Four Views on Hell,edited by William Crockett (Zondervan, 190 pp.; $10.99, paper);The Other Side of the Good News,by Larry Dixon (Victor/Bridgepoint, 216 pp.; $12.99, paper). Reviewed by Stanley J. Grenz, the author of The Millennial Maze (InterVarsity) and coauthor with Roger Olson of 20th-Century Theology (InterVarsity).
Hell has become a popular topic these days, even garnering a cover story in U.S. News & World Report. As evangelical thinkers once again turn their attention to the doctrine of perdition, they are finding they no longer speak with one voice. Some question the traditional concept of an endless conscious suffering of the damned in the fires of hell. This lack of unanimity lies behind the publication of these two volumes.
As the title itself indicates, Four Views on Hell is another installment of the multiple authors/multiple positions genre of books pioneered in the 1980s by InterVarsity, but more recently continued by Zondervan. Following the typical model, each of the contributors lays out his own view, to which the other three provide a short response.
This latest offering brings together three evangelicals and a Catholic. Former Dallas Theological Seminary president John Walvoord defends the “literal” position: Hell is a place of fire and brimstone. Alliance Seminary’s William Crockett argues for a “metaphorical” understanding: While the rebellious will be cast from the presence of God, the biblical imagery of hell as a place of physical torment must not be interpreted as a literal description of that separation. Zachary Hayes, who teaches at the Catholic Theological Union, propounds the traditional Catholic doctrine of purgatory. Finally, Clark Pinnock of McMaster Divinity College prefers the “conditional” view: The wicked do not experience eternal conscious punishment, but rather cease to exist.
Four Views provides a helpful introduction to the contemporary discussion. And the literature the authors cite offers the interested reader direction for further research. However, the volume’s importance as a guidebook through the current discussion could have been enhanced were the theme outlined in an introductory chapter and the salient dimensions of the discussion drawn together in an epilogue.
The volume also suffers from conceptual problems. As Pinnock suggests in his response to Hayes, strictly speaking, the purgatorial position is not a view of hell. Roman Catholic doctrine does not deny everlasting punishment, but rather postulates a state of purification for the saved between this life and the next.
In addition, the discussion is clouded by the diversity among the participants on foundational issues of theological method. Walvoord’s dispensational biblicism, for example, forms a stark contrast to Hayes’s employment of Scripture plus tradition. For his part, Pinnock finds it necessary to offer a seven-page defense of the Wesleyan quadrilateral. But is our position concerning the nature and reality of hell as dependent on theological method as the essays suggest? I think not.
A Hard Hell
In the face of the growing disagreement among evangelicals indicated by the Four Views book, Larry Dixon provides an apologetic for what he sees as the classical Christian teaching on hell in The Other Side of the Good News.
Although universalism is the first recipient of Dixon’s critique, the main targets are not the mainline theologians who gravitate to this position, but evangelicals who are attempting to soften the classical doctrine of hell. Specifically, he wields his sword against the likes of John Stott and Clark Pinnock for their adherence to the view that after the judgment God will annihilate the wicked, and against John Sanders, Pinnock, and others who argue that conscious acceptance of Christ in this life may not be the sole route into the kingdom of God. The assistant professor of biblical and theological studies at Providence College, Dixon calls on evangelicals to eschew the contemporary infatuation with the construction of a “kinder, gentler” gospel and to reaffirm the “other side of the good news,” namely, that the lost will suffer eternal conscious punishment in the next life.
Dixon’s case for the classical doctrine of hell as eternal conscious punishment rests primarily on a summarization of Jesus’ teaching on hell. But it is bolstered by theological considerations such as biblical authority and the reality of divine wrath.
Dixon presents a compelling thesis and raises provocative questions for evangelicals flirting with alternatives to the classical doctrine. While I share his support for the church’s traditional teaching on this subject, I can accept neither the author’s specific conception of hell nor his reasoning for it. He erroneously argues that an emphasis on God’s love can only lead to the remedial notions of hell he rejects. Hence, he maintains, only by affirming the wrath of God can we understand hell in the biblical sense of eternal conscious punishment. In arguing in this manner, however, the author seems to move in the direction of the medieval realist theology that separated God’s love from his wrath.
Despite the impression we gain from these two volumes, in the end there are only two basic positions on the question of hell. Either all humans will participate somehow in the kingdom of God (universalism) or some will miss out.
While evangelicals may differ on what that “missing out” may mean, the various suggestions all affirm that there is a tragic dimension to the experiment of creation, a “dark side of the good news,” to use Dixon’s poignant phrase. Rather than dissipating our energies arguing about the details, we ought to be constructing an evangelical doctrine of eternal lostness that understands this tragedy in the light of the biblical revelation of the loving God who does not want “anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9, NIV). Such a positive construction of the reality of hell in light of God’s love begs to be written.
The Desert School Of Prayer
To Pray and to Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church,by Roberta C. Bondi (Fortress, 151 pp.; $8.95, paper). Reviewed by Christopher A. Hall, who teaches biblical and theological studies at Eastern College, Saint Davids, Pennsylvania.
Few of us have been taught the rhyme and rhythm of prayer; many, for instance, are confused by Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing.” Nor are we aware of reliable guides to shepherd us in our quest to know and communicate with God in a fruitful, consistent manner.
Roberta C. Bondi, professor of church history at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, understands these concerns. Bondi has written one of the finest explanations of the life of prayer available today and does so by introducing us to spiritual guides that most evangelicals have viewed with some suspicion and perhaps ignorance: the desert fathers and mothers of the fourth-century church.
Bondi’s presentation is helpful in several ways. First, Bondi is a seasoned scholar who has clearly immersed herself in the world of the early monastics. She has studied the ammas and abbas with a sympathetic ear and open heart, ready to be taught, and at the same time willing to critique or set aside those aspects of their teaching or practice that are distorted or inapplicable in a modern setting. Her willingness to listen carefully and empathetically enables her to mine the riches hidden in the pithy and frequently enigmatic sayings of the monks.
Second, Bondi breaks down caricatures of these early Christians by emphasizing that they were seeking many of the same spiritual goals believers pursue today. They, like us, were attempting “to claim and live out fully what it means to be a Christian while trying to come to terms with a culture intent upon swallowing up Christian goals and values.” Yes, the monks occasionally manifested bizarre behavior and theology, but the mainstream of the monastic movement was centered on the quest to pray and to love. It is the indissoluble link in monastic thinking between prayer and love that forms the central theme of Bondi’s book.
Bondi rightfully insists we remember that for the monks “love was not an abstraction but a concrete part of their daily lives. In order to be able to hear them speak to us, we need to be able to see what it meant for them to try to love like this.” Prayer, then, entails “an integral process” of learning to love God and neighbor.
As we learn to pray, we discern that “our prayer and our life must be all of one piece.” Prayer is linked to both meditative reflection on the events and people of our lives and to the “development and practice” of a consistently loving manner of life within the providential context God provides as the framework for our development into the image of Christ.
Amidst Noise And Neuroses
The strength of Bondi’s book, though, lies not only in her analysis of the desert fathers and mothers. Bondi is also deeply aware of the struggles, frustrations, fears, destructive habits, and skewed dispositions many of us combat in our vocation to be faithful disciples of Christ today. She is particularly adept at translating the ancient wisdom of the monks in a manner that modern people can understand and apply.
Take, for example, Bondi’s discussion of the passions, the monastic term for those “habits of seeing, feeling, thinking, and acting that characteristically blind us to who we ourselves, our neighbors, and God really are so that we are not able to respond appropriately, rationally, and lovingly.”
Gluttony, Bondi explains, is just such a passion, but it is far more than simply a desire to overeat. Instead, it is a craving “for variety in life that leads us never to be able to be satisfied with what we have.” Inner dissatisfaction ignites an infectious acquisitiveness “that makes us confuse what we own with who we are.” In turn, this inner emptiness fuels a need to “dominate others, and a boredom that can be satisfied only by feeding our hunger to possess goods or other people or power.” Here we have monastic insight sensitively applied to a common pitfall of prayer—that is, “I want what I want when I want it.”
Some readers will find aspects of Bondi’s work troubling. For instance, she couples God’s desire for our wholeness to a hermeneutic “that allows us to set aside those passages in Scripture that would appear to work against us.” Wouldn’t we soon find ourselves escaping from those very texts that address issues we would rather not face?
Yet Bondi helps us remember that God has been at work throughout the church’s history, teaching us how to pray and to love, and that the insights of the desert can help us to learn to pray in the midst of the noise and neuroses of the modern world.
Multi-Liturgicalism
Signs of Wonder: The Phenomenon of Convergence in Modern Liturgical and Charismatic Churches,by Robert Webber (Abbott-Martyn, 156 pp.; $14.99, hardcover). Reviewed by Mark A. Home, editorial associate with Prison Fellowship.
Evangelicals have begun to re-examine what worship is for and, as a result, how it should be done. Preaching is, of course, a noble and necessary task, but one is hard-pressed to support its status in our churches as the end-all and be-all of the church service. Neither the Old nor New Testament promotes such a definition of public worship; nor does well over a millennium of church history.
The testimony of church history, ironically, is what caused the current confusion. It is no secret that, in defending the absolute authority of Scripture against the competing claims of “tradition,” the followers of the Reformers often ended up reacting against all things Roman. Only now, after enough centuries have passed for dust to settle and tempers to cool, are evangelicals beginning to wonder why the doctrine of justification by faith alone forbids them from eating bread and drinking wine more than once a month—or even once a quarter.
A key figure in this evangelical awakening is Robert Webber, professor of theology at Wheaton College. Not only has he written several well-received books on Christian worship, but he has also recently founded the Institute of Worship Studies, a training school for those interested in the history and theology of worship.
Signs of Wonder describes a worldwide convergence of traditions “that is resulting in the birth of a style of worship that is rooted in the Scriptures, aware of the developments in history, and with a passion for the contemporary.” Liturgical churches, says Webber, are borrowing from charismatic worship, and vice versa. Churches that are neither liturgical nor charismatic are borrowing from both.
Early in Signs, Webber discusses how Protestant worship has bounced between two extremes—rationalism and emotionalism. Neither extreme does justice to biblical worship—though Webber argues that emotional worship is “closer to the experience of God’s presence.”
The book consists primarily of vignettes of different worship services from all across the country where Webber has sighted these “signs of wonder.” They are arranged around various topics such as the church calendar, the arts, and the administration of the sacraments. By using stories to illustrate different aspects of converging worship, Webber has written a powerful little book with a healthy balance between theory and practice.
