Thoughts on "Love Wins"

I apologize for this post because it is not well planned and will probably be more critical then I want it to sound. I recently read Rob Bell's new book called Love Wins and the following are my thoughts after reading it.




I think Rob Bell failed greatly in his theology, in his understanding of God, love, heaven and @#!*% . He has tried and failed to poke holes in an essential doctrine which has been generally accepted as orthodox since the days of Gregory the Great.
Their are four primary points of the book.
First, Rob attempts to show that love wins.
"Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came and love is why he continues to come year after year to persons after persons. Love is why I've written this book,. and love is what I want to leave you with. May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about. And may you know deep in your bones that love wins.

Second, that God's primary purpose is to see that all of his creation comes into a perfect relationship with Him and so live a life of joy, hope, mercy, peace and happiness.
This is not specifically stated because its humanism and Rob would lose his audience if he actually said it but its assumed throughout the book.

Third, he attempts to show that @#!*% as a physical location of eternal torment does not exist.
" @#!*% is what we create ourselves when we reject God, it is not a literal place where we go after we die."

Fourth, he tries to show that heaven is not somewhere else but is here on earth inside of us by the power and grace of Jesus Christ.
"So how do I answer questions about heaven? How would I summarize all that Jesus teaches? There's heaven now somewhere else. There's heaven here sometime else. And then there's Jesus invitation to heaven here and now in this moment in this place."

Those four things are the main points of his book.

As far as showing that love wins Rob does not define love. I looked for a definition of love in his book and these are the closest things I could find:

"its right to point out that love by it's very nature is freedom. For there to be love there has to be the option both now and then to not love." and he says later "God is love, And love is a relationship. This relationship is one of joy and it can't be contained."

Both these definitions are faulty, unbiblical and unhelpful. For if you are in love you are hardly free to simply not love the object of your love. It is also untrue that love is necessarily a relationship. I can love a girl who has no knowledge of my love and so their would be no relationship. I did not find anywhere else in the book a definition of love.


Second point is just as easily refuted. This is Rob's logic.
God most important desire is to see all men saved
If all men are not saved God is a failure
God is not a failure
Therefore all men must somehow be saved
The fallacy is in the first premise. Rob never proves that the purpose of God's existence is to see all men saved. God has other plans and purposes of his own beyond the salvation of every human. Even if Rob is right and God exists simply for the benefit of his creation (humanism and heresy) he never is willing to say this outright because he knows nobody would believe him.

The third and fourth points can be handled together. They both touch on the same issue of what happens after we die. The book closes with these lines and I think they summarize Rob's views of heaven and @#!*% .

"The only thing left to do is trust. Everybody is already at the party. Heaven and @#!*% , Here, Now, Around us, Upon us, Within us."


Rob says that the world is one big "party" we can have either heaven or @#!*% based on how we choose to live our life and whether we will accept Jesus. By having heaven he means those who accept God's grace and live in his commandments will experience God's fullness and be the kind loving merciful people we all want to be. The same is true for @#!*% according to Rob Bell. We can have @#!*% here because @#!*% is simply the absence of God so those who refuse to live by God's rules are already living in @#!*% .

The problems with this idea are many. First, Rob never says what happens after a human dies. A reader of his book would have to assume that when we die we somehow come back to earth again in some form of Christianized reincarnation but Rob can never say this because their is no basis for it in either church tradition or the Bible. Second if @#!*% is just something that exists within ourselves then somehow someone must explain away all the passages in which biblical authors talk about @#!*% . Third Most of The Revelation along with the many smaller passages throughout the Bible which talk about Jesus returning amidst destruction and plagues to purge the world by fire and sword must be explained away. Fourth. All of the Christians who spent their lives waiting for the day of glory when Christ would return and all sin would be destroyed and Christ would begin the heavenly reign which would include Peter and Paul had a false belief about heaven.

So those are the four points that I thought Rob had to say in his new book. I did not agree with any of them and was sad that a man with such wisdom could sink to such a low level of intellectualism. The book is riddled with either or fallacies such as this one, ""is history tragic?
Have billions of people been created only to spend eternity in conscious punishment and torment, suffering infinitely for the finite sins they committed in the few years they spent on earth?
Is our future uncertain? Or will God take care of us?" or this one, "Are we safe? Are we secure? Or are we on our own?" The idea being that God is either a tyrant who hates us all and created us to send us to torment or he is a loving God who could not bear to see his creation suffer. Their is of course a third option but the fallacy tries to hide it. Their is also lots of assumptive language and taking the bible out of context.

I have not written this post because I do not like Rob Bell. I've written it because the ideas presented in Love Wins have much deeper consequences then what would appear on the surface. Anytime someone tries to poke holes in a 2000 year old belief you ought to be very very careful and the person doing the question has a responsibility to take a clear stance, define his terms, list his evidence and to analyze all of the results which would happen if someone took the new belief to heart. Rob Bell does not do this and so even if his ideas were correct I still wouldn't trust him because he does not prove them. If you are reading this and in the back of your mind happily saying, "yes, I knew Rob was wrong", well you should still read the book. The questions he raises are very important and everyone should be able to have answers at their finger tips because just believing something that is right is not helpful unless you know why you are right.

So if you haven't read the book, read it, learn from it and learn to defend what is right true.

That is all, Happy 4th of July.