I have been waiting to form an opinion about Rob Bell's controversial Love Wins, which I read last year, until I read this response. Neither book has gone without buzz in the Christian community. Erasing Hell has garnered particular attention in my circle of friends because Preston Sprinkle taught at the university I attended and now work at. In fact, a lot of my friends had class with him. His bike kept getting stolen, leading to a campus wide joke. In this book, it is Sprinkle's research combined with Francis Chan's story-telling that argues for the existence of hell.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the controversy surrounding this and Bell's work, let me give you an abbreviated version before I share my thoughts. Last year, Rob Bell, pastor of Mars Hill Baptist Church in Michigan, wrote a book entitled Love Wins. The general concept of the book is that God will, in the end, love people enough that He will offer those who have rejected Him in this life a second (or endless) chance to accept His gift of love. In simpler terms, Bell suggests that there is no place of eternal suffering which we call hell. Chan and Sprinkle, in response to Bell's book, wrote Erasing Hell, an exploratory study into what Scripture has to say about hell.
