Hope Church

At the end of March, publishers released Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.  Rob Bell is the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville MI; and his book has ignited a theological firestorm in the Christian community.  Why?  It's because he suggests that your eternal destiny and mine does not necessarily depend on how we respond to Jesus Christ in this life.  Bell has revived the teaching of Origen, a second-third century theologian who insisted that hell was really a form of purgatory in which, after being purged of their sin and rebellion against God, people could experience post-mortem conversion. Despite the fact that Origen's teaching was declared heretical by several early church councils, the teaching has been circulating in the Christian church during recent years.  And Rob Bell has now put it on the table for everyone's consideration.  The name for this is "universalism."  In other words, in the end, everybody goes to heaven.  Everyone is reconciled to God and lives in his presence eternally.  To put it in Bell's terms, God is love, and God gets what he wants.  We should make no mistake: this is serious theological error with serious consequences.