Rob Bell on the resurrection

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjXYlwvS5LY] [ht my good friend Robin Parry] A glance at my blogging over the last few weeks will reveal that I am far from an uncritical supporter, but I maintain that any preacher who does not stand in awe of his gifts in communicating demonstrates so little understanding of her calling that she should give up right now. The video above? Let me put it like this: if someone donated a 4 min advertising slot to the churches during the Superbowl, we could not do better than to play it.

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Edmund Spenser, Sonnet LXVIII

Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day, Didst make thy triumph over death and sin: and having harrow’d hell, didst bring away captivity thence captive us to win: This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin, and grant that we for whom thou diddest die being with thy dear blood clean washt from sin May live forever in felicity. And that thy love we weighing worthily, May likewise love thee for the same again: And for thy sake that all like dear didst buy, With love may one another entertain. So let us love, dear love, like as we ought, Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught. (Spellings updated silently) Happy Easter, everyone!

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‘You did the genocide really well’

The title was my best review from this year’s Spring Harvest (Minehead week 1), offered by storyteller extraordinaire Bob Hartman. I had a much lighter load than previous years (we measure things in ‘contact hours’ in universities sometimes; the last four years I’ve run at 12-15 contact hours in a SH week; this year I had six), giving Bible studies on Malachi in the mornings, and with only one extra session – on justifying genocide. OK, I exaggerate a little. The theme was Scripture, linking to the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, and particularly to the BibleFresh campaign; a strand of the optional afternoon seminars was looking at points of difficulty, and one they picked, and picked for me, was ‘Terrible Texts: God and Genocide in the Old Testament’. Yeah, thanks guys; really grateful for that… (Not that this is anything new; in the last five years at SH I’ve spoken on the continuing place of Israel in God’s purposes, the rightness or otherwise of the Iraq war, hell as eternal conscious torment, and almost certainly some other stuff that I’ve blanked from my memory as just too painful. What did I do wrong?) Someone asked me for a quote about the event, half of which (being a theologian, I was obviously a bit long-winded) ended up in the brochure for next year. Why do I keep saying ‘yes’ to the invitation to go? Our girls love it, of course, and grow visibly in their faith each time we’re there; but it’s not just that – I look forward to the week for my own sake, not just for theirs. I thought about it. I always get to work with some great people – the wonderful Abby Guinness and Amy Boucher-Pye this time around – but that’s not it, not really. I thought about that experience, before speaking about genocide or Israel or hell, of a room full of nervous energy – and full of people, people who have chosen to skip the beach or the funfair or the swimming pool because this matters to them. Given Israel, I did nothing special – a quick trip through Romans, read from a soft ‘new perspective’ a la Tom Wright. For the rest of the day, people stopped me around the site to thank me, many of them actually in tears. Their story was the same: Jewish converts, they had spent some of their lives being told they had no need to convert, and most of them being told that God’s ancient promises to their people were irrelevant, and their families were no better than idolatrous pagans. It was my privilege to be the one who told them there was another way of thinking about things, that took seriously both their own faith and their people’s heritage. And that’s what I love about speaking at Spring Harvest: people care about the questions; they are not – as they are so often in academic settings – mere intellectual exercises; they actually matter. A seminar on genocide in the OT at Spring Harvest is not an opportunity to show how cleverly you can side-step a problem; it’s an opportunity to help people for whom this question is something that changes the way they live their faith in the world. Speaking on Israel, I carefully avoided current politics about the ownership of the land; inevitably it was the first question. ‘Why do you ask that?’ I enquired – the answer came back – he was an evangelist, working in Germany amongst displaced Arab people. The single biggest problem he faced in his mission was the injustice of Jewish settlement in the occupied territories. That’s mission. That matters. I stopped avoiding the question, and did my best. This time, genocide -I looked around the room – several hundred there, including half a dozen other members of the speaking team. This matters. We need an answer – and I had the privilege of trying to offer one. It wasn’t desperately original or clever, but folk seemed to find it eased a real problem, and so were enormously grateful. That’s why I keep going – the chance to serve God’s people in something that really matters by exploring hard questions with them and for them. This year they gave me genocide, and it mattered to people, and so I could do something genuinely useful. Thanks guys – I’m really grateful for that! (And even more grateful that you gave questions of sexuality to the remarkable Andrew Marin,...

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Rob Bell (insert stupidly large number here)

In chapter 5, ‘Dying to live,’ Bell turns to give an account of the atonement. He begins with a reflection on the ubiquity of the symbol of the cross, and the slogan, ‘Jesus died on the cross for your sins.’ (122) But what does that mean? Bell explores a ‘multiple metaphors’ view of the atonement, where different stories are told, which each hint at a part of the truth. It’s no secret that I think this is just the right way to approach atonement theology (see any of several publications on the theme); having tried to write a popular-level book on this theme it is humbling and irritating in equal parts to see someone who can really communicate have a go: Which perspective is the right one? Which metaphor is correct? Which explanation is true? The answer, of course, is yes. So why all the different explanations? For these first Christians, something massive and universe-changing had happened through the cross, and they set out to communicate the significance and power of it to their audiences in language their audiences would understand. And so they looked at the world around them, identifying examples, pictures, experiences, and metaphors that their listeners and readers would have already been familiar with, and then they essentially said: What happened on the cross is like… a defendant going free, a relationship being reconciled, something lost being redeemed, a battle being won, a final sacrifice being offered, so that no one ever has to offer another one again, an enemy being loved. (127-8) Yeah, what he said… (And notice that penal substitution stands first in Bell’s list. He really is an old fashioned evangelical if you just scratch a little below the surface!) There are problems. When Bell turns to sacrifice, his account repeats where he was in The Gods Aren’t Angry DVD (you’ve not seen The Gods Aren’t Angry? Go and buy it. Now. Watch it, repeatedly. Not for the theology, which is old-fashioned Religionsgeschichte stuff, long discredited, but because this is an utterly stunning lesson in public speaking. Seriously, if Steve Jobs could communicate like this, we’d have been spared Windows completely. If Obama could communicate like this, we’d never have heard of Sarah Palin). Sacrifice, on this account, is something natural to humanity, a way of appeasing divine forces; Jesus offers the final, perfect, sacrifice, and so brings an end to every human attempt to appease an angry deity. I confess I don’t like attempts to force the endlessly diverse religious traditions of humanity into an interpretative scheme; it smacks too much of a totalising ‘I know what your religion is really about’ approach, which should have died with colonialism. Unfortunately, it seems strangely resilient in most traditions of liberal theology. Evangelicalism has generally been less arrogant, and with due respect to Bell, I would rather we continued in that. There are problems. Bell repeats Aulen’s old canard about Christus Victor being the ‘central, dominant understanding of the cross’ for ‘the first thousand years or so of church history’ (128). Sorry, but it just wasn’t. Aulen was wrong, and eighty years on, we ought to have got hold of that. In the (theologically sophisticated) East, sacrifice, eucharist-as-medicine, and Platonic physicalism were roughly equally dominant on my reading, with sacrifice receding and physicalism advancing as we move from the third century to the seventh. I struggle to find any dominant metaphor in the West – they just aren’t asking that question. The narrative moves from cross to resurrection. Bell opens with the line ‘it’s important to remember that resurrection after death was not a new idea’ (130). This is true, but not in the way Bell means it. The resurrection of the dead was a burning expectation in (some strands of) the Judaism of Jesus’ day, built on profound reflection on the justice of God in the face of endless experiences of persecution, and the gospel accounts need to read in the light of those discussions. Bell, however, offers a strange nature-mysticism instead. ‘[T]he leaves drop from the trees and the plants die … And then spring comes, and they burst into life again.’ (130) ‘The cells in our bodies are dying at the rate of millions a second, only to be replaced…’ (131) Sorry, but this isn’t the right context to talk about resurrection in the Biblical view. Easter is not an example of a general pattern of death-and-rebirth, it is a shocking and decisive intervention into the created order which changes everything. Bell gets the universality of the change, and is good on it (‘A gospel that leaves out its cosmic scope will always feel small’ (135)),...

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Rob Bell’s recantation: first thoughts

So justice won after all. By now you’ll have seen Rob Bell’s astonishing recantation. The revelation that he has been reading the complete works of John Owen, including all seven volumes of the Hebrews commentary, was shocking enough, but the road-to-Damascus like language of his described change of heart was utterly remarkable. ‘I was just reading and re-reading the Death of Death,’ Bell is quoted as saying, ‘thinking “what a communicator! Why can’t I write like this guy?” and not really focussing on the ideas at all. But then I thought “He’s right – Jesus did just die for the elect only” and with that I knew I had to change my teaching, my way of life, my style of writing, my glasses – everything!’ Bell apparently is already planning his next speaking tour, provisionally entitled ‘Approaching the mercy seat only possible by the blood of the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, with an account of the proper translation of hilasterion, and some reflections on the impropriety of indiscriminate gospel offers,’ and offering an account of his new theology. The only prop will be a dark wooden pulpit, thirteen steps high, and Bell has revealed that he intends to wear a dark suit, tie, and Genevan gown. And contact lenses. As far as I can see, no-one from the Gospel Coalition has yet commented publicly on Bell’s most recent announcement, or on his application to join. If you’ve not seen the video yet, it’s available...

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