Hell or heresy?

LITTLE ROCK — Mainstream evangelicals have discarded Catholic teachings about papal infallibility, purgatory, reliquaries and the Apocrypha, but they’ve rarely, if ever, denied the tence of eternal damnation.

Hellfire, most say, is hot. The Lake of Fire is everlasting. The th of God is poured out upon sinners, Revelation 14 says, and smoke of their torment rises forever and ever.” So it’s little surprise that an evangelical megapastor’s book, ming that everyone is heavenward bound, has captured attion.

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every rson Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell has climbed The New York mes charts.

It’s one of Amazon.com’s best-selling books.

And it has been branded “heresy” by some evangelical theogians.

That hasn’t exactly scared away readers.

“It’s been absolutely, totally overwhelming,” Bell says, when asked about book sales. “I get lots of e-mails from my publisher with exclamation points. I’m blown away.” Bell, 40, is a graduate of Wheaton College and FullerSeminary - two bulwarks of evangelical Christianity. He pastors Mars Hill Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., one of the nation’s largest Protestant congregations.

Time magazine named Bell to its 2011 list of the 100 most influential people.

Quoting 1 Timothy 2, Bell writes: “God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” Then, Bell asks, “So does God get what God wants? How great is God? Great enough to achieve what God sets out to do, or kind of great, medium great, great most of the time, but in this, the fate of billions of people, not totally great. Sort of great. A little great. ... Will all people be saved, or will God not get what God wants? Does this magnificent, mighty, marvelous God fail in the end?”

Bell declares that “God will be united and reconciled with” all of humanity and cites Philippians 2 to back his belief in universal salvation. “All people. The nations. Every person, every knee [will bow], every tongue [will acknowledge]” Jesus, Bell writes.

Without universal salvation, he argues, history is a tragedy and billions are damned and God is a failure.

“Restoration brings God glory; eternal torment doesn’t. Reconciliation brings God glory; endless anguish doesn’t. Renewal and return cause God’s greatness to shine through the universe; never-ending punishment doesn’t,” Bell writes.

The Gospel, therefore, is Good News for everybody.

Those who reject Jesus Christ in this life get a second chance to embrace him at some point in the future, Bell suggests. And if necessary, they get third chances and fourth chances and fifth chances - however many it takes to bring all of humanity back to the Creator.

“I wrote this book,” Bell said, “because at the heart of the Christian story is this insistence that God is love and that Jesus came to give us and show us that love .... The book was really me trying to set out to reclaim this simple, pure, beautiful, compelling message that Jesus came because God loves the whole world, and Jesus would like us to trust that, accept that, open up to that and receive that.”

Universalism - the idea that everyone will be saved - isn’t new. It has been around for ages, but it has been rejected by every major Christian denomination.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it like this: “The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.” The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.”

The Baptist Faith and Message, approved by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000, states: “According to His promise, Jesus Christ will return personally and visibly in glory to the earth; the dead will be raised; and Christ will judge all men in righteousness. The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell, the place of everlasting punishment. The righteous in their resurrected and glorified bodies will receive their reward and will dwell forever in Heaven with the Lord.”

‘EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT’

The Assemblies of God’s Fundamental Truths sums it up this way: “Whoever is not found written in the Book of Life together with the devil and his angels, the beast and the false prophet, will be consigned to the everlasting punishment in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone ....”

Professor Marvin Pate, chairman of the department of Christian theology at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, says Bell’s book has sparked conversation at his school.

Among evangelical students, reviews have not been positive, he says.

“I don’t in any way question Rob’s motives or his integrity. I know this book has come out of a loving pastor’s heart,” Pate said.

But Bell’s book “eliminates one-half of the whole message of the Gospel - Jesus spoke more on hell than he did [on] heaven,” Pate said. “Rob’s book is in the tradition of old-line liberalism, which emphasizes the love of God to the exclusion of the justice of God and the wrath of God.”

Universalism, Pate said, gives people a false sense of security and is “simply not in accord with the historic Christian faith. ... I cannot conceive that a Hitler or a Stalin or people like that are going to go to heaven if they didn’t repent. I couldn’t conceive of it. I couldn’t see how God could be just and allow that to happen.”

HOW ABOUT HITLER?

Asked whether heaven could open its doors for Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden, Bell says: “Those kinds of questions are beyond my imagination and I assume they’re beyond yours, too. That’s why I’m so glad there’s a God who is just and can sort those things out.”

Love Wins gets kudos from Pastor Dick King of Indian Hills Church in North Little Rock.

“I love this book,” King said. At Indian Hills, “we believe, like Rob Bell, that Jesus is the way. Through him everybody is going to be brought back to God and reconciled.”

Originally, Indian Hills was a Southern Baptist church. The congregation and the Northern Pulaski Baptist Association severed ties after Indian Hills rejected the concept of eternal damnation, King said.

It was a cordial parting of the ways, King says, but it was unavoidable.

King avoids the term “Universalism,” preferring to call the doctrine “complete reconciliation” or “total reconciliation.”

And the doctrine divided the church. “The Sunday that I preached this message, we probably had 500 to 600 here. Now we’ve got down to an average of about 100 .... Everybody calls you a heretic. People leave by the droves and we had them leaving by the droves.”

But King is convinced that his theology is sound and that everyone will eventually be redeemed. “The redemption of all things is the product of a God who is good and a God who loves,” King said. “God desires that all men should be saved.”