Mark Galli’s Christianity Today review (2 out of 5 stars) seeks to situate Rob Bell’s Love Wins in the tradition of Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Bultmann, and Tillich:
[Bell] correctly notes in the preface that many have taught what he teaches or hints at in the book. Names that come immediately to mind include Friedrich Schleiermacher, Albrecht Ritschl, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. Schleiermacher was keen on mining our innate religious sensibilities (the things we’ve intuited are true) to ground Christian faith. Ritschl celebrated the kingdom ethics of Jesus. Bultmann argued that first-century metaphors and worldviews should be abandoned. Tillich wrote of faith as accepting our acceptance. All these themes run through Bell’s book, sometimes in compelling ways. . . .
What novelist John Updike, in his poem “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” said about the Resurrection applies to all the central teachings of the New Testament, as least as far as evangelicals are concerned:
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.Since the days of Schleiermacher, liberals have striven to make the gospel relevant to “the cultured despisers” of religion, a key phrase in the title of his groundbreaking book. Liberals are evangelists at heart; they do want people to follow Jesus. The problem is methods and conclusions. For liberals, the sensibilities of the age trump biblical revelation. Personal opinion outranks the consensus of the church. Fondness for metaphor and parable sabotage the particularity of the gospel.
You can read the whole review here for further analysis.
