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robintelldrake 's review for:
Didn't expect to read this at all, let alone to be interested. It's a light read, it shows signs of having been edited in a hurry (errors crop up more and more toward the end, culminating in the words "loves wins" in the very last line, at least in the edition I was reading), and the whole thing reads like the transcript of a motivational speech delivered onstage before an audience of Christian college students, a style that gets a bit precious from time to time. But none of that is central.
The thing about this book is that I could wish with all my heart that this were the mainstream of Christianity talking, not a maverick speaking from its fringe. Here is a Christianity that gives a damn about the world we actually live in, about the people in it and what happens to them here and now. Bell asserts--and for all the complaints pouring in from mainstream Christians, he makes a good case--that Jesus was never really interested in an everlasting afterlife that begins upon dying. That for Jesus, the kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of God's loving rule opening up here on earth, and hell is the human misery, here and now, that naturally follows from refusing to embrace and emulate that love.
Bell plunges head-on into the most damning logical vulnerabilities of his own religion as it usually manifests. The idea of eternal torment visited by a supposedly loving God upon his own creatures whose nature he designed himself, chiefly. The idea that popular people have better odds of salvation because their friends' prayers help them, or that we have such a finite--and variable--lifespan in which to determine our fate for that incomprehensible forever. He asks, and this I had never thought of: if God wants everybody to be saved (he provides some quotes wherein the Bible says God does indeed want that) and God is all-powerful, then how can he fail to get what he wants? He says, too, that he believes many Christians, including leaders of the faith, don't so much love God as fear him and hope to placate him. That this reality, impossible to admit openly, gnaws at their hearts. And that rang, for me, with the clarity of something I had always murkily suspected without ever quite putting my finger on it. But of course they do. Of course they do. The mainstream conception of God is an unspeakable bastard and I can think of little more terrifying than the notion of that maniacal bully being real.
There are some parts that aren't so strong, but generally I think his case is too solid to be ignored. Here, for once, is a Christianity I can live with. It's startling to see how many Christians are too attached to their schadenfreude to even consider that he has a point here.
The thing about this book is that I could wish with all my heart that this were the mainstream of Christianity talking, not a maverick speaking from its fringe. Here is a Christianity that gives a damn about the world we actually live in, about the people in it and what happens to them here and now. Bell asserts--and for all the complaints pouring in from mainstream Christians, he makes a good case--that Jesus was never really interested in an everlasting afterlife that begins upon dying. That for Jesus, the kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of God's loving rule opening up here on earth, and hell is the human misery, here and now, that naturally follows from refusing to embrace and emulate that love.
Bell plunges head-on into the most damning logical vulnerabilities of his own religion as it usually manifests. The idea of eternal torment visited by a supposedly loving God upon his own creatures whose nature he designed himself, chiefly. The idea that popular people have better odds of salvation because their friends' prayers help them, or that we have such a finite--and variable--lifespan in which to determine our fate for that incomprehensible forever. He asks, and this I had never thought of: if God wants everybody to be saved (he provides some quotes wherein the Bible says God does indeed want that) and God is all-powerful, then how can he fail to get what he wants? He says, too, that he believes many Christians, including leaders of the faith, don't so much love God as fear him and hope to placate him. That this reality, impossible to admit openly, gnaws at their hearts. And that rang, for me, with the clarity of something I had always murkily suspected without ever quite putting my finger on it. But of course they do. Of course they do. The mainstream conception of God is an unspeakable bastard and I can think of little more terrifying than the notion of that maniacal bully being real.
There are some parts that aren't so strong, but generally I think his case is too solid to be ignored. Here, for once, is a Christianity I can live with. It's startling to see how many Christians are too attached to their schadenfreude to even consider that he has a point here.