Rob Bell - Love Wins: Chapter 5 Dying to Live

Rob Bell begins with his noticing that when Eminem returned from a long withdrawal from his performance career he returned wearing a cross. This leads Bell to wonder with us about what the cross means.

He offers several alternatives:

• Sacrifice
• Reconciliation

• The guilty set free

• Redemption

• Victory

Bell suggests that all of these metaphors are apt ones for the time in which the New Testament authors wrote. They all point to the meaning of the crucifixion using different contemporary images. None of these particular images is sufficient to capture all of the cross's meaning. "The point, then, isn't to narrow it to one particular metaphor, image, explanation, or mechanism. To elevate one over the others, to insist that there's a 'correct' or 'right' one, is to miss the brilliant, creative work these first Christians were doing when they used these images and metaphors. They were reading their world, looking for ways to communicate this epic event in ways their listeners could grasp." (p. 129)

A variety of metaphors are needed, in part, because the cosmic impact of Jesus is so enormous. Jesus is where life is, according to Bell. On p. 129 he says:  The point then, as it is now, is Jesus. The divine in flesh and blood. He's where the life is." 

I very much appreciate Bell's expansion of what is technically called the "theory of atonement."  In my view, evangelical Christians have been way to attached to the sacrifice image.

Bell moves from the crucifixion to the resurrection. He sees the pattern of crucifixion leading to resurrection as woven into the fabric of the universe.

He has a helpful outline of John's Gospel as seven signs (seven days of creation) leading to an eighth sign, which is the recreation of the cosmos in the resurrection of Jesus. Bell seeks to expand our sense of the scope of the Jesus story from the individual soul to the entire cosmos. I find this refreshing.

Summing up this chapter, I cite a paragraph on page 136:

Jesus talks about death and rebirth constantly, his and ours. He calls us to let go, turn away, renounce, confess, repent, and leave behind the old ways. He talks of the life that will come from his own death, and he promises that life will flow to us in thousands of small ways as we die to our egos, our pride, our need to be right, our self-sufficiency, our rebellion, and our stubborn insistence that we deserve to get our way. When we cling with white knuckles to our sins and our hostility, we're like a tree that won't let its leaves go. There can't be a spring if we're stuck in the fall.