A major question one would expect to be able to answer about a given author in a book like this is whether or not he believes that hell will finally be empty or be populated (even if only sparsely). But when it comes to what Bell believes on that basic point, I have to say that at the end of the book I have no clue. On the one hand he doesn’t seem to rule out the possibility that certain people could choose—yes, even again and again and again unto all eternity—to have nothing to do with God.

Note: A number of CEP visitors and other colleagues in ministry have asked me what I think of Rob Bell’s new book. So I am using this venue to respond to those requests from colleagues in ministry, who likewise are getting peppered with questions from the members of their congregations. If this is at all helpful to you in your ministry context, I am thankful. Obviously these are my review-like musings and do not necessarily represent the thoughts of my colleagues at Calvin Seminary nor of the institution as a whole.

In various venues and conversations across the last few weeks I have shared my unhappiness with the (in my opinion) shameless ways in which teaser videos and other provocative hints and whispers have been used as marketing tools to sell more copies of Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins. I am not unaware that publishers exist to sell books or that authors are not exactly uninterested in the same goal.

But when the marketing “football” that gets tossed about involves nothing less than the nature of God and the very basics of the salvation wrought by Christ Jesus the Lord . . . well, it feels more tawdry than when Dr. Phil engages in the same marketing techniques. That is part of the reason why, all things being equal, I would rather resist jumping on the Love Wins juggernaut. But because I work at a seminary, lots of people have asked for my opinion and so I will provide it here.

But to begin, I want to note the last few words of the book—words that I believe reflect Rob Bell’s dearest conviction. He says flat out that in writing this book, he wants people who so desperately need to discover that God loves them to know exactly that deep in their bones. In other words, Bell wants those who do not feel loved to discover that “God so loved the world” that Jesus came. Bell wants you to believe the gospel, the good news, that while we were yet sinners, God loved us and that God’s Son Jesus is here, now, if only we will turn to him and realize this truth.

Rob Bell wants you to know that God is, first and last and foremost and through and through a loving God, overflowing with compassion. It’s hard to argue with that, and knowing Rob just a bit, I believe this is what he wants his book’s bottom line to be. This is all-the-more reason why I am so sorry to have to disagree the way I will below.

Even so, I will not be among those who have labeled him an abject heretic, a false prophet, or someone being wielded by the devil to lead the whole world astray and just possibly destroy the entire church. There is here too much gospel truth and, yes, even some needed correctives for bad pop theology for me to believe that Rob has gone to the dark side. He hasn’t. He’s a brother in Christ. But brothers sometimes talk turkey to each other and that is what follows.

But before I put much turkey on the table, let me note a few things Bell gets right along the way. True, in this book Bell has an over-the-top (and annoying) habit of giving the impression that whenever he flags a misconception of this or that aspect of theology, this wrong idea is something that basically everybody who does not quite line up with Bell’s own theology believes.

That is an overstatement and then some.

Nevertheless, when he says that many Christians conceive of “heaven” as being a completely other-worldly, non-earthy, spiritual-only realm of clouds, vapors, wisps, and golden harps, he’s not wrong. This is bad theology and it’s not uncommon. Bell helpfully reconnects readers to the better, more biblically oriented vision of the New Creation, of a renewed cosmos that will ultimately teem with wildflowers, bobcats, tiger lilies, and soaring snow-capped mountains. He’s also absolutely correct to point out that this vision of the new order God will bring means that followers of Jesus need to start living into that vision already now by caring for the earth and attending to justice and preserving all creatures. That’s just right and, yes, very Reformed.

He’s also correct to point out that any number of those who claim to speak for God present God as being mostly a judgmental, fire-breathing figure who inspires his followers to condemn gay people and to take no small amount of relish in depicting their opponents (on big placards carried at protests and rallies) as writhing in the flames of hellfire. This is simply wrong for followers of the Prince of Peace and of the Savior who never met a sinner he shrieked at.

In short, Bell offers some needed correctives for the extremes of evangelical and fundamentalist theology and practice.

But they are extremes. Hence, one difficulty I have with this book is its nearly wholesale lack of nuance. There is virtually no hint here that a Christian believer could hold out for some vision of hell as eternal punishment without also being guilty of these egregiously bad visions of heaven, God, justice, etc. Bell throws out the words “billions” and “millions” in this book as though they represent hard numerical figures based on assiduous and careful research on how people think. In truth, all his talk of “millions” who think this way and “billions” who will go to hell are just hyperbole and rhetorical excess based on no hard data or research at all.

My own hunch, to invoke Bell-like statistics, is that “millions and millions” of Christians are thoroughly convicted that God is love, that Jesus is full of grace, and that the Christian life has nothing to do with spending all your time wagging bony fingers in the faces of “sinners” but who also have perfectly solid and good (and defensible) reasons to believe that even a good, loving, and holy God may just punish sin and sinners in the very ways Bell thinks is impossible to conceive of in case one believes “love wins.”

Ignoring the vast range of theological positions that exist among Christians and so tarring huge segments of the church with one wide brush seems unfair. But so do some of Bell’s other techniques of argumentation.

For instance, early in the book Bell seems intent on skewering as naïve those who want to say, simplistically apparently, that you have to believe in Jesus to be saved. To combat the idea that being saved by Jesus can be stated simply, Bell throws up a plethora of gospel stories about ways in which people interact with Jesus and who, apparently, were saved as a result. After each such summary of various New Testament stories, Bell makes an ever-growing list, phrased as a rhetorical question. So how does one come to Jesus?

Is it what you say,
or who you are,
or what you do,
or what you say you are going to do,
or who your friends are,
or who you’re married to,
or whether you give birth to children?
Or is it what questions you asked?
Or is it what questions you ask in return?
Or is it whether you do what you’re told and go into the city? (16-17)

The impression seems to be that the Bible is so multi-vocal that it resists theological reflection through which one could discern a common thread. The gospels are just all over the place, salvation just pops out all over, and so no one should be allowed to say just how one comes to be saved through Jesus.

But if one were to believe this, then the nerve of systematic theology is cut. No theologian would ever be allowed to draw conclusions, to pull diverse parts of Scripture together in order to see what the overall teaching of God’s Spirit may be. (It would be tough to arrive at a Doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, if all one is allowed to do is list the differing ways the Bible talks about God and then just leave it at that as proof that no one is able to be decisive on the nature of God based on the Bible.)

What if a mathematician took such an approach to her field? In surveying various ways to solve equations, could one pose a series of rhetorical questions that when it comes to doing math,

Is it about doing addition,
or doing subtraction,
or doing multiplication,
or doing division?
Or do we deal with whole numbers,
or with fractions,
or with negative numbers,
or with imaginary numbers (imagine that!!)
or with geometry or algebra or calculus?

Would this diversity of mathematical methods and numerical forms mean that it is impossible to discern unity to mathematics or to find common threads or to make general pronouncements about the overarching rules that govern math?

A multiplicity of stories, images, and facts does not indicate a lack of unity or coherence nor does it mean that when it comes to figuring out Jesus or how one is saved, it’s just “anything goes” because, after all, who would we be to discern the larger pattern of how it all works? There are other parts of the book that likewise resist nuance or that fail to acknowledge that various questions Bell raises have long been intelligently dealt with in various theological traditions.

For instance, Bell notes at one point that the various ways salvation gets described seem to cut against the idea that we are saved by grace alone seeing as the verbs that get used all seem to mean that we are the primary actors. If we have to “believe” or “accept” or “confess” or “repent,” then we undercut grace (cf. p. 11). But I am pretty sure that the Reformed tradition (among others) have pretty good explanations as to how human activity and divine grace line up when it comes to salvation and how to square the preeminent grace of God with what happens on the human plane. Sometimes it seems as though Bell raises these issues as insuperable conundrums that have not only never been addressed but that cannot be addressed in any way other than propping up his thesis.

A major question one would expect to be able to answer about a given author in a book like this is whether or not he believes that hell will finally be empty or be populated (even if only sparsely). But when it comes to what Bell believes on that basic point, I have to say that at the end of the book I have no clue. On the one hand he doesn’t seem to rule out the possibility that certain people could choose—yes, even again and again and again unto all eternity—to have nothing to do with God.

But in general the vast majority of times when Bell deals with the idea of “hell” in this book, he locates it as a present-day reality on this earth—a tragic and horrific set of conditions that comes about when people choose evil over good, selfishness over community, etc. Even in parables or passages that depict a post-mortem realm of hell (as in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus), Bell cleverly manipulates things to put the focus of hell back on this earth in this present day and age. Hell on earth is tangible and sure. Hell beyond earth is fuzzy.

He also spends a good bit of the latter part of the book making clear that in the longest possible run, it seems really unlikely that even the heart of a Hitler could hold out against God’s overwhelming love—even the hardest of hearts will finally melt and give in to God. Actually, Bell does not mention Hitler or terrorists or concepts like purgatory or how it might work to have a second chance (or a third, fourth, or one billionth chance) but the idea of not being able to hold out against God’s love forever is clearly presented. Whatever may have been true of a given person’s life or heart when he or she died means, in the long run, precisely nothing.

Finally, a few comments on some aspects of this book that I found to be disappointingly generic. Specifically I need to mention the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross, the nature of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and what the sacraments mean. In all these key areas of Christian belief, theology, and practice, I felt like this book shot for the lowest of the lowest common denominators in ways that all-but completely gutted these truths of having a unique status.

Regarding the cross, Bell makes it clear that Jesus’ sacrificial death means the end of the old sacrificial system. Here he has the Book of Hebrews on his side and he invokes it several times. But weirdly, this book makes absolutely no attempt to distinguish between the sacrificial system in Israel and in all other cultures. Instead we are treated to bald and blanket statements that all sacrifices in the ancient world were pure and simple a way of “keeping the gods pleased” and of currying divine favor and of controlling the gods who controlled crops and fertility (cf. pp. 123-26). Not once is the word “god” capitalized in this talk of sacrifice, not once is the Old Testament referenced, not once is there a hint that what the Israelites did (as referenced in the oft-quoted Book of Hebrews) was in any way different from the worshipers of Moloch or Marduk or any other ancient religion.

What could explain this?

Does he really think the Book of Hebrews is about the general concept and category of animal sacrifice wherever or however it was practiced in the ancient world?

What’s more, although Bell claims that Jesus’ death on the cross had some really big effects, there is not a hint here as to why the death of this particular person (as opposed to any other crucified person) meant something peculiar, unique, or cosmic. Bell then summarizes (accurately) the array of images used to describe the atonement but then—as earlier in the book—suggests that the Bible’s use of multiple images means that there is no singular truth to be discerned here and that we are free in the modern world to dispense with the images that don’t mean anything anymore and substitute other atonement images if they work better. The one thing he is clear on is that pretty much everyone whose view of the atonement is significantly different from his own perforce proclaims the old Umstimmung Gottes idea that what Jesus did was to save us from God.

Even more disappointing is Bell’s treatment of the resurrection. Here the Easter event is presented not as a cosmos-shattering, utterly unique, unexpected event that changed the universe forever. Instead Bell approaches Easter through the (hackneyed) image of spring following winter, of the “rebirth” of maple trees that lost their leaves in the fall, looked dead all winter, but that then in spring (behold!!) put out new shoots and then leaves.

Resurrection is not a grand miracle or surprise, it’s just the way things go. It’s typical. Shoot, it’s almost predictable. “For nature to spring to life, it first has to die. Death, then resurrection. This is true for all ecosystems, food chains, the seasons—it’s true all across the environment. Death gives way to life” (p. 130). More distressingly, “So when the writers of the Bible talk about Jesus’s resurrection bringing new life to the world, they aren’t talking about a new concept. They’re talking about something that has always been true. It’s how the world works” (p. 131).

Given this low-ball take on crucifixion and resurrection, it is perhaps no surprise to discover an equally generic view of the Lord’s Supper. The sacrament is not a faith-based, grace-driven event that thickens the union of believers with their Savior. The sacraments are not even just for Christians—the sacraments are “true for everybody” because the sacraments “unite everybody.”

At the end of the day, I can follow Rob Bell a long ways down the road in terms of highlighting God’s grace, the wideness in God’s mercy, the grace and mercy and kindness that characterized the life and ministry of Jesus and that should still, therefore, characterize the lives of his followers yet today (vis-à-vis the ugly hatred and rank judgmentalism that are so often on display among some Christians and some churches in the United States). Also, anyone with Christ-like compassion in them should hope that hell will be sparsely populated, that the kingdom of God will be the place with the “billions” of folks and not “the other place.” True enough.

But it’s unfair for Bell to convey the impression that the only way to hold out for any version of hell other than his own version is, by definition, mean-spirited and proclaims a message that is at variance with the “real” Jesus and the “real” good news of the gospel. It’s also unfair to claim (as he overtly does on pp. 174-75) that all those who disagree with him present a terrible God who can, on a dime, turn from all-encompassing love to fire-breathing hatred, and that therefore most Christians depict a God who cannot be trusted “let alone be good” (p. 174). Bell unnecessarily charges that any church that holds out for a view of the afterlife that includes hell is doomed and that such a church cannot possibly expect anyone to want to join because, as Bell stingingly says, “no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise [the] one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable reality” that your church’s God is cruel.

It is ironic that in the Preface to this book Bell claims that the history of the church is beautiful precisely because the “historic, orthodox Christian faith” is “a deep, wide, diverse stream that’s been flowing for thousands of years, carrying a staggering variety of voices, perspectives, and experiences” (p. x-xi). Bell celebrates this alleged multi-vocal witness as a way to say, in essence, that we should not be too upset with the views he’s about to present—they will, after all, fit somewhere within that wide stream of beautiful Christian thought.

Thus it’s a shame that by the time Bell’s book ends, perfectly loving and serious Christians and whole church traditions are consigned not to this beautiful stream but to some fetid, anti-Christ, anti-gospel cesspool somewhere—an unholy swamp with which the real Jesus could not possibly be associated. I wish the book did not come off this way in the end and hope that if Rob and I ever get to talk about this, we would find a way to understand one another in ways that will contribute to the very spirit of grace and generosity from which I think Rob Bell wrote this book in the first place.

Scott Hoezee is Professor of Practical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids and serves as the Director of the Center for Excellence in Preaching. This article first appeared on the seminary website and is used with permission.