Hurrah for Rob Bell who will now understand the mean spirit at the heart of much evangelical fundamentalism. Having Episcopalians praise him will not win him friends at all.

Nonetheless I offer my thanks for this little video.

As a cautionary note, however, the notion of implicit Christianity or the Rahnerian notion that God will give good non Christians heaven remains a rather condescending view towards people of other faiths. Gandhi was quite content with what might become of him and I doubt that good hearted Buddhists wants everlasting life, so "granting" it to them may not be a kindness.

I am certainly looking forward to this story as it unfolds.

I watched the video and loved it. I've said many times that I was never taught to fear God or Jesus; I was only ever taught to love God and how much I am loved by God. It was the message that I recieved in the Episcopal Church starting over 50 years ago.

Rob Bell is great. You should check out his books and NOOMA videos- a lot of youth ministry folks in the South East have been digging his work and using it in ours for a while now.

This makes sense. If anything or anyone is powerful enough to resist the love of God then God is not really God. Some Christians seem to need hell desperately for some odd reason.

Been there myself a long time - which is only to say that this is a logical conclusion if we really believe that God is love, and that Christ died to save all, and not just some.

It does leave us some things to wrestle with - Jesus' sayings in Matthew about "outer darkness" and "weeping and gnashing of teeth." If I take Scripture seriously, I can't just ignore those, any more than I can go to the other extreme with those who want to describe those and map them geographically, as it were. I don't ignore them; but I still come down where Peter did: if God is really God, God's infinite love has to be more compelling even than my own rejection.

Marshall Scott

Bell should get to know what happened to Carlton Pearson.

Take away the ever-present Threat of Hellfire! [NB: I love to tell this tale. In one Bible school I researched while doing my doctorate on religion in Pennsylvania's Appalachia, their faith-statement promised the lost "Everlasting CONSCIOUS suffering in the Lake of Fire". No passing out from the pain for you! *LOL*], and Wingnut Fundagelicalism loses its best (only?) marketing tool. They don't take kindly to that.

JC Fisher

There's a blog post about the stir the book is causing (and not even released yet) at the link below. I liked the video, very similar to his Nooma videos.
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2011/02/team-hell-gets-loud.html

Lori Johnson

there's a blog post here
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2011/02/team-hell-gets-loud.html

I liked the video. It's much like his Nooma videos.

Lori Johnson

For me, a way to reconcile God's unconditional love with the concept of Hell was opened by C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce [You have to apply quite the hermeneutic about the role and place of women, however]. But that was many years ago.
Tom Wand

@Marshall I agree, and we also have to have a discussion on predestination and election. Strong versions of both of those obviate the need for evangelism or churches at all except as places for the unsure to gloat because they think they are included.
If God is radically free and that is the core of how we are made in God's image then we might have to allow that some people will not be saved because they choose not to. As Milton suggests some might choose to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven.

In most cases the consequences of our misbehavior is our own suffering without God even being involved in the equation. In a free, non-predestined or elected cosmos God is free and we are free and what comes comes. God will not force us to acknowledge or receive the free gift, and only grudgingly will got let us suffer the consequences of poor judgment.

This stands in stark contrast to the really illogical fundie world, where our depravity makes it impossible to willfully choose the good, and where election and predestination make us simply saved or damned going through the motions of "life."

Ideas of universal salvation go back at least to Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, and in many ways inform current Orthodox thinking on the subject. So nothing that Bell is saying or speculating upon is new. I'm glad he's making waves with this in the evangelical world. It's a conversation all Western Christians should be having because, as Bell says, the typical thinking about salvation really pits Jesus against God, which makes no sense.

Rob Bell's video is right on target. I'm looking forward to reading his book.

Was the Reformation for naught? (Well, no, on the whole, but like most revolutions it got co-opted.) We are saved by the grace of God, not by anything we do, including being orthodox. Just because you claim to be an evangelical doesn't mean you aren't a crypto-Pelagian!

I'm with C.S. Lewis (with Tom Wand's caveat about Lewis and women!) and John Milton: I think it must be possible for a person to resist God's love right to the end (though we can hope and pray that no one actually does so finally), because the bottom line is that God created us as free. Without that, God's whole enterprise of creation is a cruel sham.

We've always been unwilling to say it, because we're still scared of St. Augustine, but the doctrine of predestination is a profound heresy. Being wrong about the Trinity or the Incarnation are serious mistakes, but the predestinarians Just Don't Get It. (Neither do the gnostics, but that's another issue for another time....)