Unless you have just returned from a Virgin Intergalactic flight, you are probably aware of the controversy surrounding the new book Love Wins by pastor Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church in Michigan. (Not to be confused with the Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington and its pastor Mark Driscoll who is probably plotting at this very moment how to get Rob Bell inside the octagon and beat him to a sniveling, bloody pulp.)

Even before its recent release, Bell’s publisher, HarperCollins, had leaked a very juicy summary strongly indicating the nature of the book. Love Wins would present, in the words of one editorial, “a deeply biblical vision for rediscovering a richer, grander, truer, and more spiritually satisfying way of understanding heaven, hell, God, Jesus, salvation, and repentance. The result is the discovery that the ‘good news’ is much, much better than we ever imagined.”

Early reviews began popping up from Justin Taylor (which generated 1,500 comments and 30k Facebook “recommends”), Al Mohler, Greg Boyd, Kevin DeYoung’s epic, 20-page tome, followed by later reviews from Joey Jernigan, Relevant Magazine (a shockingly good review) and 185 respondents on the book’s page on Amazon. My intent was to not read the book, but I could not be satisfied to have it pass by me, so I broke down yesterday morning and downloaded to my Kindle. Trust me when I say that this review could easily have been three or four times as long. There are plenty of, “Dude, seriously?” moments in the book. I just do not have time to cover all of the 50 sections I highlighted while reading.

First, Love Wins is not all bad, not all heretical and not all varying degrees of bad theology. Second, it has much that is good, true and biblically accurate. Third, the good is good, but the bad is terrible.

Sub-titled Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, Bell’s work is ambitiously named, but is not able to thoroughly address either of its three proposed topics. This is not to say any of them are ignored, but the length of the book and his writing style (short sentences, plentiful use of the return key, and a superfluity of questions) do not lend themselves to the scrupulousness required to explore them at more than surface depth. If the subject was cancer, then the good Dr. Bell merely sprayed it with Bactine and declared, “Antibiotics win!” This is especially disappointing since Bell claims it to be a book of answers. Less than a book of answers, it is a wide ranging book of questions and thoughts about heaven and hell as he sometimes redefines them without going to the trouble of letting the undiscerning reader know that he’s redefined them.

Bell does good in reminding us that Christ’s followers are responsible to exhibit heaven on earth. He writes (pg. 45):

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we’ve bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere. Around a billion people in the world today do not have access to clean water. People will have access to clean water in the age to come, and so working for clean-water access for all is participating now in the life of the age to come. That’s what happens when the future is dragged into the present.

This is nothing less than the kingdom present with an implicit repudiation of post-millennialism. Similarly, he asserts (pg. 55):

According to Jesus, then, heaven is as far away as that day when heaven and earth become one again and as close as a few hours. The apostle Paul writes to the Philippians that either he would go on living, or he would be killed and immediately be with Christ (chap. 1). Paul believed that there is a dimension of creation, a place, a space, a realm beyond the one we currently inhabit and yet near and connected with it.

He clearly is not is step with Belinda Carlisle here, as he holds that heaven is an actual place.

He also equates hell to the reality of sin (pg. 72):

So when people say they don’t believe in hell and they don’t like the word “sin,” my first response is to ask, “Have you sat and talked with a family who just found out their child has been molested? Repeatedly? Over a number of years? By a relative?”

Despite muddling the doctrine of hell later, he does not question its existence as related by Jesus, even providing this sterling insight:

Second, note what it is the man wants in hell: he wants Lazarus to get him water. When you get someone water, you’re serving them. The rich man wants Lazarus to serve him. In their previous life, the rich man saw himself as better than Lazarus, and now, in hell, the rich man still sees himself as above Lazarus. It’s no wonder Abraham says there’s a chasm that can’t be crossed. The chasm is the rich man’s heart! It hasn’t changed, even in death and torment and agony. He’s still clinging to the old hierarchy. He still thinks he’s better.

A real dilemma comes when Bell tries to explain away any kind of meaningful (ie, biblically sound) doctrine of eternal punishment. It’s here especially that he veers into heresy only rarely getting even two wheels on the road. It’s as if, given his revulsion for the course charted by the church for 2,000 years, he plots a new course, but, rather than using a GPS, he simply decides to spin the wheel. Bell goes to the trouble of pointing out that having a “personal relationship” with Jesus is not in the Bible, but seems blind to the fact that “love wins” makes no appearance either. Spotty hermeneutics and shoddy church history do little to help his case. It seems for him that Christianity is a religion of mystery of which questions are the core, but, historically, Christianity has been seen as a religion of revelation of which questions are a part.

Nowhere is Bell’s disdain for a doctrine of eternal justice toward sin more evident than his handling of scripture regarding who will be saved. Using a method of cherry picking that would make any migrant worker proud, Bell “proves” that “all” will eventually be drawn to heaven. With complete disregard for any context at all, verses that are directed to Israel, verses that refer to only believers, and verses that directed to another specific group are combined into a theological witches’ brew the odor of which should ward off any serious truth seeker. Even the aforementioned review of at Relevant magazine, noting “Bell’s seeming refusal in Love Wins to wrestle with the explicit difficulties in the biblical text,” concluded:

It would be easy to imagine a new Christian assuming Love Wins is an all-encompassing view of God, and then being dreadfully confused when they read Judges for the first time. Bell’s summation is at least as non-holistic as Mark Driscoll’s “My Jesus beats people up” image. It’s disappointing to see Bell fall into the same trap as Driscoll and some of his contemporaries, when the complexity and paradox in the character of God seem to be overlooked in the chase to gain points.

His belief that “love wins” becomes so completely skewed that he ultimately interprets verses that teach the depth of judgment on those who reject Christ as “there’s still hope for Sodom and Gomorrah.” It is a breathtaking display of eisegetical gymnastics. At least a 9.5.

Since Rob Bell is so concerned that billions and billions of people will go to hell, perhaps he should write a book challenging western Christians’ view of evangelism, rather than letting us off the hook by implying that all but the most hardened sinners will wind up in heaven anyway. Why should we spend one second of time and even one dollar to tell the lost about Christ when

The writers of scripture consistently affirm that we’re all part of the same family. What we have in common—regardless of our tribe, language, customs, beliefs, or religion—outweighs our differences. This is why God wants ‘all people to be saved.’ (pg. 99)

Sorry, Rob. Being in the same family is the result of salvation not the root of it.

Perhaps most disconcerting of all is his caricaturing of what most people would call “historic theology.” His complaint about the many “Jesuses” that have told a toxic story to the masses, is hardly helped by his overly simplistic, baldly inadequate description on page 173:

Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.

Nothing about the goodness of God leading to repentance. Nothing about unbelief. Nothing about sin separating from God. Bell’s comment would make Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens stand and applaud. It’s a ludicrous, stupid parody of God.

Reading portions of Love Wins I cannot help but think of a scene from the 1995 movie version of A Little Princess where the school girls had endured a lengthy read from some intolerably dull novel. As Sarah Crewe took her turn she immediately woke up everyone with a rousing portion that had every girl and one of the ladies swooning. Upon being reprimanded for changing the story, the adventurous Crewe replied, “I just couldn’t bear to think of her running off with that awful man, so I imagined it another way.” Bell’s conclusions about heaven are informative, about hell are less so, and about the fate of every person who ever lived? It seems he’s just imagined it another, unbiblical, way.

As a friend of mine (who loved the book) said of Love Wins, “This isn’t Bell’s best.” I would go so far as to say there are other books that are far less problematic than this one that are far more effective in teaching what Bell is attempting to say. This is far and away a fan club book.

If you want to read on the unimaginable love of God, please check out The Ragamuffin Gospel. If you want to read about our role with God in bringing justice to the world, read Good News About Injustice. For a far better treatment on helping the poor and providing clean drinking water, see When Helping Hurts. For an much more in depth exploration of heaven, try Randy Alcorn’s Heaven. For the best treatment on the prodigal son in your lifetime, you need The Prodigal God
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The latest in an ongoing series by Pulitzer Prize winning film critic and author, Stephen Hunter, sees the return of former Gunnery Sergeant sniper, Bob Lee Swagger, and, following a very slow effort in Night of Thunder, a return to form in the series for Hunter.

I started reading Hunter after seeing Shooter, the film adaptation of his first Bob Lee Swagger novel, Point of Impact. While the movie took liberties with the time frame of the story (Swagger is an recent war vet in the movie, but a Vietnam vet in the books), I was drawn in to the series of books by Hunter’s prose and depth of the characters he was willing to build into the stories.

In novel form, Swagger is a cranky, private, Arkansan who is regularly drawn into situations requiring him to rely on his superior knowledge of firearms and hunting. And that would be the sniper style hunting of humans, not bluejays, squirrels or warthogs. Point of Impact follows the story of his being framed for the attempted assassination of the President of the United States, his subsequent escape and tracking down of the ones who framed him. The climactic courtroom scene is excellent and worth reading the entire book.

The second Swagger novel, Black Light, is told in two phases: the narrative of the death of Bob Lee’s father, Medal of Honor winner Earl Swagger, is the first while Bob Lee’s investigation into that death years later forms the second. The book is well done and, despite 10,000 swear words (or so it seemed), captures a crass, rural side of 1950′s America, with all it’s poverty, violence and racial animus. Black Light was followed by Time to Hunt, which is one of the best novels I have ever read. This final volume of the initial Swagger trilogy ties together loose ends from characters mentioned in the first two books, most centrally, Swagger’s friend and spotter in Vietnam, Donnie Fenn, KIA by a Russian sniper the day before he was supposed to leave the country. Swagger himself was almost killed, receiving a steel hip for his trouble. While I’ve been reading novels since before I can remember, the 90 or so pages in Time to Hunt that describe Bob Lee Swagger’s Navy Cross winning actions at An Loc is as good a piece of American writing as has come off the presses in the last 20 years.

The 47th Samurai follows Bob to Japan to avenge the death of a friend, who’s own father was killed by Earl Swagger in his Medal of Honor winning action at Iwo Jima. This book seemed more to assuage Hunter’s interest in Japanese culture than a probable story for Swagger. Though enjoyable it was a slight step down from the first three. If I had happened on Night of Thunder first, I likely would not have read any of the others. It is more than 100 pages shorter than most of the other entries in the series, therefore missing much of the backgrounds and prose that made the previous efforts so enjoyable. Hunter admits in the afterward that he conceived the idea after going to a NASCAR race. It shows. There is very little interesting info about racing, driver Mark Martin is misidentified as “Mike” Martin, and every redneck, snake-handling, inbred, Appalachian, “Baptist” stereotype is in play with the criminal family who stand at the center of the story. I cannot imagine but that Hunter would like a mulligan on that volume.

Which brings us to I, Sniper where we find Swagger asked by his longtime FBI friend, Nick Memphis, (first introduced in Point of Impact), to give insight into the assassinations of four former 1960′s radicals, each of which was felled by a long range rifle shot. Another former Marine sniper, Carl Hitchcock, has been isolated by the FBI as the highest person of interest and, when a “shrine” of sorts is found in his North Carolina home, the investigation leads to a cheap hotel room where Hitchcock is found dead in a closet, apparently by his own hand. (Carl Hitchcock’s Vietnam history as the sniper with the most kills is a recurring item in the Swagger novels and is based on real life sniper, Carlos Hathcock.)

Not being satisfied with the cumbersome, time consuming methodologies of law enforcement, Swagger goes rogue, another theme of the books, to run his own investigation which ultimately leads him to the Montana ranch of one T. T. Constable (a toilet paper thin veiled caricature of Ted Turner), whose ex-wife, Joan Flanders (an even more thinly veiled caricature of Jane Fonda), where he again hunts men who believes themselves to be hunting the now 68-year-old Swagger. The writing, story depth and total length make it more like the books in the initial trilogy.

Like all the Swagger novels there are lengthy, detailed descriptions of guns, cartridges, holsters, equipment, long distance shot evaluation and shooting. Likewise, there are gory, explicit descriptions of what happens when a bullet traveling at 2,600 fps hits a head, heart or torso. If you like thrillers or firearms and can swim through some of the language and descriptions of the more sordid elements of society, you might enjoy these novels. If you don’t like reading about people dying violent deaths, you might want to move on to Karen Kingsbury.

You can purchase I, Sniper, The 47th Samurai, and Time to Hunt through the links below. You pay the same low Amazon.com price and I get a referral fee. Thanks!

The 'nook' e-reader pack from Barnes & Noble

The 'nook' e-reader by Barnes & Noble

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