Rob Bell’s ‘Love Wins’: Reviews, comments and book sales pour in | MLive.com.
An interesting story from the local Grand Rapids newspaper about the book and a video clip from a very persistant MSNBC reporter who wants black and white answers to the mysteries of God. Its funny, really. Rob tries to be patient with someone who appears to be a secular fundamentalist who sides with the literal evangelicals, that we have to have either or answers and anything else is no answer.
Like I posted on facebook: The core of the book deals with the teaching of the existence of a literal hell and that we can determine who God is going to send there. I think the video clip quoting one of Rob’s videos is spot on – what we believe about heaven and hell says a great deal about what we believe about God…
Goes back to the post a while back, why evangelicals hate Jesus. Jesus saves us from the God who wants to send us to hell. That is the premise of the American Evangelical outreach – if you die tonight, do you know where you will spend eternity? Give your life to Jesus so you don’t go to hell because God loves you that much.
Looks like I’ll be doing a podcast reviewing the book and the indignant outrage that someone might not accept that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and the mission of the Church is nothing more than to save people from a God who wants to send us all to hell.
In his new book “Love Wins” Rob Bell says he believes that loving and compassionate people, regardless of their faith, will not be condemned to an eternal hell just because they do not accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Concepts of an afterlife vary between religions and among divisions of each faith. Here are three quotes from “the greatest achievement in life,” my ebook on comparative mysticism:
(46) Few people have been so good that they have earned eternal paradise; fewer want to go to a place where they must receive punishments for their sins. Those who do believe in resurrection of their body hope that it will be not be in its final form. Few people really want to continue to be born again and live more human lives; fewer want to be reborn in a non-human form. If you are not quite certain you want to seek divine union, consider the alternatives.
(59) Mysticism is the great quest for the ultimate ground of existence, the absolute nature of being itself. True mystics transcend apparent manifestations of the theatrical production called “this life.†Theirs is not simply a search for meaning, but discovery of what is, i.e. the Real underlying the seeming realities. Their objective is not heaven, gardens, paradise, or other celestial places. It is not being where the divine lives, but to be what the divine essence is here and now.
(80) [referring to many non-mystics] Depending on their religious convictions, or personal beliefs, they may be born again to seek elusive perfection, go to a purgatory to work out their sins or, perhaps, pass on into oblivion. Lives are different; why not afterlives? Beliefs might become true.
Rob Bell asks us to rethink the Christian Gospel. People of of all faiths should look beyond the letters of their sacred scriptures to their spiritual message. As one of my mentors wrote “In God we all meet.”