At the invitation of a colleague I watched some of an extended Rob Bell interview. It was helpful in that it gave me a fuller sense of the man’s style which I think helps me read his voice into the book.

Style

Style is important. Style can include a whole world of hard to define elements that tends to evoke in people trust or distrust, attraction or repulsion, suspicion or a bias towards acceptance. Whatever you want to say about Rob Bell, he’s to a style and that style comes out in his interview and in his writing.

Style is, in a way, kind of like culture. We never think we have one that is deeply impacting everything we say or do but the cultures of other are obvious to us. For me its hard to watch and listen to Bell and not get the sense that a strong piece of the content he is generating isn’t an attempt to NOT be something else, usually the style or culture of his critics, of which he’s already elicited a strong response. If he experiences them as judgmental, he’ll create a response that is its opposite. He wants to be flexible, engaging, tolerant, open, accepting, understanding, relational, as opposed to firm, resolute, self-defining, assertive, clear, willing to go it alone if need be (I tried to not be pejorative. You can find positive qualities in many behaviors you might disagree with.)

This of course happens to all of us. We all must figure out how to deal with where we’ve come from and what to do with it. Ideally we’d learn to embody a fuller range of qualities. Flexible yet firm, engaging yet resolute, tolerant yet well-defined, open yet differentiated, accepting yet assertive, loving yet clear. Love is often confused with enmeshment. You cannot be self-giving if you don’t have a well defined self.

Heaven Isn’t Far Away

If the main point of chapter 1 was “that kind of Christianity over there has a problem, isn’t making sense, isn’t blessing the world, and isn’t faithful Jesus” the main point of chapter 2 is “Christianity isn’t about getting people from earth to ‘heaven’.”

There is a lot I like about this chapter given that my own tradition is strong on creation-fall-redemption-reclamation. I like that he works a bit on tweaking our assumptions of “heaven” and getting a bit into a more specifically New Testament terminology of “the age to come.” There are places where he’s already tipping his hand on some issues in terms of exclusion.

Sickness Unto Death and Post-Death Self-improvement

One of the important issues that this book raises are the existentialist questions about after death consistency of character. This is an issues I probably first started wrestling with after I started doing some spade work on Tim Keller’s theology and read Kierkegaard’s “The Sickness unto Death“. I wrestled with the issue a bit when working on a sermon on Lazarus and the Rich Man. CS Lewis in “The Great Divorce” also presents us as not undergoing some ultimate character makeover at death (and “The Last Battle” too) but having us now being forced to wrestle with a new view of reality on the other side of the grave. We’re going to have to come back to these questions at some point. Bell will say “What we find Jesus teaching, over and over and over again, is that he’s interested in our hearts being transformed, so that we can actually handle heaven.” (p. 50).

Also on pg 51 “Much of the speculation about heaven– and, more important, the confusion– comes from the idea that in the blink of an eye we will automatically become totally different people who ‘know’ everything. But our heart, our character, our desires, our longings– those things take time.”

I’m sympathetic to a lot of this, but I also have doubts. (See this old blog post on hell. https://paulvanderklay.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/on-hell-and-parties/) At the same time there are still many questions that have to be worked through. The truth is that there is a lot more we don’t know and as I think I’ll get into later on in this series there are major issues with this view as well. Not only does our shaping take time, it also takes context and community and context and community matter a lot when it comes to shaping.

Jesus’ Firsts and Lasts

Bell also wants to highlight one of the strong points Jesus made repeatedly that when it comes to “making the cut” there will be great surprises. Bell seems to want to do this as a kind of “in your face” to the traditions he’s pushing back against, just as Jesus did to the group he was pushing back against, but you can’t push this too hard without also embracing that there is both urgency and consequence in the here and now with respect to these things. It’s hard to say “woe to you” if there is not cliff that you are careening towards.

It is also true that embodying this element of the surprising reversal of those who were satisfied and confident of themselves being lost while the “sinners” are in has long been a stock part of evangelical preaching, often the kind he’s pushing back against. The hardest line drawers have long warned to not put your confidence in church attendance or praying the sinner’s prayer. They, however, tend to more fully embody a full throated “woe” because the consequences imagined are grave.

How Will God Enforce his Weapon’s Ban?

I think my main question for Bell (and if you want to get an answer you have to be a very determined questioner and try to keep him from going ADHD on you) has to do with what world restoration actually requires. In the chapter Bell says:

“God says no to injustice.
God says, “Never again” to the oppressors who prey on the weak and vulnerable.
God declares a ban on weapons.”

To this I say, “OK, how? When?”

CS Lewis, who Bell clearly wants to follow, also notes that ultimate we are rebels that must lay down our arms.

Read the Song of Mary sometime, and how many other passages like it in the Bible. God is not just a therapist helping us deal with our issues, he’s also a warrior and a husband and a father coming with vengeance to rescue. The New Testament doesn’t draw back from this kind of language. We are afraid of it because we’ve seen the Bible used to defend and justify injustice, but as a species we’ve got a record of being shameless about attempts at self-justification.

What Problem Do We Have That Required Jesus?

As I proceed through the book my suspicion is that what we will find is an overly optimistic sense of what we can accomplish and an underdeveloped sense of our own tragic flaws that have yielded this history of ours. What does it say about us that the Son of God feels it essential to be turned over into the hands of sinners and be executed, and that the Son of Man, the title associated with the overthrow of the empire beasts of the world (Daniel 7) will be executed by one of those beasts before his flock of horrified disciples.

Maybe we clean up well when we’re on our best behavior, but there is a darkness about us for which the evidence is clear. If that is only part of the population, then you need a hell. If that is just a darkness in all of us, then you will need a very strong exorcist.

In the chapter Bell asserts that heaven is being with God, and that is quite true and commonly asserted not only by the kind of evangelical Christians and by other faiths as well. Bell, in trying to gain traction with many in contemporary culture shares certain assumptions about what a good God wants and would be like. What are we to do with the God who is a consuming fire? Does Jesus dispel this image? It certainly isn’t dispelled by the rest of the New Testament writings.

Bell’s image of God is as much as dogma as any that he is pushing against. He’s writing a book after all. It is easy to critique the culture from which the writers of the Bible emerged as holding the expectations of an angry dangerous god. OK, but Bell also seems to share the expectations of contemporary culture that God is all about sweetness and light. What stands between us and God is a large misunderstanding. A bit of conflict mediation and re-interpretations can clear this up making us more loving, more sociable, more understanding, better justice doers. To me this is like saying that two people who really love each other can live together and always get along. Really? Does he have evidence for our capacity to do this? How much more if the relationship is enormously asymmetrical with one party being prone to anger, violence, self-pity, selfishness, small mindedness and fear and the other being omnipotent and all knowing.

Let’s check the evidence. Ancients vs. moderns steel cage match. Based on general revelation where predators cull the herds of the weak, earthquakes reshape the landscape not caring what we’ve built, meteor strikes and volcanos cause mass extinctions, which God, the one who imagines us to be just a bit flawed and in need of some correction, or a demanding God who has high standards and is enormously consequential, would we imagine to be most likely?

If heaven is so easy and so close, why send Jesus? The law had been given. CS Lewis himself noted in his Tao that much of the moral code seems available via general revelation. If our problem isn’t large, why did we kill him? If we couldn’t stand God coming in human flesh, how will we respond to the Almighty up at full volume? The children of Israel wanted Moses, not Yhwh. Do we imagine we’ll choose differently? I’m not convinced that a bit more volunteer work will really make me ready to go toe to toe with the likes of Yhwh. God himself is a problem Bell seems not ready to fully face. How Jesus’ death is the solution to that problem is something the church has been working hard in for centuries. Denying that the problem is there isn’t really helpful.