Yes, he's pastor of an evangelical church, but I've read a couple of his books now--Velvet Elvis and Love Wins--and they both seemed pretty Lutheran to me. (I'm still quoting Velvet Elvis, by the way. Did you know that, by the age of 10, a young Hebrew male in the first century would have memorized the entire Torah?)

Love Wins argues that we just can't know who's in heaven or hell, but it's neither wise--nor Christian, really--to bet against God's love, and God's desire for everyone to be "saved."

He came to this conclusion because of conversations with new attendees at his church. Is Gandhi in hell because he wasn't Christian? they would ask. It was dialog with people outside the church--people asking tough questions--which moved Bell to his current position.

This is, in a nutshell, Paul Tillich's "method of correlation." Bell was influenced by the concerns and questions of the secular culture as expressed through the people he met. In turn, he responds to those questions in light of the Christian faith, and, moreover, he responds as a partner in dialog, not as an overlord with all the answers.

He makes his point Biblically, and reasonably well. He notes, for example, that the phrase "personal Savior," so integral to evangelicalism, never actually appears in the Bible. In the chapter on hell, he traces the various images of hell through the Bible, from its beginning in the shadow-world of the Hebrew sheol to the burning garbage dump (gehenna) of the New Testament.

He goes on at some length on the meaning of the Greek word aion--usually translated "eternal" or "forever," but which also means "coming age." When aion is translated as "forever," it gives the impression that the current arrangements--time and history as we know it--will go on and on. Actually, it more likely means the end of this current world and the inauguration of something new.

Each chapter has several Biblical references, many compared and contrasted with others. This is not the normal evangelical method. Evangelicals usually cite the Bible to buttress ideological points. The Bible is used to answer questions, not generate them.

Bell does it differently. He traces ideas through texts, and compares one text with another. This inspires questions, and Bells seems to like questions very much. ("Gandhi is in hell? Really? Without a doubt?")

Bell has been called a "universalist" who believes that everyone is "saved." Bell himself doesn't use the word in Love Wins, and has generally avoided using it in subsequent interviews about the book. He is being coy, but wisely so. He wants people to focus on the questions he raises, not jump to a conclusion about his own personal beliefs (so they can trash them and him).

In any case, so what if he is a univeralist? Christian history is punctuated with the names of many "universalists"--Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Naziansus, on down to Teilhard de Chardin, Jacque Ellul, Jurgen Moltmann, and Paul Tillich in the modern age.

In fact, considering the breadth of Biblical support for the idea, we could fairly ask why more Christians aren't universalists. How else are we to interpret Colossians 1: 19--"through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things"? Or 1 Corinthians 8: 6? Or John 12: 32? Or Hebrews 1? Or Ephesians 1-2? Or, even, as Bell notes, John 3: 16, which says that God so loved the universe, the cosmou, and not just Christians alone.

Universalism is not one thing. It has several varieties. The two most popular are "hard universalism" and "soft universalism." "Hard universalism" is the position that everyone goes to heaven whether they want to be there or not. Greek Orthodox theology can be cited in support of this position. "Soft universalism" asserts that everyone, now or later, has an opportunity to go to heaven. Robert Farrar Capon is in this category. He believes in hell, but also believes that you could get up and walk right out of the place if you wanted to.

This is reminiscent of a seminary class conversation in which our professor was striking a strongly universalist note at which a fellow classmate said, "But don't you have to have faith?" The professor responded by saying, "When you're resurrected, you'll have faith."

Peter Marty's review in the Christian Century, however, contained this comment: "Charging Bell with being a universalist doesn't work. Not only does the idea never appear in the book, nothing could be less applicable to somebody with Bell's own passionate faith in Jesus Christ." (CC, May 17, 2011, p. 25)

Actually, "charging" Bell with being a universalist does work, and the idea is never far from any page in Love Wins. And just why is being a universalist somehow contrary to Bell's "passionate faith" in Christ? It is precisely because he believes in Christ, and the universal nature of Christ's work, that Bell comes to his position.

That is, in fact, his whole point, a point Marty concedes a scant two paragraphs later. He quotes Bell--"there is an exclusivity on the other side of inclusivity"--with approval to note that, yes, Christ is the way and that he "leaves the door to himself as wide open as the universe." Quoting Bell again, "He is as exclusive as himself and as inclusive as containing every single particle of creation."

The book is thin--it has less than 200 pages, and most of these have a lot of white space. Nor is it particularly well-written, unless you have a penchant for incomplete sentences. It made news because Rob Bell is an megachurch evangelical--a "rock-star popular" pastor--who is making mainline protestant points. If a Presbyterian or an Episcopalian had written these words--they have, many times over--no one would have batted an eye.