"Love Wins," a new book by prominent evangelical pastor Rob Bell, was creating controversy weeks before it was released on March 15, for its non-traditional proposals about eternal salvation and God's judgment. Now, Catholic and evangelical voices are calling for clarity in discussing the issues it raises.

While the book raises more questions than it answers, some reviewers have interpreted it as an argument for universal salvation, a position most evangelicals would regard as not biblical. Bell also suggests that there could be an opportunity for faith and repentance after death, and that God's condemnation of some individuals may not be final.

The Catholic Church denies the possibility of either post-mortem repentance or a temporary hell, and most Catholic theologians have regarded universal salvation as an impossibility. Pope John Paul II wrote that the "silence of the Church" was "the only appropriate position" on the question of whether any particular person was saved or lost.

Bell also speculates that some non-Christians may reach salvation through a type of implicit or unconscious relationship to Christ. The Catholic Church accepts this notion as a possibility, in instances where individuals have failed to receive the Gospel message by no fault of their own.

John Michael Talbot, a Catholic recording artist with close ties to the evangelical world, told CNA that all Christians must be careful in approaching the subject of death, judgment, and the afterlife - particularly those who rely upon "scripture alone," without the Church's definitive teaching authority. But Talbot said Bell, and other like-minded evangelicals, "lack the full set of tools to find those deeper answers" - which Catholics are given through  "sacred scripture, apostolic tradition, and the magisterium, or teaching authority, of the church."

Talbot said that the Catholic understanding of salvation portrays God's character more accurately than the common Evangelical teaching that assumes all non-Christians are damned.

"Love Wins" also contains a passage in which Bell expresses anxiety for the fate of those who die suddenly and unexpectedly, without having become Christians.  He indicates that the notion of an immediate and final judgment after death makes God turn from "kind and compassionate" to "cruel and relentless, in the blink of an eye."