The Foundations of Faith

This week, our college's newspaper had a couple of opinion pieces in support of Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins.  I didn't want to enter into the whole argument over whether or not Bell is a Universalist, but I wrote this response to a disturbing trend that I see in evangelicalism today.  I had to cut down what I wrote quite a bit to submit it, so here I'm going to post it in full:

When I took Bib Lit I as a freshman, I remember Dr. Richard Smith giving us his “domino and pyramid” models for constructing a biblical theology.  Build your worldview out of equally weighted points of belief, and your entire system wobbles precariously like a domino file: threaten one piece, and your whole world comes crashing down.  By contrast, a wise theologian—for we all become “theologians” when we think about God—constructs a worldview shaped like a pyramid.  Fundamental convictions form a wide base on which we stack successively less significant layers of belief.  This model requires that we differentiate between areas that are “hills to die on” and peripheral academic quibbles.  We can then debate the tiny issues on the top of the pyramid without endangering the entire structure.  Some issues, however, strike at the very heart of our faith, and these we must defend with the fervor that Paul charged Timothy to “guard the deposit entrusted to” him against “what is falsely called ‘knowledge’ ” (1 Tim 6:20). 

A pyramid only has four big corner bricks.  Likewise, I believe that God may only call us to identify a small number of foundational points in our theology.  The opinion piece states that “universalism is no more heretical than Arminianism or Calvinism.”  To bring in the debate over free will and election in the same breath as Universalism is to compare apples and oranges.  The Calvinism-Arminianism debate is in the middle of the “pyramid.”  Different people might place it at varying levels of importance, but everyone would agree that it fits into the vertical strata between peripheral and crucial issues somewhere between Christian tattoos and the doctrine of the Trinity, respectively.  The exclusivity of salvation, however, is a brick wedged firmly on the base horizontal level between truths such as Christ’s deity and the virgin birth.  Take these away, and you no longer have Christianity.  Let these slide in the name of “tolerance,” and you no longer have any faith worth living for.

We might think of this using the analogy of sports.  Every season, professional leagues vote in rules changes during their offseason meetings.  If there is a pyramid of football rules, to borrow Dr. Smith’s metaphor for theology, the length of timeouts or the placement of kickoffs might have equivalent importance to the choice of point color for the very top of the structure.  Change the playoff format or the rules on hitting, and now we’re cutting a bit deeper.  Make the ball round, though, and let players kick it along the turf, and now we have a different form of “futbol” all together. 

This is what moving the line on the clear biblical teaching of the exclusivity of salvation does to us.  Is Rob Bell a “universalist?”  I don’t know; I’ve never met Bell, and I haven’t read his book from cover to cover.  I don’t want to attack any one person or question the legitimacy of their faith.  I hope that Bell is a believer, and I have no desire to suggest otherwise.  Rather, I am responding to much greater issue, namely, the movement that I see down a continuum that leads to Universalism.  The problem with this trend is that, in the words of Bell’s title, the idea that “Love Wins” makes the serious logical error of equating God’s love with his unwillingness to judge unrepentant sinners.  It finds its basis not in Scripture, but rather in our human incredulity that a loving God would condemn those who oppose him to hell.  The problem with this thinking is that God, and not our thinking, is the ultimate authority.  God’s patient love and eventual wrath are both rock-hard biblical truths that we must accept and hold in tension, whether we understand them in this life or not.  Whether it be labeled “inclusivism,” “universalism,” or something else, all expressions of this trend suggest that to love others we must make no judgments about their eternal destiny; who are we to judge whether or not God will let someone into heaven?  This is a nice thought—or is it?  The Bible says that everyone must have a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, for “no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).   Is letting people think otherwise, to their eternal peril, really love?  Scripture tells us that “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb 9:27); how can we profess Christ-like love for the world while we tell unbelievers that there may be opportunities for salvation after death? 

I believe that we will all be blown away by the depth of what we don’t understand when we reach heaven.  God commands us to “not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes” (1 Cor 4:5), and as undeserving sinners we must all leave God room for miraculous outpourings of the same grace to others.  But Christ commissions us as the church to spread the gospel with the urgency that comes from believing that this world is a sinking ship.  This issue of Univeralism must be to us a cornerstone to the pyramid, a hill to die on, but not because it makes us the winners in an academic argument.  Souls hang in the balance; we owe it to a dying world.