Rob Bell’s Magnum Opus

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

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 How would you summarize Christianity in 2 words?  Could you maybe say, “Jesus saves”? Or maybe something more relevant like “Got Jesus?”  For Rob Bell, Christianity is this: Love Wins.  Rob has been using the phrase for years at his church and it has even shown up as bumper stickers at my church and printed on Starbucks cups.  The curiosity has been, at least for me, what he meant by that phrase.  Does it really capture the essence of our faith?

Several years ago a read a few books by Richard Bach.  Bach, most renowned for his book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, wrote a book called One.  In the preface he talked about Seagull and another book called Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah and commented that he wrote those other books in essence to have the guts to write the book he really wanted to write: One.  Having now read every book that Rob Bell has written and watched each of his tour videos, I have to say that this book is Rob’s One, his magnum opus if you will.  This is what he has tried to say all these years and what he finally got the nerve to put down on paper and send to his publisher.

Click here to continue reading this post at the Dead Pastors Society blog.

Review: The Truth of the Cross

The Truth of the Cross by R.C. Sproul
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What is the truth of the cross?  It may sound to many like a very simple question.  Yet we live in a time where the truth and reason for Christ’s death has become hijacked by many who have made something entirely different of it.  People like Brian McLaren appear to be reinventing the purpose of Christ’s death while others like Rob Bell have determined that Christ’s sacrifice was a sort of psychological relief to get people to realize that they did not need to sacrifice animals to please God (see Drops Like Stars, Love Wins, and his tour video The Gods Aren’t Angry).

It is in this time that books like RC Sproul’s The Truth of the Cross become more and more essential to the preservation of the truth of our faith.  In his easy conversational style, Sproul begins at the beginning (a very good place to start) and describes our desperate need for a Savior.  He walks us through the covenant that God made with Abraham to bless all the nations through him.  Sproul then analyzes our vast debt of sin and the impossibility of our repayment.

Review: Jesus: The Only Way to God

Jesus, the Only Way to God: Must You Hear the Gospel to be Saved? by John Piper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Love seems to be quite the unusual issue for debate.  However, it seems to be the core issue of so much of how we treat theological issues.  From Rob Bell’s Love Wins to evangelistic methods of Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, the way we are called to love one another as Christians has many manifestations and implications.

 In his book Jesus: The Only Way to God, John Piper begins with this assumption: we must define the way we love as Christians by how the Bible defines it.  Afterall, if we are to believe that “God is love,” it would stand to reason that the testimony of Scripture would tell us how God’s actions spell out that love to the world.

Rob Bell’s New Neo-Calvinism

With the release of his most recent book, Love Wins, Rob Bell and his theology have been a hot-button topic.  Quickly after the book’s release prominent pastors and church leaders came out against Bell’s position on heaven, hell, and the eternal destiny of all people. 

Being called a “universalist,” Bell firmly denied the accusation and affirmed his belief that in every human heart God’s love will win out in the end.  What has been interesting about Bell and his teaching is that he sounds Scripture saturated, even with devoted study.  Yet, with a well-rounded perspective firmly planted in a high view of Scripture, one can discern that Bell starts with his own agenda then redefines theological terms to both avoid heresy and appear stanchly orthodox.

Book Review: Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church

 
Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications by D.A. Carson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brian McLaren calls himself “post-Protestant” and others have talked about our society as “post-Christian.”  I identify as “post-postmodern” and “post-emerging.”  There was a time of several years that, while terribly discouraged with the state of the evangelical church as I understood it, I was definitely in the emergent camp.  My book shelves are still replete with the ruins of that time: books by McLaren, Marcus Borg, Rob Bell, Dan Kimball, Shane Claiborne.  They testify to a time when I was searching.