N. T. Wright: No Jonathan Edwards Either

I wrote a post recently criticizing N. T. Wright for criticizing America for killing Osama bin Laden entitled: "N. T. Wright: No Winston Churchill." Well, it seems he is no Jonathan Edwards either.

Trevin Wax has a post in which he discusses (quite insightfully) N. T. Wright's recent answer to a question on Rob Bell and hell. Here is Wright's answer:

"My usual counter question is: “Why are Americans so fixated on hell?” Far more Americans ask me about hell than ever happens in my own country. And I really want to know, why is it that the most prosperous affluent nation on earth is really determined to be sure that they know precisely who is going to be frying in hell and what the temperature will be and so on. There’s something quite disturbing about that, especially when your nation and mine has done quite a lot in the last decade or two to drop bombs on people elsewhere and to make a lot of other people’s lives hell. So, I think there are some quite serious issues about why people want to ask that question.

Having said that, I am not a universalist. I’ve never been universalist. Someone quoted a theologian saying, “I’m not a universalist, but maybe God is.” That’s kind of a neat way of saying, “OK, there’s stuff in Scripture which is a little puzzling about this, and we can’t be absolutely sure all down the line.” But it seems to me that the New Testament is very clear that there are people who do reject God and reject what would have been His best will for them, and God honors that decision. How that works and how you then deal with the questions which result I have written about at some length.

I don’t think myself that Rob Bell has quite taken the same line that I did in Surprised by Hope. I haven’t actually had the conversation with Rob since his book was published. So, one of these days, we will and we’ll have that one out. I do think it’s good to stir things up because so many people, as I say, particularly in American culture, really want to know the last fine-tuned details of hell. And it seems to be part of their faith, often a central part of their faith that a certain number of people are simply going to go to hell and we know who these people are. I think Rob is saying, “Hey wait a minute! Start reading the Bible differently. God is not a horrible ogre who is just determined to fry as many people as He can forever. God is actually incredibly generous and gracious and wonderful and loving and caring. And if you paint a picture of God which is other than that, then you’re producing a monster and that has long-lasting effects in Christian lives and in the church.”

This is, to me, a rather astonishing answer for someone who is revered by American Evangelicals. I don't think really they are feeling the love from him lately.

1. To single out Americans as unique on this point is frankly ridiculous. Wright says he gets asked about hell less in his country, but what I think he really means is that he gets asked less about hell by the liberal Anglicans he usually associates with. American interest in hell simply reflects the fact that America is less secularized. Anyone who reads the Bible very much is naturally going to have questions about something that is widely mentioned in the Bible and obviously affects every one of us in the most pressing and important way.

To take a gratuitous swipe at America by attempting to link war with belief in hell is just more evidence that he hates America as a typical academic left-winger who derives his views of international affairs from Marxist analyses of imperialism and capitalism. He obviously has a fixation on America's evils that is the sun around which individual doctrines like hell revolve. I can't see how that is healthy.

2. To imply that there is something wrong or ill-mannered about a concern about the eternal destiny of the human race is just a bit weird. I can understand why liberals are so dismissive about hell (and heaven too, for that matter), but Wright is supposed to be an Evangelical. But I guess he is a special kind of Evangelical, that is, one who talks like a liberal on many topics and preserves his Evangelical reputation by affirming the bodily resurrection of Christ.

Wright's flippancy about the doctrine of judgment is a bit disturbing. He seems to think it is a topic we ought not mention in polite company as it puts God in rather a bad light. This is rather presumptuous of him, after all. Divine punishment of sin is just and God is just; this is classical biblical teaching and its veracity does not depend on how it makes late-modern, middle-class agnostics feel.

3. And why does he think it is good for Rob Bell to "stir things up"? Bell is a mega-church pastor who preaches part of the counsel of God hesitantly for fear of offending his audience. It is not orthodoxy Evangelicals who need stirring up; it is people like Bell, who are, after all, the heirs of the seeker-sensitive, church-growth, therapeutic-oriented approach that dominated the last generation. What the Emergent types have in common with the kind of watered-down Evangelicalism of the past generation is the clever marketing that seeks a niche between outright heresy, on the one side, and the offense of the cross, on the other.

It is hard enough to be a faithful pastor these days, as Western society become more and more secular and hostile to the Gospel, the Bible and the Church without N. T. Wright commending confusion and compromise with a nod and a wink. Help like that we can do without.

I guess we won't be hearing any "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermons from N. T. Wright any time soon. Maybe we might more likely hear ones more like: "A Wrathful God in the Hands of Indignant Sinners."

Responding Appropriately to Rob Bell

I have not commented on the Rob Bell controversy mostly because it is a classic example of modern, capitalist, marketing campaign hype by a megachurch star/businessman. If you conclude from that assessment that I do not take Rob Bell seriously as a writer and theologian, you would be correct. So to respond with serious exegetical, philosophical and theological arguments to a marketing campaign would be inappropriate.

Fortunately, however, someone with some real creativity has responded to Rob Bell in a completely appropriate manner: humor.

Below is the Rob Bell video promoting his new book, Love Wins. If you have not seen it yet, you must watch it first in order to appreciate what follows.



Now for the response. (HT to The Brooks at City of God.)

Robbed Hell - C.A.S.T. Pearls Presents from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

A brilliant, pitch perfect, piece of satire. Nothing left to say.

The Relationship of the Legal to the Ontological: Matthew Lee Anderson on Universalism

NOTE:
This post has been altered since I put it up. By "altered" I mean I corrected an embarrassing mistake on my part. I misread Matthew Lee Anderson's sentence as if it meant the exact opposite of what he meant and a reader kindly called my attention to it. I have changed the paragraph below after the quote from Matthew: "The Great Divorce isn’t necessarily incompatible with a doctrine of hell that is grounded in penal substitution." I read it as a single negative instead of a double negative as if the "in" in "incompatible" were not there. Sorry Matthew. It isn't Matthew who has trouble reconciling penal substitution with Lewis' Augustinian view of hell, it is a broad swath of Evangelicalism in general. My point is valid except that it does not apply to Matthew.
____________

Matthew Lee Anderson is a very good thinker and in his post on Rob Bell's book, Love Wins, he has a paragraph (actually two paragraphs) that jumped out at me as especially insightful and, at the same time, especially revealing. He has both stated and illustrated what seems to me to be the single most important and also most profound problem in contemporary Evangelical theology. Here are the two paragraphs:

• One of Protestant theology’s central tasks in the 21st century is to articulate the relationship between the legal and the ontological. Focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter–which Protestants wary of Lewis’ doctrine of hell are always in danger of doing–will lead to an attenuated understanding of the ways in which our doctrines of heaven and hell play out in our lives.The Great Divorce isn’t necessarily incompatible with a doctrine of hell that is grounded in penal substitution. And Protestants interested in the latter would do well to work out the ontology.
• Because fundamentally, Bell–er, Lewis, Dante, Augustine–are all right that God will give us what we want. Of course, none of us want the good nearly as much as we might claim.

Let me comment on this passage sentence by sentence. I really think there is a great deal of substance here.

"One of Protestant theology’s central tasks in the 21st century is to articulate the relationship between the legal and the ontological." This is exactly right, although one wants to add that this has been true through out the history of Christian theology. In the middle of the last century the Biblical Theology Movement fell apart because of a misguided attempt to differentiate between the "Hebrew Mind" and the "Greek Mind" and this distinction soon degenerated into a reprise of Harnack's Hellenization thesis with the implicit justification of the Liberal Protestant reduction of theology to ethics and the immanentizing of the eschaton. The 20th century rejection of metaphysics took many forms - from the "functional Christology" my NT professor, Richard Longenecker, was always refuting, to the Nietzschean, postmodern program of deconstruction, to the attempt by Liberation Theology to ride the horse of history until it dropped of exhaustion.

"Focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter–which Protestants wary of Lewis’ doctrine of hell are always in danger of doing–will lead to an attenuated understanding of the ways in which our doctrines of heaven and hell play out in our lives." Protestants have lived for a century in reaction against the de-ontologizing of the Christian Faith by Liberals and there is nothing wrong with being a right-wing reactionary that a little historical perspective can't fix. The problem is our lacking of historical awareness; we have not done historical theology seriously enough. So we end up unconsciously assuming the anti-metaphysical (or better anti-sacramental) stance of late modernity without realizing what we are doing. We are suspicious of Lewis because we are used to liberals trying to deny sin, guilt, justification and salvation as forgiveness of sin. But because we start from a modern, non-sacramental metaphysical position, we cannot integrate the legal and the ontological, which makes us suspicious of any account of salvation that is not first and foremost juridical.

"The Great Divorce isn’t necessarily incompatible with a doctrine of hell that is grounded in penal substitution." The reason Anderson has to say this is because many Evangelicals think of the doctrine of hell solely in terms of moral punishment for sin and not in terms of ontological deprivation. We should not be suspicious that an Augustinian account of eternal punishment will vitiate a strong doctrine of penal substitution because the ontological and the moral are not separate, unrelated silos. Rather, they are affected by one another. [The preceding paragraph is different from the original post. See the note at the top.]

"And Protestants interested in the latter would do well to work out the ontology." I heartily agree with this statement. But when the ontology is worked out, the final result will not be the rejection of penal substitution or even the demotion of penal substitution to a marginal position in the overall doctrine of the atonement; rather, I think its ontological significance will be recovered. Within a sacramental ontology, I think, there is a need for an account of how goodness and justice meet each other in the nature of God and in the creation that reflects His glory. Hans Boersma's recent book, Heavenly Participation: the Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, is a step in the right direction. I hope the book I am currently writing will make a modest contribution to the same goal. Very little work has been done on the question of re-thinking the doctrine of the atonement in the light of a recovered sacramental ontology. One thinks of T. F. Torrance as the exception that proves the rule, but his theology has not been engaged with sufficient vigor by Evangelicals yet.

"Because fundamentally, Bell–er, Lewis, Dante, Augustine–are all right that God will give us what we want. Of course, none of us want the good nearly as much as we might claim." Exactly. The problem of disordered desires requires not merely a re-ordering of desires, which is after all an ontological problem, it also requires forgiveness for sins done in the past and until the desires of our sinful hearts are completely healed and made perfect it requires on-going forgiveness. So the legal and the ontological work together and may even have some secret, inward connection. Is it possible that we become good by being loved? Is it possible that our weak desires are enflamed by the the seductive, attractive eros of God for His fallen creatures? Is irresistible grace at least partly the means of sanctification, not just justification? Is not forgiveness transformative?

Here all I can do is throw out a few cryptic remarks and hints. But I think Matthew Lee Anderson is talking about the important issues, as usual.