Rob Bell Quotes

Has God created millions of people over tens of thousands of years who are going to spend eternity in anguish? Can God do this, or even allow this, and still claim to be a loving God?
Does God punish people for thousands of years with infinite, eternal torment for things they did in their few finite years of life?

We cannot earn what we have always had. What we can do is trust that what God keeps insisting is true about us is actually true.

God has to punish sinners, because God is holy, but Jesus has paid the price for our sin, and so we can have eternal life. However true or untrue that is technically or theologically, what it can do is subtly teach people that Jesus rescues us from God.

There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.

First, the Bible has to be interpreted. When someone says they’re just doing what the Bible says to do, they didn’t greet you with a holy kiss, they’re probably wearing two kinds of fabric sewn together, and there’s a good chance they don’t have tassels sewn on the corners of their garments, all things commanded in the Bible. They don’t do those things because they don’t believe those commands are binding on them today. And they don’t believe that or practice those things because they’ve interpreted the Bible in a particular way. Or more likely, they’ve been influenced by someone who told them that is how the Bible is to be interpreted.

I saw how the Bible isn’t a book about how to get into heaven, it’s a library of poems and letters and stories about bringing heaven to earth now, about this world becoming more and more the place it should be. There is very, very little in the Bible about what happens when you die. That’s not what the writers were focused on. Their interest, again and again, is on how this world is arranged.

Groups have a center of gravity. Families, friends, churches, offices, and schools all have a dominant consciousness, a center of gravity, a party line. It’s the often unspoken agreement that keeps things running smoothly based on what to believe, how to behave, what’s acceptable, and what isn’t. So when you charge in all excited about whatever it is you’ve learned, you are a disruption. And systems don’t take kindly to disruptions, often expending extraordinary energy to quell the disruption, pushing it to the edges, discrediting it. This is why some churches ban books, this is why certain topics are off-limits at family gatherings, and this is often why people use words like heretic.

Your marriage will only be as healthy as the least healthy one of you.

Great marriages have an ease about them, a back-and-forth nonreactive, nondefensive, open, and ongoing flow in which you never stop talking and figuring it out together.

When people stepped forward and said, “You have heard it interpreted this way, but I tell you it really means this,” it was progressive for their day. They were making new claims about what it means to be true to the Bible. What is accepted today as tradition was at one point in time a break from tradition.

In empire, you believe in that which you preserve, you preserve that which you are entitled to, and you are entitled to that which you have accumulated. ... That is the religion, the animating spirit, of empire.