Here is an audio of the preface from Love Wins audio book. It seems that the discussion about the "story" of Jesus Christ because more important than Truth itself. This story that he repeats from history appears to Rob Bell to be the "god" of his choosing.
Notice that Rob Bell states that The "Jesus Story has been hijacked by a few. Here is the Books for further study that Kevin DeYoung includes after His Book Review. If these men are the hijackers. The Biblical Truth is being proclaimed today as it was in the first century of Christianity. Thank the Lord for these men and their writings.
The Doctrine of God
J. I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove: IVP, 1998).
D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 1999).
Eternal Punishment and the Uniqueness of Christ
Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson, eds., Hell Under Fire: Modern Scholarship
Reinvents Eternal Punishment (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004).
Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson, eds., Faith Comes by Hearing: A Response to
Inclusivism (Downers Grove: IVP, 2008).
John Piper, Jesus: The Only Way to God: Must You Hear the Gospel to Be Saved? (Grand
Rapids: Baker, 2010).
The Gospel
Greg Gilbert, What Is the Gospel? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010).
Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the
Glory of Penal Substitution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007).
Systematic Theologies
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 1994), 1140–67.
Michael Horton, The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 919–990.
Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears, Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe (Wheaton:
Crossway, 2010), 145–174, 407–436.
Related Books
Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck, Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be
(Chicago: Moody, 2008).
Kevin DeYoung, ed., Don’t Call It a Comeback: The Old Faith for a New Day (Wheaton:
Crossway, 2011).
David Clotfelter, Sinners in the Hands of a Good God: Reconciling Divine Judgment and Mercy
(Chicago: Moody, 2004).
J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (1923; new ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2009).
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Read Kevin DeYoung"s six points to understand where Rob Bell's foundation for his "discussion"
From God is still Holy and what you learned in Sunday School is still True. A Review of Love Wins.
A Few Preliminaries
Before going any further with a critique, a number of preliminary comments are in order. A few
opening remarks may help put this critical review in context and encourage productive responses.
One, although Bell asks a lot of questions (350 by one count), we should not write off the
provocative theology as mere question-raising. Bell did not write an entire book because he was
looking for some good resources on heaven and hell. This isn’t the thirteen-year-old in your
youth group asking her teacher, “How can a good God send people to hell?” Any pastor worth his
covenant salt will welcome sincere questions like this. (“Good question, Jenny, let’s see what the
Bible says about that.”) But Bell is a popular teacher of a huge church with a huge following. This
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book is not an invitation to talk. It’s him telling us what he thinks (nothing wrong with that). As
Bell himself writes, “But this isn’t a book of questions. It’s a book of responses to these questions”
(19).
Two, we should notice the obvious: this is a book. It is a book with lots of Scripture references.
It is a book that draws from history and personal experience. It makes a case for something. It
purports one story of Christianity to be better than another. Bell means to persuade. He wants
to convince us of something. He is a teacher teaching. This book is not a poem. It is not a piece
of art. This is a theological book by a pastor trying to impart a different way of looking at heaven
and hell. Whether Bell is creative or a provocateur is beside the point. If Bell is inconsistent,
unclear, or inaccurate, claiming the “artist” mantle is no help.
Three, I’m sure that many people looking to defend Bell will be drawn to a couple escape
hatches he launches along the way. As you’ll see, the book is a sustained attack on the idea that
those who fail to believe in Jesus Christ in this life will suffer eternally for their sins. This is the
traditional Christianity he finds “misguided and toxic” (viii). But in one or two places Bell seems
more agnostic.
Will everybody be saved, or will some perish apart from God forever because of
their choices? Those are questions, or more accurately, those are tensions we are
free to leave fully intact. We don’t need to resolve them or answer them because
we can’t, and so we simply respect them, creating space for the freedom that love
requires. (115)
These are strange sentences because they fall in the chapter where Bell argues that God wants
everyone to be saved and God gets what God wants. He tells us that “never-ending punishment”
does not give God glory, and “God’s love will eventually melt even the hardest hearts” (108).
So it’s unclear where the sudden agnosticism comes from. Is Bell wrestling with himself? Did a
friend or editor ask him to throw in a few caveats? Is he simply inconsistent?
Similarly, at the end Bell argues, rather out of the blue, that we need to trust God in the present,
that our choices here and now “matter more than we can begin to imagine” because we can miss
out on rewards and celebrations (197). This almost looks like an old-fashioned call to turn to
Christ before it’s too late. When you look more carefully, however, you see that Bell is not saying
what evangelicals might think. He wants us to make the most of life because “while we may get
other opportunities, we won’t get the one right in front of us again” (197). In other words, there
are consequences for our actions, in this life and in the next, and we can’t get this moment back;
but there will always be more chances. If you don’t live life to the fullest and choose love now,
you may initially miss out on some good things in the life to come, but in the end love wins
(197–198).
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For anyone tempted to take these few lines and make Bell sound orthodox, I encourage you
to read the whole book more carefully. Likewise, before you rush to accept that Bell believes
in hell and believes Christ is the only way, pay attention to his conception of hell and in what
way he thinks Jesus is the only way. Bad theology usually sneaks in under the guise of familiar
language. There’s a reason he’s written 200 pages on why you must be deluded to think people
end up in eternal conscious punishment under the just wrath of God. Words mean something,
even when some of them seem forced or out of place. Take the book as a whole to get Bell’s
whole message.
Four, it is possible that I (like other critics) am mean-spirited, nasty, and cruel. But voicing
strong disagreement does not automatically make me any of these. Judgmentalism is not the
same as making judgments. The same Jesus who said “do not judge” in Matthew 7:1 calls his
opponents dogs and pigs in Matthew 7:6. Paul pronounces an anathema on those who preach a
false gospel (Gal. 1:8). Disagreement among professing Christians is not a plague on the church.
In fact, it is sometimes necessary. The whole Bible is full of evaluation and encourages the
faithful to be discerning and make their own evaluations. What’s tricky is that some fights are
stupid, and some judgments are unfair and judgmental. But this must be proven, not assumed.
Bell feels strongly about this matter of heaven and hell. So do a lot of other people. Strong
language and forceful arguments are appropriate.
Five, I am not against conversation. What I am against is false teaching. I did not go to the
trouble of writing a review because I worry that God can’t handle our questions. The question is
never whether God can handle our honest reappraisals of traditional Christianity, but whether
he likes them.
On the subject of conversation, it’s worth pointing out that this book actually mitigates against
further conversation. For starters, there’s the McLarenesque complaint about the close-minded
traditionalists who don’t allow for questions, change, and maturity (ix). This is a kind of preemptive
“damned if you do, damned if you don’t” approach to conversation (cf. 183). In essence,
“Let’s talk, but I know already that the benighted and violent will hate my theology.” That hardly
invites further dialogue. More practically, Bell includes no footnotes for his historical claims and
rarely gives chapter and verse when citing the Bible. It is difficult to examine Bell’s claims when
he is less than careful in backing them up.
Six, this is not an evangelistic work, not in the traditional sense anyway. The primary intended
audience appears to be not so much secularists with objections to Christianity (รก la Keller’s
Reason for God), but disaffected evangelicals who can’t accept the doctrine they grew up with.
Bell writes for the “growing number” who have become aware that the Christian story has been
“hijacked” (vii). Love Wins is for those who have heard a version of the gospel that now makes
their stomachs churn and their pulses rise, and makes them cry out, “I would never be a part of
that” (viii). This is a book for people like Bell, people who grew up in an evangelical environment
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and don’t want to leave it completely, but want to change it, grow up out of it, and transcend it.
The emerging church is not an evangelistic strategy. It is the last rung for evangelicals falling off
the ladder into liberalism or unbelief.
Over and over, Bell refers to the “staggering number” of people just like him, people who
can’t believe the message they used to believe, people who want nothing to do with traditional
Christianity, people who don’t want to leave the faith but can’t live in the faith they once
embraced. I have no doubt there are many people like this inside and outside our churches.
Some will leave the faith altogether. Others—and they are in the worse position—will opt for
liberalism, which has always seen itself as a halfway house between conservative orthodoxy and
secular disbelief.
But before we let Bell and others write the present story, we must remember that there are also
a “staggering number” of young people who want the straight up, unvarnished truth. They want
doctrinal edges and traditional orthodoxy. They want no-holds-barred preaching. They don’t
want to leave traditional Christianity. They are ready to go deeper into it.
Love Wins has ignited such a firestorm of controversy because it’s the current fissure point
for a larger fault-line. As younger generations come up against an increasingly hostile cultural
environment, they are breaking in one of two directions—back to robust orthodoxy (often
Reformed) or back to liberalism. The neo-evangelical consensus is cracking up. Love Wins is
simply one of many tremors.
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