On the fate of those who have never heard the gospel...

An illustration from Francis Schaeffer:

If every little baby that was ever born anywhere in the world had a tape recorder hung about its neck, and if this tape recorder only recorded the moral judgments with which this child as he grew bound other men, the moral precepts might be much lower than the biblical law, but they would still be moral judgments.

Eventually each person comes to that great moment when he stands before God as judge. Suppose, then, that God simply touched the tape recorder button and each man heard played out in his own words all those statements by which he had bound other men in moral judgment. He could hear it going on for years—thousands and thousands of moral judgments made against other men, not aesthetic judgments, but moral judgments.

Then God would simply say to the man, though he had never head the Bible, now where do you stand in the light of your own moral judgments? The Bible points out . . . that every voice would be stilled. All men would have to acknowledge that they have deliberately done those things which they knew to be wrong. Nobody could deny it.

We sin two kinds of sin. We sin one kind as though we trip off the curb, and it overtakes us by surprise. We sin a second kind of sin when we deliberately set ourselves up to fall. And no one can say he does not sin in the latter sense. Paul’s comment is not just theoretical and abstract, but addressed to the individual—”O man”—any man without the Bible, as well as the man with the Bible.

. . . God is completely just. A man is judged and found wanting on the same basis on which he has tried to bind others.

—Francis Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (Crossway, 1985), pp. 49-50.

Romans 2:1-3; 14-16:

1 Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. 2 We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. 3 Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? . . .

14 . . . When Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them 16 on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.

HT: Justin Taylor

Michael Horton on "Love Wins"

Michael Horton is one of our brightest theologians. Recently Dr. Horton lectured on Rob Bell's new book "Love Wins." Check it out HERE.

Don't Know Much About Heaven

In reading Love Wins there are times when I cannot help but almost feel sorry for Rob Bell. Almost.

His use of the Scriptures is either incompetent or purposely misleading. But I don't know when the last time was that I read a book which was guilty of so many fallacies in biblical interpretation. It makes the reading very laborious because one has to stop consistently and shout at the page.

Anyway, Michael Bird has been taking his time reviewing Love Wins. In his review of chapter two he takes Bell to task for his egregious mishandling of what the Bible teaches about Heaven.

"Sometimes when Jesus used the word “heaven” he was simply referring to God, using the word as a substitute for the name of God. Second, sometimes when Jesus spoke of heaven, he was referring to the future coming together of heaven and earth in what he and his contemporaries called in the age to come. And then third—and this is where things get really interesting—when Jesus talked about heaven he was talking about our present eternal, intense, real experiences of joy, peace, and love in this life, this side of death and the age to come" (Love Wins, 58-59).

Taking these points in turn. First, only Matthew has Jesus do such a thing; in other words in none of the other Gospels does Jesus replace “God” with the term “Heaven”. This may just have been Mathew’s preference and not much can be assumed than from this about Jesus’ usage. It is true that Matthew uses “heaven” this way. Second, while this is somewhat true. Ancient Jews and early Christians still maintained the distinction between heaven and earth. When saints died they went to heaven from where they will return with Jesus at the end of the age. Collapsing the distinction between heaven and earth to the extend Rob does is unbiblical. If Paul is right “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” then there is a heaven somewhere else at least until the time of Jesus second coming. Jesus did pray that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, but that has yet to occur. Third, this category of heaven is an illusion. Neither Jesus nor any biblical writer defines heaven this way.

So what is the final word on Love Wins and heaven?... I'll say only here that God’s ultimate place for humans is a renewed earth. God is going to make all things new (Rev 21) and the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven to earth. As I make this point, I am surprised that Rob didn’t discuss Revelation 21-22 in the chapter. It’s absence startling.

Heaven is a complex biblical idea however. There is a heaven that is distinct from the earth. They are not the same place. Right now God is in heaven and at the time of his choosing he’ll turn the eschatological calendar sending Jesus to finish the work. Yet, in the meantime because of Jesus’ resurrection life and the gift of the Spirit in the church, heaven can be enacted in this time and in this place through the work of the church. Where the church steps, heaven’s footprint is left.

This finally brings us to the question of who is in heaven. First, it needs to be said that Jesus does call people to "enter heaven", although we need to define that term appropriately. The story of the Rich Young Ruler itself shows this. Second, the saints in both the Old and New Testament times are in heaven right now. When we die, if we have entrusted ourselves to Jesus [if we follow Jesus], we’ll be in heaven immediately. This however is not the last word and it might not have been what Jesus the the young man were discussing as Rob points out. Heaven will unite with a renewed earth and it’s this harmony that the Bible foresees as the final state, eternal life. Eternal life is both a quality of life (Rob’s point) and a quantity of life (forever).

Read the entire post HERE.

Concerning the fate of those who do not believe...

From Sam Storms:

In a recent interview with Sally Quinn of The Washington Post, Rob Bell again muddied the waters over the question of the fate of those who’ve never heard about Jesus. In doing so he also greatly misrepresented the evangelical answer to this question. Here are his words:

“If, billions and billions and billions of people, God is going to torture them in hell forever – people who never heard about Jesus are going to suffer in eternal agony because they didn’t believe in the Jesus they never heard of – then at that point we will have far bigger problems than a book from a pastor from Grand Rapids.”

Bell is responding to evangelicals who purportedly believe that people “are going to suffer in eternal agony because they didn’t believe in the Jesus they never heard of.” Let me say this as clearly as I can: No one will ever suffer for any length of time in hell or anywhere else for not believing in the Jesus they never heard of. Should I say that again or is it enough to ask that you go back and read it again?

Bell and others who make this sort of outrageous claim have evidently failed to look closely at Romans 1:18ff. Here we read that the wrath of God revealed from heaven is grounded in the persistent repudiation by mankind of the revelation God has made of himself in the created order. In other words, there is a reason for God’s wrath. It is not capricious. God’s wrath has been deliberately and persistently provoked by man’s willful rejection of God as he has revealed himself...

Paul’s point here in Romans 1 is that this revelation is sufficiently clear and inescapable that it renders all without excuse (see Rom. 1:20). Consequently, there is no such thing as “an innocent native in Africa” any more than there is “an innocent pagan in America.”

What does Paul mean when he says that all humanity is without excuse? “The excuse that is banished,” notes R. C. Sproul, “the excuse every pagan hopes in vain to use, the excuse that is exploded by God’s self-revelation in nature is the pretended, vacuous, dishonest appeal to ignorance. No one will be able to approach the judgment seat of God justly pleading, ‘If only I had known you existed, I would surely have served you.’ That excuse is annihilated. No one can lightly claim ‘insufficient’ evidence for not believing in God” (Classical Apologetics, 46).

The problem is not a lack of evidence. The problem is the innate, natural, moral antipathy of mankind to God. The problem is not that the evidence is not open to mankind. The problem is that mankind is not open to the evidence.

Read the entire article HERE.

"He gets lost in his cleaverness"

Darrel Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary has been reviewing "Love Wins" by Rob Bell chapter by chapter. In his latest post Dr. Bock addresses Bell's assertions that Jesus taught inclusivism. Bock writes:

Bell never says all are saved in this chapter, but he implies that people can embrace Jesus without knowing him or about him in any direct way. People of all sorts. People of all religions. That is where the chapter fails---sadly and badly.

The most stunning statement in this transition to discuss inclusivity is his claim that no where does Jesus tell the mechanism by which he saves and "gets people to God through him."

Let's see. Did not Jesus commission his followers to take the message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins in his name in Luke 24?

Did he not say unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood (probably a reference to some type of personal engagement with Jesus!), you cannot know me in John 6?

Behind Bell's affirmation of inclusivity stands a horrendous double non-sequitur as he transitioned into this idea. He says that Jesus is "bigger than any one religion including Christianity." Now if he means the various forms of Christian expression, that I can entertain, but his placement suggests he means any expression of Christian faith and that the exclusion of people of other faiths is intended in this remark.

Here is the double non-sequitur. First, in a theological sense, Jesus is Christianity. Without Jesus as the Christ, there would have been or would not be such a thing as Christianity (in any shape or form). And second, what do we do with the claim of the Scripture Bell so clearly notes that this Jesus is unique, that salvation is his unique work and that this IS a unique theology and faith? How do we get to Bell's "exclusivity on other other side of inclusivity?"...

As much fun as Bell has with word plays and links, he often during the journey loses his way on the road to meaning by failing to work adequately with the context of the passages he cites. He gets lost in his cleverness. Somehow John 14 gets reversed. No one comes to the Father but by me becomes many will get in without knowing me (simply because Jesus is everywhere and works mysteriously).

He cites that Jesus came to save all, but ignores the text that says Jesus came to divide, even cast fire on the earth in ways that creates division within families (See Luke 12:49-53). This type of selective citation does not lead into clearly elucidating a theological topic, which is what pastors are supposed to do from Scripture.

Read the rest of the post HERE.

Previous posts in the series:

Rob Bell on Heaven

Rob Bell on Hell pt. 1

Rob Bell -- More About Judgment

Rob Bell on the Cross pt. 1

Love, Justice, and the Power of a Good Narrative

Mike Witmer has an excellent post demonstrating the problem with Rob Bell's promo video for Love Wins. You see, many folks will view that video (or read the book or hear Bell speak) and be persuaded, not because of the truthfulness of the position but by the power of the narrative.

Several years ago I was touring a holocaust museum, and I was deeply moved the images of suffering and inhuman brutality that I saw there. And near the end of the tour on the wall was a picture of Hitler standing in front of the Eifel Tower in Paris. I and many who were with me were struck by the idea of Hitler enjoying the beauties of Paris while at the same moment one of the greatest genocides the world has ever known was being carried out on his orders.

But apparently not everyone saw it exactly the same way

Sometime in the previous few hours, somebody had attached a hand written note to the picture, and on the note they had written, “It’s okay because God forgave Hitler too.”

God forgave Hitler?

He did?

And someone knows this for sure?

And felt the need for the rest of us to know?

Do the most evil and unrepentant people in history, remaining what they are, still make it to heaven?

And what of those who aren’t quite so evil as that—Child molesters, racists, drug lords.

And what of the rest of us who only yell at our children, cut people off on the highway, and cheat on our taxes?

And what makes our evil less and Hitler’s more?

Is it the number of people you hurt? Or how badly? Or whether anyone else knows? Or whether you meant to?

And what if you’re the one who was molested or your loved ones murdered because of their ethnicity?

And then there’s the question behind the question?

The real question… What is God like?

Because millions and millions were taught that the primary message of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that God is willing to forgive everybody no matter who they are or what evils they’ve committed against the rest of us.

So what gets subtly sort of caught and taught is that God is willing to forgive the perpetrators of evil, regardless of whether or not their victims ever see justice. That God is willing to let slide things that we mustn’t.

But what kind of God is that?

Can a God so uninterested in justice be good?

How can that God ever be trusted?

How could that ever be…good…news?

This is why lots of people want nothing to do with the Christian faith.

They see it as an endless list of absurdities and inconsistencies, and say, “why would I ever want to be a part of that?”

See what we believe about heaven and hell is incredibly important because it exposes what we believe about who God is and what God is like.

What you discover in the bible is so surprising, and unexpected, and beautiful, that whatever we’ve been told or taught, the good news is even better than that, better than we can ever imagine.

It means pure and perfect justice, no wrong accusations, no punishments that don’t fit the crime, no hidden motives, no unaccounted pains or sorrows. But overflowing compensation for anyone who’s ever been hurt or betrayed.

The good news is that “justice wins.”

God's Punitive and Retributive Silence

There is a sense in which the church owes a debt to heresy. Don't misunderstand. We should never be thankful for false teaching which leads God's people astray. False teachers are clearly condemned in Scripture. But we also know just how easily sound doctrine devolves into a kind of dead orthodoxy. It seems to have pleased God throughout the generations of the church to use heresy and various false teachers to prompt the church to renew her love for God and His truth.

The latest attacks on God's truth come once again from within the big tent of evangelicalism. Specifically, a certain highly influential pastor in Grand Rapids is now denying the doctrine of hell as a just expression of the judgment of God upon unrepentant sinners. Of course this is no surprise given the fact that this same man has denied the substitutionary atonement of Jesus' death and the necessity of His virgin birth and resurrection. But this same man has unwittingly called the church to arms in a way. There has been a flood of excellent material flowing through the blogosphere reminding God's people of the truth declared in Scripture.

Martin Downes has been helpful in recent postings on the Bible's doctrine of hell: HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Thanks to Kevin DeYoung for posting the following words from Carl Henry's majestic work God, Revelation, and Authority:

God’s most awesome silence in eternity will be his silence toward the lost, a punitive and retributive silence reserved for the wicked who are not on speaking terms with him. There are scholars who consider the eternal punishment of the wicked to be inconsistent with the nature of God. These critics tend to subordinate to divine love all the biblical passages about God’s wrath, and ignore the fact that Jesus said even more about the pangs of hell than about the bliss of heaven, and moreover makes their duration coextensive and unending.

Millar Burrows is right in the verdict that “no basis” exists in Jesus’ recorded sayings for the universalist notion that all humans will finally be saved: “So far as the evidence indicates, he thought of the punishment of the wicked as eternal” (An Outline of Biblical Theology, p. 211). Hell involves not only the continuance of the sinner’s present condition of unhappiness, but also grievous punishment and irreversible exclusion from God’s presence. Jesus did not hesitate to quote Isaiah 66:24, which implies eternal punishment in the flesh, and to use such characterizations as “out darkness” and “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Hell resounds with weeping and wailing: there it is not the sinner but rather God who is silent.

The New Testament has no doctrine of a “second chance”; its emphasis is rather that “everyone must die once, and after that be judged by God” (Heb. 9:27, TEV) or, as Phillips words the text, “it is appointed for all men to die once, and after that pass to their judgment.” Nor does the New Testament anywhere condone the notion that the wicked will not survive this life into an afterlife. Such an end would mercifully terminate their existence, would spare them conscious separation from God and the punishment of the ungodly of which the Bible insistently speaks.

A fundamental Christian doctrine is that all departed souls will at the second coming of Christ be restored to bodily life; the redeemed will enter upon the life of heaven, the unredeemed will be excluded from it. The punishment of the wicked who in this life rejected the divine invitation to redemption will include conscious awareness of having spurned Christ’s agony and death in their behalf. (Volume IV, 596-97)

On Monday, Rob Bell will be unveiling his new book in what is being billed as "a live global event." DeYoung will be posting on that day a review of Love Wins. Be sure to check it out.

Doubt as a badge honor...

The latest flap over Rob Bell's views of hell and salvation have raised once again the post-modern infatuation with doubt and uncertainty. Even as post-modernism has largely been consigned to the intellectual trash bin, the emergent kids still think it is cutting edge. "We're into questions, not answers." "We're into the journey, not the destination." Ho hum.

Kevin DeYoung has posted a quote from one of my favorite writers of pastoral reflection, David Hansen. The quote is from Hansen's wonderful book The Art of Pastoring:

There is an important place in the ministry for honest questioning over doctrinal issues. But I’m not proud of my tossing and turning over hell. Some pastors wear their agnosticism about hell as a badge of honor. I’ve tried it. I’ve acted as if struggling to believe our Lord’s words were a virtue. But I always found that when I became proud of my doubts, they suddenly become the sin of unbelief. For me, finally, waffling over hell became the sin of unbelief (p. 78).

Two books that give the biblical answer to "Christian inclusivism":
Jesus: The Only Way to God: Must You Hear the Gospel to be Saved? by John Piper

Faith Comes By Hearing: A Response to Inclusivism by Morgan & Peterson