assuming love motivates

Tim Stoner posts another great one in Loving the world too much or too little. It's worth reading the entire post. I'll pick out the piece where he assumes Rob Bell's motivation for Love Wins is love.

Not knowing Rob [Bell] personally I can only extrapolate based on our similar religious upbringing. I have detected my issues in lots of Rob’s questions, so I do not think I am far off the beam in drawing certain parallels. When the “world” is declared to be toxic enemy number one and when cultural truths, goodness and beauty are disparaged and demonized a reverse toxicity can occur. The truths, goodness and beauty within your own camp may take on repulsive, radioactive qualities. Now, if you’re clever and good with words this can be masked to a great extent but the poison will seep out like mercury through the cracks.

But, there is more. When your eyes are opened to the unexpected and shocking splendor of culture (“the world”), in reaction to its shallow and fearful dismissal, that submerged spill of toxic waste makes you susceptible to a dangerous embrace that is equal parts love and hate: a too-great love for the “goodness” of the world and a too-intense hatred for that which has defamed and denied it.

Ever so subtly you become a defender of the world over against the culture-phobic church. And in short order you find yourself its friend in precisely the way James [James 4.4] warns us about. You have grown to care more about how God treats humans than how they treat Him. You are far more interested in humanity being treated fairly than you are in God being worshipped, served and glorified.

Loving the world in this unhealthy way and for these unhealthy reasons causes you to reject whatever reminds you of the oppression you have grown to despise. It is love for those marginalized by an unloving church (and an angry God) that causes you to jettison all doctrines that smack of cruelty and a harsh vindictiveness.

I suspect that this is why Rob finds the historic teaching on an eternal Hell so abhorrent. It is an unconscionable assault on those he wants to protect. He tells us in his book that he wishes to shield sincere men and women from a mean God propagated by an ungracious religious establishment. This is understandable. If you are in love with the world what becomes compelling is ensuring humane justice here, not divine justice everywhere.

Unwittingly, and with the best of motives, when one’s affections are bent in one direction, one loses the capacity to empathize with the God who characterizes our misdirected loves as gross and brazen adultery; who considers humanity’s rebellion a provocative rejection of His infinite goodness, truth and beauty, and who thunders from beginning to end of the Epic Story that ignoring Him is a grievous assault on His exclusive rights as Creator and King and is ultimately self-destructive.

And what makes this whole discussion so hard is that this blindness is instigated by a faulty love that masks a subconscious hate. James tells us that loving the world in this way makes us an enemy of God. Or, put another way, when we love the world improvidently, we can easily be deceived into perceiving God (as proclaimed by the traditional, conservative Church) as the enemy.

This is why it is wrong to assume that all those who disagree with Rob are angry reactionaries.

This is why, I for one, am so sad about this whole discussion.

I am sad to see a gifted teacher defaulting on his calling to keep, guard and hand over the historic deposit of truth entrusted to him (II Tim 1); and to fail in his fiduciary obligations to “fight for the faith which has been once and for all entrusted to the saints” (Jud. 3).

I am grieved by a misdirected love and a misguided compassion.

Although I am not threatened by the error, or by the questions, I am saddened for those who will knowingly reject Christ but still be offered false hope, false comfort, false assurance and empty promises.

What makes it so heartbreaking is that when you choose to love humanity above God, you wind up becoming an enemy of both.