ABOVE: ROB BELL WITH OPRAH WINFREY, NEW AGER & MYSTIC
ROB BELL COUNSELS HURTING PEOPLE TO AVOID THOSE WHO QUOTE SCRIPTURES LIKE ROMANS 8:28
(Friday Church News Notes, August 4, 2017, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)
- Former megachurch leader Rob Bell, who has moved beyond the bounds
even of the emerging church, is spouting his heresies on a "Bible Belt
Tour" across the southern region of America. It's actually a profitable
place for him, since the South is filled to the brim with "cultural
Christians" who have gone through the motions of "believing in Jesus"
but have not been born again. Bell resonates loudly with unregenerate
people who want Christ and the world. In Atlanta, he spoke at
the Variety Playhouse. One of his themes seems to be to encourage doubts
about God and the Christian faith and to rob people of spiritual and
moral
absolutes. During Q&A, a young man raised his hand and told Bell
that "he was struggling with his faith" because he was told by a doctor
that his wife and unborn baby probably won't survive the delivery. He
asked if he was wrong to be angry with God. Bell replied that he had "no
easy answers," but he would counsel him "to avoid people who will try
to comfort him by quoting scriptures like Romans 8:28
('And we know that all things work together for good to them that love
God') and by telling
him that his loss was somehow part of God's mysterious will" ("Outlaw
pastor Rob Bell shakes up the Bible Belt," CNN, Jul. 28, 2017). In a
2005 interview with Beliefnet, Bell said, "[T]he church must stop
thinking about everybody primarily in categories of in or out, saved or
not, believer or nonbeliever." In his influential book Velvet Elvis,
which is popular with a great many Southern Baptists, Bell described a
wedding that he conducted for two pagan unbelievers who told him that
"they didn't want any Jesus or God or Bible or religion to be talked
about" but they did want him to "make it really spiritual" (p. 76). Bell
agreed with this ridiculous request and said that his pagan friends
"are resonating with Jesus, whether they acknowledge it or not" (p. 92).
Bell's 2011 book Love Wins was more of the same. Not only does
he preach near-universalism, he preaches a false god, a false christ, a
false gospel, a false heaven, a false hell, you name it. He is a master
at taking Scripture out of context and shoehorning his heresies into a
text. These are the dangerous waters that contemporary worship music
builds bridges to, as we have documented in the video presentation "The
Foreign Spirit of Contemporary Worship Music," available as a free
eVideo at https://www.wayoflife.org/
