Rob Bell in a Nutshell
Pastor Rob Bell is very popular Christian pastor and speaker. Many Christians love him, despite his many neo-orthodox beliefs. Discernment is not just the ability to be able to discern between right and wrong, but between right and almost right. I have been to his church in Grand Rapids, read some of his book Velvet Elvis (before abandoning it for better material) and listened to his sermons. What concerns me is that many Christians take in many of his false teachings without being a Berean - checking them out agains scripture to “see if what he is saying is true." But the hard part is that he says LOTS OF GREAT STUFF and the bad stuff can be SO SUBTLE. Here is an article of research that brings together in a good format a summary of many of those teachings. (note this is already a year old, so it doesn’t touch on his “The God’s are not angry” tour, in which he gives a very unclear definition of repentance, as well as the gospel. See here for that review).
also of interest
ROB BELL MAKES ME ANGRY: A PASTORAL RESPONSE TO VELVET ELVIS
Here is a quote from John Piper’s message he gave at the 2005 pastor’s conference which has now been made into a book titled “Preaching the Cross”. This comes from page 105:
“Oh, that God would raise up young preachers who leave their hearers with a spiritual sense of shock at the sense of God—some sense of the infinite weight of the reality of God.
That is my longing for our day—and for you. That God would raise up thousands of broken-hearted, Bible-saturated preachers who are dominated by a sense of the greatness and the majesty and the holiness of God, revealed in the gospel of Christ crucified and risen, and reigning with absolute authority over every nation and every army and every false religion and every terrorist and every tsunami and every cancer cell and every galaxy in the universe.”
Later he says: “What gives preaching its seriousness is that the mantle of the preacher is soaked with the blood of Jesus and singed with the fire of hell. That’s the mantle that turns mere talkers into preachers.”
Is Rob Bell that kind of preacher? You can decide for yourself.