God is reconciling to Himself Nero, Hitler, Stalin and the sick-o-father who, as he molested his daughter, recited the Lord’s Prayer and sang Christian hymns.(7) Even the Canaanites were/are reconciled to Yahweh. That God’s love may be discriminatory, that heaven might be limited to God’s elect (Calvinism), or to a contemporary evangelical crowd that just wants a “personal-relationship” Jesus, Bell rejects.
Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived (New York, NY: Harper One, 2011) xi + 198 pages, Acknowledgments and Further Reading. The back cover blurb first states and then incredulously asks: “God loves us. God offers us everlasting life by grace, freely, through no merit on our part. Unless you do not respond the right way. Then God will torture you forever. In hell.” Huh?
Recommended by a who’s who of emergent leaders, Rob Bell’s book Love Wins has, as it is calculated to do, stirred-up controversy. Recently, Time ran a front cover story on it.[1] Eugene H. Peterson lauds the book as being born out of a “thoroughly biblical imagination,” and a book “without a trace of soft sentimentality and without compromising an inch of evangelical conviction in its proclamation of the good news that is most truly for all.”(Front Cover Flap). Open theist Greg Boyd calls the book, “bold, prophetic, and a poetic masterpiece.”(Back Cover Flap). Andy Crouch sees Bell as “a central figure for his generation.”(Back Cover). So much for endorsements . . .
In his own hip way and as in his previous books (Velvet Elvis and Sex God), Rob Bell has written a book contending for universal reconciliation (UR); that based upon divine love eclipsing all other attributes of God (His justice, wrath, righteousness, etc.), everybody from everywhere and from all time and from all religions, without exception, are reconciled to God.[2] As the teacher at Mars Hill Bible Church in suburban Grand Rapids, Michigan, the reader is not surprised that Love Wins is inundated with scriptural references that cite book and chapter but omit the precise verse location. This means that readers will have to make an extra effort to locate the citation to determine if it and the context really support Bell’s interpretation. I guess the average reader will just have to trust the author has got it right.
A word about tone: For writing this book, Bell knows he’ll be criticized. Some will think he’s courageous for having stated in public what many contemporary pan-evangelicals believe in private. Survey says . . .[3] Purposely, I have not read any other Internet reviews of Bell’s book for the reason of trying to retain objectivity in this review. This pastoral evaluation results from my impressions of the book, period. The eternal destiny of human beings is a serious subject and should be treated as such. Bell writes of religious people, who “shaped by their God,” become violent, a violence manifesting itself in the “toxic, venomous nature of certain discussions and debates on the Internet.”(183) Recognizing that Bell does not articulate matters of faith as I do, and as I understand the Bible to state, I hope this review will not be taken as “violent, toxic, or venomous.” The only other option for a pastor is to say nothing, and that is not an option. With this stated, we proceed . . .
After a Preface, the book consists of eight chapters, the last of which recounts Bell’s youthful conversion to the evangelical faith in his home near Lansing, Michigan, during the mid 70s. In reviewing the book, I shall attempt to follow the argument by which Bell builds his case for UR, and then comment upon it.
Bell’s thesis is that the “Jesus story is first and foremost about the love of God for every single one of us . . . a stunning, beautiful, expansive love . . . for everybody, everywhere.”(Love Wins, vii)[4] This expansive love story includes all persons, from all times, from all places and from all religions . . . billions of people for whom Bell allows for no apparent exceptions. God is reconciling to Himself Nero, Hitler, Stalin and the sick-o-father who, as he molested his daughter, recited the Lord’s Prayer and sang Christian hymns.(7) Even the Canaanites were/are reconciled to Yahweh. That God’s love may be discriminatory, that heaven might be limited to God’s elect (Calvinism), or to a contemporary evangelical crowd that just wants a “personal-relationship” Jesus, Bell rejects. That’s just their “version,” he writes, a story that turns people off and away from Christianity.(viii) The idea that only a few will make it to heaven, Bell views as “misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’ message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.”(viii)
In this introduction to UR, Bell plays an overwhelming numbers game—millions upon billions of souls in hell forever simply because they did not hear about Jesus. The thought is stunning. But on this point, my heart is comforted by John’s vision that in heaven he saw “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues . . . clothed with white robes” [incidentally, attire Bell derides, Love Wins, 24] (Revelation 7:9). How many people will be in heaven? Less than universalism believes, and more than what Bell thinks some of these other versions allow. . . . .
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True Discernment 
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