I recently wrote the post “Should I buy Rob Bell’s book” after reading the Amazon sample. Part of me expected the discussions to die down. They haven’t yet. Bell’s book obviously hit a cultural nerve. You can criticize Bell for a lot of things, but he’s certainly got a gift for working with the culture, sensing its waves and engaging them.

I actually decided to read the book after having a conversation with a young man about the subject of the book. His questions very much followed along the lines of the questions Bell wrestles with in his book. It made me realize that I should read the book and interact with it. I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I’ll write some blog posts as I go.

Chapter 1: What About the Flat Tire

I could connect with this chapter very well because I could connect with his critique and his challenges of the caricature of American evangelical Christianity that he deals with here. Many of these questions have in fact driven me to study the Bible and the develop my own theological vocabulary. These questions haunt many who grew up American evangelicalism and the lack of satisfactory answers is part of what has prompted many to walk away from the church. Most of these critiques aren’t new and most of these challenges are fairly obvious and have been treated by many defenders of this theological tradition. I think there are some important points to make about his critique.

First I think it is important to recognize that he does set up a kind of a straw man of the composite weaknesses of evangelical theology. This I think reflects the mirror strength of what Bell can do. The community of American Christians that bear the lose label of “evangelical”, especially through the lens of the mainstream media is a diverse group. Many of these traditions bear some of the traits of the critique laid out but few bear all of them. Many of the press accounts note surveys where many Christians hold some of Bell’s views that he brings out in his book, such as the possibility of non-Christians being in heaven. That leaves this opening chapter, which is in a sense the justification for the rest of the book in a bit of a limbo. Is this Bell working through a theology that he was raised in? Is the theology he is pushing against a straw man?

My second thought on chapter 1 is again a questions whether Bell’s strength in cultural exegesis and expression is also hiding a lack of understanding about the relationship of culture to religious systems. When we from one cultural background, far removed from Jesus read the Bible, itself reflecting a significant diversity of cultural contexts far removed from our own and often very alien to our own, we naturally read our culture into the Bible. Bell in chapter 1 very skillfully relays these angularities that emerge from reading Jesus by progressively developing a list of questions about who it is that “makes the cut”:

Is it what you say
or who you are
or what you do
or what you say you’re going to do
or who your friends are
or who you are married to
or whether you give birth to children
or what question you’re asked
or what questions you ask in return
or whether you do what you’re told and go into the city

One of the big clues to recognizing that we’re having a moment of cultural misunderstanding is seeing that I don’t see that that the small pieces don’t fit into the larger picture. We can assume that the smaller pieces DID fit into the larger picture for the original cultural audience. It is therefore my job to try to reconstruct as best I can the cultural matrix of Jesus’ time so that I can understand how the pieces fit together. It is like a jigsaw puzzle but without all the interlocking tabs that indicate to me when I’m done with the puzzle. If I have some clues that the puzzle I’m trying to put together should look like a traditional portrait, but the work on the table in front of you looks like a Picasso, then I can pretty clearly assume that I don’t have the whole picture and I need to keep working on the pieces. If for example you read NT Wright’s voluminous work on the New Testament (the “Christian Origins and the Question of God” series) what you see is that he’s using history to try to put the puzzle together, history informed by everything we can credibly bring to bear on the subject.

Bell seems enormously adept at engaging with contemporary culture but I wonder if in this case the skill he’s really lacking is cross cultural skills, understanding the dynamics of communication OVER cultural lines and understanding the distortions that develop in the jig saw puzzles when by virtue of our place in time and space and history we don’t hear Jesus’ words within the specific cultural context that he spoke them.

To be fair to Bell, however, part of this problem can also be laid at the feet of many in the evangelical community who in fact by virtue of their approach to the Bible resist this fact as well. Many evangelicals want to understand the Bible, and our reading of the Bible as an exception in cultural communication that the Bible somehow transcends culture and therefore unlike talking to an ancient or a person from another country today that we immediately and directly can clearly understand all of Jesus’ words without cultural barriers or filters because they come to us through the Bible. If pressed on specific cases in my experience most Christians I know would say that understanding a passage from the time it was given is important, but when we apply that position to the Bible as a whole they resist it.

Part of the reason many Christians I know resist acknowledging the cultural separation between ourselves and the Bible is because of the modernist/fundamentalist feud that is clearly (by virtue of furry raised by “Love Wins” itself) still playing out in our context. Christians WANT to resist the separation because it threatens a chief Reformational tenet that demands that common Christians have direct access to the Bible, not mediated by the church. For more on this read Alister McGrath’s book on Christianity’s Dangerous Idea that I reviewed for ThinkChristian.net. If you say that only scholars can properly read the Bible due to the cultural distance between ourselves and the Bible then you take the Bible out of the hands of regular folk and it is no longer a tool for evangelism, for Christian devotional reading and for lay teaching. You undercut the Reformational teaching of the perspicuity of Scripture.

My position on this (obviously informed by my own tradition) is that the Bible should be in the hands of lay persons and that God’s Holy Spirit often uses the Bible, even when we read it with errors, to do work in the world and among his saints. I think that the church should train teachers and leaders to handle the Bible formally understanding and trying to compensate for the cultural distance between ourselves and the Bible, but also understand that God still uses the Bible itself to increase the faith, bring comfort, and build up the church even when we mess up our reading of it. All of us, great scholars and lay persons alike struggle with distortions in our ability to read and obviously many of us disagree on how to understand the Bible even in large and important things, but that doesn’t mean we should take the Bible out of the process at any level. My tradition, as with many other Protestant traditions asserts that the life of the church involves a necessary and dynamic interplay between “settled” doctrine (creeds and confessions in our language) and constant critique of that theology with the Bible. We mess up in our Bible reading all the time and so together, as a community, we are continuing to try to align ourselves with the objective standard (canon) that we use to try to navigate in order stay aligned with the historic Christian church. That is the process and it involves both scholars and lay persons throughout our church community.

Bell’s work, in fact, is a part of this process. As the book progresses he will be trying to evaluate his take on the evangelical theology (straw man or not) with the Bible and what he finds to be reasonable and to offer to us his view on the matters at hand. That is the basis upon which we can and should critique and engage his work. What the Bible offers us is in fact a platform, a common basis upon which to have the conversation. The conversation is nearly impossible to have productively without such a common basis.

There will be many in the broader community who will suggest that the best way to move forward is to consider NOT allow the Bible a privileged position in the conversation and to set along side the Bible other historical religious documents from other religious traditions. Whereas that might be a fine and fascinating project for Christians it is in fact a different project than the one Bell is undertaking. Within the community that affords the Bible a privileged position this discussion makes sense. Change the parameters of the discussion and you have a different discussion. For those who believe the Bible should have a privileged position then this conversation matters and matters a lot. For those who do not believe the Bible should have a privileged position this conversation will matter a great deal less, it is more of an in-house fight from their perspective.

I think locating the conversation in this way is important given how Bell (and the publisher) frame the book. Bell is claiming that this book is not simply an in-house discussion but the results of this book impact every human being in the world. That point itself will draw attention from those outside Christianity and those who want to disparage Bell out of hand might recognize that he in fact is not simply accepting the public/private assumption of religious political correctness that is common today. Bell is making an assertion about the future of Christians and non-Christians alike and making that assertion on the basis of the Bible. We will from inside the church evaluate whether we believe he’s doing that job well, but the fact that he is making this assertion at all is noteworthy and some will find it yet another offense in the long line of Christians asserting for others who are not Christians what is real. My response to that objection is simply “that’s what all religious systems do if the religious system asserts that it is talking about ultimate reality.”

Some will of course complain that they don’t make an assertion of ultimate reality, that they’re taking a more agnostic view or a more skeptical view that says we can’t know it, but the assertion itself “that we can’t know it” or “that we only see in part” is itself an assertion about ultimate reality.

The last point I want to make before getting into his chapter on “heaven” is that perhaps Bell wrote this book too soon. We all must live and speak from our own point in our own process and from what I’ve read in the book so far this book is Bell working through the questions he’s facing from his place in time and space. None of us are fully formed but as we proceed I think we will see that whereas Bell has had years to digest his critique of what’s been formed his own solutions are less well formed and likely wouldn’t stand up to the critique he has against what he is pushing back from. Again, this is understandable. It’s far harder to develop a coherent answer than to critique or criticize the answers of others (same for me here). But he has put forward a book and pushed it into the public conversation so his work is fair game for our testing, critique and examination. I wonder where he will be in ten years.