One of the main reasons I wanted to read this book is because I’ve enjoyed Rob Bell’s teachings in the past. I’ve seen many of his Nooma videos and listened to countless podcasts of his sermons. I heard that Bell may be proposing some controversial views on Hell within this book, so I decided that I wanted to read it for myself rather than accept other people’s opinions about his writing. I was surprised by the fact that within the first page and a half Bell wrote that he feels the belief that a “select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell,” is, “misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, peace, forgiveness, and joy that our world desperately needs to hear” (Preface, viii).

After reading this, I was expecting to find line after line of ideas that I disagreed with in the following pages, but ended up being on board with a lot of what Bell had to say. One place that I felt a lot of disagreement rising up within me deal dealt with views on how people come to be saved. Bell seemed to be arguing that people could come to be saved, even if they ascribed to other faiths, by following the essence of who Jesus is.

I felt that the greatest strength of this book was that it asked thought-provoking questions that others are seemingly afraid to ask. Even though I didn't necessarily agree with all of the conclusions that Bell came to, I did like the fact that the questions were being presented. Sometimes I felt like there were too many questions being presented consecutively without Bell attempting to answer anything, however I believe it is good to make people think about why they believe what they believe. Even though I didn’t agree with many of Bell’s conclusions, I don’t think any of us should believe everything that we’ve been told about God and the Bible without investigating it for ourselves.

In the end, I didn’t finish this reading with the new understanding that Rob Bell is not a Christian after all.