being the God of both life and death, living and dying, tend to involve God killing people (sending them into sheol, however one wants to translate that), and raising them up again, in that order, and in regard to the same people–as the contexts of those verses tend to indicate! (Not that Rob talks about contexts here.)
“Second …] what we find in the scriptures is a more nuanced understanding that sees life and death as two ways of being alive.”
WHICH IS HARDLY A POINT DISPUTED BY NON-UNIVERSALISTS WHO AFFIRM ETERNAL CONSCIOUS TORMENT!
True, but annihilationists tend to miss this point; and I like how Rob (via an example from Moses in Deuteronomy) extends the practical application to here and now, as well as in regard to what happens after our bodies die. “The one kind of life is in vital connection with the living God, in which they experience more and more peace and wholeness. The other kind of life is less and less connected with God and contains more and more despair and destruction.”
On the other hand, since Rob mentions Moses in Deut 30, that same speech (and related ones) show that Moses (or at least God through inspiration) was apparently “terribly concerned with” “the precise details of who goes where, when, how, with what, and for how long”, despite Rob’s denial otherwise that the Hebrews weren’t terribly concerned with this.
BUT ROB IS CONCERNED WITH WHO GOES WHERE, WHEN, HOW, WITH WHAT, AND FOR HOW LONG, AS WELL AS BEING “INTERESTED IN THE ETHICS OF AND WAYS OF LIVING THIS LIFE”, QUOTE UNQUOTE, OR HE WOULDN’T HAVE WRITTEN THIS BOOK! AND GIVEN THE BOOK ITS SUBTITLE!!!
Yes, somehow in his mind he thinks that the Hebrews were far more interested in one than the other, as though interest in one excludes the other, despite trying to tell us earlier that they were interested in both. But hey, that was back in the chapter on heaven!–if he acknowledged his own point again here in the chapter on hell, that might be problematic.
And the final prophetic warnings of Moses (from which Rob himself quotes on occasion, including in this chapter) are a fine example of this! God warns that if His people insist on doing injustice in this life, He is going to utterly destroy them, not only in this life (as in scattering them around among the nations) but down into death itself (so that they are neither slave nor free). But then, after this, His people will as a result of this ultimate punishment finally repent and return to faithfulness, and when this happens (which has to be after their deaths sometime) God will restore them. Moreover, even though the nations will also be zorched for picking on Israel, the nations will also rejoice in the salvation of God.
I would say that all counts as being very concerned about some important details of who goes where, when, how, with what, and for how long!
…WAIT… THAT SOUNDS VERY MUCH LIKE PURGATORIAL UNIVERSALISM!
Aye, verily.
ROB JUST SAILS PAST ALL THAT, IN ORDER TO MAKE SOME CHEAP INACCURATE POINTS?
Aye, verily.
OKAY, WAIT, HOLD UP, IF ALL THAT WAS TRUE, DESPITE THE EXTREME LANGUAGE OF WRATH AND PUNISHMENT IN THOSE FINAL CHAPTERS OF DEUTERONOMY, WOULDN’T THAT JUST INSPIRE PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY GOD’S PEOPLE, TO FEEL LIKE THEY COULD SIN WITH IMPUNITY BECAUSE THEY WERE GOING TO BE EVENTUALLY SAVED BY GOD ANYWAY?!?
Someone would, in my opinion, have to be a raving willful ignoramus to try to take advantage of that promise while ignoring the threats of wrath preceding the hope of that promise.
But as it happens, God even anticipates that abuse: “And it shall be when he hears the words of this curse, that he will bless himself in his heart, saying, ‘I have peace though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart in order to destroy the watered with the dry!’” Why would this person have peace hearing the words of this curse? Because he’s only focusing on the eventual salvation, not taking equally seriously the warnings of punishment and wrath. Such a person doesn’t care about beings saved from his sins, only from any bad results following from his sins, hoping he can continue them!
“YHWH will never be willing to forgive him, but rather the anger of YHWH and His jealousy will smoke against that man, and every curse which is written in this book will lie down with him, and YHWH will blot out his name from under heaven. Then YHWH will single him out for evil from all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant which are written in this book of the law.” (Deut 29:19-21)
SO THAT PERSON SHALL NEVER HAVE FORGIVENESS! IT SAYS SO RIGHT THERE!
So long as he thus refuses to repent, true. But that doesn’t void the subsequent prophecy of God that once this curse has come upon them, even to the point where they are neither slave nor free (and thus no longer living on the earth!), they will finally repent and God will vindicate His people, restoring them to blessing. Just as it is God Who puts to death, so it is God Who brings to life. Deut 32 is the culmination of this line of thought in that scroll. Most of the chapter is warning about the butt-kicking to come, of both Israel and the Gentiles, but the sure and certain hope at the end shouldn’t be disregarded.
And that’s something I think we all as Christians (or even as only Jews!) should be concerned with.
Rob is concerned with that, too; just not here, where it might look shallowly problematic to his shallow reading audience. So he treats the matter shallowly. That way he doesn’t have to be fair to his opposition!
WHAT ABOUT NEW TESTAMENT REFERENCES?
Oh, he treats them just as shallowly, too, don’t worry. Starting with numbering how often “the actual word ‘hell’” is used in the NT.
WELL, OBVIOUSLY NONE, BECAUSE THAT WORD AS SUCH DOESN’T EXIST IN THE NT, ANY MORE THAN THAT WORD AS SUCH EXISTS IN THE–
Twelve times.
–… WHAT?
Roughly. Quote, unquote.
SO… WAIT… SO WHEN TALKING ABOUT HOW OFTEN THE ACTUAL WORD “HELL” IS USED IN THE OT, HE MAKES A BIG POINT OF HOW THE TERM NEVER SHOWS UP… WAIT, HE SAID… CRAP, OUR HEADS ARE SPINNING…
He said he was going to point out every time the actual word ‘hell’ is used in the Bible, and then for the OT he pointed out less than half the times a word often translated ‘hell’ is used. While ignoring cases when the concept might be referred to without using a term at all.
BUT NOW…
Now words that don’t read ‘hell’ but are commonly translated as ‘hell’ show up twelve times, instead of umpty-muffledish times in the OT, mumble mumble. Roughly.
WHAT THE HELL???
Excuse me, not ‘words’. My bad. He only counts when the word “Gehenna” is translated as “hell”. Not when “hades” is translated that way.
HE DOESN’T REALIZE ‘HADES’ IS OFTEN TRANSLATED AS HELL?!?
Weirdly, no he doesn’t–or anyway he doesn’t acknowledge it. Yet he does acknowledge that “hades” and “tartarus”, and I quote, “occasionally mean something similar to hell”. But he doesn’t want to count them, too, because that would make his count look higher. Even higher. I dunno, maybe the New Revised Standard Version which he seems to imagine is the only Bible translation anyone has ever read in English (not to say other languages), always renders those terms as ‘hades’ and ‘Tartarus’…? (Anyone want to check me on that?)
THIS MAKES US GNASH OUR TEETH AS THOUGH WE ARE ANIMALS CHEWING ON GARBAGE INSTEAD OF IN FRUSTRATED RAGE!
Indeed. His notion of what the “teeth-gnashing” means is imaginative but not contextually appropriate. (Edited to add: unlike the other times nearby I call him ‘imaginative’, in this case I’m being complimentary. But he’s still wrong by context.)
It gets worse, because Rob is clearly trying to ‘minimize’ what the implications of Gehenna are here, by reducing it to the town garbage dump. “So the next time someone asks you if you believe in an actual hell, you can always say, ‘Yes, I do believe that my garbage goes somewhere…’” But reducing it to that meaning leaves him with an unfortunate implication of people being sent as garbage to the garbage dump to be burned and eaten up! How this is not supposed to be equivalent to either annihilation or endless constant torment, is left to Rob’s imagination, as he gives no help to the reader on this point.
SO DOES HE AT LEAST MENTION ALL OF THE “ROUGHLY TWELVE” PLACES THE WORD OCCURS?
Yes; if by “roughly” you mean “eight”. “And that’s it. Those are all the mentions of ‘hell’ in the Bible!” Wow, Rob, that was 25% fewer than you were estimating after all! Um, yay then?
(This also highlights that he is not including “hades” and the one use of “tartarus” in his count, as he then goes on to mention them after this announcement. If the reader is expecting him to mention all the uses of “hades”, the reader will have to get used to disappointment.)
(Edited to add: while he very quickly skims over mentioning them, much less discusses them, Rob does list every chapter in the New Testament where the term “hades” is found. And as I will mention soon, he does spend a lot of time discussing one of the hardest such passages, the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, where the “hades” clearly has “Gehenna” effects even though Gehenna per se isn’t mentioned.)
HOW OFTEN IS THE LORD’S SUPPER MENTION IN THE BIBLE, BY THE WAY? FOUR TIMES?
Maybe seven, depending on how the references are identified. This doesn’t stop people from taking it very seriously, despite the lack of details; but as it happens we have a lot more data about post-mortem punishment in the Bible than we do about the Lord’s Supper.
SO BELL DOESN’T TAKE THE REFERENCES TO HELL SERIOUSLY?
He does–eventually. But a somewhat educated reader could be forgiven for thinking that he’s trying not to take it seriously by how he approaches the topic in his introduction for this chapter. Heck, even a non-educated reader might get that impression, seeing as how Rob ends the introduction “having a hard time believing that somewhere down below the earth’s crust is a really crafty figure in red tights holding a three-pointed spear, playing Pink Floyd records backward, and enjoying the hidden messages.” Oh you silly “primitive, mythic religion” people who “use fear and punishment to control people for all sorts of devious reasons”!–“we’ve evolved beyond all of that outdated belief, right?”
WAH-HUH?!? DID YOU SKIP A TOPIC?!
Nope, Rob goes straight from outright cheating in order to convince uneducated readers the Bible says only eight things about hell instead of dozens of things, to lighting a ridiculous straw-man version of Satan on fire. So to speak.
Now, to be fair, the imagery used of Satan (and other devils) in the Bible is sometimes weird and even scientifically untrue. But no one anywhere at anytime would be frightened to think the goofy devil Rob describes existed. Whereas no one with even the slightest ability to read a text in understanding would think the Satan and other rebel angels in the Bible are anything other than threatening, regardless of whether the reader thought the details were true. The scriptures do make fun of the Devil every once in a while, but even then they make fun by being more threatening the other way around.
(I have in mind Jesus’ witty wordplay regarding the “plunder-possessor” being “plundered” in his own house, in one scene common to multiple Gospels. Also God’s taming of Leviathan at the climax of the OT book of Job; the humorous imagery depends on the Great Rebel Dragon having been set up first as a threat worth taking very seriously by mere humans at least.)
More to the point, while the Bible may (on rare occasions) joke about a threatening devil at the devil’s expense, the imagery used of sheol/hades/Gehenna/Tartarus etc. is never amusing. It’s so extremely non-amusing that even Rob Bell, trying to help his readers disrespect it, apparently had trouble coming up with harmlessly silly imagery concerning it. But he could come up with harmless imagery of the Devil–harmless imagery mostly promoted as such by times and cultures who had stopped believing in the devil being any threat (or existing) at all.
On the other hand: it’s also possible that Rob isn’t mocking the notion of hell and the devil here, as mocking the notion that we have “evolved past” that kind of thing.
Because despite this actively misleading introduction, Rob is going to talk pretty strongly about hell once his chapter gets going–including as a post-mortem reality (even if he doesn’t mainly focus there.)