There are a number of things in the writings of C. S. Lewis that should positively baffle most Christians. Take the final book of the Chronicles of Narnia, titled The Last Battle. In chapter 13, the heroes of the story metaphorically "go to Heaven" by being forced through the door of a stable (which is obviously a reference to the stable in which Jesus was born). Some of the "villains" of the story go through the door too, a bunch of dwarves who have consciously decided to reject the Lordship of the Christ-figure of the books, Aslan. They all, heroes and dwarves alike, wind up in a beautiful place with blue sky, refreshing summer breezes, delicious fruit growing on the trees, and reunions with loved ones. The heroes of the story love it, but the dwarves hate it; they are so determined that they know the nature of the inside of the stable that they refuse to see the reality inside. They imagine a place of discomfort and punishment, when actually they are in a place comfort and plenty. The implication would seem to be that even if someone rejects Christ, he still goes to Heaven... he just doesn't know he did. A chapter or two later, a Calormene (a member of a country that is the sworn enemy of Narnia) who spent his life serving Tash (the Satan figure in The Last Battle) gets into Heaven because Aslan has accepted his service to Tash, thinking Tash was the good true God, as service to Aslan. If you told most Christians that you thought that people who had rejected their former religion would go to Heaven anyway but not know that they were in Heaven, or that a Muslim who served Allah with all of his heart would go to the Christian Heaven because Jesus would accept his heart toward Allah as a heart toward God, they would say you were nuts, but that's what Lewis is implying in the book.
In a different story C. S. Lewis wrote called "The Great Divorce," the characters, who we eventually learn are deceased, begin as residents of Hell, but they take a ride on a bus to Heaven where they are given a chance to become full-fledged citizens. Most of them decline the invitation, and go back to Hell. Hell in this story is not a traditional flames-and-pitchforks place, but a dreary, boring, rainy kind of place. What? No fire in Hell? People leaving Hell and given a chance to repent and go to Heaven after they've died? This from the author who wrote Mere Christianity, one of the clearest articulations of the Christian faith ever written? Scandalous!
I don't think, based on what I've learned over the years about the life of C. S. Lewis, that it registered to the readers of his time what he was saying in his stories. Either that, or those kinds of views were much more mainstream in Christianity then than they are now. So C. S. Lewis probably never reaped the benefits of the sensationalized marketing that seems to surround each new Rob Bell book. I wonder if all those people who wrote all those scathing debunkings of his new book, Love Wins, before it even came out realize that all they were doing was raising interest in the book? I know several people (myself included) who might never have read it except for the controversy surrounding it. I'm glad I did pick it up, though. It gave me a lot to think about.
The Bible is a book about God and His pursuit of man, based on His love for mankind. For that reason, some things are left very ambiguous. Take the origins of the universe and mankind, for example. The Bible, not being a science book, does not explicitly confirm or debunk the Big Bang, evolution, the age of planet Earth, or many other things that scores of extremely smart human beings have spent their lives trying to figure out. God (or Moses, who scholars believe wrote Genesis, if you want to get picky) apparently wasn't that concerned with those details; the point is that God caused the world to exist and God caused people to exist, but people tried to do things their own way and they wound up in a pickle because of it. The ultimate fate of mankind is another thing that the Bible doesn't have as much to say about as we would like. Despite what some may think, the Bible doesn't say that the human race will sit on clouds in Heaven and play harps forever.
In fact, the Bible doesn't say that human beings will live forever in Heaven at all. Check the end of the book of Revelation: the human race doesn't wind up in Heaven. The human race winds up on Earth. It indicates that there will be an end to this world, God's people will be saved from destruction personally by Jesus Himself, there will be a thousand years of peace, and then... it doesn't say much about the time after that, other than that we will be on Earth (obviously a "new" Earth, one with some qualities that set it apart from the current Earth, but Earth nonetheless) and that God will be in charge through Jesus. The idea that Christians will spend forever someplace in the sky is the kind of misconception that Rob Bell takes on in the book.
But let's back the truck up here. Let's talk about the things that people have said that Bell says in the book, but which he does not actually say.
Rob Bell does not say in this book that Hell does not exist. He pretty clearly says that Hell does exist. In fact, he extends the concept of Hell from the time after death into this lifetime. Ever hear someone call something "Hell on Earth?" Ever hear about something happening with qualities that are so horrible that it qualifies for the description "hellish?" He extends the concept of Hell to those before-death situations, but he also affirms the existence of a Hell after death, flames and all.
Bell does not say that everyone will go to Heaven. In fact, he affirms that some will go to Hell, and that it will be because of their own choices that they do.
What Bell does do is challenge the cut-and-dried concepts of Heaven as a place in the sky where people play harps forever, and Hell as a place under the ground somewhere where people burn in anguish forever. Bell seems to characterize "Hell" more as the torment that a human being feels when he has chosen to reject God than as a specific place, although he does discuss Jesus' story of "the rich man and Lazarus," which indicates that the two of them are physically in two different places, at some length. Essentially, Bell seems to indicate that the "punishment" of the flames of Hell is not there to callously torment people forever, but to "punish" them in the sense of purifying them and teaching them that there is something wrong about them that needs to be corrected. He also contends that the word "eternal" (as in "eternal punishment"), based on the meanings present in the source Greek word, most likely refers to the intensity of the experience rather than the time span in which it occurs. So when an uncomfortable experience for you seems to take "an eternity," that's the sense he postulates. So perhaps the "eternal punishment" of Hell is not burning forever with no end at all to the punishment, but an experience which, no matter how long it actually lasts, is a very intense lesson in "right" and "wrong." The fire which the Bible says in several places will try the works of believers is in mind here, the "wood hay and stubble" fire. Maybe the same fire that burns away those things and leaves the gold of works done by believers by the Spirit of God - maybe that same fire will be applied to unbelievers, and likewise purify them.
Bell doesn't even contend that people will get out of Hell immediately... actually, he doesn't say that they will definitely get out at all. He seems to be saying that the purifying process will last as long as it takes for them to let go of anything they are holding onto which is anti-God. After they have been purified, presumably they will be able to join in the afterlife God had wanted for them all along. Presumably they'll get to take C. S. Lewis' "bus ride to Heaven" at that point. Whether or not anyone will be stubborn enough to stay in the flames forever or not is a question Bell does not address.
There are a number of things Bell doesn't address directly in the book, although you can infer some of the answers. One thing he does not directly state is whether or not he thinks that everyone will eventually come to Salvation. In fact, if you notice my use of phrases like "perhaps" and "seems to" and "most likely" throughout this post, you'll realize that Bell, as often as not, leaves room for doubt about what he actually believes. Whether this is to allow the reader to reach his own conclusions, or whether it is there to provide Bell some "plausible deniability" of the "I never said everyone would go to Heaven!" type, or maybe a little of both, I guess is something only Bell himself knows. I know that the sort of "presenting a huge list of unanswered questions" format of the first chapter, which is presumably intended to be compelling, I found frustrating. I already have questions - everyone does. I didn't read the book to get more questions. After that chapter, the book is less riddled with question marks, but it is also a lot less filled with "this is how it is" kinds of direct answers than most books about religion tend to be.
And in a sense, that's a good thing. Sometimes people have to be forced to think for themselves, to examine their own beliefs about things, and to reach conclusions based on their own perspective of the facts. Love Wins presents itself as this kind of book, but because it doesn't truly present every side of the story, in the end you wind up supporting Bell's apparent views without him ever saying that his views are correct. So you are convinced of something that the book never came out and said, this is what the Bible says. It's clever writing, but I'm not sure it's 100% honest about its intentions.
For many years I've said that I truly believe that we will be surprised at the people we run into in Heaven. In the end Bell brings this to an extreme: we may be surprised to find that anyone might be there one day, even people who consciously rejected God in this life. Even people who consciously reject God for a while in that life. I don't want you to get me wrong; I enjoyed this book very much. I like Bell's writing style, and his ideas gave me a perspective that will be with me for a long time as I go through the Scriptures. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in the afterlife. His ideas are different from what most Christians believe, but not in the way the pre-publication critics thought. Bell agrees that Heaven and Hell exist. He just thinks they exist in a different way than we always thought. Give the book a chance. Find out what it says. Then take it or leave it, but you owe it to yourself to at least know what it is that you're taking or leaving.
Showing posts with label Rob Bell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rob Bell. Show all posts
Friday, June 24, 2011
Friday, May 14, 2010
Velvet Elvis - Perspective Is Everything
I first heard of the "Emerging/Emergent Church Movement" several years ago. I had a kind of vague impression of it being some watered-down version of Christian teaching, some weird movement that probably wouldn't last long. As I remember it, the discussion centered around the idea that there was no "close" to the "sale", that potential converts were never told the true message of the Cross and never invited to become Christians. That whole discussion, which probably occurred on a Web site called Christdot (which more or less was reborn later as Theophiles) may be the reason why, when a good friend of mine recommended that I read Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell, the author's name seemed familiar ("rang a bell," as it were... da-dump ching!).Or it may be because a different friend of mine was telling me about the NOOMA videos around the same time. Whatever the reason, I had never actually read any of Rob Bell's books. But when my friend tweeted a Rob Bell quote and I retweeted it, he recommended that I read the book myself.
The book is a great read. Bell says things using regular vocabulary and phrasing that people use in their day-to-day lives. He doesn't use a lot of Theological words like "substitutional atonement," and indeed, Velvet Elvis isn't a textbook of systematic Theology. It's more like a suggestion of a different way of looking at your relationship with God. And it's not a textbook about how to initiate a relationship with God! If you aren't a Christian, the book isn't a good way to find out how to become one. But if you already are a Christian, it might be the kind of thing that inspires you to think anew about what your relationship with God really means.
The title of the book refers to an element of American pop culture that is pretty ubiquitous: paintings of Elvis Presley that are painted on black velvet. Bell apparently has one in his basement. The idea is that no painter would dare say that his own art is the pinnacle of creativity and nobody else need ever paint anything; creativity continues on. Then Bell applies the same concept to Theology; it is the product not only of the specific words written in the Bible, but also of thousands of years of discussion of what those words signify. No generation has Theology sewed up; each generation has to figure out not only what the Scriptures mean, but what they mean right now, to people in the current day and age. It's a quite fluid way of looking at Theology, and that relaxed, accepting attitude is probably what's gotten Bell criticized with such fervor over the past few years.
Bell likes to keep things sort of open-ended. His goal is not to tell you what the truth is, as much as to start and facilitate a conversation about what the truth is, and see what conclusions naturally arise from that discussion. A physical book is pretty much a one-way street, of course, but Bell's writing is such that you do intellectually and emotionally interact with the text. Facts are presented, for sure, but he never seems to come to a place where he says, THIS is what I'm getting at. He makes his points, but he doesn't make them rigid. He explains this in the first "movement" of the book (there are no boring, ordinary "chapters", but there are seven hip, fresh "movements" which look just like chapters if you, like me, are not hip and fresh) where he compares Theology to either a trampoline or a brick wall. If you build your personal Theology like a brick wall, with each component very rigid and with no room for modification and change, and then one brick in your wall comes into question, then your wall is weakened or destroyed. But if you build some elasticity into your Theological outlook, like the springs on a trampoline, not only will your ideas be able to withstand changes better, but discussing them will just be more fun! Like jumping on a trampoline. Not a bad analogy!
But people don't like to hear stuff like that. People like to think that there are always pat, set in stone, easily-understandable answers to every question. Some Theologians like to think that every bit of the Bible can be figured out and understood. I would like to submit that the idea that we can eventually figure out everything about the Bible, get everything pat and straight, is intellectual arrogance. In fact, I'd have to say that the idea that we can ever understand everything about even any one single part of the Bible is laughable. If Jesus is, as the Bible says, the "Word", and if Jesus is also the incarnation of God, then saying we can truly get the Bible all wrapped up intellectually is saying that we think we can wrap our brains around God Himself. I'd say a little humility is called for there.
We read in history that in the early years of the 20th Century, people started to see the incredible discoveries of science, and started to believe that science could figure out everything. Eventually we would know it all, or at least somebody would know it all. Everything has an explanation that can be studied and discovered. People bought into it, and several generations later, it is part of our basic thought processes in the West. No matter how many weird moans the floating ghost makes, Scooby-Doo always pulls off his mask and we find out he was Mr. Smith the Gardener all along.
There is no room for the supernatural in this kind of science, which explains why it sometimes cooks up oddly unlikely theories like the one that says that the universe created itself and all life appeared randomly, instead of the more logical idea that complex systems and living beings were planned and created by an intelligent creator. This isn't science: this is arrogance. Theology that is unwilling to listen to ideas that are not framed in the terms and thought frameworks that have been used before is, likewise, arrogant Theology. (I'm not against Theology and I'm not against science; I enjoy both. But when either excludes facts to arrive at their own version of the truth, they cease being the truth and start being presumptuous.)
Today I was reading this response to the book, and I began to wonder if Pastor Abendroth had read the same book that I read. The article said that Bell said things that I don't see in the book, even when Abendroth gives a page number. I mean, I can find the part he is talking about, but there seems to be a lot of point-missing going on. For example, Abendroth says that Bell "writes off the virgin birth of Jesus as non-essential," but that's not how I read those pages. Bell is making a point about how your Theology can't be so rigid that if one part of it is proven false, the whole thing comes crashing down. Could he have thought of a better example than the virgin birth thing? Maybe. Maybe he could have told the true story about how once upon a time, the Church insisted that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and based that insistence on something in the Scripture. When observational science said that things were actually the other way around and the Earth actually travels around the Sun, people's faith in God was challenged because they had been taught a flawed Theology. Would using that example rather than the virgin birth thing have deflected criticism? Maybe or maybe not, but at least it might have made Bell a tougher target for criticism. Rob Bell wasn't saying that the virgin birth is inessential; in fact, he wasn't actually taking a side on that at all in that passage. He was simply making the point that if you are rigid in your beliefs and unable to consider different ideas, you're setting yourself up for a big fall at some point. It's a hypothetical example that he's using to illustrate his "trampoline springs" analogy, not a statement of his doctrinal position on Hebrew words vs. their Septuagint equivalents.
The "virgin birth thing" I'm talking about is actually an old argument about the word "virgin" in the story of the birth of Jesus. The word in Matthew 1:23 means what we mean when we say "virgin," but the source Scripture in Isaiah 7:14 uses a word which some have said means only "young woman" with no connotation of sexual experience. This has been a point of contention between liberal and conservative Bible scholars for many years, and in fact was one reason that, many years ago, some conservative Theologians rejected the Revised Standard Version translation when it came out. My guess is that when Pastor Abendroth saw the passage about the virgin birth, he automatically snapped into "this person denies the virgin birth" mode, and suddenly turned his listening ears off and assumed a connotation for the words on the page that is not there. After all, there's nothing between the lines when you get a book; you can read in whatever you want and it can be tough to dispute you.
Part of the strength of Bell's thought processes is the fluid, let's-start-from-the-ground-up writing style he has. That is also its weakness, because Bell invites each of us to look at the Bible that way. That's a wonderful approach for someone with a strong background in the Scriptures, and ideally much of his audience would be that sort of person. Bell has quite a lengthy discussion in the book about how Jewish children in Jesus' day memorized huge hunks of Scripture in school; the entire Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy) and, in the case of the quicker studies, the entire Hebrew Bible, all the way to Malachi. That is the kind of person who is able to figure out that when Bell says that our message will get through to more people if we love them without an agenda (the agenda being to turn them into Christians just like us), he's not saying that people don't need to become Christians; he's saying that if we walk up to them with sales pitch in hand, we will push them away. Anyone who has ever had a street preacher yelling in his ear (like I had a few days ago) will understand this. (Apparently Pastor Abendroth didn't see it that way. According to him, Rob Bell not only thinks that the virgin birth is an unnecessary Theological concept, but that salvation is as well. Again, I don't see it in the black words on the white pages.)
The reason I disagree with Pastor Abendroth on those two points is that the chapter mentioning the virgin birth is not about the virgin birth. The chapter talking about the notches-in-my-belt-style evangelism-with-an-agenda isn't about salvation. But because those things are mentioned, people seem to assume that those chapters should say certain things, and when they say different things, there must be something wrong with the book. It's like reading a book about the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln and then complaining that it's light on information about his years in the White House. That's because it's not what the book is about!
I wonder if the modern Christian, who in most cases hasn't even read every word of the Bible, much less memorized them, has the kind of balance needed to understand those shades of meaning and logic present in books like Bell's. When you're in a physical room having a discussion with someone and the conversation begins to go off track because they misunderstood an illustration you are making, you can correct course and clarify what you were getting at. That luxury isn't present in the printed word. It could be that a weakness of Velvet Elvis is that it is too much like a conversation, except without the option of clarification when necessary.
Several years ago, I read another recent very conversational book about the Christian life, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I enjoyed it a lot, but I left it feeling vaguely unsettled, and after reading Velvet Elvis, I think I know why. Miller seems intent on getting someone to tell him the answers to his questions about spiritual things. Bell, on the other hand, seems content to leave some things a bit mysterious... ambiguous... mystical. I think there are certain things that the Word of God does leave ambiguous and mysterious. If we Christians were content to leave those kinds of things hwo God left them, we wouldn't almost come to blows whenever a six-literal-days creationist and a thousand-years-are-like-a-day creationist discuss the opening chapters of Genesis. God didn't inspire a history or science textbook; God inspired a spiritual book expressing His love for us. He left the mystery in, and when we take a hard line on issues that God left open, we become divisive.
I grew up in the 70s, during what was called the Charismatic movement (funny, there's that "movement" word again). Charismatics believe things that some mainstream Christians thought were borderline heresy. We prayed for sick people, expecting that God would heal them. We raised our hands to God during worship services. We used brief, catchy, repetitive, pop music-influenced songs in our worship services, and gave hymns a back seat or no seat at all. We spoke in tongues. We didn't mind too much if people dressed casually for church. The Charismatic movement spread rapidly, and since then many of the practices from that time (rock-style worship services, for example, or raising hands during worship, or casual dress for church, etc.) have been adopted by many mainstream churches as well. Those things seemed revolutionary back then, but much of it is commonplace today. In retrospect, it seems obvious. The Christian rock albums that people burned as heresy back then seem tame and boring next to the music you hear on most Christian radio stations today. I just wonder if some of these "emerging" concepts that have caused so much controversy in the past five years might, ten or fifteen years from now, seem glaringly obvious. I've heard that the "emerging" movement has been losing steam lately, faltering because of lack of strong leadership or whatever, but I see some of the concepts of reaching out to people in love present in my own "non-emerging" church. There may be some bathwater there, but I definitely see a baby splashing around, too. Hopefully we as the body of Christ can get rid of the right one and keep the other!
The book is a great read. Bell says things using regular vocabulary and phrasing that people use in their day-to-day lives. He doesn't use a lot of Theological words like "substitutional atonement," and indeed, Velvet Elvis isn't a textbook of systematic Theology. It's more like a suggestion of a different way of looking at your relationship with God. And it's not a textbook about how to initiate a relationship with God! If you aren't a Christian, the book isn't a good way to find out how to become one. But if you already are a Christian, it might be the kind of thing that inspires you to think anew about what your relationship with God really means.
The title of the book refers to an element of American pop culture that is pretty ubiquitous: paintings of Elvis Presley that are painted on black velvet. Bell apparently has one in his basement. The idea is that no painter would dare say that his own art is the pinnacle of creativity and nobody else need ever paint anything; creativity continues on. Then Bell applies the same concept to Theology; it is the product not only of the specific words written in the Bible, but also of thousands of years of discussion of what those words signify. No generation has Theology sewed up; each generation has to figure out not only what the Scriptures mean, but what they mean right now, to people in the current day and age. It's a quite fluid way of looking at Theology, and that relaxed, accepting attitude is probably what's gotten Bell criticized with such fervor over the past few years.
Bell likes to keep things sort of open-ended. His goal is not to tell you what the truth is, as much as to start and facilitate a conversation about what the truth is, and see what conclusions naturally arise from that discussion. A physical book is pretty much a one-way street, of course, but Bell's writing is such that you do intellectually and emotionally interact with the text. Facts are presented, for sure, but he never seems to come to a place where he says, THIS is what I'm getting at. He makes his points, but he doesn't make them rigid. He explains this in the first "movement" of the book (there are no boring, ordinary "chapters", but there are seven hip, fresh "movements" which look just like chapters if you, like me, are not hip and fresh) where he compares Theology to either a trampoline or a brick wall. If you build your personal Theology like a brick wall, with each component very rigid and with no room for modification and change, and then one brick in your wall comes into question, then your wall is weakened or destroyed. But if you build some elasticity into your Theological outlook, like the springs on a trampoline, not only will your ideas be able to withstand changes better, but discussing them will just be more fun! Like jumping on a trampoline. Not a bad analogy!
But people don't like to hear stuff like that. People like to think that there are always pat, set in stone, easily-understandable answers to every question. Some Theologians like to think that every bit of the Bible can be figured out and understood. I would like to submit that the idea that we can eventually figure out everything about the Bible, get everything pat and straight, is intellectual arrogance. In fact, I'd have to say that the idea that we can ever understand everything about even any one single part of the Bible is laughable. If Jesus is, as the Bible says, the "Word", and if Jesus is also the incarnation of God, then saying we can truly get the Bible all wrapped up intellectually is saying that we think we can wrap our brains around God Himself. I'd say a little humility is called for there.
We read in history that in the early years of the 20th Century, people started to see the incredible discoveries of science, and started to believe that science could figure out everything. Eventually we would know it all, or at least somebody would know it all. Everything has an explanation that can be studied and discovered. People bought into it, and several generations later, it is part of our basic thought processes in the West. No matter how many weird moans the floating ghost makes, Scooby-Doo always pulls off his mask and we find out he was Mr. Smith the Gardener all along.
There is no room for the supernatural in this kind of science, which explains why it sometimes cooks up oddly unlikely theories like the one that says that the universe created itself and all life appeared randomly, instead of the more logical idea that complex systems and living beings were planned and created by an intelligent creator. This isn't science: this is arrogance. Theology that is unwilling to listen to ideas that are not framed in the terms and thought frameworks that have been used before is, likewise, arrogant Theology. (I'm not against Theology and I'm not against science; I enjoy both. But when either excludes facts to arrive at their own version of the truth, they cease being the truth and start being presumptuous.)
Today I was reading this response to the book, and I began to wonder if Pastor Abendroth had read the same book that I read. The article said that Bell said things that I don't see in the book, even when Abendroth gives a page number. I mean, I can find the part he is talking about, but there seems to be a lot of point-missing going on. For example, Abendroth says that Bell "writes off the virgin birth of Jesus as non-essential," but that's not how I read those pages. Bell is making a point about how your Theology can't be so rigid that if one part of it is proven false, the whole thing comes crashing down. Could he have thought of a better example than the virgin birth thing? Maybe. Maybe he could have told the true story about how once upon a time, the Church insisted that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and based that insistence on something in the Scripture. When observational science said that things were actually the other way around and the Earth actually travels around the Sun, people's faith in God was challenged because they had been taught a flawed Theology. Would using that example rather than the virgin birth thing have deflected criticism? Maybe or maybe not, but at least it might have made Bell a tougher target for criticism. Rob Bell wasn't saying that the virgin birth is inessential; in fact, he wasn't actually taking a side on that at all in that passage. He was simply making the point that if you are rigid in your beliefs and unable to consider different ideas, you're setting yourself up for a big fall at some point. It's a hypothetical example that he's using to illustrate his "trampoline springs" analogy, not a statement of his doctrinal position on Hebrew words vs. their Septuagint equivalents.
The "virgin birth thing" I'm talking about is actually an old argument about the word "virgin" in the story of the birth of Jesus. The word in Matthew 1:23 means what we mean when we say "virgin," but the source Scripture in Isaiah 7:14 uses a word which some have said means only "young woman" with no connotation of sexual experience. This has been a point of contention between liberal and conservative Bible scholars for many years, and in fact was one reason that, many years ago, some conservative Theologians rejected the Revised Standard Version translation when it came out. My guess is that when Pastor Abendroth saw the passage about the virgin birth, he automatically snapped into "this person denies the virgin birth" mode, and suddenly turned his listening ears off and assumed a connotation for the words on the page that is not there. After all, there's nothing between the lines when you get a book; you can read in whatever you want and it can be tough to dispute you.
Part of the strength of Bell's thought processes is the fluid, let's-start-from-the-ground-up writing style he has. That is also its weakness, because Bell invites each of us to look at the Bible that way. That's a wonderful approach for someone with a strong background in the Scriptures, and ideally much of his audience would be that sort of person. Bell has quite a lengthy discussion in the book about how Jewish children in Jesus' day memorized huge hunks of Scripture in school; the entire Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy) and, in the case of the quicker studies, the entire Hebrew Bible, all the way to Malachi. That is the kind of person who is able to figure out that when Bell says that our message will get through to more people if we love them without an agenda (the agenda being to turn them into Christians just like us), he's not saying that people don't need to become Christians; he's saying that if we walk up to them with sales pitch in hand, we will push them away. Anyone who has ever had a street preacher yelling in his ear (like I had a few days ago) will understand this. (Apparently Pastor Abendroth didn't see it that way. According to him, Rob Bell not only thinks that the virgin birth is an unnecessary Theological concept, but that salvation is as well. Again, I don't see it in the black words on the white pages.)
The reason I disagree with Pastor Abendroth on those two points is that the chapter mentioning the virgin birth is not about the virgin birth. The chapter talking about the notches-in-my-belt-style evangelism-with-an-agenda isn't about salvation. But because those things are mentioned, people seem to assume that those chapters should say certain things, and when they say different things, there must be something wrong with the book. It's like reading a book about the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln and then complaining that it's light on information about his years in the White House. That's because it's not what the book is about!
I wonder if the modern Christian, who in most cases hasn't even read every word of the Bible, much less memorized them, has the kind of balance needed to understand those shades of meaning and logic present in books like Bell's. When you're in a physical room having a discussion with someone and the conversation begins to go off track because they misunderstood an illustration you are making, you can correct course and clarify what you were getting at. That luxury isn't present in the printed word. It could be that a weakness of Velvet Elvis is that it is too much like a conversation, except without the option of clarification when necessary.
Several years ago, I read another recent very conversational book about the Christian life, Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I enjoyed it a lot, but I left it feeling vaguely unsettled, and after reading Velvet Elvis, I think I know why. Miller seems intent on getting someone to tell him the answers to his questions about spiritual things. Bell, on the other hand, seems content to leave some things a bit mysterious... ambiguous... mystical. I think there are certain things that the Word of God does leave ambiguous and mysterious. If we Christians were content to leave those kinds of things hwo God left them, we wouldn't almost come to blows whenever a six-literal-days creationist and a thousand-years-are-like-a-day creationist discuss the opening chapters of Genesis. God didn't inspire a history or science textbook; God inspired a spiritual book expressing His love for us. He left the mystery in, and when we take a hard line on issues that God left open, we become divisive.
I grew up in the 70s, during what was called the Charismatic movement (funny, there's that "movement" word again). Charismatics believe things that some mainstream Christians thought were borderline heresy. We prayed for sick people, expecting that God would heal them. We raised our hands to God during worship services. We used brief, catchy, repetitive, pop music-influenced songs in our worship services, and gave hymns a back seat or no seat at all. We spoke in tongues. We didn't mind too much if people dressed casually for church. The Charismatic movement spread rapidly, and since then many of the practices from that time (rock-style worship services, for example, or raising hands during worship, or casual dress for church, etc.) have been adopted by many mainstream churches as well. Those things seemed revolutionary back then, but much of it is commonplace today. In retrospect, it seems obvious. The Christian rock albums that people burned as heresy back then seem tame and boring next to the music you hear on most Christian radio stations today. I just wonder if some of these "emerging" concepts that have caused so much controversy in the past five years might, ten or fifteen years from now, seem glaringly obvious. I've heard that the "emerging" movement has been losing steam lately, faltering because of lack of strong leadership or whatever, but I see some of the concepts of reaching out to people in love present in my own "non-emerging" church. There may be some bathwater there, but I definitely see a baby splashing around, too. Hopefully we as the body of Christ can get rid of the right one and keep the other!
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