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Exploring Love Wins 7

Exploring Love Wins 7

Last updated on: April 15, 2011 at 6:25 am by Scot McKnight

Exploring Love Wins 7 2011-04-15T06:25:21-05:00 Scot McKnight

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The 5th chp in Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, is called “Dying to Live.” I am asking that you pause quietly and slow down enough to pray this prayer as the way to approach this entire series:

O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing:
Send your Holy Spirit and pour into my heart your greatest gift,
which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue,
without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you.
Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and for ever. Amen.†

In this chp Rob seeks to communicate into today’s idiom the significance of the cross and resurrection. Which means he’s touching on atonement theory, surely one of the most discussed topics of our day, but he shifts the conversation from atonement theory to another topic. More of that below.

How would you explain what Rob says about cross and resurrection in this chapter? Do you think it is adequate? Do you see a shift in topic — from salvation and atonement theory to moral theory?

The big theme of this chapter is that the Bible speaks of the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection through a variety of images, each designed in different ways to speak to humans/Israel/church. In other words, this chp enters into atonement theory. Bell then proposes looking at the cross through the lens of elemental features of the universe.

Here are the atonement images in the Bible: Sacrifice, reconciliation, justification, victory, redemption.

Which is the correct one? His answer, “Yes.” Which is to say, each is true. Rob Bell then tries to get to the bottom of atonement theory. Here are his words: “The point then, as it is now, is Jesus. The divine in flesh and blood. He’s where the life is” (129).

First cross, and then resurrection, and in this he works out what I’m going to call an “elemental theory of the cross.” It is clear that his “elemental theory” is neither the Christus Victor theme made so clear in Tom Wright nor the solidarity theory seen in the writings of Moltmann. Here’s where he goes:

1. Death gives way to life in all of nature, and in relationships. “It’s how the world works” (131). The cross is a “symbol of an elemental reality.”
2. The resurrection is cosmic — “The tomb is empty, a new day is here, a new creation is here, everything has changed, death has been conquered, the old has gone, the new has come” (133-134).
3. The resurrection is personal: “When we say yes to God, when we open ourselves to Jesus’s living, giving act on the cross, we enter in to a way of life. He is the source, the strength, the example, and the assurance that this pattern of death and rebirth is the way into the only kind of life that actually sustains and inspires” (136).

And: “Lose your life and find it, he says. That’s how the world works. That [sic] how the soul works. That’s how life works when you’re dying to live” (136).

A few points:

First, I summarized where all those atonement theories were headed in Rob’s view just before the jump, and I think he’s shortchanged and simplified them. Again, he says the point is Jesus. He is where life is. No one wants to disagree with that, but even if I agree, that’s not how to get to the “point” of all those atonement words. The point of each one of them is this: humans are sinners and enslaved and entombed, God has done something mighty to rid them of their sin problem, and what God has done can be expressed as sacrifice, reconciliation, justification, victory and redemption. Yes, the point is Jesus and Yes the point is life, but the Jesus of these images is the Savior — the one who steps in and gives himself in our place (vicarious) and who removes our sins at the cost of his own life — and who by his death and resurrection brings us into new life. Inherent to each of these is the removal of sin as precondition with the forgiving, etc, benefits that follow.

As I read this chp, Rob shifts the topic from sin removal to cross as paradigm of elemental factors.

Second, Jesus, too, says there’s something elemental about death and life. John 12:24. But I can’t quite comprehend how the atonement-sacrifice work of Christ can be so elemental and at the same time a “scandal” and a “rock of stumbling.” There’s not enough here about sin removal and not enough here about something God does, and more an elemental principle that death leads to life — but why death? How does death work? These are the elemental things atonement theories work out, and his “elemental theory” doesn’t explore that.

Third, I agree with Rob in that the cross and resurrection have to be tied together — one without the other is no gospel. Too many today have a Good Friday only gospel. Rob wants it to be cross and resurrection.

Fourth, I’m all for seeing atonement language as various metaphors (see A Community Called Atonement: Living Theology). And I’m all for finding a way to bringing them into our modern world. And how we do that matters. But however we do the transfer, it needs to be comprehensive. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s got to retain and sustain the various dimensions of those biblical metaphors. Here’s how I see what I see as a shift in this chp: the “elemental theory” seems to drop the sin and drop the Savior and instead explores perhaps the most significant moral theory in the entire Bible, and it is a cruciform moral theory: we die and in dying we learn to live.

And I want to emphasize how much I agree with Rob on this moral theory: the essence of flourishing is loving God and loving others; the essence of loving is giving to the other and that means surrendering — it means dying to our ego and living to God and to others. So, yes, totally, dying to live. I agree. But that’s not atonement, nor does it explain the meaning of the cross of Jesus as atoning.

On the cross Jesus shouldered the sins of all. 2 Corinthians 5:15: “And he died for all…” and 5:19: “that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.” 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is the stuff of atonement.

Humans today — modern and postmodern — experience guilt, and they experience broken relationships, and they experience a sense of being out of sorts with God so that they experience God’s displeasure/wrath, and they experience a sense of futility and being trapped and being captured in the systems and in their own private worlds, and they experience being enslaved — and so those old Bible images still work. And they work well. I see no need to say they are just back then. There is a way to bring those very images into our world to speak to the conditions of postmoderns.

Exploring Love Wins 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6

For other posts, see Tony Jones, Greg Boyd.

Jeff Cook compares Rob Bell with C.S. Lewis.

Early Rob Bell reviews.

Waiting for Rob Bell part one and part two.

Atonement

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