Heaven and Hell: Pastor Rob Bell Extended Interview

the biblical trajectory is about this world this world being good and this world being reclaimed and restored so the so if the Bible is a story it's a story about this place it's about this place a place that God calls good place that God loves a place that is created out of great joy and creativity and that God has no plans to sort of abandon and that's sort of the biblical story and and my observation would be especially in Western culture there's a large number of people who the Christian story they were told was about evacuation and Escape essentially this place is going to burn this place is no good uh but if you say believe do confess the right things then you can get out of here and go somewhere else which instantly the sort of Theology of evacuation now you've got to come up with images for that other place so hence clouds and white robes and people singing with perfect clar all hair and you know Perfect Pitch you like instantly you're just sort of making up stuff um but but the Jesus movement comes out of this Jewish rabbi who comes from a very Jewish world that always talked about Olam Haba the the age to come so there is this age and then there is the age to come and there was this great hope that Justice would be served and Shalom would be restored and they would train for war no more thinking about heaven grounds it in this world and then things like justice and caring for the poor and compassion and issues of Injustice the sex trade or the exploitation of those who are vulnerable we work for these things because this is where we believe it's headed towards a restoration or renewal and towards a place where Justice is is is made known and the world is made right and that's to me a much more healthier ethic of how to live now if you take seriously this world restored and and life in the age to come as Jesus put it then the kind of person that you are becoming matters you you are compelled and drawn into becoming the kind of person who could live in a in a new world well so if it's a new world that's free from violence then becoming a person who's free from violence means you are all the more ready to live in that kind of world the philosopher Dallas Willard talks about the Flames of heaven we love the idea of this perfect world but how many of us could sort of step into that and not have some Shock I mean what what about a world that was just pure gener ity because we get a bit clingy and and greedy um and so I think that's that's at the heart of Jesus Calling disciples his invitation right now is to trust that not only am I loved but that this love can flow through me to others and in the process free me from all sorts of bitterness and rage and envy and jealousy and destructive Tendencies so first and foremost he he begins with this urgent immediate invitation secondly he tells a lot of of stories about religious people who are very sure of who's in and who's out and his stories generally subvert whatever categories the religious establishment has created so in his day there's this very very hierarchical um Tax Collectors over here teachers of the law are over here Sinners and prostitutes are over here and lepers are over here Pharisees are over here like they had a very strong sense of clean and unclean in out and most of what he does and most of his stories are about flipping that around and saying actually the people who are convinced that they're in May in fact in some senses be out and the people who everybody who consist who's in thingss are out May in some way be in and he sort of turns the whole thing upside down so that tells me we should be very careful about these sort of lasting judgments because his impulse is always to say wait wait wait wait wait nope you can't do that um and then he says very mysterious things like he's he'll be lifted up and draw people to himself well what do you what do you do with that or he says he has other sheep or he speaks of a renewal of all things he could have said a renewal of all good Christians you know what I mean he could have used lots of very specific sort of particular language and instead he has this absolutely massive wide expansive Embrace um and I'm okay with that it makes things interesting and I think we ought to leave room for that and for many people I think your real question is for many people the moment you leave room for the wide expansive Grace and love of God the only way to know how to think about that is that somehow diminishes Jesus it's like wait wait then I guess it doesn't matter no those two can be held perfectly in tension which is one of the things in the book I sort of do is just park the book right there um the Urgent immediate call of Jesus to trust that God is really this loving and at the same time to leave all sorts of room for that love and that's a tension that I think if you if you go One Direction or the other at the expense of one or the other you've lost something and we don't like tension in the modern world we like it to be this or this we like it to be either or we grew up with multiple choice fill in one bubble it's not a and b or a andc um and if that's the case then it's one bubble still on the test um but the Hebrew mind and the world of the scriptures is very comfortable with this being true and this being true it's very comfortable with Paradox it's very comfortable with a number of things simply held intention I think there's something around 30,000 verses in the Bible the word hell is used about 20 times so I think sometimes just the pure math on that is helpful for people just the numbers okay so that's what we're talking about um within that you have three different words one's used once one's used a couple times the main word this word gehenna which I talk about in the book is the word that Jesus uses was was an actual place the valley of ham gahena Valley of ham so it's an actual place in the south and west side of the city of Jerusalem and that's where they put the dump so there's a fire going to burn the trash so when he even speaks of Hell he's using a real place that every oh yeah it's the town dump right over there well Southwest right over there um so I think that's very important and for a lot of people that can be very helpful because it takes it out of the there are these conceptions of Heaven and Hell sort of floating around culture and people have all these images of people in red tights listening to Pink Floyd records backwards and sort of bird you you know um some and and it's I think it's important to go wait wait wait when Jesus talked about this this is what he talked about secondly he talks in very sort of brutal detail about the consequences of being a particular kind of person in the world so the actual use of the word hell is in the context of being abusive being exploitive being violent um and he uses this very visceral image of gehenna as what happens when we are that kind of person in the world which I don't have a hard time believing I we've all seen that um rape greed Injustice abuse Financial scandals third world dictators killing whole Villages of innocent women and children I mean we we've sort of seen that um and underneath it all sort of the subtext of everything is you can resist God you can resist God's love you can say no is there a point at which a change of heart no longer means anything to God because the central story of of the Bible seems to be God is looking for repentance and a change of heart you're headed down this path I'm pleading With You Begging with you Jesus is the Divine in Flesh and Blood no no come this way so for many the simple argument has been why if this is the central narrative come home come home the father's waiting for the prodigal come home would all of a sudden a point be picked at which God says all those things that always mattered to me that I celebrated no longer mean anything or if hope is the driving sort of engine of this Redemption story why would God at some point say hope now there's no hope anymore the key thing about judgment when people say well I don't believe in a god of judgment yes but you're quite upset about the O bill so the idea of judgment the idea of why can't somebody fix this or the latest sort of financial Scandal where a number of people lose all their life savings or thousands of people are laid off and the a number of other people walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars I mean there there is within our bones a cry for justice that's not right that's not fair that somebody should be held accountable so we I think we absolutely must hold on to that and that is Central to the biblical narrative God judging the world and all those who are like no way actually you you can't wait for it it's your own self that you're like I want God to do the thing for all those people but not me you know what I mean and um so which is it um at the heart of Jesus message was simply a loving trust that we can trust him that our sins have been forgiven that that's all been taken care of I mean the cross and the resurrection at the center of the Christian faith was the insistence that all of the ways we have contributed to the disruption of Shalom have been taken care of we've been forgiven we can trust him for this so Mercy um but the narrative is about this world being restored and renewed and for that to happen God has to render judgments this can no longer go on there um this cannot be permitted there cannot be rape in this new world otherwise it wouldn't be the perfect union of Heaven and Earth so that sense of certain things are from now on forbidden here we actually crave that as much as people sort of push against some of those Notions um but that is always rooted in God's love God's love for us God's desire for us to flourish in God's good world and I think what Happ s for many people is they heard about the Judgment before the love but if you start with the love and the Judgment flows out of that God's love is for us to flourish in God's good world for us to flourish in God's good World judgments have to be made well that then now that puts judgment in its proper place and okay I can live I I can trust this God the really important thing about Jesus is sometimes Jesus has presented as God was looking at the world like what am I going to do with these kids um you you know he's like who's his son you know you go down there and fix it oh dad you know what I mean sometimes it's sort of the world is really in a jam and God thought up this idea hey I'll send my son my son will go and show up and sort of fix the place um but but the first Christians seem really really intent on making Jesus and portraying Jesus in a far more broad he he is the Flesh and Blood embodiment of something far larger and more uh Cosmic so so they speak of the word at creation this Creative Energy that formed the whole universe at the center of Jewish thought they just called this the word so they say when you see this first century Jewish rabbi you were seeing this lifegiving word in flesh and blood but it's always been here and people have stumbled upon it in all sorts of ways so what they do when they do that is broaden this fantastically people may be stumbling upon this mystery hidden in every inch of creation all the time and not knowing or having a name for it and so it's even interesting and uh someone was telling me just recently there are these very conservative Christian missions organizations that send people missionaries out to convert in all you know unreached people groups and they'll go into this Village that is unreached and start talking and the people will say oh yes we've been we've been worshiping this being for a number of years now that's what you call them interesting and they're like wait what because it's almost like their theology doesn't know what to do with a life-giving Christ who's already present in that place um which I think is very entertaining like just the sort of just when you think you've showed up to save the day God was already there

Channel: Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

Views: 129,403

Keywords: Rob Bell, heaven, hell, eternity, eternal judgment, God, Christianity, theology, forgiveness, sin, gospel, afterlife, evangelicals, death, Love Wins

Id: 4zBXuRIQ3gg

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2011