Rob Bell’s ‘Love Wins’

And you thought I was done!

… oops

Once I was finished with my book project, I went straight to our ‘other’ bookshelf and picked up Rob Bell’s Love Wins. Gareth bought this book at the end of his semester at Carey because he had left over credit at the local bookstore, and we both had been insterestingly following the hype of the book since it hit the shelves.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, Rob Bell is from the town I grew up in. When I was in high school, Mars Hill was the hip new church, and I would often attend evening church there throughout high school and into university. I have always respected Rob Bell both as a communicator and as a church leader. His way of making complex or obscure ideas or interesting Biblical truths relevant and readily understandable is seriously brilliant; and the way he is able to reach and love the thousands of thousands of people in his congregation well is something that I really admire.

I have also read Velvet Elvis, Drops Like Stars and Sex God, so I am familiar with his writing too.

So I was pretty excited about reading Love Wins.

Firstly, I would like to start by saying something about the media and the hype that has been surrounding this book: if you are relying on the media and hype surrounding this book to form your own opinion, please don’t; read the book yourself.

Now to about the book specifically: first of all, I love how Rob addresses the hard questions. In fact, much of the book is actually asking rather than answering the tough questions that people have been asking in our faith for centuries. And the way he does so is conversational, but it is also intellectual and biblical. His questions are based on solid biblical stories and things Jesus himself has said, and his expounding of these questions is done so in an intellectual, not silly, way.

Second, I positively love what Rob has to say about Heaven being in the here and now. I studying eschatology at Calvin College, and one of the things that I guess was really revealed to me at that time was that Heaven doesn’t need to be this obscure place in the sky: we can, as Christ’s ambassadors, bring Heaven into earth. Now.

I love how Rob takes the story of the Centurian and explains what the notion of Heaven would have meant to him at that time in history. He explains that people wouldn’t have thought of Heaven as only a future thing, but also as a state of being that is attainable in the here and now. This, I think, is a hugely important concept for Christians to grasp in a world where the ‘Heaven of the future’ can stop us from bring the ‘Heaven of now’ to the earth today.

And it’s this ‘Heaven of now’ that Rob talks about that brings about things like, as he says, ‘Honest business, redemptive art, honorable law, sustainable living, medicine, education, making a home, tending a garden–[which are] all sacred tasks to be done in partnership with God now, because they will all go on in the age to come (46).’ He adds later in the same page: ‘A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.’ I’m not quite sure how I could disagree with this.

Rob then talks about how this type of Heaven, while being a comfort, can also be a confrontation for some people, such as the racists. Since Christ came for ALL people, ALL nations, ALL races, how uncomfortable would a racist, who still held to their racist ideas, be in Heaven, sitting next to the very people they have hated for so long. Thus, Rob says, ‘What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he’s interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.’ The racist would be entirely uncomfortable in Heaven; so God is interested in him/her being transformed in order to be able to fully appreciate what Heaven is actually all about.

I feel like I could go on and on …

I’ll end the Heaven section with this from Rob: ‘Jesus invites us, in this life, in this broken, beautiful world, to experience the life of heaven now. He insisted over and over that God’s peace, joy, and love are currently available to us, exactly as we are … There is heven now, somewhere else. There’s heaven here, sometime else. And then there’s Jesus’s invitation to heaven here and now, in this moment, in this place (62).’

Then there’s hell.

One of the important things that Rob insists about what Jesus and the Bible have to say on hell is that God is ultimately in complete control over life and death and what happens as a result of either.

Rob then also makes the interesting point of the hell of here and now: the homeless, the helpless, the lost among us. The injustices that create our world into more of a hell than a heaven. He talks about personal hells: about lives lived apart from God that mean the person actually creates his or her own hell. Rob says: ‘God gives us what we want, and if that’s hell, we can have it (72).’ I think there’s really something to that.

Rob then goes on to discuss the different ways that the idea of hell is portrayed in scripture and talks about this, again, in a very intellectual and real way. Again, his way of communication is absolutely brilliant here. He ends his hell chapter this way: ‘To summarize, then, we need a loaded, volatile, adequately violent, dramatic, serious word to describe the very real consequences we experience when we reject the good and true and beautiful life that God has for us … And for that, the word “hell” works quite well. Let’s keep it (93).’

The next chapter is an interesting one, and possibly where some of the controversy of this book comes to the forefront. It’s called: ‘Does God Get What God Wants’. Rob begins this chapter by asking that very question: Does God get what God wants? In 1 Timothy 2, God says that he wants all people to be saved … so, does God get what he wants?

This is a terribly interesting, and terribly controversial, question in our faith: will everyone be saved? I think this question really came home when Rob put it this way: ‘Does this magnificent, mighty, marvelous God fail in the end? (98)’

Again, this chapter asks a lot of questions, both about God and humanity. And what I like about this chapter is that, while Rob is dealing with an incredibly touchy subject, I think he handles it and himself brilliantly without the attempt or desire to shock and with a genuine desire to give insight into the hard questions.

Rob does not say that everyone will mysteriously be granted entry into heaven. He is not, in fact, a universalist. Instead, he brings the perspective that everyone will eventually at some point in this life or the life to come, will come to experience the power, the love, the intense goodness of God and make the decision themselves to serve him. He says this: ‘At the heart of this perspective is the belief that, given enough time, everybody will turn to God and find themselves in the joy and peace of God’s presence. The love of God will melt every hard heart, and even the most “depraved sinners” will eventually give up their reistance and turn to God (107).’ Again, knowing the greatness, the love, the power of the God I serve: I don’t think this idea is so far fetched. I am a firm believer, along with Rob, that God is bigger than all the stuff that humanity brings–that his love truly does win out in the end, whatever that might look like.

I also like how he ends this section. He says, blatantly, bluntly: ‘Will everybody be saved … Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are free to leave fully intact. We don’t need to resolve them or answer them because we can’t, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love requires (115).’ I really appreciate that, even while wrestling with the hard questions himself, Rob still leaves room for God’s mystery, which is so obvious and so beautiful in our midst.

The next chapter talks a lot about the cross and Jesus. He talks about how Jesus is not just the person who saved individuals from their sins but that he is encompassed in all of scripture as the meaning, the breath, to everything there is. The gospel, Rob says, has to be much, much more than just about what it means to us as individuals.

In the next chapter Rob picks up again on this idea of Jesus being more than just the Jesus at the cross and says, ‘Jesus wasn’t something God cooked up at the last minute to try to rescue us from what happened when we were given the freedom to truly make a mess of things. Jesus, for these first Christians, was the ultimate exposing of what God has been up to all along (148).’

Rob then addresses another tricky topic. The Gentiles of our world – the everybodies of our world. One of the things that I liekd what Rob said here was this: ‘Jesus is supracultural. He is present within all cultures, and yet outside of all cultures (151).’ This can get tricky, because I don’t think that this can be an excuse for saying that everyone of different religions is on the right track because Jesus is present in their culture in some way … so they must be on the heaven track without even realising it. I don’t think that’s true. What I like to take from this is what Rob is talking about in the rest of the book: he says that everyone will eventually know the truth of Jesus, who is amongst them by his very nature, for how can they not?

Rob also goes on to say: ‘What Jesus does is declare that he, and his alone, is saving everybody. And then he leaves the door way, way open. Creating all sorts of possibilities. He is as narrow as himself and as wide as the universe (155).’ Again, I don’t think that Rob, based on all of the other things he says in this particular chapter and in the remainder of the book, is in any way saying that he thinks that Muslims, while still not believing in Jesus, will go to Heaven. What he is doing is taking a very real statement that Jesus made that he is the way for all creation, not just the people we think should get into heaven. I honestly think these are great questions to raise, because, quite honestly, wouldn’t it be great if the new heaven and the new earth did include everyone, completely renewed?

I won’t go into much detail for the rest of the book because what Rob does in the remainder of the book is really give examples and expounds about what he believes about heaven and hell and Jesus and humanity and all of these incredibly difficult questions being raised.

I do love what Rob says here, though, about the way many of us view heaven: ‘So when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club. The good news is better than that … When the gospel is understood primarily in terms of entrance rather than joyous participation, it can actually serve to cut people off from the explosive, liberating experience of the God who is an endless giving circle of joy and creativity (179).’

And ultimately, Rob says, it’s about the immeasurable, the incredible, love that God has for us. ‘Our invitation,’ he says, ‘the one that is offered to us with each and every breath, is to trust that we are loved and that a new word has been spoken about us, a new story is being told about us (195).’ It’s about trusting God with our lives and with the lives of those arouond us. It’s about inviting in the love of God and letting it permeate the lives we live now, so that pieces of Heaven come down to earth. Now. It’s about humbling ourselves to God–letting go of what we don’t know and don’t have, and letting God. ‘Whatever you’ve been told about the end,’ says Rob, ‘–the end of your life, the end of time, the end of the world–Jesus passionately urges us to live like the end is here, now, today (197).’

I don’t actually agree with everything that Rob says in this book. But I do think he raises brilliant questions and talks about a God and life that I want to know and live. This is a book well worth the read and one that pushes me on to do what I can to bring heaven to earth now – to be the kind of ambassador that pushes people to Jesus – and to have the kind of love that Jesus, God himself, demonstrates to us all.

I’ll finish with this, Rob’s benediction: ‘May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about. And may you know, deep in your bones, that love wins (198).’

And as always: Happy reading.

And so it ends.

And so, with the completion of Dostoevsky by Rowan Williams, my book project is complete. In 10 and a half months I have read and blogged about 43 books. As I just told my mother: I am proud to be me.

But first, before I let my pride become the sole subject of this post: Dostoevsky. Reading this book made me want to, first, go back and read the Dostoevsky that I have read previously; two, read the Dostoevsky I have not yet acquired; and three, read more about the man himself.

While I wasn’t, at first, terribly keen on Williams’ writing style – he was so formal and assumed too much of his audience – I did actually appreciate the conclusions that he drew about Dostoevsky and faith. I appreciated that he didn’t take the easy road to simply say that Dostoevsky utilises faith in his writing for a larger purpose, but that he instead ties faith and humanity together, making Dostoevsky’s work much more about life and reason than simply faith alone. Nice work, Rowan.

Now, before I finish entirely (what on earth am I going to do without this project!!), there are two matters of business I need to attend to. First is my trusty bookmark, pictured below.

As you will be able to see for yourself, this bookmark is actually a receipt. I would tell you how much for, but I can’t actually read the writing on it anymore. All I know is that it is from Glassons and has served me well through every book that I have read since March 2011. Word.

If you know me really well – maybe only my family and Gareth would know this – you would know that I am notorious for losing bookmarks. It’s like second nature to me. It could possibly be because when I am really enjoying a book I take it with me wherever I go: to get a drink, to go to sleep, to go outside, to go to the bathroom … thus, the bookmark gets left behind.

Not so with this one! When I started this project I also gave myself the task of not losing my bookmark, and … I win again! Though it’s lost its ink and is gross and quite disgusting, I still win again!

Second matter of business: I didn’t actually make it. Though I completed my task and faithfully read every single book that was on my shelf (not Gareth’s shelves) in 10 and a half months, I did not make it 10 and a half months without buying more books.

In fact, in this I not only failed, I failed epically. By my count I have acquired 68 new books that I have not yet read.

Oh dear.

I will say for myself, though, that not a single one of these books cost more than a dollar. My parents moved house, giving me about 10-15 books (mostly American lit, yeay!), I bought a bunch (and I mean a bunch!) of Dickens on a TradeMe auction that I seriously just couldn’t pass up, and the guy threw in a bunch of classics – all for $20! (word); and I have frequented a few $1 book sales at one of the local Lions club and picked up 10-20 books there each time as well.

However, you must admit that 68 books for under $68 is really such a steal that it would have been a shame if I hadn’t bought them. I told Gareth that he could send me to book buyers annonymous if he thought it necessary; instead he just threatened to buy another ridiculously expensive bookshelf … touche!

So, really, my book project isn’t finished; it’s really only just starting. But that’s the way I like it. As I told my mom yesterday when I told her how many books I had read in the month of January: reading is good for my soul. I find intense enjoyment in a well-crafted phrase. I find the life that a novelist is able to portray beautiful, brutal, raw and real. I love having a look into another world; I love unique turns of phrases; and I love dreaming that I, one day, could write as well as some of my favourites (yes, I know; I did say dream!). Reading brings me joy; and so, with 68 new books on my beautiful shelves … here we go again!

And for the last time: happy reading.

Legend.

I made the mistake of telling Gareth the other day that me reading Maugham was like him reading theology: I get so excited about getting into the brain of a guy who I admire so much as a writer … Gareth thought the comparison between Maugham and Jesus just a bit exaggerated … not entirely what I meant …

Anyway, The Summing Up was brilliant. Maugham is an incredible fiction writer, but this book has proved to me that his thought process and life are equally as interesting. While the book itself doesn’t give too much away about Maugham personally, he has this brilliant way of describing life, literature, the stage, love, happiness, beauty with poise and directness … all while giving bit by bit of himself away. The end of the book is particularly telling of Maugham as a man and made for very, very good reading.

What I love about this book particularly is that in so many places, particularly when he spoke of writing and reading and literature, that his thoughts mirrored my own. I had to smile each time Maugham said something (much more elloquently) that I believe in as well. To be honest, it just makes me a little bit giddy to get inside the head of an author whom I admire so greatly. I wish I could have met him … no, scratch that … I wish I could have observed him. That would have been neat.

I’ll leave the Maugham with a quote I particularly enjoyed: ‘But the author does not only write when he is at his desk: he writes all day long, when he is thinking, when he is reading, when he is experiencing; everything he sees and feels is significant to his purpose and, consciously or unconsciously, he is for ever storing and making over his impressions.’

Word.

Next, and finally – did you read that? FINALLY! – is Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury … yup, the guy that married William and Kate. This book I bought on recommendation of my Russian Literature professor, Professor Chad Engbers. I had asked him what I should read next in terms of Russian Literature, and he recommended this. I bought it ages ago but was always ‘in the mood for fiction’ when I went to my bookshelf, so have yet to read it.

I am particularly interested in this book not only because I so highly admire Dostoevsky, but I also find the Russian way of thought so intriguing and worth the study. I am particularly interested in the faith side of things and am eager to embark on my last book in this project.

Oh, and I read 12 books this month. That’s 3 a week. Can you say you’ve accomplished this much?

Hehe – Happy Reading!

Subconscious agreement

It’s amazing. When I pick up this kind of book I immediately think it is going to be a slog. I enjoy finding out new things about literature, but a whole book of literary critism, I suppose, isn’t really normally on the top of my reading list.

But I am happy to say that, once again, I have been pleasantly surprised.

First of all: if you haven’t read Hardy, please do. He is brilliant.

Second: this book was written by Andrew Enstice, which I did not mention in my last post but probably should have; becauase now he and I are friends.

I loved studying literature at university - even after I had completed all of the requirements for my major (in English), I CHOSE to take mostly 300-level English papers in my last two semesters, meaning I basically read and analysed literature all day long. And I loved it. So, really, this type of book is right up my alley. I won’t go through all I have discovered tonight, but I will talk about a few things.

Enstice goes through a few of Hardy’s novels (I have read 4 out of the 7 that he discusses so have only read those 4 essays) and talks about various important features of the writing, pretty much all to do with the relationship between nature and humanity. I found this particularly interesting in two of the novels that I read.

The first one is The Return of the Native where there is this beautiful, large, practically all-consuming heath that regularly imposes on the book. It is, in fact, one of the centre features of the book. Enstice basically uses the image of the heath to describe Hardy’s inter-relation between nature and humanity and the place that humanity fits within nature. Reading some of the quotes again and seeing how the descriptions of the characters as well as the man-made features surrounding the heath, made Enstice’s comments really come alive.

The second one, and most fun to read about again, was Jude The Obscure. Now, I read this book back in the day, but one of the things that I vividly remember is the contrast between the country scenes and the city scenes. I remember the country, in my imagination, as lush, beautiful, peaceful, quiet, slow and green. The city, I remember, as dark, grey, stone, depressing, dreary, foreboding. Enstice is saying, rather correctly, that this was highly intentional on Hardy’s part, and it was just so fun to read about it from a literary point of view as the scenes are still so vividly sketched that way in my memory.

It was also just neat to read again about an author who puts so much thought into his books. Hardy, I appreciate you.

Next, and second to last, on the list is: The Summing Up by Somerset Maugham. Now, we have seen enough of Maugham by now not to have to do a small biography as I have done previously. You only need to remember that he is one of my very favourites and that I am greatly looking forward to this.

The Summing Up was writen by Maugham when he was 64 and is said to be ‘autobiographical without being an autobiography, confessional without disclosing the private self.’ This is not a work of fiction but will be Maugham’s stance on ideas, philosophies … life in general.

And I am greatly looking forward to it.

Once again: happy reading!

Style, style, style

Bill Walsh, a Michigander, certainly knows his style. The Elephants of Style is a quirky way of looking at the age-old rules, the obscure ones and the ones you expect to be followed but perhaps shouldn’t be afterall. I enjoyed it!

It’s quite fun, actually, reading a book like this after being a writer for so many (makes me sound old) years. It’s fun to know what he’s talking about and also to see some of the stylistic differences between American English and British English, which I adhere to now.

Overall good read, though a bit heavy for an every-night read.

Next on the list (we are in the final few now!) is Thomas Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind. This is basically a book that picks apart Hardy’s novels and talks specifically about tings like the village community or the farming community and what it means in the context of the book.

Now, this is a bit of a funny one: because I have not read all of Hardy, and I certainly don’t want to kill the surprise and find out who dies or what disaster strikes at the end of a novel I have not yet read but still definitely want to read, I am going to only read the chapters that refer to books that I have read. This still is the majority of the book, so I actually really don’t feel like I am cheating. In fact, I am pretty darn proud of myself for even tackling these literary critism books as part of my book deal in the first place … so there.

And with that (and 10 books in the month of January – woo hoo!) – Happy reading!

Oh man.

So I had a realisation in reading my latest book: On English Writers … which was written before 1880 … and that is this:

If I had a blog in 1880, On English Writers is probably exactly what I would have written. Ahh ha ha ha. Oh man.

Seriously, though. What this book does is basically tell ‘the student’ which authors he/she (actually, just he – it was 1880 after all) should, explains a bit of the author’s background and history within the genre and then analyses, on a basic level, the author’s work. Seriously, it’s pretty much exactly what I have been doing with this blog. He he  he.

The other thing that I found terribly, terribly interesting about this book is that, because it was written before 1880, I don’t know most of the writers talked about! The poetry that the book starts with is so old that it even uses old English. Check it out: “A wyf is Goddes gifte verrayly: Al other maner giftes hardily, as landes, rentes, pasture, or commune, or other moeblis, ben giftes of fortune, that passen as a schadow on a wal.” … Yup, I totally just read this book.

The next book on my list is called The Elephants of Style by Bill Walsh. Let me tell you the story of how I acquired this book: my freshman year of university, I took English 101 with Professor Nathan Bierma, who also ended up being a bit of a journalism mentor to me when I was attempting to get started in the field. Anyway, he gave the class the challenge of finding typos or grammatical errors in either the newspaper, the university’s printings, really anything we came across. Well, I love words, so I kind of went to town. I think I ended up having probably about 10 times the amount of typos and errors than anyone else in the class.

So I won a prize. And that prize was The Elephants of Style. The book is basically for writers or language lovers and is witty, clever and a good read (I know because I started it ages ago and got about halfway through).

Definitely looking forward to this one. Happy reading!

And here ends …

… my run with fiction. You thought I was going to say I was done, didn’t you! Alas, no. I still have 5 books to go on my list, and all of them are nonfiction of some sort. So, thus ends the fiction part of my journey.

But back to Woolf. She has a kind of crazed brilliance about her. Her stories are very distinct and often include a sort of random thinking aspect to them. One of her stories, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ is literally just the writer following her train of thought after seeing a mark on her wall. And while it sounds dull when I say it, there is actually something fairly remarkable about the way she writes. It’s a flow of consciousness that adds to her brilliance, I reckon.

One story I liked particularly was ‘A Society’. Woolf is known as a feminist, and this piece definitely highlights this. Man, oh man, I laughed outloud through a good half of the story, particularly at the start when the whole of the male sex is called into question. Absolutely hilarious! I also found it particularly tickling that one of her characters was to read the whole of the London library before receiving the money her father left her in his will. HA! Brilliant.

Another book well read.

I can’t really find much out about the next book that I have on my list except that, as per its title, it is a compilation of essays on English writers called, wait for it, On English Writers!

I am going to be perfectly honest when I tell you that I think this one is going to be a slog. And I am not going to deny that parts of it will be skimmed. However, I am game for anything in the project of mine, particularly as only 5 books remain on my quest to reading glory

And with that … happy reading!