sure you distinguish ideas from the people who are expressing those ideas (including your own). Candid and strong discussion is powerful and beneficial when we don’t attack the people we are talking with. Debate the worthiness of the idea without infringing on the worth of the person.5 Make peace with the reality that good Christians can disagree on important matters. This is another reason why it is important to separate critical comments about ideas from critical comments about people. Very bright and very devout people have a vast range of orthodox opinions that don’t always align.
6 Study the history of the idea you are defending. Many people are shocked to discover that what they thought was ancient Christian orthodoxy turns out to be a relatively recent development in the church or, conversely, what they considered a problem doctrine has been a standard orthodox view for centuries. That is why it is helpful to ask: How old is the idea in the history of the Christian tradition? Where did it originate? What was it responding to? What were the original arguments disputing it? Understanding these contextual issues allows us to appreciate both the limits of an idea and how adaptive doctrines have been to the issues and context of the church throughout the centuries.
Jesus specialized in taking religious people’s understandings about God and how everything works and then turning them on their heads. He wanted people to see that God was doing something new. In that vein, Love Wins stretches many of our preconceived ideas about Christianity for those both inside and outside the faith. Rob does this mostly by getting us to pay attention to what Jesus and his followers actually said. Embracing the biblical text with as much separation from our preexisting ideas and experiences as possible may offer some surprises about Jesus’s good news. Perhaps God is offering a bigger love than many of us have ever imagined.
Chapter One What About the Flat Tire?
Over the years I have met many people who are fascinated, compelled, or drawn to Jesus, but some reason or obstacle keeps them away. They may have heard from a Christian, “This is how it is, period, end of discussion. The Bible says it, so that settles it.” Or they might have been taught that to follow Jesus, they had to go down a certain road and believe certain things, some of which they found problematic. What I’m interested in in this chapter is the power of questioning and the experience of solidarity in finding you’re not alone—of always wondering, “But what about that?” and then finding out, “Oh, other people feel the same way.”
My interest here is that you get loosened up with the questions, that the questions pull out of you, “You’re right. That doesn’t make sense” or “You’re right. I’ve always had a problem with that explanation.” It’s okay. There should be no fear in the questioning and no hesitation in the asking. We can go there—that’s the power.
And the biblical tradition is actually filled with questions, all the way to Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Questions are actually one of the ways we meet the divine. My hope is that somewhere in here you find your own questions and you learn that you aren’t alone.
Going Deeper by David Vanderveen
Many readers of chapter 1 of Love Wins are a little taken back by all the questions Rob throws at them about what it means to be “saved.” Rob is not trying to deny or criticize what Christians believe, but to reveal that our present understanding does not explain everything. Some churches suggest there is a specific process for getting “saved.” In this chapter, Rob explores a wide range of those techniques, some of which conflict, as well as a long list of ways that Jesus told people they were accepted. Our beliefs about God, Jesus, and the meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection need to deepen in order for us to grasp more fully what the Bible means by “saved.”
Rob is not the first to raise these issues. In a 1997 interview of evangelist Billy Graham by televangelist Robert Schuller of the “Hour of Power,”[1] the conversation was surprisingly broader than some Christians imagined it should be:
Schuller: Tell me, what do you think is the future of Christianity?
Graham: . . . I think everybody that loves Christ, or knows Christ, whether they’re conscious of it or not, they’re members of the Body of Christ. And I don’t think that we’re going to see a great sweeping revival that will turn the whole world to Christ at any time. I think James answered that, the Apostle James in the first council in Jerusalem, when he said that God’s purpose for this age is to call out a people for His name. And that’s what God is doing today. He’s calling people out of the world for His name, whether they come from the Muslim world or the Buddhist world or the Christian world or the nonbelieving world, they are members of the Body of Christ, because they’ve been called by God. They may not even know the name of Jesus, but they know in their hearts that they need something that they don’t have, and they turn to the only light that they have, and I think that they are saved, and that they’re going to be with us in heaven.
Schuller: What I hear you saying is that it’s possible for Jesus Christ to come into human hearts and souls and lives, even if they’ve been born in darkness and have never had exposure to the Bible. Is that a correct interpretation of what you’re saying?
Graham: Yes, it is, because I believe that. I’ve met people in various parts of the world in tribal situations who have never seen a Bible or heard about a Bible and never heard of Jesus, but they’ve believed in their hearts that there was a God, and they’ve tried to live a life that was quite apart from the surrounding community in which they lived.
Schuller: I’m so thrilled to hear you say this. There’s a wideness in God’s mercy.
Graham: There is. There definitely is.
We should not be surprised that one of the greatest evangelists in the history of the church thought along these lines. As someone who had spent a career presenting the gospel to non-Christians, Graham had to think deeply and thoroughly about the logic of God’s salvation. So should we.
We have included an excerpt from Oswald Chambers’s My Utmost for His Highest as another example and model of a past Christian teacher who offers counsel. In “The Temptation of Religious Success,” Chambers describes the danger of religious conformity and taking pride in Christian success. Instead, he advises that we try to seek only the Lord’s approval. This is good, but tough advice.
People have very personal stories about how they came to accept Jesus or why they’ve rejected him. The questions, Bible studies, exercises, and readings in this chapter are designed to dig into the various claims different Christian groups make about what salvation is and the variety of ways to accomplish it, allowing you to explore more fully what you think the Bible teaches on this core issue. Before the group exercise and discussion questions, we have included a Bible study showcasing just how much the Bible embraces and models the practice of asking questions; this is followed by David Dark’s reflections on the theme of his book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, which we excerpt.
Bible Study: A God Who Loves Questions
Many people are afraid to question their faith, having been taught that this is tantamount to either rejecting or losing one’s faith. The best evidence against this line of thought is
