J. Webb Mealy's Bad Place: Or, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Hell, But Were Afraid to Ask is a book I so wanted to read and enjoy. The thesis of the book is one with which I agree: Christians have so misunderstood the New Testament notion of "hell" as "eternal conscious post-mortem punishment", a notion that requires a drastic re-reading from the biblical text in order to sort out. What I found in this book, though, is a clear thesis -- a correct thesis -- in search of a depth of scholarly treatment. There just simply isn't much to this book.
The writing is mediocre. The conclusions are overdrawn from the evidence presented. Too often the author stacks the deck in favor of his own conclusions without the clear evidence to support those conclusions. This is sad, because I think the evidence is there in the biblical text.
What this book ultimately needs, then, is a much better editor, to help the author say more clearly, more forcefully, in a more focused way, the kinds of things that need to be said in order for this to be a book worthy of the reader's time.
There are just too many other works out there that make this argument so much better than The Bad Place.
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I received this book in exchange for my honest review here.