Bear with me, Stream readers. I am about to explain to an ecumenical audience why the affection many Christians have for a popular post-Evangelical preacher should be replaced by a Catholic devotion. As you will see in a moment, I do so in order to better serve the shared values we fight for together in the public square.

You have no doubt heard of Rob Bell, the influential Evangelical author who graced the cover of Time Magazine a few years ago. Rob Bell is big. St. Faustina Kowalska should be bigger. I want to talk to you about her teaching about the Divine Mercy. Today is Divine Mercy Sunday for Catholics, the day on which we thank God for the gift of His mercy through a particular devotion given through Faustina. It can be a life-changing one.

Rob Bell Answers Modern Man

Rob Bell is, most famously, the author of Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. In his book, he covers several questions about eternity, questions that “ultimately revolve around one central quandary: how can a loving God send some people to an eternal place of suffering?”

As for his answer, “though Bell doesn’t explicitly state this, he implies that when all is said and done, nobody will actually end up in hell. He suggests that hell is real, but that it will always be empty,” writes Brandon Vogt. This view is called “universalism.”

Bell’s critics are many. From the Catholic apologist Vogt to Evangelical sources like The Gospel Coalition and a new book by Evangelical academic Michael McClymond, Christian writers have repeatedly laid out where Bell’s theology departs from historic orthodoxy.

Nevertheless, he’s enormously popular. As his own web site notes, he has authored four New York Times Bestsellers, iTunes named his “RobCast” one of the best podcasts of 2015. “He’s been profiled in The New Yorker, toured with Oprah, and in 2011 Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

Walking Around Crushed

I can understand why. I don’t say that just because of the man’s undoubted talent. Nor do I say it simply because some“ people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings” (2 Tim 4:3).

No, Rob Bell is popular because he offers answers to some of the deepest spiritual anxieties afflicting modern man. And not just answers. Answers people want to hear. The message of mercy,” he says, “is that God loves us — all of us — no matter how great our sins. He wants us to recognize that His mercy is greater than our sins, so that we will call upon Him with trust, receive His mercy, and let it flow through us to others. Thus, all will come to share His joy.”

Bell’s teachings about God’s mercy are appealing because they are true. And the truth about God’s mercy is what we most need to hear right now. The danger is in mixing the most important truth of our time with an old heresy. Fortunately, there is a devotion that addresses the need without falling into the heresy.

Many of us are the walking wounded, crushed by the peculiarly modern burden of sins resulting from the Sexual Revolution. For Christians, fears about our eternal fate may weigh on us more acutely than it did for previous generations.

Bell is right to address the burden of guilt borne by modern man. His answers are partly right — but significantly wrong. And what he gets right, he doesn’t get right enough.

Bell’s Right, and Wrong

He’s right to say that our hearts must be transformed so that we can handle Heaven. He is wrong to say that Hell is not permanent. He’s right to hold out a hope of salvation for those who were never introduced to Christ. He’ s wrong to imply that nobody actually ends up in Hell.

Taking the possibility of eternal damnation off the table is not just a denial of Scripture. The old heresy of universalism undermines Christian witness in the fight against the evils of our own time.

Indeed, it even causes us to embrace those evils in the name of misplaced compassion. Regardless of whatever Bell himself may believe about contemporary issues, I have seen how his teachings can lead his fans astray in the fight for life.

The answers Rob Bell’s fans rightly seek in his teachings are more fully and faithfully realized in St. Faustina and the Divine Mercy devotion.

The Divine Mercy Answer

St. Faustina was a nun in Poland in the early 20th century. Her diary emphasized, as few other sources have, God’s overwhelming love for us. She explained God’s mercy to us without ever denying his justice. She left us a particular devotional practice directed to the Divine Mercy. It is a devotion and a message especially tailored to modern man — and without Bell’s deadly errors.

God’s mercy is, of course, as old as Scripture itself. “But” as EWTN puts it, “in the Divine Mercy devotion, the message takes on a powerful new focus, calling people to a deeper understanding that God’s love is unlimited and available to everyone — especially the greatest sinners.” As St. John Paul II put it in his book Memory and Identity: The devotion arose in the 1930s, at “precisely the time when those ideologies of evil, nazism and communism, were taking shape. Sister Faustina became the herald of the one message capable of off-setting the evil of those ideologies, that fact that God is mercy — the truth of the merciful Christ.”

God gave modern man the Divine Mercy devotion to address the same spiritual anxieties that Rob Bell rightly sees. But where he offers soothing falsehoods, Divine Mercy instead offers a plan of action. As EWTN describes it, “It is a message we can call to mind simply by remembering ABC.”

A — Ask for His Mercy. God wants us to approach Him in prayer constantly, repenting of our sins and asking Him to pour His mercy out upon us and upon the whole world.

B — Be merciful. God wants us to receive His mercy and let it flow through us to others. He wants us to extend love and forgiveness to others just as He does to us.

C — Completely trust in Jesus. God wants us to know that the graces of His mercy are dependent upon our trust. The more we trust in Jesus, the more we will receive.”

Evangelicals can easily embrace this. It is almost a Catholic version of the “Sinner’s Prayer,” the basic Evangelical teaching that you’re damned, but God will save you if you trust in him. It addresses the same modern anxieties as does Rob Bell’s teaching — the deep desire we have for God’s mercy — but without the universalist heresy.

There are more detailed instructions for Catholics. But if you practice the ABCs listed above, you have nailed the basics. It’s a devotion Rick Warren says he loves, by the way. He watches it on EWTN. “In that time of reflection, meditation, quietness I find myself renewed and restored,” he says.

Nail the Basics

It is important to nail the basics in our spiritual life. Because not doing so can cripple our efforts to defend life and to restore faith and family to our nation.

In Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion, he argues that Christians failed to evangelize the culture not because secularism was too strong but because Protestants and Catholics alike have embraced beliefs that are not Christian.

Douthat’s book was published too early to include a discussion of Rob Bell’s “Love Wins.” But — regardless of wherever Bell himself may stand on the issue — Douthat’s thesis was confirmed for me on one of the issues where I am in the fight. A few years ago Brittany Maynard famously killed herself to further the cause of assisted suicide. As her planned Nov. 1st demise approached, one of the best, most devout Evangelicals on my Facebook posted this:

Will our Merciful, Omnibenevolent God, who loves us so much that He sent His Only Son to die for us while we are sinners, abandon us when we choose our timely death or would He be close by, holding our hand through the valley of the shadow of death, and take us home in comfort & peace? With everything I know to be true about God’s character, my prayers are with Brittany Maynard and may she be as joyful as a child, when she sees Christ’s face on November 1st!

My friend is a fan of Rob Bell. Would she have embraced Maynard’s impending suicide if she were not certain that Maynard would see the face of Christ on the day of her self-inflicted death? Would she have fought against it if she thought it possible that Maynard was condemning herself to eternal damnation? I think she would have.

Not the Way

Christians should have a deep desire to evangelize: to rescue all humanity from damnation by bringing them the good news of our savior, Jesus Christ. Evangelicals have long been known for this. They gave us Rob Bell, but also Billy Graham.

Modern man’s guilt is a barrier to hearing that message and embracing our salvation. Christians must address that barrier. But not by giving up the reality of sin. That doesn’t help us at all. Rob Bell is not the way. Trust in the Divine Mercy is the way.