I have mixed feelings about putting this post up, mostly because I don't think very much else needs to be said about Rob Bell's book Love Wins. If you haven't seen Martin Bashir's interview with him on MSNBC, you need to. It tells you everything you need to know about the book and Bell's approach to these issues: He clearly has about six highly-crafted and exquisitely ambiguous things to say, and is doggedly determined to avoid---at all cost---giving straight answers to any questions about what he really believes. Bashir calls him out on it, and it's a service to the church and the world that he does.
Several friends have already done a great job of reviewing the entire book. Both Tim Challies's and Kevin DeYoung's reviews are helpful pieces of work. So this isn't going to be a full review. That said, I do think it might be useful to point out a couple of details that I haven't seen talked about much, and that Bell simply got flat wrong. You know the old quip about lawyers? "Always confident, sometimes right." That's an almost perfect description of Bell in
Love Wins; he writes with amazing confidence about certain facts (word meanings, Jewish backgrounds, historical issues), and yet if you just pick up a dictionary or google a quote, you realize that what he's saying is simply wrong. Pointing these things out isn't just a matter of "picking on" Bell, either. It's a matter of doing our best to make sure little errors don't become part of our atmosphere. Otherwise, before we know it we'll have people in our churches saying, as if everybody knows it already, that Luther was a universalist and that the Bible doesn't have a concept of "forever." So in the interest of preventing that, here are just a handful of the things that Bell gets flat wrong in his book.
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