The review is coming this week but to be honest the debate and controversy that has surrounded the book is almost as important as what Rob Bell actually says. Up until now I’d not really considered the issue of hell as an issue to ‘die for’ – it’s well known that John Stott favoured annihilationism instead of eternal conscious torment and he has never been considered anything other than evangelical. So how is this different with Rob Bell?

If you read this and follow the link to listen to audio of the panel discussion you get a sense of the strength of feeling there is about this book. As Adrian Warnock mentions,

“Yet, in the book, as Keller points out, he is positively scornful of many traditional evangelical perspectives.”

And it’s what Keller says that I find particularly interesting. One of the few books that Bell references is Keller’s Prodigal God and in fact the penultimate chapter contains an extended Bell paraphrase of that book with one or two additions. And as I pointed out Bell and Keller both share the same influence in CS Lewis and you can hear that while Keller has some issues with the content it is what he perceives to be Bell’s attitude that he is most disappointed by. In fact he uses the word disappointment several times I think.

Reviewers like Kevin DeYoung who has produced the most thorough negative review and who chaired the panel discussion gets very hot under the collar about this and there is the real feeling of personal offence here. These guys feel attacked and so are responding very defensively. They think their views are what Bell is taking aim at and you can see why but I’m not so sure that they are who Bell is taking aim at. Think Terry Jones not Tim Keller. But Tim Keller is disappointed, he feels his views are included and for that Bell must take responsibility for what he has written.

As Warnock notes, ‘Bell also said he felt that the UK response to his book has perhaps been more appreciative than in the USA’ and I think that context shapes how the book is read. So Steve Holmes reviews Love Wins in a completely different way to say DeYoung. The tone is different, the approach is different, the result is different and this comes from someone who doesn’t agree with Bell on the key points.

The reason for all this is I think the context. The USA is still a culture of Christendom, Christianity permeates every facet of American cultural life, not quite to the same extent as it did 50 years ago but this is not Europe. It’s president has a prayer breakfast and believes in the resurrection and talks of grace. There’s probably only sovereign state in Europe whose leader does that and he’s the Pope. More than 40% regularly attend church and a whopping 44% consider themselves evangelical, again in a continent where anything over 6% looks like revival these are astonishing numbers.

Yet amongst these vast numbers of faithful Christians there is some frankly odd stuff – it is the home of prosperity teaching, Westboro Baptist and Koran burners like Terry Jones. There is a Christian culture that is steeped in fire and brimstone but the general movement in America is that it is following Europe into agnosticism just three or four decades behind. So there are two responses to this situation; there are those like Bell who respond to this scary Christian twisted subculture and say ‘that’s really not what the Bible is talking about’ and as he says ‘repaints the Christian faith’ and then there are the Gospel Coalition folk who do the same thing but seek to renew authentic Christian faith by being rigorous, coherent and reformed.

Context matters. It matters when you interpret the Bible and it matters when you read a book and I think in the case of Love Wins the cultural context has shaped how two different evangelical communities in two different countries have responded.

The second thing is I think there is a group that have basically been waiting for Rob Bell to say something like this. He’s too ambiguous, they want clarity not questions. So unless he performs some pretty spectacular u-turns in the future it won’t matter much what he says from here on in, the reformed bunch have cut whatever cultural cords there may have been in the strongest possible terms. John MacArthur has consigned Rob Bell to hell as a false teacher and as Jason Boyett rightly says,

“This is why people hate us. There is no meaner, more hateful person on Earth than a Christian who suspects you have gotten your theology wrong. Labeling that mean-ness as “being faithful” to the Gospel doesn’t make it less hateful. While Taylor’s post was fairly calm, the response to it by his readers was not.”

And it’s them I think Rob Bell is aiming at, not the leaders like Keller but the rabid reformed, judge on sight, damn you for wearing the wrong trousers brigade. I could be wrong about that but even so set Love Wins in context and you’ll see why there have been vastly different reactions.

I think that much of what has happened has been a shame, I think it is unnecessary and I think it misreads Bell as I’ll have a stab at showing in the next few days.