Rob Bell is a pastor, speaker and author. Opinions on Bell vary throughout the evangelical community. To some, he is a revolutionary and engaging presence, a new Billy Graham for a new generation.

To others, he's a heretical hipster, a charlatan whose message is heavy on social justice but seemingly light on Christ.

Personally, I find a lot of value in Bell's writing - even if I don't always agree with him. In fact, one of the reasons I respect him is because he's the first to admit that he doesn't have all of the answers, that he's just adding his thoughts to a discussion that has been ongoing for centuries.

I think Bell sums it up nicely in his book Velvet Elvis:

Test it. Probe it. Do that to this book.

Don't swallow it uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it.

Just because I'm a Christian and I'm trying to articulate a Christian worldview doesn't mean I've got it nailed. I'm contributing to the discussion. God has spoken, and the rest is commentary, right?

I find this attitude refreshing.

And Bell certainly has his critics. Consider the following excerpt, again from Velvet Elvis, in which Bell posits a hypothetical situation to examine the relationship between faith and doctrine:

What if tomorrow someone came up with definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if as you study the origin of the word virgin, you discover that the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word virgin could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being "born of a virgin" also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse?

Could a person still love God...Could you still be a Christian?

Or does the whole thing fall apart?

Before I get a bunch of comments decrying the idea presented above, I'd like to point out that at no time does Bell insist that he has any reason to think this is true. In fact, he goes on to point out that he personally affirms the historic Christian faith and the virgin birth presented in the Gospels. He's merely trying to make a point, and he raises some good questions (the subtlety of which is apparently lost on folks like http://hankhanegraaff.blogspot.com/">Hank Hanegraaff of the Christian Research Institute, who has been very vocal in speaking out against Bell):

How strong is your faith if it falls apart when a core doctrine is thrown into doubt? At what point does it become more about doctrine and less about faith?