Bell's great leap backward

Of the myriad of critics taking aim at Rob Bell and his new book, Love Wins, one of the most outspoken is Kevin DeYoung, whose detailed critique clocks in at 21 pages in .pdf format. Mark Galli cuts Bell more slack than others, but still finds the trajectory of his theology problematic. Albert Mohler laments the (re)emergence of worn out Protestant liberal theology to which Bell's apparent rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell inevitably leads.

The linchpin statement from Bell's book which seems to be at the root of the controversy could bear some additional scrutiny.

A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

The point no one seems to be making is that the heart of Bell's argument is a straw man. The picture he paints of "a select few Christians" spending "forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven" and "the rest of humanity" spending forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better" is, at best, a generalization from a particular or, at worst, a caricature. His problem with the doctrine of hell in general seems to be rooted in a moral conundrum over a particular hyper-Calvinist belief in double predestination. This may explain why the most strident critiques of Bell's work have come from hardcore Reformed types.

There is a considerable chasm between rejecting a particular understanding of predestination and abandoning the doctrine of an eternal hell altogether. But Bell seems eager to leap across that chasm with an alternative to traditional teaching that is a bigger caricature than the one he finds so objectionable. In the end, however, it is a great leap backward; just another example of the "Emergent" crowd shadow boxing against imagined enemies and imagining themselves to be purveyors of "fresh" insights and "cool" ideas which are, in reality, nothing more than recycled heresies just as easily refuted today as they were at Nicea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon.