[This is part III of a multi-part series on Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins.]

“First,
heaven.”

“I show you this painting because, as surreal as it is, the fundamental story it tells about heaven—that it is somewhere else—is the story that many people know to be the Christian story.”

The painting above isn’t the black-and-white replica that Bell has in his book but it’s pretty close and retained the same ideas.

Bell’s point in Chapter 2 is to challenge the reader’s conceptions about heaven and all that they’ve heard or think (or know) to be true. He references the parable of the rich man who wants to know how to get eternal life. According to Bell:

“When the man asks about getting ‘eternal life,’ he isn’t asking about how to go to heaven when he dies. This wasn’t a concern for the man or Jesus. This is why Jesus doesn’t tell people how to ‘go to heaven.’ It wasn’t what Jesus came to do.

Heaven, for Jesus, was deeply connected with what he called ‘this age’ and ‘the age to come.'”

Bell’s references to “this age” and “the age to come” become foundational to Love Wins:

“We might call them ‘eras’ or ‘periods of time’:
this age—the one we’re living in—and the age to come.

Another way of saying ‘life in the age to come’ in Jesus’s day was to say ‘eternal life.’ In Hebrew the phrase is olam habah.

What must I do to inherit olam habah?

This age,
and the one to come,
the one after this one.”

Bell defines ‘age’ further:

“Now, the English word ‘age’ here is the word aion in New Testament Greek. Aion has multiple meanings… One meaning of aion refers to a period of time, as in ‘The spirit of the age’ or ‘They were gone for ages.’ When we use the word ‘age’ like this, we are referring less to a precise measurement of time, like an hour or a day or a year, and more to a period or era of time. This is crucial to our understanding of the word aion, because it doesn’t mean ‘forever’ as we think of forever. When we say ‘forever,’ what we are generally referring to is something that will go on, 365-day year, never ceasing in the endless unfolding of segmented, measurable units of time, like a clock that never stops ticking. That’s not this word. The first meaning of this word aion refers to a period of time with a beginning and an end.

So according to Jesus there is this age, this aion—
the one they, and we, are living in—
and then a coming age,
also called ‘the world to come’
or simply ‘eternal life.'”

When Bell has paragraphs that meaty, they beg to be explored. Continue reading “Love Wins Analysis: Chapter 2: Here Is the New There” →