rob bell

Did I really need to learn How To Be Here, urgently, right now? The book’s publisher had sent me not one advance reading copy, but three. A sign from the universe? I decided to read the book to find…

Rob Bell is on the move. In 1998, as a 28-year-old evangelical pastor in Michigan, Bell founded Mars Hill Church. The community swelled into a megachurch, and Bell gained a national reputation among…

The influential founder of Mars Hill says “the ship has sailed.”

Judgment is a process, a refiner’s fire, not a permanent condition. If people can’t abide the idea of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot gliding right through the Pearly Gates, they don’t have to worry. But no one should ever say “never” about anyone else’s chances. The theological and ethical point is to try to have the mind, and more importantly, the loving heart of God.

What I started out writing, churlishly and petulantly, is that I could only surmise that the market for books like this consists mainly of somewhat innocent readers; of people who whose only previous conception of Christ’s atoning work is of the standard, unreconstructed, washed-in-the-blood variety. For them, discovering what Jones is writing about would come as manna in the wilderness, and in that regard Jones has performed a mitzvah by publishing this book.

Welton Gaddy talks to Rob Bell about hell, the firestorm unleashed on his book, and what he really believes.

In a nation founded on the radical premise of republican virtue without a monarch to rule over the people what would keep people in line? Hell.

Those who are ready to send Rob Bell to the hell he purportedly denies have unwittingly confirmed the suspicion of skeptics who want nothing to do with a religion whose practitioners seem to relish every opportunity to squabble, berate, and condemn; who strike a contentious pose on every theological issue; and who have the profoundly mistaken idea that at the heart of the Christian gospel is the doctrine of karma rather than that of grace.

Bell, the enormously popular pastor of the enormous Mars Hill Bible Church, has a new book coming out this month called Love Wins in which Bell “puts hell on trial, and his message is decidedly optimistic—eternal life doesn’t start when we die; it starts right now. And ultimately, Love Wins.” This description launched a frenzy of reactions within the evangelical community.