I started reading this book pretty skeptically. I was pleasantly surprised to find some important points made pretty poignantly in the book. Unfortunately, it's mixed in with a sprinkling of heretical claims and a lot of shoddy logic. Often, even when making a statement that I believe is 100% spot-on, his support for it just didn't demonstrate the point that he was trying to make. For example, the fact that Jesus used earthly metaphors to describe heaven doesn't tell us that heaven is an earthy place. What he was saying about heaven was true, but we can't draw the conclusions that he drew from the metaphors that he mentioned. Metaphors, by nature, generally relate more complex realities to simple material ones.
Insofar as the book pushes people to think about the way we talk about Heaven, Hell, Sin, Death, and Judgement, I suppose it could be of use. It makes an impassioned, if at times logically flawed, case for rethinking our concept of Hell, but I wouldn't use the book as a doctrinal argument. And, I have to say that Bell is just one more author who's failed to convince me that a rejection of Hell as an eternal place of punishment is in line with Christian Scripture.
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