George Stephanopoulos interviewed Rob Bell today on “Good Morning America.” The segment was titled “Pastor Claims Hell Does Not Exist.” The lead-in report includes remarks from Justin Taylor, and I agree with him entirely. “Rob Bell… is obscuring God’s word. He’s teaching false doctrine. And he’s unorthodox in his beliefs.” A clip from Albert Mohler’s interview a couple of weeks ago also appears in the segment. Watch the rest of it above.
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Lisa Miller Interviews Rob Bell
Earlier this evening Lisa Miller of Newseek interviewed Rob Bell about his new book Love Wins. If you want to see where the rubber meets the road with the theology in Rob Bell’s book, then you’ll want to watch this. Miller actually does a good job of pressing Bell on some key points. I think she understands the affront of the cross, and even Rob Bell’s inclusivism is offensive to her because it still relies on Jesus as the savior of the world. Unfortunately, Bell fails to state a clear gospel message. Instead, he gives short pat answers and tells lots of stories. Interestingly, Miller calls him a universalist inspite…
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Richard Mouw on “Love Wins”
From Cathy Lynn Grossman at USA Today: Richard Mouw, president of the world’s largest Protestant seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary based in Pasadena, Calif., calls Love Wins “a great book, well within the bounds of orthodox Christianity and passionate about Jesus. The real hellacious fight, says Mouw, a friend of Bell, a Fuller graduate, is between “generous orthodoxy and stingy orthodoxy. There are stingy people who just want to consign many others to hell and only a few to heaven and take delight in the idea. But Rob Bell allows for a lot of mystery in how Jesus reaches people.” I think this quote from Mouw portends the shape of the…
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Revising Hell into the Heterodox Mainstream
Much has been made of Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Before the book was even released, promotional materials seemed to suggest that Rob Bell would be heading in an unorthodox direction in this book. Now having read the book, I am convinced that the promotional materials were correct. Bell has launched out into a heterodox, unbiblical accounting of sin and judgment, the cross and salvation, heaven and hell. He pictures a God without wrath who would never create a place of eternal conscious punishment for the wicked. No one needs salvation from God’s wrath; they…
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DeYoung’s Review is Must-Read
Kevin DeYoung’s review of Rob Bell’s Love Wins is a theological and pastoral tour de force. If you have limited time to read book reviews, skip mine. Kevin’s is much better.
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John Piper on the Tsunami
It will be a while before we know how many people lost their lives in yesterday’s disaster. The 2004 tsunami that devastated Indonesia killed over 230,000 people in 14 countries. Hopefully the death toll in Japan and elsewhere will not be as high. Nevertheless, the scope of the yesterday’s loss will no doubt be of disastrous proportions. The questions of theodicy that people had in 2004 will surface again as more news unfolds. In light of that, my mind has been on a discussion that John Piper had with an NPR reporter after the 2004 tsunami. This interview was tremendously helpful to me then. My hope and prayer is that…
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Pray for Victims of Quake and Tsunami
The scale of this disaster certainly rivals that of the great tsunami of 2004, and so does the horror of it. In 2004, the tsunami killed over 230,000 people in 14 different countries. We do not know how many lives were lost today, but the death toll will likely be staggering. We need to pray.
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“Sin No More” Not in Scripture?
Perhaps you have noticed in your translation of the Bible that John 7:53-8:11 is set off in brackets with a footnote saying something like, “the earliest and best manuscripts do not include verses 7:53-8:11.” It is a bit jarring to see such a note attached to one of the most beloved stories in our English Bibles (“let he who is without sin cast the first stone”). Nevertheless, the note is correct. This text was most assuredly not a part of the original text of John but was added centuries later. Every semester in the hermeneutics courses that I teach at Boyce College, I do a brief section on textual criticism—the…
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First Review Calls Bell a Universalist
Tim Challies has written the first major review of Rob Bell’s book Love Wins. Based on his reading of the entire book, he concludes that Bell is a kind of “Christian Universalist” and that he denies the doctrine of Hell as a place of eternal, conscious punishment. Something tells me this conversation is just getting started.
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Zondervan’s Break with Rob Bell
CNN reports on the reason that Zondervan broke with Rob Bell. According to the report, the President of Zondervan evaluated the book proposal for Love Wins and decided that it did not fit with their mission. From the report: “Love Wins” is Bell’s first book since his break from Zondervan, the Christian publisher based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that published Bell’s first four books and also publishes the New International Version of the Bible, one of the most popular translations of the Bible among evangelicals. Bell’s split from Zondervan came in part over this new book. “The break with Zondervan was amicable,” [Mark Tauber, senior vice president and publisher at…