Thoughts on Love Wins

I finished Love Wins, but instead of doing a full review, I’ll list a few random thoughts. In case you missed it, here is a thorough, must-read review. This review carefully walks through the sheer tonnage of errant doctrine contained within its pages. I’ll limit my observations to small things that seemed weird, out of place, or just plain bad.

Random Thoughts

1. See picture to the right. That about sums it up.
2. The tone of the book is condescending and mocking. Bell continually presents the “traditional” view of hell as a straw man, and then proceeds to knock it down in a show of (supposed) theological strength. I was obviously not impressed.
3. Bell is not simply asking (or raising) questions; he is clearly laying out his view of “Christianity” as better than the other “versions” of Christianity out there. In reality, it is clear he has veered away from orthodox Christianity.
4. Holiness seems to be category altogether absent in Bell’s teaching. There’s lots about social transformation, but little with reference to living a holy life in response to the great mercy of God. All of his negative examples of the traditional (aka, orthodox) view sound bad because he has divorced them (the examples) from any concept of holiness. In other words, holding an orthodox view of God’s holiness, and the subsequent call for believers to be holy, would resolve much of the negative things Bell sees as closed minded and cold.
5. His example of Eminem’s comeback as a “possible” example of following the dying-to-live paradigm he advocates was careless, in my opinion (chapter 5). He never says anything directly about Em being a Christian, but he certainly raises the question. Knowing Em’s pre-comeback music well, and having listened to a few of post-comeback songs, there is little to no evidence that he has been converted to new life in Christ.
6. Chapter 6 is awful.
7. The worst part of the book (for me) is on page 173-175.
8. Bell’s exegesis is horrible.
9. Bell quotes lots of verses, and seeks to exegete numerous passages (see #8), he uses biblical language, but he starts and ends in places completely different than most realize. This is what makes this book so subversive.
10. I find it really strange that he would recommend Tim Keller’s book The Prodigal God. Does he realize Keller is no where near him theologically? In fact, Keller was deeply disturbed by Bell’s book.

Stay tuned in the coming months; many books will be written to refute the errant doctrine presented in this book. It really is that bad.

Satire Well Done

Doug Wilson (aka, literary genius):

It is when parody does its job, to use James White’s descriptive phrase, that compromised teachers who have a demonstrable and real contempt for the authority of Scripture suddenly discover that their ideal Sermon on the Mount is filled with marshmallow clouds and sparkly rainbows, with the foreground filled with little blue Christian smurfs hugging each other. Can’t we teach whatever the heck we want and still get a hug? Why can’t we? That’s what we want. And what we want is the god of the system, but that’s another topic.

But every orthodoxy uses humor on the outsiders, and every group of outsiders uses humor on the orthodox. This is the way it is in the world as God governs it, and this reality does not exclude Jesus and the holy apostles. When it came to Pharisaical balloons, Jesus and His righteous pin set some kind of a record. Archeologists in Jerusalem are still finding little bits of plastic. Whether it is an appropriate use of satire or not is a question of truth and righteousness, and if you belong to a faction of the church that wonders whatthose are, then all you are doing is using your seminary degree as a device for blowing up balloons.