“◦Which Jesus are your referring to? What do you do with a women like Renee Alston who begins her book, Stumbling Towards Faith, “I grew up in an abusive home…I mean my father raped me while reciting the Lord’s prayer. I mean my father molested me while singing Christian hymns?”
◦What about this Jesus? A man lived in a village in eastern Europe in which Christians rounded up Muslims in town, herded them into a building, where they opened fire on them with machine guns and killed them all. He has no interest in going to a Christian church.”

Why does Bell think these sort of people are Christians? Because they say they are? Isn’t this part of the bigger problem? Believers are not telling the world—-these are not Christians! We don’t because we have bought the lie that we are not allowed to.

“◦If our salvation is dependent on others bringing the message to us what happens when the missionary gets a flat tire and never makes it to my village?”

Does he ever wonder why Jesus Christ has not come back yet? Perhaps it is so the missionary can get his car fixed and make it to the villiage. And all salvation is not dependent on someone bringing the message. Just like the Joel Prophecy, Jesus Christ has revealed Himself through dreams to people.

OK, although there are things I don’t like about Bell’s book, I think he keeps answering questions with questions in order to try and get people to take off the blinders. (We all have our own sets of them – me no less than anyone else.)

I have to re-read the book, as I’m not retaining very much – this after zooming through it in less than 2 days, right after it was 1st published.

You know, rabbis are fond of answering questions with questions – it’s a teaching method in the Jewish tradition.

How that works out with Bell I have no idea, never having heard him preach (though i did buy some MP3s of his sermons early this a.m. so that I can check out some of his sermons for myself).

I can say a couple of things, though:

– I think he is right to point out that there are some serious tensions – even seemingly contradictory statements – in the NT regarding passages that refer to Jesus drawing all people to himself, etc. How do you understand the “all” when pitted against, say, strict Calvinist ideas about predestination?

– I find his willingness to ask questions very refreshing. It’s like fresh air after being locked in a musty underground room for a long time. (One way of describing my experience among the evangelical/charismatic/sorta Calvinsta and/or Reconstructionist crowd).

– Maybe it’s OK to not provide all the answers? 🙂

I could go on, but I’ll quit for now.

And i really, really appreciate the fact that we’re having a civil – even friendly – discussion here. Too many supposedly “Christian” sites and blogs are overflowing with unkind – even outrightly vicious – comments and personal attacks.

TWW is part of the breath of fresh air that I mentioned a couple graphs back.

cheers, D & D! (Gosh, your blog initials sound suspiciously like a role-playing game… ;))

Numo

This is the reason that I like so much. You don’t take what I say at face value and you go and explore it for yourself. I agree with you that far too many in the evangelical world have pat answers for many issues that are not clearly spelled out in the Bible. The reason that I attend he church that I do has to do with the fact that my pastor asks more questions than he answers.

There are too many people in this world who want to put God in a box. I think it is because they fear a Being Who is beyond comprehension. He’s given us some answers-like how to get to heaven. But He is beyond our wildest imaginings because He is the One Who created everything we see.

It is good that Bell asks questions. however, sometimes he has to answer them, even with an “I don’t know.” Except for the Resurrection, he seems to be an avoidance mode. Perhaps he doesn’t have an answer but he should say so. The constant answering questions with questions becomes a little to Confucius for this babe.

Prediction: he will evolve in his thinking, come down a bit more on traditional thinking and then write lots of books on how to think through your faith. As he ages, I hope he doesn’t trade those skinny jeans for Hawaiian shirts and a goatee, however…

“As he ages, I hope he doesn’t trade those skinny jeans for Hawaiian shirts and a goatee, however…”

Or a puca shell necklace with a Mickey Mouse T-Shirt.

On some of Bell’s Nooma videos he had bleached his hair white and had it gelled into spikes. I was glad to see he has matured as far as his hairdo is concerned. 😮

Thanks, Dee!

I did finish watching this and… saying “I don’t know” would help a lot. While I have no idea why Bell handled things the way he did, I think he’d better overhaul his interview strategy, because what he’s doing does ,b>not work… although toward the very end of the interview, they were actually getting somewhere.

What a shame that the hour was (imo) largely wasted.

It’ll be interesting to listen to his sermons with this in mind.

I have tried to watch the whole Adrian Warnock/Bell debate (it was not a debate) but am having trouble with it on my phone. I watched most of it and have some idea of what might be going on.

Bell, like Piper and all the others, is not good in a debate type environment with his educated peers.

They are used to being listened to, not interacting. This is a big problem for celebrity preachers. They have full control of content and delivery venues whether speaking in church, conference or on a video. They are not skilled at interacting with an educated peer.

I know that when we had a minister doing a secular radio interview, we did ask for questions ahead of time so as not to be blindsided. If they went off script, we simply never went back. If you are enough of a celebrity, they do it your way. It does not hurt that many advertisers attend the mega!

Is this one reason why Piper wrote a book instead of debating Wright publicly? In fact, one of the most amusing things to come out of SBTS was when they held a “panel” and tried to frame it as a “debate” with Wright. Wright was not there. And the panel was stacked with those disagreeing with Wright. That was their idea of a “debate”. Perhaps that is where Ergun Caner got his idea of a “debate”. :o)

I have to give Bell credit for even attempting to do this. Most celebrities don’t because they are trying to protect their image. They stay in friendly venues.

And with Bell’s performance, we can see why. Many are seeing what they would not have seen with just his delivery on a stage or in a book: There is not as much there as we thought.

From what I understand, Warnock, ( used to read his blog) is not a full time pastor but one who is bivocational as a medical doctor and preaches at a church in London. My guess is that Warnock has had plenty of opportunities to interact with educated peers on hard questions whereas Bell is from the other side where he simply delivers and is not used to having to defend his words to those who are just as smart as he is.

It was not just that Bell did not answer questions, it was also that he kept trying to reframe them to what he wanted the question to be. I agree with the commenter above who said it would have come off better if he would have just said, “I don’t know”. He comes across as a guy who is not straightforward at all but goes back and forth.

@ Lydia: once Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, a lot of things, changed – and not necessarily for the better by any means.

The numbers of Jewish believers dwindled sharply, then seem to have disappeared altogether,

*If* that had not happened, I wonder… Jesus answered questions with questions quite often (etc. etc. etc.). Would we have a more Jewish approach to discussion and theology if Christianity hadn’t been co-opted by the imperial government of Rome and turned into an arm of the state? My guess (for all kinds of reasons) is “yes,” but it’s only a guess, since history didn’t go that way.

I love history – includes church history – and I think that it’s helpful for all of us to know something about it. (Beyond the bare minimum, that is.)

I wish church history was taught in Sunday schools.

I deeply appreciate the Socratic Method, something that may have indeed influenced the Jewish style of questioning as a teaching method, or vice versa.

It’s likely not known in these venues, but because of my citing of Jewish sources on my own blog, I have my own critics that claim (wrongly) that I interpret Christianity through Judaism. I’ve got a whole string of posts on my blog which compares teachings in the Quiverfull/Patriarchy movement with Rabbi Lamb’s book to demonstrate that what many QF/P groups teach as OT wisdom is far more oppressive than conservative, orthodox Judaism. So some critics claim that I believe that Christians should follow these teachings. People have even claimed falsely that because of these posts, that I am really advocating the Kabbalah. ??? I’ve taken several classes in college with at least one nationally known Rabbi and studied Greek with a Jewish believer who graduated from Gordon Conwell who emphasized “how the Jews used the Greek language.”

It is not that I find no worth in examining what the Jews believed, and it is especially important to a grammatical historical hermeneutic. Often times, these considerations reinterpret the English translations of certain Bible passages.

I find the questions that Dee quotes out of the first chapter of Bell’s book fascinating. But my concerns are not in reference to this list of questions, nor am I advocating that people should not think or question. My express goal in being online at all involves getting people to question their beliefs and to constantly re-evaluate their beliefs.

But look at the last statement that Bell makes as an example, why I suspect that Dee and others have made note of it. There is nothing Socratic/Jewish in style about that to me. I honestly do see it as a judgmental statement, though it contains one rhetorical question. It, to me, smacks of the “Do you still beat your wife” type of informal logical fallacy. I can see only one purpose in this paragraph above (beginning with “I don’t know why as a Christian you would have to make such declarative statements. Like your friend, does he want there to be a literal hell?” It is, as I stated further on up the thread, a red herring. It says that decent people must reject hell, or at least, they will cease from defending it. That is not tolerance to me. I don’t see it as Socratic Method, either. I wish that it was. I just don’t see that specific example and others in both interviews as an example of such.

Cindy
That last question irritated me. What someone wants is not the issue. Some want a Dante type of hell, others want annihilationism, and others simply want Adolf Hitler to finally get his.

What we want is not the problem. What we have or think we have is the debate. I would have answered Bell thusly. I do not like the concept of hell but I understand the need for justice and so, hell, whether I like it or not, seems to be a viable possibility in the Bible. So, tell me what you believe-is there a hell or not? Yes, no or don’t know but say something.

@ Dee: cool beans!

btw, has anyone checked out the link I posted in reply to the “babies in hell” post on Eastern Orthodox views on the afterlife? Their beliefs re. “hell” are radically different than those of most Western Christians.

The article I linked to is sometimes heavy going, but it’s got loads of info. on translation of specific passages and more. (From the pov of people who are fluent in modern Greek as well as having studied NT Greek).

I can’t vouch for the veracity of it all (and I noticed a couple of mistakes on things like Dante’s “Inferno”), but I would highly recommend the article.

I have a suspicion that both N.T. Wright and Bell are leaning very toward the Orthodox stance on a number of issues re. the afterlife and final judgment, though there are some big differences, too.

Here’s the link I was talking about: http://aggreen.net/beliefs/heaven_hell.html

apologies for multiple comments!

Time to inject some reality into this discussion. It was a sermon on getting the reality of hell in my heart back in 1989 that set me on the path out of the church. My response at the time was inchoate (even though I wrote a five-page letter to the pastor), but the chink in the whole armor of God came at that time.

Cindy above wrote that she believes in hell because Jesus taught about it. Well…no. It’s what writers who were not witnesses to the events wrote thirty to sixty or more years after the fact based on the stories that were handed down to them. It’d be like me trying to write a real history of the history of punk rock based on the recollections of people who had lived in Kansas based on the stories they’d heard from people who had maybe been at the scene of the activity in New York and London. That’s not even a good oral history. But it’s similar to what we have in the New Testament–with the exception that someone telling stories about Malcolm McLaren and Sid Vicious doesn’t claim to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, or that every word on the paper is somehow “inerrant in the original autographs.”

And that’s just one issue.

Then there’s the whole notion of how the “wonderful” religion of Christianity basically suppressed half humanity (women) as well as had no problem with chattel slavery for over seventeen centuries. While good religious people like William Wilberforce and Quaker John Woolman went against the religious sentiment of the times to champion e the idea that a human being cannot be owned, women had to fight against the establishment–political and religious–and still do–just to get basic human and civil rights.

Let me end it with a few related thoughts, ones that will ensure I’ll be outside the household of faith forever. First: If God is really almighty, he could have forgiven us without “the shedding of blood,” just simply as an act of his will. But no, instead he has to sacrifice a human being (which is one reason why Christianity is so repugnant to Jews, because the prophets told them human sacrifice was bad), a human being who is described as God’s Son, because God needs the blood. Otherwise, no forgiveness.* Second: The idea described in the first item makes God look like a cosmic child abuser. If a human father attempted to do this to his son, he’d be in jail. Third: I can’t worship a god who, despite having all power, believes that the only way to save people is to kill his son for the blood sacrifice or who thinks it’s perfectly OK to torture people for eternity. If this were a human being I was talking about, I’d want him locked up for the former and on trial for crimes against humanity for the latter. It would be hell being in the presence of someone like that for eternity. Which is why, if your god and your heaven and your hell exist, I’d rather go to hell. Because I have standards, and they include not worshipping a deity who comes across like a bloodthirsty megalomaniac. No Thanks!

* I’m acutely aware that there are other ways to see the death of Jesus, but since substitutionary atonement is the primary means preached over the pulpit in Evangelical Protestant churches, that is what I’m talking about here.

anonymous in the southwest says:
Cindy above wrote that she believes in hell because Jesus taught about it. Well…no. It’s what writers who were not witnesses to the events wrote thirty to sixty or more years after the fact based on the stories that were handed down to them.

That may be what someone you respect taught you, but it’s incorrect. But based on the rest of your comments, it appears to be what you prefer to believe, which is, of course, your right.

First: If God is really almighty, he could have forgiven us without “the shedding of blood,” just simply as an act of his will. But no, instead he has to sacrifice a human being (which is one reason why Christianity is so repugnant to Jews, because the prophets told them human sacrifice was bad), a human being who is described as God’s Son, because God needs the blood. Otherwise, no forgiveness.

Just as the Bible (which you reject in ignorance of its truth) says, the cross is offensive and seems like foolishness to those who are persishing. I remember well when I was perishing. Salvation is so much better.

It would be hell being in the presence of someone like that for eternity. Which is why, if your god and your heaven and your hell exist, I’d rather go to hell. Because I have standards, and they include not worshipping a deity who comes across like a bloodthirsty megalomaniac. No Thanks!

I pray God will show you His grace, truth, and love.

“Well, don’t you want all people to be saved”?

I might be getting myself into some trouble here, but I actually think this is an important question to ask. Maybe not to any of us, or to whomever Bell might be in a debate with, but to the LARGER section of the Christian community. I mean, some of the comments I’ve seen in discussions about Bell and his book around the interwebs leave me with no choice but to conclude that without an eternal, tormenting hell, the commenter’s entire faith would unravel and be worthless. Lots of “You bet your bippy there’s a hell Rob Bell! Just wait til you’re burning in it!” type of stuff – sometimes from people I’d expect more from, which is fascinating and frustrating at the same time. It reminds me of the church marquee I see, SOMEWHERE, every July or August – “You think this is hot You should see Hell”

The whole Rob Bell phenomenon is proving to be a pretty good measuring stick between those who seek genuine, loving relationship with Christ and those seeking eternal fire insurance – and I think that’s an important distinction, cause I worry about the second group and their spiritual health. I think some in that latter group DO desire people to spend eternity in torment just to give some basis of support to their belief system and prove their choice the right one. Prime soil for abusive situations.

While that type of question does nothing to further any doctrinal conclusion (and from what I’m hearing, Bell continually remains vague about a LOT of stuff – not to his credit in a debate setting), it does help in the human aspect of the issue.

dee…You’ll have to cut me some slack on watching that debate. I LOATHE debates like that 😉 Like I say, with Bell, it isn’t so much him or whatever message he’s presenting that’s fascinated me, but all the firestorm around it.

Lewis

I agree that there are quite a few Christian people who seem to go around life, rubbing their hands and gleefully stating, “Someday you’ll get yours.” Many of these people are unsuccessful schlocks who find the faith a way to finally get back at the world. you know the type. “So, you fired me and you think you are all so smart with your fancy cars and houses. Well, wait till you get on the wrong side of the Almighty. I’ll be standing right next to him, laughing as you get sent down to Lucifer and burn forever.”

Frankly, I question the faith of such people. If they do not understand the value of each and every soul and mourn its passing, then I question what they understand of the Bible. CS Lewis said “You have never met a mere mortal.” I think all of us should do a heart check and see if we understand why Jesus had to die for me. That should keep us too busy to wish ill on others.

Don’t worry about the debate. I just thought it showed Bell’s weakness which clarified a few things for me. But, I agree. The firestorm is interesting. We can take it as an opportunity to think through this very, very difficult issue. I hope to do a couple of posts this week on some alternative ways of approaching this subject.

Numo,

I am glad that I make none of these kinds of decisions.

I don’t have any interest in governing people or any of that kind of stuff in real life, either. I took a political quiz and came out in the quadrant with Ayn Rand and Morton Friedman. But probably along the lines of “no free lunches,” there are consequences for everything. In my own estimation, life for most people is pain enough, but we can all be glad that I’m not God.

God is gracious and shows us lots of patience, and I’m grateful that he shows us lovingkindness as we work out these things in fear and trembling. The important thing is, I think, that we’re thinking about things and examining things, and looking at our own hearts as we do. He loves us and gets us where we need to be. I’ve got enough to worry about.