Tag: Jesus

Rob Bell’s Mental Furniture

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Talking about Talking About God

Rob Bell gave a lecture tonight at First Baptist Church of Pasadena to promote his new book, “What We Talk About When We Talk About God.”  He kept repeating a phrase that was incredibly revealing.

 

THE CROWD

The crowd was about 300 people, almost all students of Fuller Seminary, which had promoted the event.  I should say, in the world of hipsters, hats are apparently completely out after having been completely in for about a year.  The crowd was maybe 50/50 on the gender split, mostly around 30 years old, and heavily Caucasian.  An one hat.

The hour long lecture was a funny and warm-hearted verbal rendition of the first chapter of Bell’s book.  Literally almost word-per-word in some sections, with all the same punchlines.  For first timers, it was a lot of fun.  For anyone who had read the book, it was like watching the same episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond” for the second day in a row.  You’re like, “Yeah, I remember that being funny.”

 

QUESTION TIME

At the end, in a Q&A period, a couple of students asked some really smart questions.  They asked them humbly and hesitantly, so I’m not sure if everyone understood how sharp they were.  One person observed that Bell keeps talking about the God who is “ahead of us, pulling us forward.” In Bell’s cosmology, God’s primary goal is progress.  God is working to get us to “the next step,” and there’s no judgment for being in your present place (I’m not sure if these means theologically, morally, or in terms of mental health).  “What about the fact that the Bible seems like it’s behind us then?” the student asked.  Bell rambled on this one.  He said that the Bible was in fact progressive for its time, which only left open the possibility that it’s not progressive in our time.  Rather than linear answers that addressed the questions, Bell tended to float around verbally to different illustrations which were not always on topic.

Another student followed up, “Let’s say you have a friend who is a spiritual seeker who reads about Joshua killing the Canaanites,” he began.  “Who picked that text?” Bell teased.  Then he answered that “You can just start with Jesus and work your way back from there.” He referred the student to a British theologian whose name he couldn’t remember who argues that it wasn’t actually genocide (I think he’s referring to Christopher Wright, though Wright actually says that the Canaanite slaughter was as bad as it sounds, and God was just accommodating that context). Bell simply dodged the question.

 

THE BIG ISSUE

Which brings me to absolutely the most interesting part of the night.  Several times Bell referred to doctrinal accuracy with the phrase, “Getting the mental furniture in order.” He said, “Instead of trying to get the mental furniture in order, which you’re never going to do…”, we should instead gather around the eucharist and make sure everyone’s needs are met.  What’s shocking about this is that Bell isn’t taking his own advice.  Bell very clearly thinks he understands God’s nature, and very clearly thinks that “the institutional church” is getting it wrong.  He says that if we believed (aka got the mental furniture in order) that God was with us, for us, and ahead of us, this generation would be more interested in God.

This is just contradictory.  If getting God right is important, we can’t very well dismiss doctrine.  Bell threw in an aside, “Sure, some doctrines are helpful.” But he seems to be missing the heart of the exercise that he himself is taking part in, which is the revision of doctrine.  He’s absolutely right about what’s at stake – a mistaken understanding of God turns people away from God.  The problem is that the God who is always leading people towards progress without judgment isn’t an entirely accurate picture of the biblical image of God.  Bell has moved the furniture while denying that the placement of the furniture matters.

The upside of Rob Bell is that he really believes that people need love.  He thinks that they need to know Jesus.  He just doesn’t seem to think Jesus jibes with the God of the Bible, including the God that Jesus himself describes.  Bell needs to have a come-to-Jesus talk with himself where he admits that he has intentionally ordered the mental furniture to arrive at his present theology.  Then he might realize that he’s got the furniture in the wrong places.  And maybe then we’ll find the hat rack.

In The Mix

ImageI’m digging through drawers at my parents’ house, looking for stole-me-downs [(n.) stuff you take home from your parents’ house], and I’ve come across a pile of old papers and photographs.  They are valuable the way a foreign currency is valuable – only to the person who comes from the same place.  The place is my childhood, a country of one.  I’m the only traveler who would look at these and think I had found something worth keeping.

There are letters I wrote to my mom from camp, newspaper clippings of a diatribe I wrote to the Editor in high school, yellowed pictures of a school play.  I found things I drew when I was daydreaming.  It’s all wrapped in a dust sarcophagus that makes me sneeze.

So much goes into the making of an adult.  In this country, typically tens of thousands of dollars of expense, schooling, training, coaching, discipline.  If the ingredients of a recipe cost this much and the cooking took this long, you would expect an extraordinary meal.  You kind of think most adults should be marvelous instead of mundane.  Maybe we are.  Maybe we are simply so surrounded by one another that we take each other for granted.

I’m mixing a couple of recipes of my own.  We take pictures of them with Gramma and Grampa, which will in this generation will never yellow.  They will go in a digital file somewhere, numbered, and be forgotten for a generation.  They will not make anyone sneeze when they’re discovered.

There are certain key ingredients.  Today I took them to church.  At the lunch table, we talk about the faith.  We talk about what Jesus thinks and what the Bible says.  We talk about what it means to be good.  In my room, I’ve found notes from the first Bible study I joined in college.  Someone made sure that was part of my recipe along the way.  I’m making it the most important part of theirs.

To me, the recipe is worth every penny.  If I accomplish nothing else, I hope that my children are my masterpiece.  Somewhere deep in my soul I find a longing to make sure that they have everything they need and become everything they want to be.  I am crafting a work that will last forever.

Oh Well, Rob Bell

ImageI always liked Rob Bell’s call narrative.  He says that when he was young, he felt like God told him, “Just teach this book.” Forever after, that was to be his call.  Now he has the chance to do it on a wider scale than ever before.  His latest book, “What We Talk About When We Talk About God” was the best chance yet, because the controversy surrounding his last book, “Love Wins,” made him virtually a household name.

What Bell Could Have Done

Bell is now poised in exactly the place every evangelist should want to be: hated by religious teachers, loved by the masses, and enjoying a wide (and lucrative) voice in the public sphere, from which he can preach the gospel without hindrance.  And he honestly starts to do that.  He talks about a God who loves us, a God who took on flesh as Jesus, a God who gives us hope.  He acts like he might intend to entice a modern Millennial audience to follow the God whom they’ve always heretofore been told is an oppressor. 

What Bell Did

He starts to but doesn’t follow through.  Because when it comes to an obligation to respond to God, he can’t say anything more that lots of people are kind of spiritual (chapter 1).  When it comes to miracles, he can’t say anything more specific than that everything is wonderfully miraculous (chapter 2).  When it comes to God revealing himself, he can’t say anything more than that the biblical writers were coming up with flawed analogies (chapter 3).  When it comes to the Holy Spirit, he here wanders around quite a bit (chapter 4), establishing little more than that life is mysterious and “we” have a sense that history is progressing somewhere.  He finally comes to Jesus, whom he dives into without any explanation of why I should be interested in Jesus more than Buddha or Muhammed, and why I should believe the Bible is at all reliable (chapter 5).  Chapter 6 doesn’t fall within the realm of traditional Christian theological doctrines.  The chapter simply asserts that God is “progressive.”  Finally, in the last chapter, Bell is supposed to tell us what to do with this progressive, hope-inspiring God who never does anything to make us unhappy, but instead is in the business of blowing our minds.  This final, punchline chapter just doesn’t hold together.  He tells the story of the sheep and the goats, but strangely leaves out the goats.  Then he tells the story of a comedic friend who pretends to be a priest and take confession, which shows how much we need to confess.  Then he tells a story about a yoga class in which women weep because they are integrating their bodies with their “being.” Then he talks about how our brains react when we watch each other.  Then he talks about communion, the purpose of which is to open our eyes to the fact that God is everywhere bringing everything together.

This isn’t even liberalism.  This is pantheistic mush.  This is Spinoza and Hegel reheated and dumbed down.

The enemy throughout the book is a group of wildly construed straw men.  They are Christians who protest against peace and hate questions and are out of date and oppose progress.  Who are these people?  Well, they’re not Rob Bell, that’s for sure.  He’s way too cool for them.

What Bell Didn’t Do

What Bell doesn’t do is tell us why on earth anyone should trust the biblical revelation of Jesus once the cultural ship sails towards secularism.  Bell thinks he’s an evolutionary step above the biblical writers.  He credits the explicit self-revelation of God to the writers’ personal impressions.  When they make moral judgments on issues like homosexuality, Bell knows they’re wrong and that God’s revelation has progressed.  Yet it’s not clear why the gospel writers’ impressions of Jesus aren’t also projections.  After all, miracles may just be their antiquated means of describing what they saw.  Bell’s use of Scripture generally is not deferential.  He riffs off of it but doesn’t submit to it.  He’s moved from exegesis to allusion.

Let me use a surfing metaphor, since Bell’s new book is rife with images of water skiing, surfing, and sunbathing from the beaches of southern California, where he now spends most of his time.  Let’s say someone drifts out on a surfboard to enjoy the sun.  Then they keep drifting.  Then they take a nap.  When they wake up, still on the board, land is nowhere in sight.  Now that person is still alive and still floating, but prospects aren’t all that good.

Bell has cut himself loose from a local church, from the accountability of community, from the necessity of responding to critics, and from the canon of Scripture.  Now he’s drifting.  His still alive.  Hey, maybe he’s enjoying the sun.  But he’s getting further away.  And prospects aren’t good.  And sadly, he has a little fleet of floating followers.

In Bell’s mind, all of this is progress.  He’s moved from the hard work of pastoring in the harsh climate of Grand Rapids to the relaxing life of writing books in Laguna Beach.  In fact, Bell is now charging 50 people at a time $500 to spend 2 days with him, which includes casual conversation and a few hours of surfing.  He’s about to do this for the fourth time.  That, ladies and gentlemen, is $100,000 in 8 days to be covered in the dust of your rabbi.  To which land is he anchored?  Not to his original call narrative.

Rather than joining the Bell critics who use the clicheic promise not to drink his Kool-Aid, I’d recommend a metaphor a bit more in keeping with the substance of Bell’s theological work.  Don’t eat the cotton candy.

Cultural Scripts

The reason this debate is at the center of culture is because Christians have not acted like Jesus.  Don’t try to demonize gays and lesbians on this.  If Christians had shown a shred of decency (or even of humanity) over this issue over two thousand years, they might not be suffering the backlash that they are just beginning to suffer.  That’s because Christians have addressed this issue with pronouncements and position papers rather than love.  It never crossed the minds of the bulk of Christians to identify with the woman caught in adultery and facing death by bludgeoning.  We just stood back and said, “The law says no.”

Picture a fifteen year old boy.  He’s lost in a world of confusion as he tries to establish his identity, find friends, individuate from his parents, dream of the future, and fall in love.  He is a mess of ego and hormones.  No one who has been fifteen would ever do it again.

Now imagine that he finds himself attracted to other boys, with whom he identifies.  Girls just don’t hold the same interest.  But between the things he hears from the bullies on the playground and the things he hears from the bullies in Sunday School, he kind of knows that this is off script.  So he keeps it to himself.  It starts to make him nervous, because he wants to be normal.  He wants to be accepted.  He starts to pray that his desires would change or go away.  But they don’t.  He dabbles in gay pornography and then feels ashamed of himself.  He still doesn’t tell anyone.  He doubts himself.  He doubts prayer.  He doubts God.  He doubts life.

Now he is presented with two cultural scripts.  A cultural script is sort of a storyline for your life.  They’re all around us.  It tells us how you are to generally behave if you want to fit into any one particular group, culture, or relationship.  There’s a brutish, truck-driving, military man script.  There’s a demure, responsible housewife script.  There’s a driven, type-A, businessman script.  This fifteen year old is offered two scripts.

One is a growing culture of love and acceptance.  It teaches that he should be free to develop into his full potential as a responsible, thoughtful adult.  It teaches that he should be able to express his opinions without persecution, silence, and shame.  It allows him to fall in love and to seek companionship.

The second script tells him that he is broken.  It says so with a sense of sympathy.  The solution to the brokenness is suppress his desires and manage his behavior.  This can be done with a lot of work, prayer, and support.  However, by and large, there are not people around who know how to support him.  He’s referred to a specialized group that has quiet meetings in the back room of a church.  There’s not a sense that he is supposed to talk about it.  He’s ok, but questionable.  To be fair, his closest friends know his deepest secrets and love him.  They walk with him.  It’s only because of them that he doesn’t feel completely alone.

The first script is being offered by the gay community.  The second script is being offered by the Christian Church.  One is confident, growing, and seems to be arising out of persecution with force and popular appeal.  The other still seems to be limping along without a clear message.  Which one is this fifteen year old likely to take?  Which one would you take?  Which one sounds more like Jesus?

Dear Christian Church – as you suffer the consequences of the mess you’ve made, pray that the secular culture around you does a better job following Jesus’ teaching to love your neighbor than you have.

In my next post on the subject, I’d like to talk about what the Bible does and doesn’t say.

A Final Word

ImageThere is an odd linguistic curiosity of history that I believe has gone unnoticed.

The historian Suetonius tells us that in his day, Julius Caesar used to brand his belongings with the logo “Veni, vidi, vici.” You may not recognize it in its original form, but you know its translation: I came, I saw, I conquered.  You recognize it, of course, because it’s what we all say when we leave Farrell’s.

Here’s the odd coincidence, unplanned anywhere except perhaps in the mind of God.  When Jesus came on the scene, he said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” When that phrase made it into Latin, the language of Caesar, the three key words translated: via, veritas, vita.  It stands as a stark rival alliteration.

I ponder these two men, both hailed as gods after their deaths, both leaving behind epitaphs of a sort.  The similarity between the two claims is enough to catch the eye, and the weight of their difference is enough to pressure the conscience.  We can choose to live lives in which we conquer, in which we prove ourselves, in which we triumph.  Or we can follow in the way of the one who taught us that life is what you get when you follow the way to the truth.  One lay down roads to conquer an empire.  The other became a road for tired travelers in search of a peaceful kingdom.  It strikes me that we must choose one or the other epitaph for ourselves.  We are either conquerors, or we are followers on the Way (Acts 9:2). 

Between those two men, one of them now has over 2 billion living followers, and countless more from throughout history.  The other has a nice plaque on the ground in Rome.