PLUS these classics:

What do you call it when someone writing a book that is designed by its publisher to sell gazillions of copies, based primarily on its inflammatory claims, uses evidence to make those claims that is historically, Biblically, and textually inaccurate?

Thus the single biggest knock against the best-selling title from America's leading "emergent" voice and someone who could legitimately be labeled universalist, Rob Bell.

I have a series of blog posts that will be coming on my own observations from actually having read the text of Bell's postulations.

But I begin with the most disconcerting issue with the book: it's repeated, and unseemly non-random use of evidence where he claims to demonstrate one thing, when in reality the context of that actual evidence is claiming exactly the opposite...

Review: Love Wins, Part One...
"Why it is not an important intellectual or serious work:"
Rob Bell, while on his book tour, painting my city (New York) fantastic, and enjoying and drinking in the attention and limelight and glory that only a book tour can provide, for the most part was not required to answer serious questions about "Love Wins."

He was asked about the comfort people could draw from grand ideas of a loving God. He was asked about a world in its ideal state. And conveniently rarely asked about a world in need of salvation in it's present state.

My guess is most of those asking these questions did not read the book, and I'm quite certain the majority of them did little research in understanding Rob Bell's claims. Yet there were significant problems with Bell's research. Or to be clear his assertion of research as he attempted to parse evidence for the underlying universalist viewpoint that the book puts forward.

From a historical standpoint alone, Bell commits nearly criminal recklessness with his either purposeful misuse of Martin Luther. So much so that he appears to present the most famous protestant reformer as someone who held open the possibility of "universalism."

People of good will can say, perhaps it was an innocent mistake that he attempts to use the lead reformer of the protestant reformation as an example of universalism. But being a strong believer in man's depravity I tend to think he did this in the hopes of bolstering his case, and betting that no one would expose it. But students of history and of the church's history specifically easily can prove Luther believed, argued, and felt otherwise. (And we can do so from the very document Bell quotes to show Luther's "support" of universalism.)

Bell's use of scripture to argue in similar fashion goes beyond just simple sloppiness or negligence to a purposeful misrepresentation of what the text is saying. He implies for instance that John 3:17 teaches a universalist proof. When John 3:18 clearly demonstrates the opposite.

Even one of my emergent brothers, who I regularly disagree with, made this observation: "You CAN FIND a kind of universalism in Bell's book that arguably strays beyond orthodoxy defined in a certain way--or at least, beyond a robust Biblical Christian faith situated in historic Christian tradition including the various streams of the Reformation... ...The terrible enormity of sin, the gravity of God's judgment, the reality of the hardness of the human heart, the Biblical picture of a final judgment and the theological and philosophical imperative of a final judgment, the glory of the atonement, the "blessed hope" of the return of Christ the King and Judge who will vindicate his people by permanently excluding and destroying evil in all of its structural and personal embodiment, including evil persons who spurn God's grace and persecute his people--all of these are indespensible components of the Christian story."

Bell's research misquotes (based on context), misleads (based on meaning and intention), and misstates (based on history and consensus.)

The innocent, "I'm not a researcher, I'm just a pastor who wants people to know they are loved..." response he offered on the one national media outlet (that had the guts to question him on these issues) was far from sufficient. Bell knows it.

His book demonstrates it... He either didn't do his homework, or his methods were exceedingly poor. Either way this fundamental problem plagues the integrity of the rest of his text.

Some may be willing to dismiss it out of hand saying, "But he makes an ultimate point.'"

How can serious intellectuals look at this particular bit of work with anything other than at minimum some moderately skeptical suspicion for his most stretching claims?

PLUS these classics: