Letters

Love Wins

In reference to N. D. Wilson’s review of Rob Bell’s Love Wins [“Pensive Rabbits,” July/August]: Could it be that when something strikes us as terribly “ugly,” that thing is splattering against the Truth of God’s image deep within us? I felt this recently when I took a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp outside Krakow, Poland. I was in Krakow for a theology conference on the theme “What Is Life?” I learned more during that tour of Auschwitz than I did from any of the papers given during the conference (many of which were excellent). I suppose that, for Wilson, the visceral ugliness of Auschwitz doesn’t convey any Truth at all. For my part, I think the bile I felt in my throat during my tour of Auschwitz was the image of God pressing against every cell in my body—literally, a “visceral” reaction, deep in my viscera—against the horror of the death camps. This is why I think Bell is entirely right to raise the “hippidy-hipster’s” aesthetic “Really?” in response to the stories of Heaven and Hell we so often like to tell. I don’t agree with all of Bell’s answers, but he asks the right kind of questions.

N. D. Wilson’s sarcastic review represents not only a failure of imagination on his part but a failure of vision on the part of the editors of Books & Culture. Whether you like it or not, Bell’s book represents the wave of the future, a generational shift, if you will, in evangelical Christianity, an opportunity to reimagine and revision so much of what has failed in American evangelicalism, and it deserved to be dealt with far more seriously, thoughtfully, and respectfully than you and Wilson have chosen to do.

I sat last summer with my niece, a young woman raised by my brother in a strict evangelical home, as she declared that she was no longer a Christian. I naturally raised my eyebrows at this, and when I began to probe, I discovered that her theological beliefs were more conservative than mine. She’s sort of a dispensationalist atheist. But what surfaced was that all her friends “hate” Christians, and she wants nothing to do with an evangelical church that her friends revile, a church that stands for intolerance, hate, foot-dragging on virtually every progressive cause, etc.

Bell speaks for this generation, a generation that wants no part of their parents’ evangelicalism. He speaks for a generation sick of planting its flag on doctrines like inerrancy, tired of twisting themselves in logical knots trying to defend a God who orders the annihilation of entire tribes down to the last baby and kitten that block the advance of his people into their “promised land,” and disgusted with evangelical leaders who march in lockstep with a morally bankrupt Republican Party.

Yes, Bell speaks “as an impressionist,” as Wilson points out, but Wilson then totally fails to deal with Bell on his own terms, as someone who makes impressionistic films, whose entire body of work is impressionistic, who does not speak as a theologian bound to literal interpretations of Scripture. Wilson calls Love Wins a “pitiful piece of coffee-shop thinking and foggy communication.” As if the next generation of evangelicals is not even now doing more thinking in coffee shops and bars than in churches and theological institutions. Yes, this is coffee-shop thinking, and it presents a vision a hell of a lot more exciting than that presented in most evangelical churches and seminaries. What would it mean to free ourselves from this hidebound and horrific doctrine, to really believe that love will win, that our primary job is not to frighten people into eternal life, but to present them with a God who loves infinitely? How might that change evangelism and mission? How might that change the doing of church? Such “impressionistic” discussions are undoubtedly taking place at coffee shops around the country, even as Wilson and other spokesmen for mainstream evangelicalism hammer Bell for not parsing the Greek and Hebrew with enough care. Wilson’s insinuation that Bell is simply trying to be “cool” is deeply insulting, and where evangelicals follow his lead and belittle Bell and his message, they do so at their own peril.

N. D. Wilson replies:

I absolutely agree that truth can come to us through visceral reactions—because I believe the law of God is truly written on the hearts of men and women (as Scripture teaches), because I believe in natural revelation (as Scripture teaches), and because I believe we were created in the image of God (again … as Scripture teaches). I can have lesser faith in all of these things because I have greater faith in a greater thing. However, I am also acutely aware that my “viscera” and my knee-jerk truth reactions are deeply (and sometimes completely) affected by the narratives in which I am situated—both in my immediate community and in the broader Western world and all of its pop glory. And in those things, I don’t trust. Run a litmus test on visceral epistemology: All of my friends at the mall, my Ethics 101 professor, the lead singer of my favorite Portland band, and all of my cinematic and literary heroes share a single (oh, so hard to predict) view of the authority of Scripture. Now, does Scripture make me embarrassed of them, or do they make me embarrassed of Scripture? If my reactions are merely springing from my wee cultural context, and if I let that context trump the Word of God, then I need to come clean and admit that my god is Peer Pressure (and his prophet is Cool). Rob Bell is embarrassed by the very idea that God might not like Gandhi. Does that embarrassment find its roots in anything truly authoritative? No. It’s based on the same kind of authority that gets women under the knife in Beverly Hills, the same authority that will scowl if I gush about industrial farming in a Whole Foods, and that will grieve if I wear jeans with baggy thighs and tapered ankles just about anywhere. And thus, I snicker.

As for hypothetical waves of hypothetical futures, I find myself unimpressed. This is simply an “everyone is about to be doing it” argument. It barely even rises to the present tense. And even if it did, who cares? Why would I want to be affected by a trend in white, suburban America? Has that authority ever gone wrong before? The same kind of argument is being weepily presented by a few thousand teen girls to a few thousand mothers who aren’t convinced of the moral necessity of getting a nose stud immediately. (Like, now, Mom.)

To sum up: I don’t trust my own visceral reaction when it turns out that the folks in the church who share my reaction are also white (and tend to wear black skinny jeans). Getting outside one’s own situatedness is awfully reassuring (a second witness of sorts). I’m standing on a doctrine that straddles both time and place—a doctrine that was shared by men and women now long entombed and is currently shared by men and women on different continents and of different hues.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I think the real future of Christendom lies in Asia, Africa, and South America—nowhere near a comfortable little town called Grand Rapids.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.