Rob Bell
I got a loan of his Everything Is Spiritual DVD from my mom and dad. It is quite interesting. He makes some very good arguments as to why creation points to a God. They are not knew to him but he presents them quite effectively. He has learned enough science to pretend he knows a lot so it is pretty impressive.
He also does a good job of showing how Genesis was very different from other creation stories. That is has some things in common with them but some very important differences. We see these as obvious because those uncommon ideas have become common over time. Ideas like one, good God who creates from nothing. Most stories of the day had some sort of conflict between good and evil gods that resulted in humans being formed from some preexisting material.
His central point is that God is in everything, in everyone. That is true to a point. He makes the case quite well but after reflecting on it you can see it as quite misleading. Is there nothing that is holier than everything else? In the Old Testament there was something called the Holy of Holies. If Everything Is Spiritual then how could such a thing exist? Well, because there is more to it than that. God is omnipresent but God becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ. The incarnation implies matter in which God is present in a more profound way than He is in all matter.
Rob Bell does not deny the incarnation but he fails to teach it as an important balancing truth to what he is teaching. Greg Gilbert goes into many of his teachings and notices the same pattern. What is said is mostly true. The overstatements he makes seem minor until you realize there is an important doctrine he is leaving out. Many of his listeners might assume it is unimportant or even untrue. So when he says Jesus taught us that everything is spiritual you can easily get the idea that Jesus is just an enlightened teacher. Jesus is a teacher but he is first and foremost a saviour. Bell seems to quite frequently gloss over the idea that we need to be saved.
This reminds me of looking at evangelical materials as a Catholic. Most of them were not explicitly denying any Catholic truth. So a Catholic could use the material. But if he used it to frequently it might be dangerous because things like the church, the saints, the sacraments, etc. were left out. So you want to use the stuff because it is artistically good but you fear people will start to see Catholic distinctives as extra add-ons that don’t really buy you much. Protestants like Greg Gilbert have the same objections to Bell that I used to have to stuff from Saddleback or Willow Creek. If they were Catholic lite then Rob Bell it Catholic lite lite. It is starting to get so lite it is hardly there at all. But what is there is powerful. It is not hard to discern real biblical truth being taught in a very beautiful way.
[...] to Brandon Vogt’s blog and he had some very nice words for him. I review one thing by him before and saw some good things but some misleading things as well. I watched a sermon of his at Willow [...]
October 15th, 2009 at 10:22 am