The Real Roots of the Emergent Church Documentary — Elliott Nesch

The word emergence was that it's used in the emergent growth, a little thing that's just grow, this very well could be, this growth will grow up and will become the treetops.

Churches are always looking for novel approaches to bring young people into the fold, but a brand new breed of church is pushing the envelope in a whole new way.

The emergent church, a loosely connected group of Christian churches rebelling against the cultural war going on in this country when it comes to religion. It's a confession that while I'm a Christian, church planting, Jesus loving, evangelizing kind of Christian, I have a problem, one that's only gotten worse, frankly, in my years of being a Christian.

And that is I just don't believe in Christianity anymore. So the emerging church to me seems to be the implication or the play out or the ramifications of emergence happening inside the church. But one of the movement's leaders says together as a whole, this new generation of churches has the power to change the way Christianity is practiced.

I look at us as an R &D department of people who are trying to innovate and experiment, make a lot of mistakes, I'm sure, but hopefully we'll discover things that can serve the church at large and be of use to the church at large.

Solomon's Porch is an emerging church that began six years ago in Minneapolis. Its pastor, Doug Padgett, was one of the early emergent leaders. The church meets in the round and has couches and recliners instead of pews.

The setting resembles a coffee house more than a church. Take one.

I don't know if you've seen one of these Jesus bobbleheads, but Jesus is becoming pretty popular out there in our culture and world kind of as an icon today.

Notions and ideas of this grand emergence that's happening in culture, that there's a great cultural shift that's going on, probably developing over the last 500 years, that that kind of shift has ramifications in ecclesiological structures or what would churches look like.

The emerging church is a place of conversation and dialogue and movement. Where that's going to go, we don't know. We're figuring this out together. We don't have an agenda of what it looks like at the end of the road.

We just want to gather up people on this road who want to go together on it. He's coming at it from a different angle, and I think that's revolutionary.

My name is Rob Bell. I'm a pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, not that far away from you. Some have called it a conversation. These are people who are wrestling with what, if it's a tag that refers to those who are serious about what I would argue is central to the Christian faith, which is the endless hard questioning of what does it mean to be the people of Jesus.

But now we're at the point where there's too many people in too many places that are fully engaging in this, that no one organization could capture all of it.

I was asked my perspective on what are the real roots of the emerging church. Well, there's several roots. There's a whole root system, and there's many tap roots.

The emerging church movement has triggered much excitement and controversy because of its growing popularity and influence in Christianity. Who are the leaders, and what are they teaching? Because diversity characterizes the emerging church movement, it is difficult to paint all of its leaders with a broad brush.

Well, the emerging church movement today has really changed, actually, in the last several years because there's been a lot of bump changes going on. Matter of fact, the word emergent is not being used as much as it used to be, and so we have to kind of define our terms.

Some have observed that defining the emerging church is like nailing Jell-O to a wall.

Many people have struggled to define the emerging church. A lot of people have defined it as, or have explained it as being like nailing Jell-O to a wall. This is because the emerging church is a lot of moving pieces.

They're constantly redefining themselves.

They're very hard to pin down on a doctrine. In fact, that's part of what they pride themselves in is mushiness and undefinability.

Emergent leaders say because the spectrum of their beliefs is so diverse, it's impossible to make sweeping judgments. Tony Jones, Emergent's new national coordinator, is not concerned by charges of theological sloppiness.

Is it more sloppy than what a systematic theology professor does? Sitting in his tenured chair, typing up a book on the doctrine of the atonement? Yeah, it's messier than that, but that's, I think, theology as it works itself out in the lives of human beings who are kind of scratching and clawing their way to try to follow Jesus on a daily basis.

It's a messy endeavor, and I embrace that messiness.

It is a movement that crosses a number of theological boundaries. Proponents of the emerging church emphasize its developing nature, vast range of beliefs, and its commitment to conversation.

I have a friend who suggests that rather than calling it the emerging church, we ought to call it the church emerging. I think it's good because the people who are involved in this conversation, the people who are involved in what people refer to as this movement, come from a wide background, Protestants and Catholics.

And in the Protestant field, it involves people who are Methodist and Presbyterian and Mennonite, a whole stream of Anabaptists, a whole stream of Reformers, people that come from contemporary churches and traditional churches.

It's not one little sliver of people. It seems to be people coming out of a whole variety of backgrounds who are having a common conversation about the goodness of the gospel in our world and what that can mean in our world.

The emerging church movement began several years ago as a conversation among evangelical Gen-X leaders who were alarmed at church dropout rates among 20s and 30s. About the same time, a pastor from Maryland, Brian McLaren, began writing about what he saw as a growing disillusionment with the way evangelical Christianity was being practiced.

All participants agree on their disillusionment with the institutional church, but do not all agree on where the church is destined to go from here.

A group of individuals who were really kind of frustrated with what they were seeing in the church, with the hypocrisy, with the religiosity of a lot of the present church.

They share a common concern with many evangelicals over the state of the modern church, especially the megachurch phenomenon and seeker-friendly churches.

With my emergent friends, emergent pastors that I know, and we've had debates and disagreements obviously over the years, there's one thing we do agree on, and that is the church does need to change.

For this reason, many evangelicals who observe the emerging church are fascinated by it, drawn to its creative approaches to worship, genuineness of many of the leaders, and the desire to reach Generation X.

Kind of the emerging church, which is a sort of a catch-all phrase for those younger churches and pastors that are trying to figure out how to do church in a postmodern world.

So I like to distinguish between the emergent movement and the emerging movement.

Emergent liberals, the lane that I was somewhat connected to and left, and I would say my problem with this team is not that they're trying to find innovative ways to do church, but they're also calling into question many Christian doctrines that should not be questioned, particularly by those who claim to be pastors.

This would include Brian McLaren, Doug Padgett, and Rob Bell, who also has a church called Mars Hill in no way affiliated with us.

The emerging movement, that's emergent movement, the emerging movement would, in many cases, like Driscoll for example, believe in strong doctrinal core. And they would teach the gospel, they would believe in the fundamentals of the faith.

These are people who believe all of the evangelical distinctives and are trying to find a way to make the church more relevant, accessible, culturally connected.

But they are willing to change certain methodologies in order to reach the postmodern young person. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's not so good, but that's the emerging movement. My bigger concern is the emergent movement.

Some people say emerging is one thing, emergent is something else. It doesn't matter. They're all the same. When we were at that conference with their 250 leaders, they alternately called their movement emerging, emergent.

They used it synonymously.

Call it what you want, the emerging church is having a big impact across denominational lines. But there are no easy labels. Participants have called themselves postmodern, post-conservative, post-liberal, post-evangelical, and post-Protestant.

Brian McLaren is the closest thing to a spokesperson for the movement. He recently appeared in Time Magazine's list of the 25 most influential evangelicals.

A few years ago, when Time Magazine decided to include me in its list of the top 25 evangelicals, a lot of evangelicals were very sure this was a mistake. First, that I would be included in the term evangelical at all, and second, that I would be considered influential in any way.

But I think my inclusion was an attempt to redress the problem that we're talking about today, the need to break media stereotypes that equate religious with conservative. I do come from an evangelical background, and perhaps of all backgrounds it is the most deserving of being associated with a conservative stereotype.

But I am an example of a growing shift from the monopoly of the religious right on a conservative ethos, and in fact I think I'm an example that that monologue and domination by the religious right is actually becoming a fact of history rather than contemporary news.

There's a character, his name is Rob Bell, and he's very popular in evangelical Christianity right now, mainly because of his NUMA videos. So he's gained a lot of credibility within the evangelical circles, because a lot of pastors use them and show these videos, they're about 10 minutes long.

A lot of youth pastors use them, so his name has gained a great deal of credibility, and he has about a 10 ,000 person church near Grand Rapids.

Bell, he's insidious, he's probably the best communicator they have in the entire merger movement. He's brilliant, he's articulate, he's interesting, he can communicate, and he just draws these people in.

Be careful. Be careful of people who grab a line from an interview with me and wave that one line around. What about this? He said this. People can write anything they want and they can be as unbelievably hurtful because the internet is a safe, anonymous place for cowards.

Some religious historians believe the emerging churches represent the next wave of evangelical worship after the boom in megachurches in the 1980s and 1990s.

In all honesty, I think most of those in the merger movement, whether it's Bell or McClain or Tony Jones, are probably really nice people. I believe they're sincere. I have friends in the movement that are sincere.

So my intention in addressing these things is to expose, not personally attack them, but to expose the things that they are believing and the things that they are teaching. And the reason that I have such a passion and I'm zealous for this is because eternity is at stake.

So they have candles and couches. What do we care? No, they're brainwashing your kids into believing a worldview that's not a Christian worldview. It's a pagan worldview.

If this can happen at my old church, Johnson's Ferry Baptist Church, now called Johnson's Ferry, but Bryant Wright, my old pastor, has been the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination other than Catholic, largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it can happen to any church anywhere.

At the heart of the emerging reformation is a perception of major changes in contemporary culture. Most emerging pleas for reformation in Christendom are rooted in their understandings of postmodernism.

Those within the movement generally believe that the modern church cannot connect with the postmodern mind and culture, so the emerging church conversation responds to the perceived influence of modernism in Western Christianity.

When we talk about the emerging church, we're talking about a group of people who are trying to meld syncretistically postmodern thought with Christianity. Stan Grenz writes,.

Just a few years ago, I was asked if I would write an emergent book, and why. I remember even my answer back was, do you know who you're asking that question to? In other words, it's basically the framework of postmodernism.

But the publishing industry has seen the success of these books. I mean, it's massively successful. The best-selling books in Christianity today would be termed by myself as emergent. Some of them are now not wanting that term, but they still are.

Is Mars Hill, the church that you pastor, is that an emerging church? We don't ever use that word,.

Because in our particular context, unnecessarily creating labels, that are you in, are you out, are you one of them or not, seems to work against the spirit of Jesus. A lot of times, what the appeal is, when someone is talking from a postmodern mindset, is they say, well, what we have is we have postmodernism and we have modernism.

Modernism meaning just sort of a calcification of thought. Everything has to be logical and everything is reasonable, but it doesn't have any spirit. It doesn't have any of the mystical dimensions of God.

It's all Gnosticism. Well, yeah, I would disagree with that too. Christianity isn't Gnosticism, but it's also not whatever this newfangled thing is, which is postmodern.

Emergent leaders addressed the issue of truth in their official response to critics,. We would like to clarify, contrary to statements and inferences made by some, that yes, we truly believe there is such a thing as truth, and truth matters.

If we did not believe this, we would have no good reason to write or speak. No, we are not moral or epistemological relativists, any more than anyone or any community is who takes hermeneutical positions.

We believe that radical relativism is absurd and dangerous, as is arrogant absolutism.

On one hand, the emergent church will affirm truth, but in their truth claims, they deny absolute truth. The number one virtue in postmodernism is tolerance, or having an open mind. It's true for you, but not true for me.

So, that's not compatible with Christianity that says Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.

The postmodern young person did not grow up with a sense of truth as an absolute. And therefore, when it comes to the gospel, where Jesus claims to be the way, the truth and the life, in John 14, 6, then how do we reach such a person with the gospel, when they've actually rejected truth?

To the postmodern, truth is subjective, and therefore, relative.

A postmodern mind can allow for contradictory ideas to remain. Buddha is valid, Muhammad is valid, and Jesus is the only way. How does that work? What it leads to is mush. That's what it is. There's nothing solid and concrete.

The rock is removed. And what is ironic about that is error, like cancer, always wins over white blood cells. In other words, you can have the health there. It can come in. But as long as cancer remains unabated and untended and unfought, it ultimately rots the body.

And that's what happens in the soul of a man who does not take Jesus as the exclusive truth and allow it to push out all that's erroneous. And so postmodernism is a bait for the church to say, no, you can be a Buddhist and a Christian as well.

McLaren has actually made that as a very clear statement. You don't have to call yourself a Christian, but you could be a Buddhist who has some kind of relationship with Jesus Christ. And so it's not mutually exclusive.

It's postmodern, which allows us to have error and truth cohabitate under the banner of truth.

So I see the emergent church as this movement that is undermining the fundamentals of the faith in an attempt to reach a generation, a postmodern generation. But in doing so, they're removing the core of truth, the core of the gospel, and replacing it with mystery and ultimately mysticism.

And we'll talk about mysticism a little later on.

In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell quotes the Hollywood actor Sean Penn and calls him one of the greatest theologians of our time who says, the mystery is the truth. Doug Padgett says, Mystery is not the enemy to be conquered, nor a problem to be solved, but rather the partner with whom we dance.

And dance we must. The call for the post-evangelical community is to dance and play the music. We are also called to show each other the way into mystery. We would certainly be under-providing if we didn't offer new ways to enter and live in mystery.

So across the board, the emergent church embraces mystery and ambiguity over clarity.

This is the funny thing that's happened in Christianity, and that's why I call it, in my book Brave Heart of Gospel, I call it Vogue Doubt, Hip Doubt. It's actually cool to show doubt towards scripture.

Questioning and doubt become the highest form of knowing. When the Bible says without faith it's impossible to please God. For me it's a daily, daily, I wonder if this whole thing is a total crock. Daily, I think, is there really a God?

Is my whole life based on a hoax? Every day I make a decision to go one day more. I mean really, I'm agnostic in that sense, in that I, every day I don't know.

So do I believe in God? Most of the time I don't believe in God. I want to. They advocate wrestling with traditional understandings of the faith rather than accepting pat answers. It's more important for us to feel like we are representing a beautiful expression of our life with God than it is to be right about everything.

Many of these emergent voices are less certain of their theological ideas, and this appeals to a generation that is given to dialogue and to discussion and to conversation and not making firm judgments about people.

In some cases, McKnight says, they are challenging deeply held views. They're asking questions about how we should understand our relationship to scripture. Is it inherent? Is it true? They're asking questions about what we should believe about the afterlife.

Where I would compliment the emergent church with what they are doing as far as asking good questions. They're really good questions, but they're not going to the word of God to find their answers. And so that would be my concern with it.

But however, they are bringing up good issues for the modern church to begin to wrestle with.

Emergent leaders want to affirm the supremacy of the Bible. For instance, McLaren says that the generous orthodoxy affirms that scripture itself remains above creeds and that the Holy Spirit may use scripture to tweak creedal understandings and emphasis from time to time.

One of the unique features of the emergent church is their view of scripture. Scripture is something we embrace, we love as a people of God. The people in the emergent movement would not deny scripture.

They would use scripture in their books, they would talk about scripture. But they give different twists to it that are very important. For example, Bell says in reaction to abuses by the church, a group of believers during the time called the Reformation claimed that we only need the authority of the Bible.

But the problem is that we got the Bible from the church voting on what the Bible even is. That kind of shows the lack of respect for the scriptures. His idea is that, you know, we got this Bible here, we'll study it, we'll find principles in it.

But the authority of scripture and even the inspiration of scripture is often called under attack by these folks and they question it quite often.

Rob Bell in The Velvet Elvis says this, and I quote, Is the Bible the best that God can do? With God being so massive and awe-inspiring and full of truth, why is this book capable of so much confusion?

End quote. In fact, on pages 28, 29, right around there in Bell's book The Velvet Elvis, it kind of gives not only just his view on the weakness on his conviction on who Jesus is, but also it is revealing as to how he views scripture.

After reading what he said in his Velvet Elvis book, that if they found that Jesus had an earthly human father named Larry, that that was Jesus' biological father, that it wouldn't affect his faith whatsoever.

He says basically that Christians ought to be ready to find things out, like, you know, maybe Jesus really wasn't the son of God. Maybe he was the son of a man named Larry. He just wasn't virgin born.

He was not really the son of God. We find this out from, like, DNA evidence and we find out that, you know, he's basically the product of Christians snatching mythologies from the Dionysian and Mithraic cults and what have you.

Luke was just fudging to compete with Mithraism or some other pagan deities and the origins thereof, you know, by fudging on the virgin birth and Mary, that it wouldn't bother him.

When you hear someone talk like that and you realize that they could hold their faith so-called, if those things aren't true, you start to see what their faith is really made of. It's not built upon Jesus Christ as the, you know, God in the flesh, the God-man.

They obviously aren't holding to the authority of scripture.

Brian McLaren makes the pitch that the Bible is a narrative, and it's one of his classic words, and that it is written by men. And it's like, yeah, that's true. And he says, oh, so Eric, are you actually saying that the Bible wasn't written by men?

You're saying it's the word of God? No, it is written by men. I agree with that, Brian. And then he's saying, okay, well, what's the discussion then? It's written by men. It's a book written by men. It's a good book, Eric.

It's a good book. It's a good book of morals and ideals. God endorses it. No. God writes and carries along these writers by his spirit to write precisely what is on his heart. We believe that the Bible is written by men, but 100 God.

Now, a Christian who has studied good theology and has built a framework of who Jesus Christ is should see a tandem there. We believe that it is written by men, but 100 God. Who is Jesus? We believe that he was 100 man.

However, he was 100 God. He's the Word of God made flesh. The same mystery of the Word of God is revealed in him. And so when you begin to break that apart, and you begin to separate the divinity from Jesus Christ, now you just have a mere man who is a good prophet, a good moral teacher.

You lose the substance of the victory of the cross. You can't touch that. You can't touch his virgin birth. Why? Because not only would it defeat his credibility as the Messiah, because he had to be born of a virgin, which is huge, but then it removes his divinity.

He was conceived of by the Holy Spirit. This is no accident. This is no small thing that the liberal church will come after. So, if you begin to trounce upon the divinity of the Word of God, suddenly you can do whatever you want with it.

Rob Bell explains how communities can make new interpretations of the Bible. He comments, Notice what Jesus says in the book of Matthew, I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

What he is doing here is significant. He is giving his followers the authority to make new interpretations of the Bible. He is giving them permission to say, Hey, we think we missed it before on that verse, and we've recently come to the conclusion that this is what it actually means.

If we take Jesus seriously and actually see it as our responsibility to bind and loose, the implications are endless, serious and exhilarating. The Bible is a communal book.

We have, what he terms, the keys to the kingdom, to stick into truth and turn it and unlock a new definition in our day and age. Am I the only one that's uncomfortable with this?

This is something that Jesus said to the apostles. The Greek form of the verbs for bound and loosed is helpful. It's in the perfect passive participle, which should read, Whatsoever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven.

Whatsoever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven. It's not that new generations can make new interpretations of the Bible. Rather, the apostles bound on earth what was already bound in heaven through the writing of scripture.

It says the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. We don't have the authority to make new interpretations of the Bible. The scripture is the authority from generation to generation.

You know, Christians have had problems with popery, you know, Catholic popery, because the pope is above the word of God. This is the reason why Protestant Christians throughout the ages have had a problem with Catholicism, is, hey, the pope needs to submit to the word of God.

Someone has to be the canon, has to be the defining measure and rule. And it can't be a man. It must be the word of God. And so when we see the pope above the word of God, it creates an outcry. Well, guess what's happened?

Postmodern Christianity, the emergent movement, is putting men and women above the word of God, saying we have a key and at any point in time we can inject it into the word of God and make it say whatever we want it to say.

What you're left with is truth that can only be experienced emotionally and mystically as you are in unity and community.

In Rob Bell's bullhorn video, if you've seen it, in the beginning of the video he's talking about going out with some friends and they hear this guy on a bullhorn and he's talking about sin and hell and judgment and if I die, if I die tonight, then I might go to hell.

And then he talks about Jesus.

So I'm going to see a band with my friends and we're walking into the venue and up ahead on the sidewalk out front is this guy, he's got one of those bullhorns and he's yelling all this stuff and at first I can't hear what he's saying but as I get closer I hear the words sin and burn and hell and repent and then I hear the word Jesus.

He's got all these pamphlets and he's quoting these Bible verses about the anger and wrath of God and how if I don't repent I'm going to pay for it for eternity and how I might die, I might die tonight, this might be my only chance and then I might spend forever in misery as I burn in hell.

Bell kind of makes this equation that sin and hell and judgment should not be associated with Jesus. And I find that amazing because just if you look in the Gospels alone, there's over 46 references or 46 verses where Jesus himself talks about hell and warns of hell and refers to hell.

I don't think it's what Jesus had in mind.

And see, bullhorn guy, it's confusing for my friends and I because some are Christians and some aren't but we just don't get it. We just don't understand about all the condemning and the converting. We don't understand what it has to do with Jesus' message.

Matter of fact, if you took everyone in the Scripture and put them together on what they said about hell, Jesus said more than all those put together.

In an interview with Todd Friel on Way of the Master Radio, emerging leader Doug Padgett tells listeners his position on hell.

Do you think that there's an eternal damnation for people who are not Christians?

Yeah, well, I think that there's all kinds of... I mean, the damnation would sort of be that there's parts of life and creation that seem to be counter to what God is doing and those are the things that are eliminated, removed, and done away with.

And so I think that's what damnation is. And so there's people who want to live out that kind of... who want to have that good judgment, the judgment of God in their life. I mean, you know, judgment in a biblical sense.

That God remakes the world. Doug, hold on a second. I have no idea what you just said. Here's what I think hell is. Eternal damnation. God sends lawbreakers to a place where there's weeping, there's gnashing of teeth, a lake of sulfur, the worm never dies.

Eternal conscious torment. Agree or disagree?

Disagree. What do you think hell is? I think hell is disconnection and disintegration with God. I agree with that also. And I have no idea what you mean, you know, what those... Those sound like... Those sound much more like metaphors than they do like actuality.

But I don't know. Well, those are the words that Jesus used to describe hell.

Oh, I know. Oh, yeah, I know. Yes, I know. Okay. But Jesus didn't use them in a string like that. So you just pulled a bunch of words and Jesus strung them together in your own way.

It's called systematic theology. Doug, I'm a good Buddhist. Do I get to go to heaven or hell? Doug, I'm a good Buddhist. Where do I go when I die?

Are you suggesting to me that heaven is actually a place? When you say where do I go, you're suggesting to me that the reign of God, that the place of God is an individual place that you go? Is that what you're suggesting?

Yes, sir.

Well, where is that place? It's called heaven. Where is it? We don't know where it is exactly right now.

Then why would you ask a question where do I go?

Just because I don't know where it is doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Then why do you ask where? This is the core of Christianity. This is no-brainer land, sir. It doesn't take a rocket scientist Christian to look at Scripture and know that there's a place called hell.

It's a place and it's called hell. You have someone like Doug Padgett. He gets up in arms at the notion of it being called a place. It's a concept. And even that, everything he says, it's not a place or a destination.

It's the undiscomfort that we may feel in not being loving here on earth. And so we feel hell. It's so bizarre and so utterly ridiculous, but what it does is it takes the word of God and literally spits on it.

Because it's saying you cannot be understood, word of God. You are confusing and we want to take from this what we feel would define our reality. We don't want there to be a place called hell.

It is not no-brainer land. It's a non-equator.

I'm a good Muslim. Where do you think I go, pastor?

Where do I go? See, here we go again.

Now you're talking about a place. What happens to my soul when I die?

In a podcast interview with Leif Hansen, Brian McLaren presents what he calls one of the huge problems with the traditional understanding of hell. He questions the idea of God sending his son to die on the cross, calling it false advertising and divine child abuse.

So this is one of the huge problems with the traditional understanding of hell. Because if the cross is in line with Jesus' teaching, then I won't say the only, and I certainly won't say the, or even the primary, but a primary meaning of the cross is that the kingdom of God doesn't come like the kingdoms of this world by inflicting violence and coercing people.

But that the kingdom of God comes through suffering and willing, voluntary sacrifice, right? But in an ironic way, the doctrine of hell basically says no, but that's not really true. At the end, God gets his way through coercion and violence and intimidation and domination, just like every other kingdom does.

The cross isn't the center then. The cross is almost a distraction and false advertising for God.

Brian McLaren is one who has made statements about, you know, not being really a literal hell. One of the things he said was this, in an interview with him, and he was referring to Tony Campolo, he said this, Tony Campolo and I might disagree on the details, but I think we are both trying to find an alternative to both traditional universalism, in other words, when everybody's saved, and the narrow exclusivist understanding of hell, that unless you explicitly accept and follow Jesus, you are excluded from eternal life with God and destined for hell.

Brian McLaren says, We should consider the possibility that many, and perhaps even all, of Jesus' hellfire and end-of-the-universe statements refer not to post-mortem judgment, but to the very historic consequences of rejecting his kingdom message of reconciliation and peacemaking.

The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 67 -70 seems to many people to fulfill much of what we have traditionally understood as hell. Rob Bell makes similar statements in his books about hell, and by doing so, the emergents dismiss all the passages on hell and suggest that hell, or Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, was merely this garbage dump outside of Jerusalem that bodies were thrown into in the Roman siege against Jerusalem.

But that doesn't account for Jesus speaking of hell as being everlasting, eternal, post-mortem even. He said that, Do not fear them that after killing the body have no more they can do, but fear him who after having killed can cast into hell.

This is speaking of post-mortem judgment, and cannot refer merely to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Rob Bell in his book, Sex God, which the title in and of itself is, I find, pretty disturbing. But even within his book there, he talks about heaven and hell. And the way he explains it is this, When I do good to you, I'm bringing heaven to earth.

When I do bad to you, then I'm bringing hell to earth.

Will only a few select people make it to heaven? And will billions and billions of people burn forever in hell? And if that's the case, how do you become one of the few? Is it what you believe, or what you say, or what you do, or who you know, or something that happens in your heart?