read the book - why?

It's amazing to me that the standard defense of Rob Bell's error is "you cannot critique it/him if you haven't read the book." I think if I wanted to defend Bell I'd steer people away from Love Wins.

Does Bell think only some will be saved and the rest damned? He writes in regard to God condemning some to hell, “Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God?”

But in another place he writes a somewhat Calvinistic thought, “Will all people be saved, or will God not get what God wants? Does this magnificent, mighty, marvelous God fail in the end?”

Later however he's a little Arminian, “Although God is powerful and mighty, when it comes to the human heart God has to play by the same rules we do. God has to respect our freedom to choose to the very end, even at the risk of the relationship itself.”

What does Bell believe? Well if you've read the book, he believes the first and uses the other two to support his real thinking. In the end, he is as Bertrand Russel who wrote in Why I am not a Christian, "There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.”

Bell is actually quite clear in his error on pages 173-175 where he reveals his true heart - he cannot accept the God of the Bible and uses minor distortions that we bring to the party as his justification:

Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony.

If there was an earthly father who was like that, we would call the authorities.

If there was an actual human dad who was that volatile, we would contact child protection services immediately.

If God can switch gears like that, switch entire modes of being that quickly, that raises a thousand questions about whether being like this could ever be trusted, let alone be good.

Loving one moment, vicious the next.

Kind and compassionate, only to become cruel and relentless in the blink of an eye. Does God become somebody totally different the moment you die? That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can.

And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.

Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality

Sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting “the gospel” is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense, it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no. They don’t want anything to do with Jesus, because they don’t want anything to do with that God.

So Bell reinvents God in his imagine to make Him more agreeable. This is error.