Rob Bell's Love Wins

I don't know if I'll get around to reviewing Rob Bell's controversial book Love Wins. As most of you probably know, he's accused of universalism (the view that everyone goes to heaven/will be in the kingdom of God).  He has provided a target for those who have had a gnawing feeling that younger Christians have no real sense of hell.  In a video, Bell has explicitly acknowledged belief in hell.

They're calling it neo-universalism and I believe it is a clear cultural trend especially among younger Christians.  Bell is simply capturing the trend and giving opposition a target.  If there proves to be demand, I can still read through the book later, but since Scot McKnight has already done it, I thought I would pass on his review for now:

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9

One word to Wesleyans.  Because we are a heart-oriented tradition, we often let others do the thinking for us.  In good frontier spirit, we even make fun of scholars and are suspicious of education. We are thus very prone to the influence of those outside our tradition who tend to share our social values.  Because so many of us are social conservatives, many have a tendency to jump on evangelical Calvinist trains without even realizing what we're doing.

So let's be very clear here.  Bell is far less extreme for a Wesleyan-Arminian than he is for an evangelical Calvinist.  Since McKnight is Arminian, his review is much more balanced than a lot of the stuff we're hearing out there from evangelical Calvinists.  I've never viewed Bell as a serious authority on anything, but his spirit comes much closer to the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition than John Piper or Mark Driscoll's does.

Rob Bell's Confession of Faith

Saw this over at Jesus Creed, for those interested.  Ironically, Love Wins came in the mail yesterday.  There's been such a fuss over the book I thought I should probably at least thumb through it to see what it says.  In the video, Bell says he believes in hell.

Witherington on Rob Bell

Scot McKnight's blog pointed me to some thoughts on Rob Bell on Ben Witherington's blog:

http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/02/velvet-elvis-and-king-has-he-left.html

I'm so bad at reading the culturally important, so what I know of Bell I know second hand. But interestingly I had a conversation just this week with Adam Thada about Bell and about how accurate some of his biblical/cultural comments are. My impression has been that he does what so many popular preachers do--he gives very memorable insights, "secrets" if you would, into the original context of the Bible that really drive points home... but they usually are a little off. This is a pervasive preaching phenomenon from Spong on the left to some holiness preachers I've known who really impress their audience with these little secrets that even the biblical authors didn't know ;-)

Adam and I were talking about him saying something about having to take a mark in the days of Domitian to buy or sell. I don't know of any evidence for anything like this and have never seen it in anything I've read on Revelation in the scholarly or popular domain. There is good reason to think the book of Revelation's imagery might connect strongly to current events in the late first century in Rome and Ephesus. But I really don't think this is one of them. I've wondered if this comment had something to do with the use of Roman coinage at this time, which indicated that Domitian was a god.

Witherington's review is overall very positive toward Bell and this is my current feeling toward him too. But Witherington has confirmed my impression as well, that Bell's knowledge of ancient culture, history, and context is not always all it's cracked up to be.