“Have you heard of Rob Bell’s ‘Love Wins’?” my friend Ted asked me over a cup of coffee. He was a retired pastor and a member of my church. We enjoyed talking about theology and the Christian life, and he was a huge encouragement to me, providing “atta boy” messages to me often after my Sunday sermons. 

I had heard of the book when it was published a couple years earlier. It caused quite a bit of controversy in the world of the evangelical church because it asked a series of questions and posed answers “about Heaven, Hell, and the fate of everyone who ever lived”. These questions and answers departed from the interpretation of scripture I had learned and shared with people since I had been in high school. Though I had heard of the book, I had not picked it up.  At Ted’s prompting I did, not realizing I was about to experience something that would become a point of no return in my journey toward a more beautiful story.

As I think back to how I felt as I read the book back then, I realize it was not shocking to me. It was confirming. Bell put into language the questions and doubts I was having about the evangelical formulation of the salvation story. It addressed my difficulty believing in the literal existence of a place of eternal conscious torment for those who had not accepted Jesus as their savior. 

Years earlier I had searched the New Testament for any references about what it took to be saved. Starting in Matthew and heading to the end of Revelation, I listed them all. What I found went right in line with the first section of “Love Wins”: there is not one simple formula that says what it takes to be “saved”. In fact, there are many different passages that say very divergent ideas. Some, in line with the evangelical story, emphasized the importance of belief and faith. Many others, contrasting with the evangelical story, emphasized caring for the lowly and needy in the world. As Bell went through many of these same passages, he kept asking, “So when it comes to being saved, what is it? Do I need to do X, or believe Y, or say Z?” He gently reminded me that the story of God’s work in the world and the response God wants from people cannot be summarized in four bullet points like I had been teaching for many years. 

But it was when Bell turned his attention to Hell that I realized I was crossing a threshold from which it would be hard to return. He went through every passage in the New Testament that speaks of Hell. He then showed a way of understanding them that changed the story from describing a literal place of fire, with eternal conscious torment that never ever ended. He pointed out the difficulty he had in calling a being who could sentence people to infinite, eternal suffering “good”, “loving”, or “just”. He went on to demonstrate how certain Christian theologians from the 2nd century forward to the 21st had viewed hell differently than the literal place of torment I had always heard about . He pointed out numerous scriptures pointing out God’s ultimate plan to save everything and everybody, and asked the giant question, “Does God get what God wants?”

With poetic language I was not fully able to understand in that first reading, he helped me open my mind to a much more beautiful story of salvation. It was a story that had to involve some sort of consequences for sin, but also affirmed the ultimate goodness and love of God for all of creation and of course every human being who has ever lived. Although providing no answers for how exactly it would happen, Bell proposed there must be SOME way for people who either never heard of Jesus, had been born in areas of the world where the Jesus story was maligned, or who chose to ignore the good news of Jesus to still be engulfed in God’s beautiful, expansive, and redeeming love. 

Hell broke for me as I read “Love Wins”. I felt myself being pulled from a story about an unjust God who would torture people for eternity into a more beautiful story about a God who was loving and just and good toward every person who ever lived. It felt freeing. It felt right. But it also led to discomfort, knowing this more beautiful story would not be accepted in the church I pastored.

(For more on the topic of Hell and Eternity check out this post from my Reflections.)