It is amazing how many celebrities wreck themselves trying to ride a motorcycle. The long list includes Bob Dylan, Ben Roethlisberger, Gary Busey, Liam Neeson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, T.E. Lawrence, Keanu Reeves, Duane Allman, and French actor Gerard Depardieu, who has been in over a dozen crashes, one of them breaking a leg in five places. But he keeps riding, saying he will never be able to give up the “feeling of freedom.”1

The sight of professing Christians, indeed professing preachers, going goofy over Gandhi, can remind one of the amateur motorcycle enthusiasts enjoying the frisson of their first rides. Despite generous biblical warning, they jump on the Gandhi machine and roar down the road toward pluralism. No doubt it makes them feel good and the waves and cheers from the sidewalks can be intoxicating. But the cost is dreadful.

Which brings one to Rob Bell, author of the hot-seller, Love Wins.

He begins his book with an anecdote and some “penetrating” questions. His church held a “peacemaking” art show, and one of the pieces featured a quote from Gandhi. When someone attached a piece of paper saying, “Reality check: He’s in hell,” Bell headed to the Harley dealership:

Really?
Gandhi’s in hell?
He is?
We have confirmation of this?
Somebody knows this?
Without a doubt?
And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?2

First, it’s important to note what he doesn’t say. He might have attempted a conciliatory defense, something like this: “Granted that Gandhi needed to accept Jesus as his Savior and that, without Christ, he did, indeed, face hell, we can still appreciate some of his words. And though this is a Church-sponsored show, it doesn’t hurt to draw from outside sources for wisdom. Indeed, all truth is God’s truth. Besides, the Mahatma might have privately turned to the Lord for salvation in the days or moments before his death. We’ll never know this side of the grave. We can only pray that he had a heart change which he didn’t have time to express.”

Of course, Bell has no taste for this. He’s saying something else – that such a great, sensitive guy as Gandhi may well have gotten into heaven on some sort of great-sensitive-guy track.

Actually, he doesn’t quite have the umph to say this, so he goes the haughty-question route, which protects the “inquirer” from heresy charges, even elevating him above the merely orthodox to the higher plane of disinterested, non-parochial reflection. This approach is akin to that taken by those who want to slam something but they prefer to test the waters before they commit, as in, “What did you think of today’s chapel speaker?” A bit less than manly, one might say.

Bell needs to catch up on his reading. He might start with Richard Grenier’s 1983 book, The Gandhi Nobody Knows, a reaction to adulation generated by Richard Attenborough’s worshipful and Oscar-winning film, Gandhi.3 Or Andrew Roberts’ “Among the Hagiographers” in the March 26, 2011, Wall Street Journal. His review of the new Gandhi bio, Great Soul by Joseph Lelyveld, picks up on the book’s evidences that Gandhi was in no position to stand in the Judgment on his own merits.4

These sources reveal that he was callous toward his wife and kids. He was contemptuous of God’s good gift of sexual intimacy within marriage while, at the same time, taking grotesque liberties in intimacy, even having his 17-year-old niece sleep nude with him to test his restraint. Though he softened his stance toward “untouchables,” renaming them “children of God,” he never rejected the Hindu classification system. He urged the English to surrender to Hitler, while he, himself, refused to surrender to Christ. And one can read the rest.

Of course, Gandhi was lucky that he took on Christendom’s Brits. His efforts would not have gone down so well had the colonialists been Muslim, Shinto, or Stalinist. And he has been very lucky to enjoy the adulation those inclined to declare him spiritually acceptable if not transcendent. But it is time for a reality check. As Jesus said, in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” That is true for Gandhi as well as for everyone else.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Sandy Wood, “A Disturbingly Long List of Celebrity Motorbike Crash-ups,” Mental Floss, September 27, 2007, https://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/8265 (Accessed May 10, 2011).
 
2  Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 1-2.
 
3  Richard Grenier, The Gandhi Nobody Knows (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1983), 34. The essay first appeared in Commentary, March, 1983.
 
4  Andrew Roberts, “Among the Hagiographers,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160371482469358.html (Accessed May 10, 2011).
 

article adopted from Karios Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located at 4800 W. Pulaski Hwy., Perryville, MD across from the Principio Health Center on Rt. 40.