Mark Galli is the senior managing editor for Christianity Today. Earlier this month Tyndale published God Wins: Heaven, Hell, and Why the Good News is Better Than Love Wins, a response to pastor Rob Bell's controversial Love Wins.
RBL: What prompted you to write this book?
Galli: I had been working for about two-and-a-half years on a book on Karl Barth. When Rob Bell's Love Wins appeared, I had already been thinking hard about many of the issues the book raises about salvation, the nature of Christ, and the nature of God, so I wrote an extensive online review of Bell's book. He was asking important questions, but readers were befuddled and confused by his questions, and I wanted to help readers try to clear up their confusion by offering a restatement of classical Christian orthodoxy. Since these ideas were bubbling up already in my mind, I wrote the book in two-and-a-half weeks.
RBL: How and why does God win? What do you mean by this title?
Galli: The God of Scripture is fuller, richer, deeper, and more real than the picture painted in Love Wins, and that God invites us to know him as he truly is. Bell's book lacks the personal and participatory vision of living in the Trinity and the Trinity living in us that the witness of the Bible affirms. God has revealed himself to us as a personal God—a God who wins by drawing us to himself for an eternity of extraordinary fellowship.
RBL: Bell's book has been controversial for its embrace of universalism, which posits that Jesus will save all people, even those who have never heard the Christian message of salvation, and that they will enjoy harmony with God in heaven. What are the shortcomings of this view?
Galli: Like most moderns I wish for all people to be saved, but I keep getting backed into a corner by the words of Jesus. Plenty of momentary decisions have consequences that last a lifetime; through Scripture, God shows the way that this aspect of our lives reflects the bigger picture. When it comes to our eternal lives, Jesus teaches that this momentary life has an eternal trajectory, that the response we make to him has eternal consequences. I know of no biblical witnesses that talk about second, third, or fourth choices, and the classic Christian view of these matters is that the consequences of embracing or rejecting God are eternal, eternal life or eternal death.
RBL: What message do you want readers to take away from your book?
Galli: I'd like for people to see how in fact God has dealt with the world. What we've been shown in the Bible and through Jesus Christ is a God that is perfectly just and merciful. We can trust this God to make the right calls about our lives, and we can go about our own business doing what we've been called to do, which is to tell people about God's perfectly loving, just, and merciful nature.
Henry Carrigan is the associate director of Northwestern University Press and the editor of eight books of Christian classics from Paraclete Press, including, The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (Paraclete Essentials, 2010).
