Chaplain's Corner

By now you may have heard of or even read Rob Bell’s book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. It is by no means the first book of its kind and it will not be the last. During my year of training for chaplaincy I was asked by one of my supervisors to read Clark Pinnock’s book A Wideness in God’s Mercy: the Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions. This book raises the same question as Rob Bell’s, only from a more scholarly perspective. Both books raise the question of the existence of Hell and the traditional Christian teaching that hell is the eternal destiny of those who do not receive God’s grace available only through faith in the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is not a new question, nor is the supposition raised in each book: that Christ’s atonement will cover everyone, regardless of their response to the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus. Theologically this supposition is sometimes called “universalism” or the belief that everyone will enjoy the destiny of heaven, regardless of their belief in Jesus Christ and his saving death and resurrection. Or as it is more colloquially put, “all roads lead to heaven”. This question was raised as early as the 3rd century A.D. by Porphyry of Tyre (AD 234–c. 305) and has been raised in every generation since. There is just something repugnant to the human spirit about anything like eternal punishment.

Now, by now you probably know where I stand. I believe that Rob Bell has ventured into dangerous territory, not because I don’t agree with him (and I don’t), but because the supposition requires that we devalue the Bible, taking from it its status as God’s Word and making it simply the ideas of 50 some ancient writers. When we do this to the Bible, we consequently call into question God’s self-revelation and we are left to imagine God to be whoever or whatever we want.

Voltaire, and 18th century French philosopher once said, “God created man in His own image and ever since we have been returning the favor.”  It seems that this is what Rob Bell and all those who have gone before him in espousing universalism are doing:  Recreating God in an image they are more comfortable with, a less offensive, easier to manage god.

I can not embrace this supposition because it would require me to assume that I have the right to determine the nature and character of God and it requires me to disregard God’s self-revelation of himself, his own nature and character that we have in the Holy Scriptures.

A few weeks ago I attended a Spring Lectureship at a church in Winnipeg. Dr. Erik Thoennes, associate professor of Biblical Studies and Theology at Talbot School of Theology and teaching pastor at Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada, California, spoke on the subject “No God but GOD: Jealousy, Idolatry and the Glory of God”. During the four hours he made a powerful case from the pages of the Scriptures for the necessity of embracing the belief that the God who reveals himself in the Holy Scriptures is the only true God and that all others must be rejected as idolatrous creations of the sinful human spirit.

I think one of the reasons we find ourselves in the condition we are in these days is that even the church has joined in the recreation of god in our own image. How often do we confront themes like the holiness of God, the justice of God, the jealousy of God, or the wrath of God as we worship these days?  Hardly ever. How often have we heard a pastor speak on the reality of hell?  Hardly ever. Many have come to believe that to speak of these matters will empty the pews, the church coffers and put the church out of business. So many these days have tweaked the presentation of the Scriptures, ignoring passages that are difficult and talking only of those passages that are palatable.

Dietrich Bonheoffer, a German Lutheran pastor who died in a Nazi prison before the end of the 2nd World War wrote in his book The Cost of Discipleship about his concern over this drift away from allowing God to define himself to our defining God for ourselves. In the introduction of the book he wrote, “cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”  Rob Bell’s book and all those who before him espoused a Universalist doctrine of salvation proclaim a “cheap grace” that represents an idolatrous god who is neither holy nor just.

In chaplaincy, many have embraced this Universalist doctrine of salvation. This allows many chaplains to simply view people of other faith traditions and those who embrace no faith at all as people who simply need compassion and comfort in their times of sickness and as death approaches.  These chaplains carry no concern in their hearts for the salvation of those they care for, for they believe that everyone will be saved. I have never embraced this concept of salvation or chaplaincy.

One of my giftings is mercy. I find joy in bringing God’s mercy and compassion to those who are hurting, sick and dying. I feel deeply privileged to be invited into these sacred times, into the intimacy of illness and death and I am extremely aware that as I come into those sacred times that I must use my training, my health and my vitality to care for and provide comfort to those I encounter. I am cautious not to use my training, health and vitality to coerce or to assume a right to address another’s spiritual concerns. I have a deep respect for each person which allows me to reflect to those I serve issues that I hear but will not allow me to set the agenda for our encounters.

I have a deep trust in God’s love and his desire that all men come to repentance and I have seen His Spirit move in hearts and lead people to desire the saving graces of Jesus. Being confident of these things, I can live with the realities I confront, trusting God and standing firmly in the faith that God reveals himself in His Word. I don’t need to “create god in my own image” in order to be comfortable in the face of the harsh realities of sins devastating impact on our world and race and I can live with the difficult mysteries that are part and parcel of who God is and what that means in relation to us.

God’s love does win and there is a tremendous wideness in God’s mercy, but to believe that God’s love and mercy eradicate the necessity of a person coming in repentant faith in the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus is to strip away any meaning to love and mercy at all. Dr Erik Thoennes put it well in his lecture when he said, “Grace makes no sense without justice. The cross makes no sense if God is not angry at sin and gracious towards sinners…We must not create a god who is ‘user-friendly’”. If we are to let God be God, then we must accept the awful reality spoken of clearly and with alarming frequency in the Scriptures that some people will miss the grace of God and that hell does exist where such people will exist in the absence of God’s love for all eternity.