I spoke about Mark Galli’s
God Wins in the previous
blog. (The ebook is now available on
Amazon.) Today I’ll deal with Francis Chan’s
Erasing Hell, another response to Rob Bell’s
Love Wins. Then I’ll compare Chan’s book to Galli’s.
In
Erasing Hell, Francis Chan speaks with compassion. You
can almost feel him trembling over the issues at stake. He recognizes
this debate is about God, His nature and His authority. I sensed both
humility and prophetic power in this book.
I’ve talked with Francis personally and been at a few conferences
where he’s spoken. It’s like watching a fire burn—you don’t know exactly
what’s coming next. That same passion is on the pages of his book. Chan
lays his heart on the table. It’s rare that a book mixes
straight-from-the-heart talk with careful citation of Scripture.
Erasing Hell does exactly that. I was not only informed, but moved.
What I read wasn’t the final edit, so some of the contents may have
changed by the time the book’s released in early July. But these were
some of the chapters:
Does Everyone Go to Heaven?Has Hell Changed? Or Have We?What Jesus Actually Said About Hell
Chan’s
book goes deep and detailed exactly when it needs to. It occasionally
appeals to the original languages, e.g. the meaning of the Greek words
Gehenna and
aionos. It does so in order to deal with misleading statements about those terms in
Love Wins.
The author explains that he asked his friend Preston Sprinkle to
assist him in the research. That research and Francis Chan’s
presentation are a dynamic combination.
Chan is honest, admitting that when it comes to Matthew 25:46
“everything in me wants to interpret it differently, to make it say
something that fits my own view of justice and morality.” Then he adds,
“But from what I can tell, this is what the text is saying.”
One of the tests of whether we truly believe in the authority of
God’s Word is whether or not we bow to it and accept it by faith even
when it is painful or disturbing to do so. (What should it tell us if
the Bible seems to always agree with us?) Chan models this approach to
biblical interpretation. Will we pridefully believe what we want to, or
humbly believe whatever God has told us?
C.
S. Lewis said of Hell, “There is no doctrine which I would more
willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But
it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own
words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of
reason.” Dorothy Sayers, another broad-minded Christian, claimed, “We
cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.”
Too many Christians choose to believe whatever makes them feel good,
while they ignore, deny, or reinterpret Scripture when it doesn’t fit
culture’s current definition of love and tolerance. Hence, culture and
the reader of Scripture become the authority, rather than Scripture
itself. Faith becomes merely a collection of fleeting opinions, always
subject to revision. That is something very different from historic,
biblically grounded Christian faith.
Rather than apologize
for God, Chan suggests we should apologize
to
God for presuming to be wiser and more loving than our Savior. Yet he
does this while fully acknowledging the heart-rending difficulty of
facing the existence of eternal Hell.
How does
Erasing Hell compare to
God Wins? I would describe
Erasing Hell as passionate, biblically reasoned and pastoral.
God Wins
is historically rooted, theologically reasoned and journalistically
precise. Someone who prefers thoughtfully presented theology and history
might favor Galli’s book, while someone who enjoys careful exposition
of key biblical passages and likes to connect with an author on an
emotional level might prefer Chan’s.
I deeply appreciated both books; their content is sufficiently unique
to justify reading both. I think it’s a God-thing that these small
books are so different, yet complement each other with minimal
redundancy. With their different backgrounds, personalities, life
experiences, and writing styles, Mark Galli and Francis Chan each bring
to the table things the other doesn’t. Reading them back to back, I
found they produced a stereo effect that made the sound fuller than
either on its own.
These
are both small books. Combined, they are less than 80,000 words, which
would total one medium-sized book, still smaller than most theological
books. If you are thinking a book can’t be that great if it’s just a
critique, realize that both of these authors don’t just respond to Bell,
they set forth a positive case for a central biblical doctrine.
(Remember too that Luther’s classic
On the Bondage of the Will, which he considered his best book, was actually a critical response to a book on free will written by Erasmus.)
I love that these authors don’t throw anyone under the bus for
raising questions. But neither do they throw orthodox Christians
throughout church history under the bus for believing the most difficult
teachings of Jesus.
I was encouraged that both my sons-in-law clearly saw the danger of
Bell’s book and rose to the occasion in their churches. One, a pastor,
produced a podcast on Rob Bell’s book for his church and the other led a
study of the book with men in his church.
God Wins and
Erasing Hell will be invaluable tools for pastors and lay leaders to guide believers in evaluating these doctrines.
Is it possible that God can be loving
and that there is such
a thing as eternal punishment? The Lord Jesus and Scripture, as
understood by the great majority in the early church, the medieval
church, the Reformation and the evangelical church, has always answered
affirmatively.
Yes, Hell is dreadful, but it is not evil—it’s a place where evil
gets punished. Something can be profoundly disturbing yet still be
moral. Hell is moral because a good God must punish evil.
Much more is at stake here than the doctrine of Hell and the question
of universalism. We don’t own the Christian faith. It isn’t ours to
revise. God’s Word wasn’t meant to be given away piecemeal, leaving the
next generation with leftovers. If we go on decade after decade
parceling out fragments of the faith, what will be left? When we abandon
truths Christians once died for, will we no longer have truths worth
living for?
Both Chan and Galli recognize that the doctrine of hell isn’t a
ballot measure, and God doesn’t give us a vote. There will be no end to
dismantling doctrines if we consider it our calling to try to make God
look good in our eyes and our culture’s. If his definition of good is
different than ours, we dare not expect him to be the one who changes.
The Almighty doesn’t need us to give him a facelift and airbrush his
image. Our task is not to help people see God favorably but to see him
accurately. God has the power, through the true gospel, to touch hearts
and draw people to his love and grace while they fully affirm his
holiness and justice. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.
We are tempted to shrink God so he fits inside the borders of our
minds. But those are small borders, and he is a big God. There’s great
comfort in knowing a God who loves me but doesn’t need my counsel. The
best part about Chan’s
Erasing Hell and Galli’s
God Wins is that as I read both these books, God became greater and I became less.
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The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the
ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It
hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of
iniquity while death draws every day nearer and the command to repent
goes unheeded. A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961), 95.
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