Love Has ALREADY Won

Guest Post by Dan Cruver.

Well, here's to jumping into the Rob Bell discussion.

When dealing with the historic crises of his day (theological, political, etc), Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that most theologians, politicians, and philosophers were asking the wrong questions: “What must be done to solve this or that problem?” or “How can this problem or that debate be resolved?” Dietrich was insistent that these "What" and "How" questions were the wrong questions to start with. Yes, he agreed, they are very important questions…but they are not the most important questions.

So, according to Dietrich, what is the most important question to ask when considering society's ills or evangelicalism's necessary battles? Dietrich argued that it is the “Who” question. If we answer the "Who" question, then we are in a much better position to adequately address the “What” and “How” questions. According Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the critical “Who” questions to be asked and answered are “Who is Jesus?” and “Who is the Trinity?” The answers to which contain, at least in seminal form, the answers to all the “What” and “How” questions that have historically plagued Christianity.

Think of it this way: these particular “Who” questions are eternal while the “What” questions are temporal. The "what" of all our theological debates have/had a beginning. The "Who" of the Trinity, on the other hand, does not. Our theological debates ("What") will one day come to an end. Jesus ("Who") will not. As a consequence, we will always forever be asking the “Who” questions: Who is our Jesus who is our eternal Prophet, Priest, and King? Who is the Trinity that has come to His people in grace and Who gives us grace upon grace for eternal ages? These are not only questions that we will joyfully ask for all of eternity, they are also questions that God will joyfully answer for us, forever.

But that’s not the case with the “What” questions: "What can we do to ensure that everyone in the world has access to clean water?" "What can we do to solve the global orphan crisis?" etc. There will come a day when "What" questions like these will no longer need to be asked. Those questions will evaporate into glorious nothingness in the new heavens and the new earth. "Who" questions, on the other hand, have a much longer shelf life.

Let's take this a step further. The eternal God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has in Himself the solutions to every human crisis, for it is in God that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). Since our Triune God is Himself the Solution to all problems, we will find ourselves moving toward solutions on the horizontal axis as we answer these “Who” is God questions, questions to which, by the way, Scripture has not left us without clear answers.

Keep in mind, though, that giving priority to the “Who” questions does not mean that we care less about the “What” questions. It simply means that the “What” questions should always start with, flow out of, and never move away from who God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So, let me offer some “Who” questions and attempt some brief answers.

I think all of us would agree that we were made by and for the triune God. Consequently, as Cornelius Plantinga writes, all of us “long for wholeness, for fulfillment, and for the final good that believers call God,” whether we realize it or not. Due to the fall of man, the only alternatives to finding our satisfaction in the triune God are for us to seek our main sense of identity, significance, and rest either in loose living (i.e., prodigal living) or in what we do religiously (i.e., elder brother living)—that is, what we do for the poor and marginalized, for those we consider less fortunate than ourselves.

So, following Dietrich’s lead, if it is true that we were made by and for the Trinity, the question we must begin with is “Who is the Trinity?” I believe that Rob Bell would agree that our God has always been and always will be a communion of Persons. Reciprocal love has eternally flowed and will forever continue to flow between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore, we already have biblical warrant to conclude that LOVE has always WON in eternity past, long before anything was ever created, long before there was man or his tragic fall.

We naturally think of beings as individual, not triune. But Scripture reveals God to be three Persons, not one. Theologians have wrestled with this concept for centuries. Richard of St. Victor, a Scottish theologian of the 12th century, wrote an important philosophical work on the Trinity titled “De Trinitate” (or On the Trinity). He combined the teaching found in two passages of Scripture to reach a compelling conclusion. 1) First John 4:8 tells us that God is love. 2) First Corinthians 13 tells us that love never turns in upon itself, but always turns out upon other persons. 3) Therefore, God could not possibly be love if he were only one person.

A god who existed in all eternity past as one person would be a god eternally turned in upon himself. Such a being could not be love because by its nature love turns outward.

Think of it this way: God was eternally a closed circle of loving communion (as in an exclusive circle), perfectly satisfied and happy in his triune Being. Even during Jesus’ days on earth as the incarnate Son of God, he clearly enjoyed a uniquely close relationship with the Father that everyone else was outside of. In this, we see something of the miraculous and gracious nature of redemption. This fact alone, as theologian Kevin Vanhoozer writes, hints at the striking reality of the gospel which “concerns the triune God’s self-communication for the purpose of enlarging the circle of communion. The gospel proclaims a new possibility, namely, that of becoming a ‘communicant’ in the life of God.”

When the Son of God became man, the loving communion of Persons that the Trinity is became earthed among us—in a single human being (Galatians 4:4-5). Never before had the communion of love that the Trinity eternally enjoyed ever existed in a man . Even Adam in his pre-fall state fell infinitely short of this degree of communion. As the God-man (fully God and fully man in one Person), Jesus suddenly made communion with God an unfathomable human reality. He embodied the Trinity’s loving communion. He earthed it on human soil. If all we did was look at Jesus, the God-man, we could say unequivocally that LOVE WON "simply" by the Son becoming man, even if he were the only man ever to participate in the Trinity's communion of love. Because of the miracle of the incarnation (which I believe is a far greater miracle than the creation of all things in the beginning), love broke into the human race, a race that had been cut-off from God because of its own sin. The Son of God became man in the midst of a human race which Scripture describes as "children of wrath" and "sons of disobedience" (Ephesians 2:1-3). Jesus earthed communion of God among those who were dead in their trespasses and sins. For that miracle alone to even happen in our fallen world is a win-win. Finally, after a long history dominated by sin and death, communion with God became a human reality on earth in the Person of Jesus. Something like that could not happen except for the “But God . . .” of Scripture.

So, because of Who Jesus is as the communion of God become man, T.F. Torrance is able to write:

"We must be quite definite about the fact that in the Lord Jesus Christ God himself has penetrated into our suffering, our hurt, our violence, our sinful alienated humanity, our guilty condition under divine judgment, and even into our dereliction. 'My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?'" (The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons, p 251).

Torrance speaks of the dereliction of Jesus (i.e., Jesus' experience of hell on the cross) in very terrifying terms. If hell, as Torrance describes it, is true and Jesus penetrated into its utter depths (the depths of utter God-forsakenness), then hell certainly has an eternality about it.

I searched and searched, but I could not find a single place where Rob Bell even comes close to talking about hell (or Jesus' dereliction, for that matter) in those terms. If the God-man of infinite worth and value, the perfect man, the Communion of Love earthed in a Person, descended into the hell of God forsakenness, then hell must be considered a terrifying place and experience. Whenever Bell does describe hell, he never speaks of it in those terms. He really just plays down “hell” as simply a garbage dump of sorts. For example, Bell writes: “In Matthew 23 he tells very committed religious leaders that they win converts and make them ‘twice as much a child of hell’ as they are, and then he asks them, ‘How will you escape being condemned to hell?’ Gehenna, the town garbage pile” (p 68). Never once in Bell’s entire book does he refer to, let alone explain, Jesus’ God-forsakeness on the cross (not that I could find). Never once does he tell us that the death of our representative-man, Jesus, shows us what hell and dereliction really are. Never once does he say that this God-forsakeness is something that is to be feared. Whatever Bell’s definition of hell is, he never refers to it in this stark Jesus-centered terms. I think this is Bell’s major failure in the book. There's really no Jesus on the cross in Love Wins, and that, as far as I'm concerned, is a big loss. Sure, Rob mentions Jesus and the cross, but Scripture is clear: Jesus experienced hell on the cross (Matthew 27:46); he experienced God-forsakenness in its infinite depths. However Scripture actually uses or doesn’t use the word “hell” itself, a primary concern of ours should be the hell that Jesus experienced for us and in our place.

Also, it seems to me, too, that Bell really lacks a robust understanding of the Trinity. One of my main problems with his underlying presuppositions is that he does not consider Who God is ontologically (that is, who God is in himself). In other words, he fails to give due consideration to the fact that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and as the God who IS Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, he is an eternal loving communion of Persons with no shadow of lack within himself. Forever and ever in his triune-being LOVE has ALWAYS won. Because God is love in his eternal and infinite essence, love always wins. The reciprocal love within God cannot be broken or defeated. It can’t be otherwise, in both eternal and created reality. But since God is sovereign in how and whom he chooses (redeemed human creatures) to participate in that love (Matthew 11:25-27; Luke 10:21-22), since He is fully free to extend that love to whom He so desires through faith in Jesus, love always wins whether “we think” it does or not.

I'm willing to be corrected on this, but it seems to me that Bell minimizes the necessity of faith in Jesus, and I think he does that, in part, because he does not see the reality and necessity of the vicarious faith (i.e., believing for us, in our place) of Jesus for us and in our place. Jesus wasn’t simply God become man so that he could do good deeds of mercy and justice and be our example for those deeds. Jesus became man for us that he might believe in our place (see his temptation accounts: Matthew 4; Luke 3:38 – 4:13). As the Second Adam, Jesus did for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And the better news is that Jesus’ vicarious faith actualizes faith within us, a real faith, an actively believing faith. But Bell really says nothing, at least nothing of substance, about faith in Christ. Therefore, the kind of love that Bell presents is “I don’t know how it will work out in the end, but I do know that in the end love will win…for everybody.” But there’s really no Jesus the God-Man in that. There is no Jesus who is our vicarious substitute in the totality of his life (from his conception in the virgin womb to his resurrection, ascension and beyond) in Bell's way of thinking. Therefore, there is really no one who believes for us (Jesus) and makes it possible for us to believe now and forever. “Today is the day of salvation.”

So, in Bell’s way of telling the story of redemption, God’s love is not a love that “actually” wins. It’s simply a love that outlasts our resistance. I don’t know what others think about that, but that’s not winning as far as I’m concerned. It’s like beating someone in an arm wrestling match not because you can put his arm down, but because he can’t get yours down. So your "opponent" eventually just gives up. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but underneath it all, isn’t that basically the kind of winning Rob Bell is hinting at?

[Note: Portions of the above text were adapted from my book Reclaiming Adoption: Missional Living Through the Rediscovery of Abba Father]