stoner nails it again

If you are not following Tim Stoner's blog shame on you ... well, not really ... but you should.

Stoner absolutely nails one of key problems if not the key problem with Rob Bell's Love Wins. In short, it's not just the asking of the questions that is the problem but the question behind the question. Bell is asking the wrong (or at least on the wrong path) questions because he assumes an answer to a more foundational question before he ever began.

What does God really want? Here's Stoner's post ... I hate to simply copy something so long but I don't want to risk his blog going down and this great work being lost. Please read and reread this carefully and then drop by Stoner's blog to thank him.

I have not counted all the questions in Love Wins but I did do a cursory pass through the first chapter and counted close to 60. It would be interesting to ask the copy editor how many question marks lie between those 198 pages. There are many, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Rabbis ask lots of questions. Philosophers are defined by the questions they ask. More often than not, Jesus responds to inquiring minds not with an answer but another question. And, come to think of it, the first words out of the mouth of the serpent came in the form of an insidious, sly, unexpected interrogatory, as well.

The lesson? (speaking of interrogatories): all questions are not created equal. Some are helpful while others are designed to lead you away from light and life into death and destruction. In Love Wins, I have no reason to think that the authorial intent is for ill. Bell invites the reader to look at old answers in new ways. Bell wants to shake people free from a mindless assent to ancient creeds, stodgy dogmas, constricting religious mantras.

And this is not bad.

More than three decades ago I was a Freshman in Intro to Philosophy. My acerbic professor was a die-hard Calvinist. Despite his unwavering commitment to Reformed theology he made it his singular mission to undermine all our nice convenient assumptions, even the ones that happened to be true. He wanted to slap us awake. Dr. Grier succeeded brilliantly. The majority of those who paid attention in class left that institution with a sturdy commitment to what became known as the doctrines of grace. But he shook the heck out of us first. We had to survive boot camp for the mentally and spiritually soft and flabby.

Good questions do that.

I think Bell asks good questions. In the middle of the book he devotes a whole chapter to one of his better ones. “Does God Get What God Wants?” On the surface this appears to be a simple, straightforward question with a rather obvious answer: God is God therefore God gets whatever He wants. The positive response bursts from the mouth almost before the interrogatory is affixed to the last word. But as the assent dies on the lips a niggling thought interrupts: but does God want sin, and death and evil? Does God want Hell?

God being God–with the automatic corollary following hard at its heels that His desires are invariably fulfilled–leads one to wonder, who then wants the truly awful things that have gone on since the Garden? Beginning with the goodness of God as a starting point we conclude rightly that He does not want sin. He hates it. Who then wants it?

Satan.

So do we live in a universe with two competing powers, one getting the good He wants and the other getting the evil he wants? If you stop and think about this cosmology for just a minute you realize that, if this is true, neither is getting what he wants. Since there is evil everywhere, the good God is clearly not getting what He wants, but given the prevalence of goodness, truth and beauty, neither is his arch nemesis. So, who gets what he wants?

Bell states categorically that God most definitely, surely and without question gets what God wants. Anything less makes Him out to be pathetic and inept. Bell is thinking specifically about God’s declaration that He “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (I Tim. 2:3). If this is what God wants, and He is great, Bell wonders, how great is He? Is this God “great enough to achieve what God sets out to do, or kind of great, medium great, great most of the time, but in this, the fate of billions of people, not totally great. Sort of great. A little great. (LW, 97-98).

It’s a fair question.

If God wants everyone to be saved and God is God, does that not lead to the conclusion that all will be saved? Anything less, Bell argues, means that God fails and human sin prevails. It means that God would have to take the stage with Mick Jagger and “shrug God-sized shoulders and say, ‘You can’t always get what you want’” (LW 103). And that, for a host of reasons, could never be.

This is a foundational premise of Bell’s book. It drives his conclusion that since God is neither helpless, powerless or impotent, and “doesn’t give up until everything that was lost is found,” God’s love ultimately and finally triumphantly wins (LW, 101). Yet, to be honest, Bell does not categorically paint himself into the “universalist” corner. He hints, suggests, winks and nods, but he never directly and positively answer the ultimate question: “Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of their choices?” He leaves the answer unresolved because he believes a definitive answer is impossible. It is a tension “we are free to leave fully intact” (LW, 115).

The reason he rejects the “U” label is because he wants to leave the door open. God gets what He wants because love wins. Yet, paradoxically, there is still the real possibility that “we can have what we want” (LW, 119). We can choose Hell, which is “our refusal to trust God’s retelling of our story” (LW, 170). Despite these careful caveats, again, just being honest, the pervasive implication throughout the book, beginning with the title, is that God is great and good enough to insure that somehow, sometime, in some way His love will not go unrequited. There are good and convincing reasons to expect that, at the end, all people will “experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been [theirs] all along” (LW, 198).

Granted, there is an almost sensuous tug to those words. It enchants like the alluring song of those mythic sirens that drew unwary seamen to shipwreck on the rocky coasts of their flowery island. And the only way to break its spell is to question the question: Is it true that since God wants all to be saved and He gets everything He wants, all will be saved?

Those much smarter than I will tell you that questions about God’s will have been pondered by many theologians, for many years. The best answers point out the difference between what God desires and what He decrees. These are two parallel but distinct realities. God’s decrees govern what is and will be on a primary causal level, and direct—without coercion–what happens on the secondary causal level, where you and I live, in such a way that allows for human dignity and authentic choice—free will, if you will.

And speaking of will that brings up Shakespeare. On a primary causal level, Will writes his brilliant sonnets. He invests pulsating energy into his characters. He breathes his passion, fury and longing into them, and they come to life. As any novelist will tell you, the better the writing, the less control you have over what the characters choose to do. This sounds ridiculous on the face of it. After all, you are the one tapping on the keyboard. Of course you are manipulating every word, including the muscular reactions and gestures of everyone in the story. Your will must rule. Oddly, the reverse is the case.

The best characters sometimes surprise the stuffing out of you. They really do say the darndest things. And they go down paths you never expected. When you pour your blood into them these creatures made up out of your own imagination take on personality, a dignity that is nowhere more evident than in their “free” will.

Is Will scratching his inked quill across parchment paper? Is Will directing what is going on in his play? Are his characters functioning along the lines he is ultimately decreeing? The answer to all these is yes.

But on the level of the parchment where the characters have come to life, are they deciding and responding authentically and freely? The better the story, the more emphatic the yes. Looking at it from the perspective of the author (primary causality), Shakespeare gets what he wants. Every letter is what he wants, and every action is what he has ordained. Yet from Romeo and Juliet’s vantage point (secondary causality), they are doing exactly as they please. Nobody is forcing them to fall in love and start a bloody feud. Nobody is making them take poison or stab themselves on an altar.

This analogy, like all analogies breaks down. Nothing we do takes God by surprise. He sees the end from the beginning. That includes every word on our tongue and every decision we make. He is also the initiator of salvation, giving faith and repentance as a gift. But, this is all on the authorial level. On the creaturely plane, despite what the Author knows and wants for us, we go our own merry way choosing what seems best in our own eyes, free from all constraint and imperious authorial control. As Augustine would say, we are completely free to choose what we love and what we love is sin.

If Shakespeare were perfectly loving and good, Hamlet might very well look up at him out of the pages on which he broods, and declare, “I have it on good authority that you are loving and good. Will not your perfectly loving plan win out in the end? After all you are the Great Bard, are you not?”

Sharpening his quill, Will would properly respond, “Yes, tis true. I am and I desire for you all the happiness in this great, wide beautiful world. But alas, I’m afraid what I fervently wish does not compel your choice. You will do what you will do. I cannot force you to dance a jig when what you really pine for is death.”

Hamlet being of a philosophical bent would counter: “But you are holding the quill, confound it!” To which Will replies, “Yes, in truth, but you are the one living the story.”

God desires the salvation of all, true indeed. Man prefers to save himself, evidently enough. God is writing the story, but we are living it. So, the answer to Bell’s simple question is neither as simple nor as categorical as he assumes.

God is so great that He accomplishes everything He decrees, and every detail of it is perfectly loving. Yet He does not get what He desires. After all, God wanted Adam and Eve to live in Edenic perfection forever. But they chose to exercise their freedom against God’s will and were cursed. God’s desires are contingent on the wills of creatures He has invested with all the love and weight and significance He is capable of. And that is a lot. It is a weight of glory that is almost impossible to bear.

But let’s ask one more question. It is the question behind the question. It is the reason why Bell gets it so wrong. What is it that God really wants? What desire drives Him and the storyline of every story that has ever been lived? Is the Author’s ultimate and supreme goal for his Story that of the salvation of all people?

Am I the chief end of God? Asking the question answers it doesn’t it?

This Loving God has one supreme affection. It is not what Bell assumes. It is not what so many others with him assume who strain and kick at the sharp edges of the Gospel story. God’s great, primary passion is not the happiness of His creatures. It is for Himself. He is supremely glorious, supremely beautiful, infinitely perfect in His wisdom, majesty and splendor. The best that the fiery seraphim in heaven can come up with is the enthralled, repetitive tripartite chant: holy, holy, holy. Of course, this glorious Being loves Himself above all. There is no one more worthy. No one holds a candle to Him.

Wisdom is to love, cherish and enjoy that which most deserves it. And God is Wise as well as loving. He is the source of Wisdom and is its boundless repository. So out of this undiminished, free-flowing fount, He loves Himself perfectly. And that means infinitely and eternally. His aim, first, is that His glory fill the earth as the waters cover the sea.

This is why the great good news declared by those with beautiful feet on the mountains is not “You are forgiven!” or “All will be saved!” but “Your God reigns!” (Is. 52:7). This is why the first commandment is a prohibition against placing any other god above Yahweh, and why Ezekiel repeatedly states that God is jealous for His holy name above all things. And this is also why he asserts (almost 60 times) that everything God is about to do in the earth is so that His people will come to know that “I am the Lord.”

Jesus, the perfectly obedient Son, makes this priority explicit a few hours before His death. When the last supper is over he prays to His Father: “Glorify your Son that your Son may glorify you.” He then declares that He has given eternal life to all those the Father has given Him and turns His attention back to His Father: “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do” (Jn. 17:1-5).

Though we seem to miss the point, none of the apostles did. Paul, Peter, Jude and John punctuate their letters with the exclamation: “To Him be glory forever!” The last book begins with John’s dedication: “to Him who loves us. . . to Him be glory and power for ever and ever!” (Rev. 1:6). When John is allowed entrance into the mysterious activities before the throne of God he hears “every creature in heaven and earth and under the earth on the sea” singing: “To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power forever and ever!” (Rev. 5:13).

And when the story reaches its climax there is a New City prepared for God’s People. But what makes it significant is not its citizens. It is given a name that forever will celebrate its unique glory: “The Lord is There” (Ez. 48:35), while what eternally shines from it is the glory of God (Rev. 21:11).

So, does God get what He wants?

If by this we mean are the Author’s desires for His creatures carried out of necessity, the answer is no. But, if we are asking instead, will God get the eternal glory He wants from a passionate, holy bride who has voluntarily chosen Him above all rivals, the answer is unequivocally yes.

So, does love win? Of course it does—God’s love for Himself is a thunderous, irresistible wave of sovereign power that crushes and cows Satan and all his hosts. It triumphs over all who embrace it as well as all who resist it. God is eternally glorified by those who worship Him with full hearts and by those who refuse His love and are justly condemned to be separated from His love forever.

Either way, God’s love for Himself wins.