Short Take: Who is Jen Hatmaker and talk about influence of Richard Rohr.

Talk about Brandon, who Jen Hatmaker is, and especially Richard Rohr, and why he's been such a influential person amongst progressive Christians. So Jen Hatmaker is a popular progressive author, blogger. She's got a podcast called For the Love. I think she was also on HGTV a few times. In 2016, there was a news story about how she basically said homosexuality wasn't a sin and that we should include LGBT into Christianity.

And in response to that, LifeWay, the SBC's Christian bookstore, removed her books. In that clip, she calls Richard Rohr her spiritual father. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar. He's a Catholic. They call him one of the most popular spiritual authors and speakers in the world. He's been on Oprah a few times, and a lot of people in the progressive movement consider him their spiritual father, or they've been influenced by him.

Rob Bell is a big name. He teaches, as you mentioned, universalism, that everyone will be saved. He denies the existence of hell. He's a perennialist, which means that all religions, even though they outwardly look different, they all share a single core divine truth that's the same across all religions.

He denies original sin, and as you brought up, his main, and I would say most serious error, is his understanding of Jesus Christ. He separates Christ from Jesus, so the historical Jesus is different from what he would call the cosmic or universal Christ. He believes that at the Big Bang, that that was the birth of the Christ, that Christ is actually another name for everything. Everything in the universe, anything that's physical that we can see, can be called Christ.

This cosmic Christ is bigger than Jesus. I just want to read this quote from his website where he describes Christ as a kite, and I think this kind of helps you understand what he's trying to do. He says, If Christ is the kite, Jesus is the person flying the kite and keeping it from escaping away into invisibility. If Jesus is the person holding the string, Christ is the great banner in the sky from whom all can draw life, even if they do not recognize the one flying the kite. So essentially, he's saying that you can recognize Christ without acknowledging or even knowing who Jesus is. He believes there's really no atonement necessary, that everyone is already in Christ, so we don't need to be reconciled to God. In that sense, that's kind of his logic and where his universalism comes from.