Sightings 8/15/2011

Who Wins? Two Books about Heaven and Hell

— Martin E. Marty

“Let’s you and him fight!” The old comic-book trope is good advice for bystanders as Mark Galli’s God Wins counters Rob Bell and his book Love Wins. The two are respected evangelical leaders, an editor and a pastor, who attract headlines and readerships as they debate “Heaven, Hell” and the “Good News.” Their subject is a meaningful alternative to the otherwise preoccupying evangelicals’ debates over homosexuality and abortion. “The Good News” is a debate over whether “Love Wins” or “God Wins,” and those who hear the biblical word that “God is Love” may have trouble telling the players without a program. Both sides agree that this is all about “the ultimate fate of human beings,” a classic concern of all who believe that there is an afterlife.

What follows is not a taunt but a challenge: let us have a Volume Two, especially from Galli. He offers soft but evangelically-orthodox answers to most questions which Bell posed last year in his book. But he slights the biggest, hardest, most troubling questions about the love and justice of God. He is anthropocentric, of course, but his “anthro-” who asks questions and ponders fate tends to be someone familiar with the biblical questions with which serious apologists for centuries have dealt as they set out “to justify the ways of God to man” (and woman).

Such are perhaps the hardest questions which concern “me” and “my personal fate,” or “people who need to get motivated to evangelize others,” who worry about predestination and God’s foreknowledge and the hardness of heart which the Bible says God causes. Galli is humble about what he knows and does not know, but always punts when it gets hard and interesting by saying that God is a loving judge who is smarter than we are and who told us enough to get us personally through our questioning. But here’s the challenge: watch the evening news, as we do, showing Somali children starving, parched, dropping in the desert, in the arms of a dying mother. By the thousands upon thousands. Or walk among the poor of India, by the millions. There is no chance. Repeat: no chance, that they or their parents can ever hear the Christian “good news,” to reject or accept it. Galli makes much of choice. Time is short: there is no way the best-intended gospellers can mobilize to reach them. No way. And staying home with books keeps gospel-recruiters from the desert sands or Indian villages.

Only a couple of dozen lines in Galli’s book even bring up the question, which he then drops with some verbal sleight of hand. I’m almost embarrassed bringing this up, so ancient and worn it has become, but it’s here. About the “fairness and justice of God,” “let us not too sweepingly dismiss such questions.” We Christians, our club, should ask them, since this is “one of the ways” we get a deeper faith and “think more deeply about God” in our sanctuaries and libraries. Meanwhile, hour by hour, millions by millions go to hell. Galli is sure about hell. Page 95: In the New Testament hell is “mostly pictured as fire,” “darkness, destruction, exclusion from the presence of the Lord.” “The point is less to describe hell in detail than to suggest it is a place of torment.” In this case, for the innocent. Still: “those in hell experience torment for eternity,” say most evangelicals, and Galli does not dispute them.

I’m a reporter, columnist, bystander, and don’t claim to have credible answers to the questions Bell and Galli pose and to which they would respond. But we need a Volume Two from Galli on these really tough questions. Otherwise, “Bell Wins.”

References

Mark Galli, God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News Is Better than Love Wins (Tyndale, 2011).

Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (HarperOne, 2011).

Martin E. Marty’s biography, publications, and contact information can be found at www.memarty.com.

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In this summer’s Religion and Culture Web Forum: What does religious education look like in the globalized realities of the 21st century? This was the question put to a distinguished panel at the recent meeting (May 22-28, 2011) of the International Association of Black Religions and Spiritualities (IABRS), an organization that “represents the religions and spiritualities of darker skinned peoples globally.” This month, we feature the response of Dr. James Massey, the male Dalit (India) delegate to the IABRS. Dr. Massey argues that peace among the world’s religions will require finding not only a “common ethic” (per Hans Kung), but an “appreciation of differences.” To both these ends, Dr. Massey calls for “re-looking at the religious traditions.”

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Sightings  8/22/2011

 

 

Hell Reappeared

— Martin E. Marty

 

 

It’s bad journalism to obsess about a topic and inflict it on readers; it’s bad manners for a columnist to be self-referential. So I’ll start off saying “my bad!” and “my bad!” for returning to last week’s topic, “Hell.” And some readers may fear that I am going to obsess about “hell,” after having received so many responses to last week’s column. (Sightings is not a blog but an e-column, and though my e-publisher at The University of Chicago and I at my home study and learn from all your responses, much as we’d like to, we are not in a position to carry on give-and-take responses. (Thanks for those responses.) An exception today:

 

Obsessively, I obsess about the “hell” topic, writing about it, as I do, every 23 years. Before last week, the last time was in the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard in 1988, published in 1989. I called it “Hell Disappeared. No One Noticed. A Civic Argument.” Not equipped to handle the subject theologically, I kept on my historian’s hat and reported. For example, I could not, in pre-Google times, find a single scholarly article on the subject in an academic journal in the past century. Typical, however, had been advice about hell to public school teachers, who were told to threaten lying children: if you die today with unforgiven sins like lying, you will go to hell. Know that your parents and family will live on without you, able to congratulate themselves while peering over the rim of hell, seeing you roast, and knowing you got what you deserved.

 

Chicago colleague Arthur Mann, a reverent secular Jew and I, having shared advisorship or oral examination sessions for years, discerned that except in formal and doctrinal concepts, nothing explained late-modern Catholic change more than the disappearance of hell. Televangelists, of course, preached it, and drew crowds. Polls revealed—no surprise—that the majority of Americans told social scientists that they “believed” in hell. They still do, and may for a long time. We did not imply that they were unbelievers but we were suspicious that “bad faith” was characteristic. That is: if they profess to believe that people they could reach and convert could be spared hell, what were they doing wasting time sleeping long, arguing with us, preaching Prosperity Gospels, going to football games, and not joining Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses in ringing prospects’ doorbells. Mann and I would report and ponder and turn the subject over to serious theologians, few of whom picked up the signal to write about it.

 

Now “Hell reappeared,” and many noticed, especially in evangelicalism, where two books, noted here last week, stirred up discussion. We heard from some thoughtful theological thinkers from that camp. One deserves mention here: Mark Galli, author of God Wins, asked why I called his book “anthropocentric” in approach. For the third time this week I have to say, “My bad.” It was a bad choice of terms. I wanted to say that the very, very hard questions he took up dealt with intellectual questions that “we” anthropoi in the Western Christian tradition addressed—easy questions like “predestination,” but devoted only a couple of paragraphs to the big one about relating God to the “eternal” “hell” of “torment” for those who “never heard of Savior Jesus” and “never had a chance.” Galli is an informed student of theologian Karl Barth and therefore far from “anthropocentric” minded.

 

I told a friend that I had had enough of “Hell” and was ready again to write on “religion and current American politics.” Response: “How can you tell the difference?”

 

References

 

“Hell Disappeared. No One noticed” is in the Harvard Theological Review 78, 1988. Access to the whole article is complex but possible at http://www.jstor.org/pss/1509697.

  

Mark Galli, God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News Is Better than Love Wins (Tyndale, 2011).

 

Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived(HarperOne, 2011).

 

The first response to Bell’s book, I am told, is from within the Calvinist tradition, commended to me (but I’ve not yet read it) by publisher and professor Quentin Schultze: Christ Alone, by Prof. Mike Wittmer, the book’s website is www.christalonebook.com.

 

For two short popular essays on Calvinist views of “heaven and hell” in current dispute, seeBenjamin Kuipers, “The Meaning of Life,” and “Responding to Calvinism.”

 

 

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In this summer’s Religion and Culture Web Forum: What does religious education look like in the globalized realities of the 21st century? This was the question put to a distinguished panel at the recent meeting (May 22-28, 2011) of the International Association of Black Religions and Spiritualities (IABRS), an organization that “represents the religions and spiritualities of darker skinned peoples globally.” This month, we feature the response of Dr. James Massey, the male Dalit (India) delegate to the IABRS. Dr. Massey argues that peace among the world’s religions will require finding not only a “common ethic” (per Hans Kung), but an “appreciation of differences.” To both these ends, Dr. Massey calls for “re-looking at the religious traditions.”

 

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