Dear Rob Bell

From Scott Hoezee

Dear Rob: Please don't think I'm being snarky posting an open letter to you.  But the issues you've raised over the last year or so remain vital, and an incident yesterday powerfully put me in mind to review a part of the wider conversations surrounding your recent work on heaven and hell.   So permit me a few musings, not at your expense I hope but in dialogue with a topic in which you've engaged so many people.

Yesterday I made the mistake of clicking on an embedded link on a CNN newspage about the massacre in a Syrian village Saturday. The link took me to a 2-minute silent video.  The footage toured the house of a family that had been slaughtered. It began grimly enough with a scene of 3 adults lying in pools of blood in a corridor.   But then the camera panned into a bedroom where two little boys--perhaps 8 and 9 years old--were facedown on their beds, each with two bullet holes through their temples. The brains of the one child were spilling out the exit wound on the back of his head. Then we saw a little girl, perhaps 4, lying on her back in the kitchen her soft brown tresses looking like they had been lovingly brushed by her mother not long ago.  She might have been asleep with her mouth slighltly parted. But the dark and clotted blood that had dried and caked around her little right ear told the true tale.

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