TALK about hellfire! One of the nation’s rock-star-popular young pastors, Rob Bell, 40, has stuck a pitchfork in how Christians talk about damnation.
Pastor Bell’s Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, arrived in stores Tuesday (March 15).
Critics pounced before the book was even published, provoking weeks of fierce infighting among pastors, theologians and anyone else who scans the Christian blogosphere.
In Love Wins, Bell claims:
- Heaven and hell are choices we make and live with right now. “God gives us what we want,” including the freedom to live apart from God (hell) or turn God’s way (heaven).
- Death doesn’t cut off the ability to repent. In his Bible, Bell sees no “infinite, eternal torment for things (people) did in their few finite years of life.”
- Jesus makes salvation possible even for people who never know his name. “We have to allow for mystery,” for people who “drink from the rock” of faith “without knowing who or what it was.”
- Churches that don’t allow for this are “misguided and toxic.”
Small wonder that traditionalists call him a false teacher of a Jesus-optional gospel, leading innocents to damnation and a traitor to the evangelical label.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Bell jokes: “I am not aware that labels are the highest form of goodness and truth.” He rebuffs critics who say he presents a Jesus-optional Christianity: “Jesus spoke of the renewal of all things. He said, ‘I have sheep who are not of this flock.’ Through him, extraordinary things are happening in the world.”
To read more from the USA Today report, click here.
