It's really, really remarkable that prominent evangelicals are now rethinking nearly every piece of dogma we assoicate with evangelicals. A decade ago Carlton Pearson was driven out of the evangelical community for simply being open to the claim that Hell does not exist. But now Mars Hill Bible Church pastor Rob Bell has made the same journey and though he is getting pilloried by all the usual suspects there is no evidence that his influential church has any indication of repudiating him.
This is actually a huge cultural shift, in importance and improbability on the level of working class people now widely supporting Occupy Wall Street (perhaps the two are related).
This from the book: "It's been clearly communicated to many that this belief (in hell as conscious, eternal torment) is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear." Amen to that.
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