Yet another interview with Rob Bell

I am not a Rob Bell hater - I am not out to destroy him.  But as a Bible College student I have been very interested in the reaction people have had to his most recent book.  I know with writing assignments and essays it can be very tempting to think you've found something new, apart from the scholars of history, and want to write this amazing new insight.  However, again, as a student I understand I'm probably not finding something new, just misunderstanding something old, so then I research and come to an understanding of the topic I'm studying.

I really feel Rob Bell has not done that, he's purposely wanted to move away from what people have accepted for years (mainly because those scholars are right) and present something new that is contextualised for a post-modern culture.

Here's what Bell says in this interview I've read today - I think to believe something so different, which is a personal view not held in agreement with the tradition of the apostles, is so arrogant and self seeking that it cannot be a notion of God.

One of the things I traced is that heaven and hell in the Bible are present realities, they are dimensions of existence, they are choices we can make every day. And I assume that those choices and those realities extend on after we die. I grew up like a lot of people, [thinking] heaven is somewhere else, sometime else, mainly after you die, and Jesus is how you go somewhere else, sometime else. And so all of this arises out of my studies of the Scriptures and my interactions with people from across the depth and breadth of the Christian conversation, and my growing awareness that Jesus, in the world that He lived in, the issue was not evacuation, the issue was not, “How can I get out of here?”

This article comes from RELEVANT Magazine's website.