Russell Moore on Love Wins

Russell Moore:

Much has been made, and rightly so, in recent days about popular preacher Rob Bell’s denial of the Christian doctrine of hell in his new book Love Wins. Reading this book over the past couple of days, I was prepared for what Bell was up to. I’d seen his promotional video, for one thing. For another, his arguments are the same efforts at hell-denial Christianity has seen, and rebutted, in almost every generation from the first century onward. What caused me to gasp out loud though was Bell’s dismissal of the blood of Jesus.

“There’s nothing wrong with talking and singing about how the ‘Blood will never lose its power’ and ‘Nothing but the blood will save us,’” Bell writes. “Those are powerful metaphors. But we don’t live any longer in a culture in which people offer animal sacrifices to the gods.

“People did live that way for thousands of years, and there are pockets of primitive cultures around the world that do continue to understand sin, guilt, and atonement in those ways,” he continues. “But most of us don’t. What the first Christians did was look around them and put the Jesus story in language their listeners would understand.”

On this point, Bell couldn’t be more wrong.

His conclusion:

That’s why every church that has embraced universalism had died out, withering away from the gospel. In order for people to see Christ, they must see sin and, yes, judgment. In order to see justification, you must also see justice. If you drain the blood out of the church, all you are left with is a corpse.

Read the rest.


Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived