Just days after word broke that Rob Bell, author of the best-selling and controversial book Love Wins, which challenges the Christian teaching of Hell, came out in support of the homosexual lifestyle, Bell has reiterated his beliefs to the media.
This week, Odyssey Networks posted a video interview with Bell, during which he further outlined his stance, stating that he believes that the push for homosexual “marriage” is actually a move of God.
“What we’re seeing right now in this day, I believe, [is] God pulling us ahead into greater and greater affirmation and acceptance of our gay brothers and sisters and pastors and friends and neighbors and co-workers,” Bell asserted. “And we’re realizing that God made some of us one way and some of us another.”
“A lot of people when they say, ‘By God [pulling us] ahead, do you mean like same sex marriage?’ Yes,” he continued. “[W]e live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles — people we’ve journeyed with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems we have in the world.”
Bell contended that homosexual relationships should be affirmed because the world is in need of love.
“I think that’s one of the things you’re seeing right now is, you are seeing God pulling us all forward into a greater realization that we need more love. We need more fidelity. We need more monogamy. We need more people who are committed to each other,” he explained. “It’s not good for us to be alone.”
The former pastor then opined that the “old way” of handling the issue of homosexuality is faulty.
“I think lots of us are realizing the old way of seeing things doesn’t work. It causes so much pain and heartache,” Bell said. “And God’s inviting us to see things in new ways. And we need to say yes, and then we need to step into the future together.”
As previously reported, Bell announced last Sunday while speaking at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco that he supported same-sex “marriage.”
“I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it’s a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man,” he said. “I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs — I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.”
Bell opined that many evangelicals can no longer be classified as conservatives because their beliefs have changed with the times.
“I think we are witnessing the death of a particular subculture that doesn’t work,” he asserted. “I think there is a very narrow, politically intertwined, culturally ghettoized, evangelical subculture that was told ‘we’re gonna change the thing’ and they haven’t. And they actually have turned away lots of people.”
“And I think that when you’re in a part of a subculture that is dying, you make a lot more noise because it’s very painful. You sort of die or you adapt,” Bell continued. “And if you adapt, it means you have to come face to face with some of the ways we’ve talked about God, which don’t actually shape people into more loving, compassionate people. And we have supported policies and ways of viewing the world that are actually destructive. And we’ve done it in the name of God and we need to repent.”
Many have expressed concern since the news of Bell’s comments.
“Plain and simple, Rob Bell’s teachings are not true to the words of Scripture,” Eric Ludy, pastor of Church at Ellerslie and president of Ellerslie Mission Society in Windsor, Colorado told Christian News Network. “They are a sly attempt at blending the philosophies of our post-modern age with the vernacular of pop-Christianity. The end product is highly dangerous to the human soul because it is the forging of a golden calf god — a God of our culture’s making — and certainly not the God of the Bible.”
“The God of the Bible doesn’t change. His opinions don’t change. There is no shadow of turning in Him nor in His Scripture,” he said. “We cannot pander after the approval of the culture; we have to stand on the Scriptures just as they were written.”
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