Religious Rebuttal: Southern Baptists Resolve That Hell Is Real
At their convention in Phoenix this past week, Southern Baptists issued a resolution asserting their “belief in the biblical teaching on eternal, conscious punishment of the unregenerate in Hell.” … Or, as the resolution’s title succinctly puts it, “On The Reality Of Hell.”
The document’s raison d’etre is cited in its very first line: Evangelical pastor Rob Bell’s best-seller, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, “called into question the church’s historical teaching on the doctrine of eternal punishment of the unregenerate.” The Southern Baptists didn’t exactly like the book.
Their resolution hardly came out of the blue. In April, Jon Meacham explored the controversy surrounding Bell in TIME’s cover story, “What If There’s No Hell?” He quoted R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, as saying that Love Wins is “theologically disastrous. Any of us should be concerned when a matter of theological importance is played with in a subversive way.”
