Empathy – the Enemy?

 

I read an interesting piece by Mark Steyn recently that questioned to oft-vaunted “empathy” of the Left.  The occasion for this discussion was the horror that some members of the media showed when Rick Santorum explained the circumstances around the death of an infant child.  In brief: though told that the baby would live only hours outside the womb, Mr. and Mrs. Santorum decided to take the child home so that the family could meet him.  Basically, he decided to treat his non-viable child like…a life.  How strange.

Steyn points out the irony of the “empathetic” Left showing horror at this occasion:

The Left endlessly trumpets its “empathy.” President Obama, for example, has said that what he looks for in his judges is “the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” As he told his pro-abortion pals at Planned Parenthood, “we need somebody who’s got the heart — the empathy — to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom.” Empathy, empathy, empathy: You barely heard the word outside clinical circles until the liberals decided it was one of those accessories no self-proclaimed caring progressive should be without.

Of course, the irony goes deeper than this instance.  The Left’s empathy ends when it meets people with whom it disagrees:

The Left’s much-vaunted powers of empathy routinely fail when confronted by those who do not agree with them politically. Rick Santorum’s conservatism is not particularly to my taste (alas, for us genuine right-wing crazies, it’s that kind of year), and I can well see why fair-minded people would have differences with him on a host of issues… The usual rap against the Right is that they’re hypocrites — they vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, and next thing you know they’re playing footsie across the stall divider with an undercover cop at the airport men’s room. But Rick Santorum lives his values, and that seems to bother the Left even more.

All this has me wondering if empathy is much good at all.  I recently completed Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve.  If you aren’t familiar with systems theory, you probably should be.  His basic argument in this book is that leaders lead best who lead themselves.  That is, the best leaders are able to remain connected while staying differentiated (not “bound up” on a core level with those one leads).  Doing so enables leaders to take well-defined stances that, if maintained, encourage growth on the part of those around her or him.

Empathy, as it turns out, is counterproductive to this model of leadership (and maturity).  Friedman points out that “empathy” entered our language very recently, and yet in its short history has come to be viewed as indispensable in all kinds of professions and contexts.

“As lofty and noble as the concept of empathy may sound, and as well-intentioned as those may be who make it the linchpin idea of their theories…societal regression has too often perverted the use of empathy into a disguise for anxiety, a rationalization for failure to define a position, and a power tool in the hands of the “sensitive”…I have consistently found the introduction of the subject of “empathy” into family, institutional, and community meetings to be reflective of, as well as an effort to induce, a failure of nerve among its leadership.”

The basic assumption of empathy is understanding.  The classic illustration is that sympathy can look down on someone from above with pity, but empathy puts us right next to the person in trouble.  Friedman’s argument – and he is not a reactionary arch-conservative but a Reformed Rabbi and counselor – is that the empathetic stance is actually counter-productive to the growth and “self-regulation” (read: maturation, development, positive change) of the others we seek to help.

The bottom line:

“Forces that are un-self-regulating can never be made to adapt toward the strength of a system by trying to understand or appreciate their nature…it is self-regulation, not feeling for others, that is critical in the face of entities which lack that quality.” (133-135).

What do you think?  Is empathy actually holding back our churches, families, and communities?  Is empathy the enemy?

A Lament for Scripted Television

 

Tonight I watched two shows about motorcyles (to one extent or another).  One was the season finale of Sons of Anarchy on FX.  The other was the American Chopper Build-Off Live on Discovery.  The common theme shared by these two programs exacerbated the differences in a very telling fashion.

Sons of Anarchy is possibly the best show on television, a masterpiece by Kurt Sutter (one of the masterminds behind my all-time favorite series, The Shield).  It follows a motorcycle club (read: gang) brought together by intense bonds of fidelity but torn apart by power struggles, greed, and sheer lunatic mania.  The club is their only real loyalty.  They call club meetings “church,” for crying out loud.  It has, impressively, maintained edge-of-your-seat drama through all four seasons.  I’ve never watched an episode and thought, “That was a dud.”  Not so for much-lauded programs like The Sopranos, for instance.  Excellent acting, intriguing characters, but most of all – amazing writing.  Storylines are weaved with mastery, and every angle, look, and pause has meaning.

Thanks to the wonder of DVR, I also watched the live build-off between the elder and junior Teutels and the now-infamous Jesse James (look up Sandra Bullock’s personal life if you’re not tracking). This series has been revived, sadly, due to the falling out – personal and professional – between the father and son duo that won the company such acclaim both on TV and in the custom bike industry.  As the series has been revived as a father vs. son competition – their bike shops build similar products in the same town, to be fair – there have been questions as to the authenticity of the drama.  I hadn’t been too concerned about this, but tonight’s programming was the height of manipulation.

They held a “build-off” between the three main characters and their teams.  Jesse James has never before been mentioned on the show as competition or even inspiration, so I’m not sure why he was brought in except to add lots of bleeps and false bravado.  That, and Discovery may be bringing him back on a new show yet to be named.  A couple episodes ago, James sent obscene cakes, seperately, to Senior and Junior to drum up some conflict.  In every frame, he finds something negative to say about their respective NY bike shops.  They aren’t real builders, for instance, they are “cake decorators.”  Each built a machine that was shown in the previous episode, and the hook for tonight was that you tune-in to find out who would get the most votes for the title of “Greatest Builder on the Planet” or something awful like that.  Of course, this wasn’t a judged competition at Sturgis, but a staged performance for cameras in Vegas.  It was clearly a popularity contest from start to finish, and if you paid attention you knew who was going to win weeks ago.

The actual live show was terrible.  The host went out of his way to get each competitor to say negative things about the others’ projects.  When they didn’t give sufficiently biting critique, he asked them not to hold back.  When there was a moment that actually meant something – father and son embraced for the first time in over a year – it was followed up immediately by a clip of the elder smack-talking the younger.  The one moment worth viewing was immediately spoiled by a Michael Moore style editing trick, forcing a clip in your face that was hoping to create tension.

I finished SOA in awe at the story I’d just seen unfold: it’s elegance, unpredictability.

I finished American Chopper Live and just felt…dirty.  This poor family has been made wealthy and famous by reality TV, and been torn apart by it.  I’m not sure if the subjects or the views are being more exploited in all of this.

There’s no art in this or any ‘reality’ show.  It shouldn’t even be called ‘reality’.  Reality indicates that it corresponds to the way the world actually is.

But in reality, there is no zoom, no music to toy with your emotions, no editors to crop out the boring parts and create plots out of days on end of reel.  Reality can be quite boring, lifeless, rigid, and drama-free, which is why we perhaps want the escapist contrivance of “reality” TV.  I think this current trend may be the most obvious effect of human sinfulness in the realm of entertainment: we are so uninterested in reality (actual love, drama, conflict, hopes and dreams) that we can no longer identify it.  We are hoarding fool’s gold.

As Don Draper said on another great scripted TV show, “Can’t you find something else to do besides dining on the drama of other people’s lives like a bunch of teenage girls?”

If the current crop of reality television programs is indicative of what the networks think of us, then we should all be insulted.  Here’s looking at you, Jersey Shore.

Chesterton and The Thrill of Orthodoxy

We live in an age that revels in rebellion, that idolizes the myth of “thinking for myself.”  In such an environment, adherence to a set of philosophic, historic, and theological norms is seen as silly at worst and oppressive at best.  Orthodoxy is safe, boring, on this reading; the post-moderns tell us orthodoxy is the teaching of the powerful, the “winners” of history.  And, as the so-called Occupy Movement has taught us, nobody wants to pull for the winners anymore.  The effect of this cultural suicide in the church is the love-affair with the heterodox, seen in the odd passion for long-dead Gnostic sects and the popularity of speakers like John Shelby Spong (who jumped the shark years ago).

But alas, there is a balm in Gilead.  His name is G.K. Chesterton.  I’d heard much about Chesteron, but never read any of his major works.  Now I’m most of the way through his most famous work, Orthodoxy.  It is marvelous.  Arguments aside, it is quite simply written beautifully.  The man has a way with the language.  He brings his considerable talents to bear describing how he came to discover the truth and then, to his surprise, discovered that he had arrived at orthodox Christianity.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy.  People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe.  There was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.  It was sanity; and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.  It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses…she swerved to the left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles…The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions: the orthodox church was never respectable.  It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.  It would have been easy, in the Calivinist seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination.  It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic.

He argues that orthodoxy is a game of balance, and that the delicacy of that balance explains all the so-called hairsplitting over theological debates.  If you’re balancing on the tip of a needle, it becomes a game of millimeters.  Of course, I have to applaud him for taking a shot at the Calivinists right after the Arians (though I wouldn’t put them that close together).  But what a grand vision of basic Christian teaching!

He concludes the chapter on “the paradoxes of Christianity” writing:

To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame.  But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. (Orthodoxy [New York: Dover 2004], 94.)

Orwell once wrote, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”  Chesterton fulfilled this duty admirably.  May we be so bold in our own time.

Thought for the Day: How the 1% Have Helped Me

Short and sweet (or bitter, depending on which side of the Marx/Smith divide you fall on):

My seminary education would not have been possible without the 1%.  I went to Duke Divinity School, a part of Duke University, which of course was built on a tobacco fortune.  There is still massive wealth associated with the University; like it or not, such institutions, no matter how high their purpose or how much their professors despise the accumulation of wealth, rely on the highest wage-earners and their philanthropy.  As Dave Ramsey recently pointed out, the top 1% also give a vast majority of the charitable donations in America.

You can’t love the milk and hate the cow: they are connected.  Inextricably.  I’ve found it troubling that so many of my fellow pastors – whose seminaries, churches attended and churches served relied heavily on the generosity of those who made enough to give a lot – have bought into the OWS ideology utterly hook, line, and sinker.  You can hate the system all you want to, but many of you, like me, have benefited from it in innumerable ways.  To pretend otherwise in fits of pious grandstanding is nothing short of dangerously naive.

John Wesley Lays the Smackdown on Predestination

 

Granted, it is doubtful that Wesley would be a WWE fan, but it seems like an adequate description of the argument I am about to share.

 
Came across this gem as I began to reread Randy Maddox’s modern classic Responsible Grace in hopes that it will spark ideas as I begin to write my ordination papers.  For Methodists, there is probably no better broad interpretation of Wesley’s whole project than this monograph.  For non-Methodists, it is important for its contributions to practical theology and for its suggestions (via Wesleyan soteriology) toward healing the Orthodox-Catholic rift.

This particular passage comes during a discussion of Wesley’s view of Scripture.  For Papa John, it was important that any text be interpreted within the structure and thrust of the whole Bible.  To defend a devilish doctrine – like predestination – on Scriptural grounds was, for Wesley, an affront to the whole testimony of the Bible.  Predestination, he says,

destroys all His attributes at once.  It overturns both his justice, mercy and truth.  Yea, it represents the most Holy God as worse than the devil…. But you say you will ‘prove it by Scripture’.  Hold!  What will you prove by Scripture?  That God is worse than the devil?  It cannot be.  Whatever that Scripture proves, it never can prove this….There are many Scriptures the true sense whereof neither you or I shall know till death is swallowed up in victory.  But this I know, better it were such say it had no sense at all than to say it had such a sense as this….No Scripture can mean that God is not love, or that his mercy is not over all this works. (“Free Grace,” quoted in Maddox, 39.)

Calvinism has been resurgent lately (and not the friendly, graceful Barthian version).  I’m not sure why, except perhaps that in an age of sloganeering and polarization, there are folks attracted to strong convictions of whatever sort, regardless of theological merit.  Of course, hardcore Calvinists will say that we Arminians lean towards works righteousness or universalism.  But, with Wesley, I would affirm that double predestination turns the God of the Bible into an unrecognizable tyrant.

 

 

The full text of the above sermon is available here.

St. Diadochos of Photiki on Blogging

Well, more or less.  In the Philokalia, St. Diadochos reflects thus on the danger of talking too much:

When the door of the steam baths is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates itsremembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good.  Thereafter the intellect, though lacking appropriate ideas, pours out a welter of confused thoughts to anyone it meets, as it no longer has the Holy Spirit to keep its understanding free from fantasy.  Ideas of value always shun verbosity, being foreign to confusion and fantasy. (“On Spiritual Knowledge,” in the Philokalia Volume 1, 276)

If indeed “ideas of value shun verbosity,” then is it possible to gain much through blogging?  I think the 5th century Bishop has a point.  Granted, it can be taken too far – scholarship of every kind is built on a kind of “verbosity.”  We wouldn’t have PHDs without forests of trees being destroyed to put ink on pages.

I suppose these matters are on my mind because I’m preaching tomorrow on humility, based on the Christ hymn in Philippians 2.  It strikes me that blogging doesn’t seem like a very humble activity – a way for those unsuccessful in traditional media to put their thoughts out there for the world to see.  Most social media is built on this desire.  Is there such a thing as “humble blogging”?  Is it possible, in the verbosity that is the blogosphere, to find ideas of value?

My own thought, at least today:  I’m not sure that anything I’ve written is worth the time, either in my writing of it or your reading of it, when compared to the Scriptures or to the writings of the Church Fathers or the greats like Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Barth.  For that matter, I don’t know if I’ve read any blogs good enough to justify spending the time there versus any of the above.  What say you?

(And don’t be too verbose.)

Who Gets You Out of Bed On a Sunday Morning?

I’m reading N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian with a small group at church.  It’s proving to be a little heady, but most are liking it.  (While many on the theo-blogosphere might not find it so, it’s worth remembering that even Wright’s popular writings are far denser than the drivel that is typically mass-marketed to literate believers.)  He does a great job of mapping out three different ways of relating heaven and earth, or, if you like, the physical and the metaphysical.  The Bishop says they are either the same (pantheism), overlapping and mysteriously interlocking at various and sundry places (the Jewish/Christian view), or they are utterly distinct (gnosticism and its cousins).  The last of these views is held by many in the West who believe in a vague, uninterested and uninteresting god – the one Pacino/Satan in The Devil’s Advocate calls “an absentee landlord.”  Wright correctly notes that such a God would motivate few if any people to do anything worthwhile; even something as simple as getting out of bed for such a deity would seem rather pointless.

In fact, many people in the Western world assume that when they talk about “God” and “heaven” they’re talking about a being and a place which – if they exist at all – are a long way away and have little or nothing directly to do with us.  That’s why, when many people say they believe in God, they will often add in the same breath that they don’t go to church, they don’t pray, and in fact they don’t think much about God from one year’s end to the next.  I don’t blame them.  If I believed in a distant, remote God like that, I wouldn’t get out of bed on a Sunday morning either. (Simply Christian, 62-63)

 

For a great introduction by Bishop Wright, check out his lecture from a few years back at the National Cathedral over at their site.

Vaccinating the Church Against Modernity: The Hartford Appeal, Then and Now

In 1975, a group of folks got together to refute 13 heresies of modernism affecting the church(-es).  I don’t know enough to say if they represented a “who’s-who” at the time, but they certainly do now: signees include George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, Avery Dulles, Alexander Schmemann, Thomas Hopko, Lewis Smedes, William Sloane Coffin, Peter Berger, Robert Wilken and Richard John Neuhaus.  They came from many parts of the Christian family, but agreed on one thing (though expressed 13 ways)…faithful Christians across the board had to stand up against the modernist impulses that were threatening the teaching, preaching, and spread of the gospel.

Their original introduction and the rejected themes are below:

An Appeal For Theological Affirmation
THE renewal of Christian witness and mission requires constant examination of the assumptions shaping the Church’s life. Today an apparent loss of a sense of the transcendent is undermining the Church’s ability to address with clarity and courage the urgent tasks to which God calls it in the world. This loss is manifest in a number of pervasive themes. Many are superficially attractive, but upon closer examination we find these themes false and debilitating to the Church’s life and work. Among such themes are:

1. Modern thought is superior to all past forms of understanding reality, and is therefore normative for Christian faith and life.

2. Religious statements are totally independent of reasonable discourse.

3. Religious language refers to human experience and nothing else, God being humanity’s noblest creation.

4. Jesus can only be understood in terms of contemporary models of humanity.

5. All religions are equally valid; the choice among them is not a matter of conviction about truth but only of personal preference or lifestyle.

6. To realize one’s potential and to be true to oneself is the whole meaning of salvation.

7. Since what is human is good, evil can adequately be understood as failure to realize human potential.

8. The sole purpose of worship is to promote individual self-realization and human community.

9. Institutions and historical traditions are oppressive and inimical to our being truly human; liberation from them is required for authentic existence and authentic religion.

10. The world must set the agenda for the Church. Social, political and economic programs to improve the quality of life are ultimately normative for the Church’s mission in the world.

11. An emphasis on God’s transcendence is at least a hindrance to, and perhaps incompatible with, Christian social concern and action.

12. The struggle for a better humanity will bring about the Kingdom of God.

13. The question of hope beyond death is irrelevant or at best marginal to the Christian understanding of human fulfillment. (1)

There seem to be a lot of seeds here.  Shades of post-liberalism, radical orthodoxy, and emergent Christianity are plenty.  Though many conservative Christians, especially fundamentalists, are stuck in their own varieties of modernism, this seems to be a clear shot across the bow of liberal (think Enlightenment-worshipping) Christianity.  Such Christianities are still alive in both the mainline Protestant denominations and elsewhere.  They were admirably dismissed by H. Richard Niebuhr, who summarized their basic assumptions as, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

Some useful commentary and background was later published as Against the World for the World. The full text is linked below.

Yeah, I know it’s old news.  But for those of us attracted to these ideas today, it is interesting to see the early stages of later seminal works like The Nature of Doctrine.  Do these affirmations hold up 40 years later, or were they wrong from the start?

1. http://www.philosophy-religion.org/handouts/pdfs/Hartford-Affirmation.pdf

The Gospel: Liberal & Conservative

The following is an excerpt from the sermon delivered last Sunday, part of a series I’m doing on how to follow Jesus in a polarized culture.  I used Deuteronomy 4 to discuss the constant (conservative) call of Israel to remember God’s work among them, and Jesus’ controversial sabbath healings as an example of his (liberal) tendencies to stretch the bounds of acceptable law observance.  I’ve received inspiration from Adam Hamilton for this series, especially from his book Seeing Gray in a World of Black & White.  Here it is:

When it comes to thinking through and living out our faith in the world, our culture has set us up to fail.  Our talking heads tell us that everything has to be one way or the other: left or right, donkey or elephant, blue state or red state.  When we come to the faith assuming that everything can fit neatly into one of two boxes, we lose something very precious: the gospel itself.  Jesus was not a Republican or a Democrat, but all too often we try to argue that the view of the world we prefer must have been the view of Jesus.  Father James Schall put it this way:

“The division of the world into “liberal” and “conservative” on every topic from politics to our taste in cuisine, clothes, or automobiles is one of the really restricting developments that has ever happened to us. If we are not what is considered popularly a “liberal,” then we must, by some convoluted logic, be a “conservative,” or vice versa. No third or fourth option is available as is usually the case in the real world. It has to be, we are told, either this way or that.

Such a view makes things very simple, I suppose. But it also reduces our minds to utter fuzziness. We are required to define everything as either liberal or conservative even when the two allowable terms of definition are not adequate to explain the reality that they are intended to describe.” (1)

The gospel is certainly something so marvelous, so transformative and beautiful and powerful, that a simple “left or right” is not remotely close to being able to describe it.  Today we are continuing in our series The Extreme Center: Following Jesus in a Polarized World.  I’m going to show today how the gospel is both “liberal” and “conservative.”  That, of course, is just another way of saying that the gospel is not easily defined one way or the other.  The message of Jesus refuses to be pigeonholed into our simple categories, it shatters them, it stretches us, and challenges us with a third way that is neither solely “liberal” or “conservative”: the way of cross and resurrection…

The gospel, then, is liberal and conservative. It’s both, which is also to say that it is neither.  The way of Jesus is higher than those cultural divisions.  Recognizing that is one way that Christians of all sides and stripes can seek the extreme center together: like Jesus, all of us seek to conserve some things and change some things.  None of us are a simple as these labels, even if we claim them strongly.  The gospel, the good news that God has entered the world as a human and opened up salvation to all people, also cannot be reduced to one of these categories without making it something unrecognizable. 

A few years back there was a commercial on TV that opened with two infants trying to learn their shapes.  They had those toys that hollow out different shapes in plastic, like a triangle, a circle, a square, and a rectangle, and the goal is to match them all up.  They are both struggling with the square piece, pushing and yelling and twisting, trying to get it to fit into the round hole.  Then it flashes forward, both of them are grownup mechanics under the hood of a car.  One of them is struggling with a battery, trying to make it fit right into its cradle.  He’s banging it with a hammer, and over his shoulder his buddy is yelling, “Just keep hitting it, it’ll fit eventually.”  Of course, the lesson was that you don’t want mechanics like this working on your car.  All they are going to do is damage your car.

Trying to fit the gospel into the convenient confines of a box like ‘left’ or ‘right’ also does damage.  In our polarized culture, Christians of every political persuasion want Jesus on their side, and so he is trotted out to bless this position or Scripture is quoted as simple justification of this legislation.  Parties and candidates try to convince us that they are God’s choice, which means that the other side must be against God.  All of this does great harm to the gospel.  It reduces the message of Jesus to a tool to gain power.  It renders unto Caesar what is God’s.  On a practical level it harms evangelism, it will turn off all those on the other side who may be searching for God but are suspicious of a God who looks tailor-made for this or that party or issue.

Chuck Colson, a writer and activist whose life was transformed after being put in prison as part of the Watergate scandal wrote this:

“…Christians should never have a political party.  It is a huge mistake to become married to an ideology, because the greatest enemy of the gospel is ideology.  Ideology is a man-made format of how the world ought to work, and Christians instead believe in the revealed truth of Scripture.” (2)

Friends, the world doesn’t need more ideology.  We fight over it; families split over it; countries are torn in two by it; those in power kill for it.  The world needs Jesus.  Each and every person on this big, round rock need to know the transformative power of Jesus’ love.  But party politics masquerading as faith won’t do it.  People can smell ideology from a mile away; it stinks to heaven.  The gospel, on the other hand, is something so sweet it is unmistakable.  The gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, is too glorious to be contained by our simple categories.  It is its own party, its own “side”; the gospel bids us to show love rather than claim power, because Jesus was exalted by rejecting power and submitting to death.  So, too, all of us, who find ourselves drowning in a sea of partisan politics, of ideology, of talking heads and pundits, must reject our desire to be “right” and give our desire to win over to Christ.  The extreme center, the way of the cross, is the way that asks us to sacrifice everything to him.  To play with Paul a little bit: in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, republican, democrat, left, right, progressive, libertarian, socialist, anarchist.  However it is we participate in the world, whatever our views are, we are to present them at the foot of the cross, the throne of our true Lord, who bids us to be about Kingdom business.  In a world that asks us to choose between black and white, left and right, the only way to win is to refuse to play the game.  Let us follow Jesus not with timidity but extremely, with abandon, with gusto, keeping him at the center, and led out these doors by the Spirit to show a divided world a better way.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

1. “On Being Neither Liberal Nor Conservative,” http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/schall_libcons_may05.asp

2. Quoted in Lyons and Kinnaman, UnChristian.

Calvinists and Hell: A Love Story

Calvinists seem to be really into hell.  I mean, really.  And, apparently Rob Bell is the new Dan Brown; his latest book is spurning a cottage industry of books from every yahoo with a Master’s Degree from their pastor’s basement.

Here’s an interview with Francis Chan about his Erasing Hell, a book written in response to something Rob Bell doesn’t do in his book.  And as I’ve said before, Bell’s book isn’t original in its arguments.  Check out Von Balthasar (or really, Origen), CS Lewis, or as my buddy Nick pointed out, Willimon’s Who Will Be Saved? for better fare.

I don’t know much about Chan and he’s not currently on my reading list.  That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have valuable things to say, though I’ve become as suspicious of megachurch pastors as I am of the head chef at McDonald’s; when you’re serving that many people, the quality has to be in question.

Can you judge a book by a back cover?  I won’t go so far as to do what Bell’s opponents did – brand him a heretic and a universalist before the book was even released – but though I’m sure Chan is a well-meaning writer and a gifted speaker, I think I can smell some unpleasantness here on the back:

“Like you, sometimes [the authors] just don’t want to believe in hell.”  I don’t “believe” in hell.  I believe in God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Hell describes life – here and into eternity – without that God.  But hell is no more central to my faith than it is to the Apostle’s Creed or, for that matter, the teachings of Jesus.  I believe in the Kingdom, in the triumph of grace, and the love of God for all.  Hell? I can’t ignore it, but I can “dare to hope” that that not many of my brothers and sisters get a bird’s eye view.

“It’s a book about what God says.”  If God already said it and it is that clear, why do we need a separate book?  If it were that simple, then Rob Bell never would have written a book whose sales incited such jealousy in the industry whose arguments so incensed Chan and Sprinkle.

The cover can’t be ignored either: “What God said about eternity, and the things we’ve made up.”  This is a convenient subtitle.  It indicates off the bat that whatever the authors are going to claim is straight from the mouth of God – itself an interesting take on biblical interpretation – and anything else that someone would say is purely and simply made up.  Sorry, Isaiah, it turns out that my thoughts are God’s thoughts (see chapter 55).

At the end of the day, hell is something so horrible and the ways of God so strange to my own that I think we cannot but leave room for questions, mystery, awe, and wonder.  Drawing easy lines about who will and will not be with God in the end to me misses what, to me, is a fundamental thrust in the Scriptures: God is constantly blessing those purported to be “outsiders” and calling those who think they are right with God to account.  (For instance, Jesus entrusts his message to tax collectors but calls the holy people vipers.) Hell seems to be a possibility most of all for those who know and heed not.  Those who think they have God figured out are constantly wrong, and their arrogance puts them at distance from God.

Let those with ears, hear.  May I be one of them.