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Francis Chan’s latest book Erasing Hell is an interesting read. I finished it today and found it to be more than a rebuttal of Rob Bell’s Love Wins. He does a wonderful job of outlining the issues Bell’s position (universalism) brings to the discussion and then showing where those views have gone wrong.

Erasing Hell starts off with a broad overview of popular beliefs about Hell and then moves on to the Jewish views of hell that would have been contemporary with the time of Christ. It was interesting to find out some of the things that I had heard or thought about hell were inventions carried over from the Middle Ages, no doubt those views were NOT something I had heard from my parents or my church who have been very staunch providers of a biblical worldview.

Anyway, to get back on track. Chan works through a number of issues and brings it all home in the last chapter by broadening the question to be more than just about Hell. After he shows the various views of hell, and the passages of Scripture that support or debunk them, he moves on to challenge the reader to look at the rest of scripture and see what other areas there are where we believe things just because we don’t want to necessarily admit the simple truths of Scripture.

All in all I don’t know that this is a must-read for most of you, but it was interesting.