Author of the week: Rob Bell

last updated 8 January 2015

Rob Bell has started an online firestorm over the question of hell, said Erik Eckholm in The New York Times. A “Christian celebrity” and the pastor of the 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., Bell, 40, has roiled many in the traditional evangelical community with the message of his new best seller, Love Wins. In the book, which is outselling the pope’s at Amazon.com, Bell calls “misguided and toxic” the idea that only faithful Christians will spend forever in heaven while the rest of humanity spends eternity in hell. For Bell, the idea that Gandhi may be suffering in perpetuity somewhere seems absurd.

Bell’s critics are fighting back, using Twitter, Facebook, and podcasts of panel discussions to quash his proposition, said Cathy Lynn Grossman in USA Today. “This is a massive tragedy by any measure,” says Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who’s helped lead the counteroffensive. To traditional evangelicals—what Bell labels “the E-club”—Love Wins flirts dangerously with the heresy of “universalism,” the idea that all people can be saved, regardless of whether they embrace Jesus’ teachings. Bell, for his part, says he’s merely asking questions every Christian should ask. “I think that grace and love always rattle people,” he says. “Jesus spoke of the renewal of all things. He said, ‘I have sheep who are not of this flock.’ Through him, extraordinary things are happening in the world. If saying that gets you banned from the E-club, so be it.”