Bell does say it is okay to “long for” universal salvation. So did Pope John Paul II!...Chapter 6 is about what is usually called inclusivism–that salvation through Jesus Christ is not limited to those who hear his name. (I’ve discussed problems with restrictivism here before.) I find nothing in that chapter that Billy Graham has not said. (Go to youtube.com and look up Graham’s responses to questions from Robert Schuler.)
While reading Love Wins I kept thinking “This sounds like C. S. Lewis!” In his Acknowledgments Bell thanks someone for “suggesting when I was in high school that I read C. S. Lewis.”
This belies a fundamentally muddleheaded approach to theological questions. Merely quoting the opinion of a famous religious figure is irrelevant. Religious truth is not decided by committee. It’s not an opinion survey. It’s not about who has the most votes. Or someone we admire.
The first question we always need to ask ourselves is whether the speaker was in a position to know what he’s talking about. What’s his source of information?
Here we’re dealing with the question of what ultimately happens to you when you die. And the only reliable source of information to answer a question like that is divine revelation. This isn’t something you can determine by armchair speculation or empirical observation.
Personal experience is a poor way to discover what happens to you after you die, for if you wait until you find out the hard way, then it’s too late to make preparations for the afterlife before you die. If you find out what happens to you after you die…after you die, then you can’t go back and make a midcourse correction. You’re stuck with the outcome.
Billy Graham is a saintly man, but he’s not a great Bible scholar or theologian. C. S. Lewis was a gifted fiction writer, but The Great Divorce or The Last Battle is hardly a trustworthy way of finding out what awaits us when we die. The pope is not a prophet.
There's a sense in which Lewis in the Last Battle is actually an exclusivist. He distinguishes between those who worship Tash and those who worship Aslan but wrongly call him Tash. The idea seems to be that some within Islam (clearly what he means by analogy) might not genuinely be Muslims, because they know what their religion teaches is wrong, and the assumption is that they somehow get the right content even though it's not taught to them (which is the part that strikes me as least plausible in our world, since in our world the content that matters includes understanding the cross and its purpose). But if Lewis is right (and I would be very reluctant to say he is), what follows is not that Muslims might be saved without believing in Christ. What follows is that some people think they're Muslims but aren't, because they actually believe in Christ. No one is saved without believing in Christ. Therefore, it's exclusivist.
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