And now, just what you've been waiting for...another Rob Bell post!

Is it sad that I almost confused Rob Bell and Rob Halford earlier?


My comic mixing up of celebrities aside, I finally got my copy of Love Wins and read it.  I've been letting it marinate for the past week or so, and I've reached the following conclusions:


-I'm not going to go back and edit my previous entries, despite the fact that my presentation of Bell-through-the-"evangelicals" is not necessarily accurate to Bell's own words.


-Bell, while not necessarily the world's greatest exegete, provides a reading of scripture that is, if absolutely nothing else, thought-provoking and opens the door for some much-needed fresh air in a theological room grown far too stuffy.


-"Evangelical" criticisms of Bell as "universalist" might have a leg to stand on, though if Bell is a universalist, then he is of the same mold as Karl Barth, who is best described as an exclusivistic universalist (i.e. everybody's getting saved, but only through Jesus Christ).  I'd say that you could argue that Bell is not a universalist in that, even with his model of there being a lot of "second chances" that "evangelicals" don't support, he never asserts directly that all people will 100% for sure be saved, or say that there aren't some who will never "say yes."


-I still stand by my original position: it's not our job to save people (that's up to God), and a literal, fiery hell full of demons (whether it literally exists or not) is a completely bankrupt image in the West, and it seems to be a dramatic failure at encouraging people to consider the Gospel.  What we CAN do: proclaim the Gospel, in both actions and words, and trust God to do the rest.


-I also still stand by my criticism of Bell's "evangelical" theology that revolves too heavily around the language of personal choice and decision when it comes to salvation.  If it's up to us to choose, then we turn faith into a work.


-The main value of the book: emphasizing that (as one of my high school teachers put it) "eternal life begins now," and that our call as followers of Christ is to live out the world-transforming values of the Kingdom of God rather than simply wring our hands over whether our neighbor has the "right" kind of "personal relationship" (again, I stress that phrase is nowhere in the Bible) with God.  We so overemphasize personal relationship that we forget that our relationship with God is supposed to be PUBLIC (thank you, Miguel de la Torre).