This Time, Rob Bell's Lost It

Reviewed by Joel Riley

Enough is enough! With Rob Bell's new book, one thing becomes clear--the man has lost it.

And it is not that I do not like Rob Bell, because I do. I admire the guy. He has almost singlehandedly breathed new life into the nearly dead concept of a discussion about Christianity. His thoughts and contribution to the discussion was what we needed for our religion and denominations to get out of the dogmatic routines and traditions that would have inevitably been cemented within our sanctuary walls like the Catholic church.

Whether you agree with Rob Bell's opinions or not, you must say that the role that he (and a few others) has played in recent years within the great Christian discussion has been for the better, simply reminding us to never be complacent until we have found the truth in its entirety.

Neither Heretic Nor Prophet

Some call Rob Bell heretic, others call him prophet, but that is not the purpose of my discussion. I am simply denouncing the fact that Rob Bell thinks he is speaking for God. If Rob was wrong in Velvet Elvis, we can at least be assured that we were reading words from a man who thought he was a microphone for God. If Rob was wrong in Sex God, one still got the sense that he thought his mission was in love and purposeful to make the Savior smile.

Just as the 9-11 terrorists thought they were doing the will of Allah when they caused the deaths of thousands on that dreadful day, and just as Paul thought he was doing God's will by denouncing Peter for his legalism in the Book of Acts, Rob Bell, I was convinced, thought he was on a “mission from God.”

But, alas, with his new book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile (which I highly recommend for a thought-provoking read), Rob Bell has forgotten what it's all about.

While I smiled at his rant against churches trying to be relevant, the entire book is filled with one man's opinion, one seemingly not bound by the words of the Bible any longer.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with such a method. My favorite author, Clive Staples Lewis, never forgot that everything he was writing was opinion. Whenever C.S. Lewis, or his guide Chesterton, wrote about God and Christianity and the Bible, they would write with furious, convincing arguments. They would write about these matters as best they knew regarding Christ and the Bible. But the one thing they did that Rob Bell seems to have forgotten to do between Sex God and this book, is that at the end of the day, they knew and were excited to admit that the writings were their own and they had great potential to be incorrect, since these words were coming from a mortal. While I believe what I write is correct (that is what opinions are for), I know well that more times than not, I have found myself calling my opinions of the past wrong. I am constantly in error and I am not God, so therefore I do not think that what I write is perfect.

Talmud, Koran, God's Word
Rob Bell, I propose, has not only lost the will to write as a microphone for God, but in the process he has mistaken his opinion as the stance of God himself. He now thinks his opinion is divine.

This is tragic. The Roman Empire thought the Caesars were divine, and we saw it crumble under the laughter of God. While I do not want to bore you with a chapter-by-chapter critique of Rob Bell's new book, I will summarize, as best I can his divine demise.

First, the man has a strange fondness for the rabbi's of the Oral Torah, which would be fine except he seems to quote them at times as the spiritual authority. There is no difference between the Jewish Talmud that Rob Bell loves to quote and the Islamic Koran. They both were made in response to Christ's spiritual power that was converting the masses, and they both are works that cannot be resolved in any way with the Old Testament, nor the rest of the bible.

New Theology or Mistaken Theology?
Rob Bell tells us in the beginning of his book that he is presenting a new theology (which excited my desire to read it). This is great. New theologies are presented all the time, but never can one come across a new theology that claims to come straight from the Bible. If the theology comes from the Bible, people have had it for hundreds of years. He is ignorant of Solomon's warnings in Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun. Either his new theology is in an actuality an old theology, or his new theology is simply wrong.

But what is the new theology? On paper it is quite cute. It symbolizes everyone's walk with God through themselves and as a church body.

In summary, there are four stages to a walk with God:

First is the cry for help (the Jews in slavery in Egypt) that God hears.
Secondly, there is the part where God (who is accessible for everyone) brings the slaves out of the despair and communicates His love for them personally (Mt. Sinai).
Third is the buildup of the empire by God's love because we worship him and thus he helps us (the nation of Israel). In this third stage, at some point we begin to stop looking to God as our source of wealth and dwell upon our own power. The example he uses is that Solomon stopped praising God and started using slaves, which God had allegedly forbidden to build his temple. And because Solomon made an empire, which God supposedly does not like, and used slaves, God decided to drive out the Jews and put them in exile so that at some point again someone will cry for help and depend fully on Him.
Of course, there is then a chapter about how the new covenant is Jesus and not the Law.

Without a couple chapters about how Jesus hates the American military, how youth pastors shouldn't try to be relevant, and a weird and pathetic attempt at eschatological theology with the book of Revelations, I have just presented you the whole book.

Oh, and we need to help the poor. I agree.

So where's the problem?

Here's the Problem

Apparently Rob has justified his ability to make the Bible say whatever he wants, ignoring whatever he wants, all in the name of being able to affirm his own theology. He went to the Old Testament to find a theology that would prove that any kind of empire or war is wrong, and when he got to the New Testament, he couldn't find anything so he just rearranged the Old Testament in a way that would fit his philosophy. And he had to pull some teeth to do it.

He manipulates the Old Testament into something it is not. He claims the will of God for Israel was peace and not slavery, and that Solomon was a bad guy

First, he claims that God in the Old Testament hated slavery. He fails to mention that there are dozens of laws within the Mosaic Law that validate that slavery is okay (although the slavery law was quite progressive for it's time, there is nothing to show within the Old Testament that slavery was wrong for the Jews).

He claims that all of Israel's sins were in Solomon's empire building--except he fails to mention the empire God promises the Jews from Abraham through Solomon. He fails to mention the part where Moses, with the words of God, commands the Jews to go into a town and kill all animals and men, and leave the virgin women for themselves (once again there was nothing wrong with this).

Rob Bell fails to mention the atrocities that God allowed and promoted throughout Israel with Joshua, Saul, and David.

He fails to mention God never condemns Solomon's use of slavery, but rather Solomon's sins were his idol worship and allowance of his wives to worship their own gods.

He fails to mention that between Solomon's reign and the Jews' exile you read half of II Samuel, and all of I Kings and II Kings; this means that if God kicked the Jews out of Israel because Solomon allowed slavery, then he took almost 400 years to perform the eviction.

The New Theology is . . . Jesus' Theology?

Once again, it is not necessarily the message that I m opposed to; it is the biblical manipulation that Rob Bell performs in order to come to his message. And if I were to be honest, all he did was present the theology of Christ disguised in another costume. The costume he used took the Old Testament story of the Jews, manipulated it, and scrambled it up out of context to tell us something we already knew: Humans are in bondage and Christ is our redeemer, but for some reasons God's blessings make us humans complacent, so God has to allow pain and tragedy to get us to rely on him again.

Just because Rob Bell's message is good and productive does not mean it is biblical. We must ask what the difference is between his new theology (which greatly destroys portions of the Bible), and a good message one can extrapolate by reading the good words and productive messages found within the Koran or even Hitler's Mein Kampf. Give me any book and allow me some time, and, if I tear out the right stories, I guarantee you I can come up with a philosophy not that far off from Rob Bell's new way.

ninetyandnine.com

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Joel Riley is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan and is currently attending Urshan Graduate School of Theology for his MTS. He spends his free time arguing with atheistic philosophers in his head, fixing the difficulties of our century, and engaging in formal picnics.