The book Love Wins by Rob Bell reads as an attack on John 3.16. Bell says you don’t necessarily need to believe and in the end (probably) no one will perish. He calls the gospel, as traditionally understood, ‘misguided and toxic’.
We must ask first why Bell has become so uncomfortable with (perhaps ‘ashamed of’) what Christianity stands for.
Therapy culture
During the last century, with secularism and Freud, Western society has moved from a moral culture to a therapy culture. Good is no longer defined in moral terms. Good is now generally what ‘feels good’. Whereas 50 years ago ordinary people aimed to be ‘decent’ people, now the goal is ‘to enjoy myself’. So people now see things differently. ‘O poor old Bin Laden’, says the liberal / therapy outlook, ‘shot dead without the chance of phoning a lawyer!’ That he gloried in the fact that he was behind the deaths of 3,000 people on 9/11, and therefore morally deserved to die, doesn’t register. That moral way of seeing things is very unfashionable.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …