What's Your Take on This Rob Bell Kerfuffle?

 
So I've got no opinion about Rob Bell's minstry one way or the other, apart from, of course, being happy for whatever good comes out of it.  (And a kajillion people can't be entirely wrong, can they?)  But I'm not the age he's targeting.  I don't have the religious background that, if I'm reading his ministry, he seems to be targeting.  I read Velvet Elvis and it struck me as fine but unremarkable.  So I'm pretty much just aware that he exists and little more than that.

But, as DB Beem points out, he seems to have found (or "to have orchestrated?") a big controversy this week with his new book that's led a couple of stern, big-name conservative Christian leaders to condemn him to the eternal fire.  I don't have it in me to sympathize with stern, big-name, conservative Christian leaders who have a hair-trigger instinct to condemn other Christian leaders to the eternal fire, so that leads me to my own knee-jerk support of Rob Bell, even as I know nothing about him.  But I wonder what your thoughts are on the current controversy.

I'll repost DB Beem's comments, which include a link to a summary of the controversy.

 I know that Dave’s question regarding liberalism and a centered set approach was heading in a different direction, but I couldn’t help but notice the recent controversy over Rob Bell’s upcoming book on heaven and hell, entitled “Love Wins.”

To get an overview on the controversy go here:
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2011/02/rob_bells_book.html

The book is basically about hell and whether a good and loving God could send people to hell. Without going into all the details and the arguments for/against and in between, it has become a huge “kerfuffle” (one of my favorite words) and thousands have tweeted on it. The book hasn’t been released yet, but based on some advance chapters, and a promotional video from Rob Bell, Justin Taylor of Crossway wrote a blog highly critical of Bell, which accused him of possibly being a Universalist. Others have written even more critical blog.

Personally, I would agree with Scot McKnight who came somewhere in the middle of the discussion, and said that we should be temperate in our response, because the actual book has not been released yet, and everyone is basing their opinions on partial knowledge. Scot also sagely remarked that Bell's publisher is doing a great job of creating a controversy that will sell books. As far as I’m concerned, many of the arguments against Bell strike me as Stage 2 at its harshest. The whole debate just reflects so poorly on Christians because, it’s so unkind and mean-spirited.

Anyway, to me the discussion over Rob Bell seemed to me to be a case study for the whole closed set/centered set, stage theory discussion. I have some more thoughts the matter, but the casserole is still in the oven.

What are your thoughts?