Quotes from Rob Bell

I think that grace and love always rattle people.

God gives us what we want. For people who want nothing to do with peace, joy, reconciliation and peace... God will give you what you want. I see people make unbelievably destructive choices.

I get ideas about things I want to make and then I throw myself into it with everything I have.

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.

We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.

My parents were both very intellectually honest, straightforward, and for them, faith meant that you were fully engaged.

The cross is Gods way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments.

It's as if Thomas Kinkade and Dante were at a party, and one turned to the other sometime after midnight and uttered that classic line "You know, we really should work together sometime.

The joy is in the creation. So I've never had a target audience, it's always been about being true to the work as it emerges.

When we get to what happens when we die, we don't have any video footage. So let's at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are.

The myth of redemptive violence - Caesar, peace, and victory - is in people's bones so deeply, we aren't even aware of it. You crush the opposition; that's how we bring peace.

If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.

My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.

Well, I affirm orthodox Christian faith. I affirm the Nicene Creed. I don't think I'm doing anything terribly new.

If your faith is threatened by something that's true, then it wasn't much of a faith to begin with, was it?

Faith can take many different forms and expressions.

You can be living in a big house, driving a nice car, going on exotic vacations and still be empty inside, crippled with fear and dread.

We can choose the way of compassion, the way of forgiveness, the way of generosity. Or we can choose other paths and those have very real consequences in the world. This is absolutely crucial.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

When someone sets out to be controversial or provocative or shocking as an end in itself, I don't think that's a noble goal.