Rob Bell Love Wins- a few thoughts

I have just finished reading" Love Wins" Rob Bell's latest book that has stirred up huge debate among Christians
Plenty of people have written proper reviews so I won't attempt that but simply give a few impressions

• It is  a small book to have caused such a big fuss.a mere 198 pages,it would have been even less if the type was not so spread out over the page, I guess to make it more visually attractive, and easier to read
• Rob Bell is a very readable writer with a neat turn of phrase He is a good story teller ,not in my view as good as Max Lucado but still very good.
• The book is full of quotations and stories from the Bible.It challenges our neatly worked out theologies and points us back to The Book and makes us consider afresh what some well known verses really mean-.that can only be good.
• Love Wins is also full of questions. .Provocative questions, dozens of them ,forcing us to think, which since we are also to love God with our minds is surely not a bad thing!
• The book contains wonderful and biblical statements about the amazing love of God.It really made me think again about the awesome strength of God's love for human beings. The message that God loves his creation so much that refuses to give up on us, forms the core of Bell’s book. 

Having said all that it appears, to me at least, that Rob has strayed beyond orthodox evangelical statements of faith and, if not into universalism, at least into pluralism,and I part company with his views at that point.

That is no reason not to get and read the book.

Rather than dismissing Rob Bell and "Love Wins" out of hand and in some case without reading the book  and even worse impugning his motives for writing the book as some leading  Christians have done,it is surely more profitable to engage with his arguments and above all wrestle with the Bible

 His critics may not be as good story tellers as Rob Bell but I suspect they would be better than him at disciplined exegesis of the Bible if they put their minds to it.