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A review by mrericsully
Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell
1.0
After reading Preston Sprinkle's "Fight" I decided I was going to read more of his books. One of his books "Erasing Hell" is a response to this book. So, I figured I'd read this book first. There are a few verses that he cites that he raises good, genuine questions. However, lots of scripture is cited without ever being quoted, and much of it is taken out of context. Furthermore, he ignores a lot of inconvenient passages that refute his stance. He also ignores a lot of verses that refer to Hell figuratively or metaphorically. If you cherry picking enough you can support almost any position. One of his main flaws is that he pays attention to fallen human examples of Christian faith- then criticizes them as if they are real representations of Christ. Like many atheists, he has a problem with the holiness, sovereignty, and authority of God. And so he dictates to God what God must do, or what the right thing to do is from human perspective. To me this is one of the many reasons why I am not Armenian, and lean more on the doctrine of predestination, rather than free will. I will concede that there are a few passages that deserve further study because they are complicated, but as one of my pastor's was fond of saying "You can't just say thus says Scripture, unless you back it up with and it also says, and it also says, and it also says." In other words you can't base all your theology off of one verse you have to interpret that verse in context of the rest of the Bible. Admittedly, I do agree with the author that Christian faith should be something more than just "fire insurance", or is he calls it an "escape ticket", but I just agree him about the conclusion he then draws. He does not adequately address what happens to those who intentionally and repeatedly reject God. He doesn't really focus on the other side of eternity, that is Heaven and how to handle the passages that talk about it. And he only briefly mentioned the criticism of "what's the point of Christ, the cross, and faith if everyone is going to be saved and redeemed".
I do remember in college being asked to respond to an article where a pastor/theologian came to the conclusion that Hell was a literal second death, that is that the soul/spirit is destroyed at the judgment and so there is no continuation of the judgment, no consequence, nor a Hell. I wrote a critique of the paper as I was asked to do, but I concluded with the idea that I wasn't sure why it mattered so much here in this life. Plenty of Christians have focused wrongly on the idea that the Christian faith is about avoiding hell. Certainly on this side of eternity we can't be dogmatic about things that just have not come, that scripture does not fully illuminate. Despite losing points in that paper, I'm still not sure I agree with my professor that the exact consequence of hell matters as much as the mere idea that there is a consequence. I don't regret reading book, but I certainly don't agree with it beyond the minor exceptions I noted above. I am interested to move on to Preston Sprinkle's book and see how he handles the tricky passages that were noted.
Lastly, I have listened to literally hundreds of audiobooks, and this one was just poorly produced. Normally I don't love it when the author reads the book, unless the author is a professional public speaker- he is and so that part didn't bug me. There were way too many places where he tried to adapt the print book to be an audiobook and yet failed to do so in other parts. The description of a few images was very clunky, and the transition between chapters was horrendous. It was obvious to me that this was a very low budget production, probably because many wanted to avoid being associated with the book since it stances so radical.
I do remember in college being asked to respond to an article where a pastor/theologian came to the conclusion that Hell was a literal second death, that is that the soul/spirit is destroyed at the judgment and so there is no continuation of the judgment, no consequence, nor a Hell. I wrote a critique of the paper as I was asked to do, but I concluded with the idea that I wasn't sure why it mattered so much here in this life. Plenty of Christians have focused wrongly on the idea that the Christian faith is about avoiding hell. Certainly on this side of eternity we can't be dogmatic about things that just have not come, that scripture does not fully illuminate. Despite losing points in that paper, I'm still not sure I agree with my professor that the exact consequence of hell matters as much as the mere idea that there is a consequence. I don't regret reading book, but I certainly don't agree with it beyond the minor exceptions I noted above. I am interested to move on to Preston Sprinkle's book and see how he handles the tricky passages that were noted.
Lastly, I have listened to literally hundreds of audiobooks, and this one was just poorly produced. Normally I don't love it when the author reads the book, unless the author is a professional public speaker- he is and so that part didn't bug me. There were way too many places where he tried to adapt the print book to be an audiobook and yet failed to do so in other parts. The description of a few images was very clunky, and the transition between chapters was horrendous. It was obvious to me that this was a very low budget production, probably because many wanted to avoid being associated with the book since it stances so radical.