Elliot Ritzema

Tag: Rob Bell

  • Love Wins. Maybe You’ve Heard of It?

    Perhaps you’ve heard of this book. It has made no little stir on the Interwebs. And it continues to make a stir, since I know of at least two books that are coming out in the next month that deal with the subject of hell, at least one of which deals explicitly with this book.

    Since so many people already have such strong feelings about the book, I’m a little reluctant to say too much about it for fear of being misunderstood. But I will share a couple of thoughts:

    1. Bell still writes like he speaks. Line breaks aplenty.

    2. Bell is an impressionist. He shares the impressions that he gets from the Bible and from the world, and his refusal to explain how he arrived at some of the assumptions behind his impressions were frustrating to me. I wished that he would go into more depth, but at the same time I know that if he had gone into more depth, this would have been a very different book. Apparently he didn’t want to write that kind of book.

    3. Bell is a pastor. He understands that the image many people have of God is violent and destructive, and leads to awful results in their lives. So he presents a different image. In some ways I think this image is biblically faithful, and in some ways I think that it isn’t. But I do know this: any response to this book that does not attempt to respond to the same issues Bell brings up, but in a better way, will not succeed. It is not enough to say that Bell is not being biblical enough. It needs to be demonstrated both that Bell is not being biblical enough, AND that being more biblical addresses the problem of destructive ideas about God, or the fate of people who have never heard the gospel. That is the issue, and in my opinion too few critiques of the book understand this.

  • Book Review: Jesus Wants to Save Christians

    Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile by Rob Bell and Don Golden. This is the third book published by Rob Bell, the first one with a co-author (Golden was lead pastor of Bell’s church, Mars Hill, 2005-2008), and the second one I have read. In it, Bell and Golden encourage their readers to see the Bible and the church through a particular lens. That lens is “exile” (hence the subtitle).

    The first four chapters (“The Cry of the Oppressed,” “Get Down Your Harps,” “David’s Other Son” and “Genital-Free Africans”) give a quick overview of the Bible through this lens. In the first chapter we follow the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt, to encountering God at Sinai, to living in Jerusalem, to exile in Babylon. The second chapter deals with the hopes of the Israelites while in exile. The “David’s Other Son” of chapter three is Jesus, and Bell and Golden focus on Jesus walking with two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke’s gospel. Jesus is the suffering servant referred to by Isaiah, and is also the new leader of a new exodus. The “Genital-Free African” of chapter four is the Ethiopian eunuch from Acts 8. His baptism by Philip is a sign that the “new exodus” has been extended beyond the Jewish people to everyone, since “Baptism is a picture of exodus” (p. 100).

    Chapter five is where the application (for lack of a better word) section of the book kicks in. For the first part of the book, Bell and Golden have been speeding through the Bible, and now they begin to talk about “Swollen-Bellied Black Babies, Soccer Moms on Prozac, and the Mark of the Beast.” (catchy chapter title, no?) In it, Bell and Golden connect the stuff they covered in the first four chapters to our own situation. And one of their most eye-catching assertions is this one:

    America is an empire.

    And the Bible has a lot to say about empires.

    Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It’s a book written from the underside of power. It’s an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.

    This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures. (p. 121)

    In the next chapter, “Blood on the Doorposts of the Universe,” Bell and Golden give us a resource for resisting empire, and that resource is the Eucharist. God brought his people out of Egypt during the Exodus, Jesus became the new passover lamb, and the church celebrates this today:

    The Eucharist is about the church setting the table for the whole world.

    The Eucharist is about the new humanity.

    The Eucharist is about God’s dream for the world. (p. 167)

    The Epilogue wraps it all up:

    Jesus wants to save us from making the good news about another world and not this one.

    Jesus wants to save us from preaching a gospel that is only about individuals and not about the systems that enslave them.

    Jesus wants to save us from shrinking the gospel down to a transaction about the removal of sin and not about every single particle of creation being reconciled to its maker.

    Jesus wants to save us from religiously sanctioned despair, the kind that doesn’t believe that the world can be made better, the kind that either blatantly or subtly teaches people to just be quiet and behave and wait for something big to happen “someday.” (p. 179)

    I must say that I liked this book. I have heard critiques of Rob Bell, and I think some of them are valid, but in general I have to honor the guy for trying to make the gospel relevant to our culture. I think that Bell is mainly trying to reach two people groups: those who were raised in the church and are disillusioned by it, and those who don’t have any experience with church at all. It seems to me that some of the people making the loudest criticisms are people who are part of the church and are comfortable with the church the way it is. That doesn’t mean their criticisms are automatically not valid, but it does mean that they are not the audience Bell is shooting for.

    The “new exodus” theme was not new to me, especially after having taken a class on the gospel of Mark with Rikk Watts (whose thesis was published under the title Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark). I do wish, though, that Bell and Golden had given their readers a few more resources for following up this line of thinking. The idea that the arc of redemptive history can be seen as a “new exodus” is probably foreign to most of the people who read this book, and nods to a few more scholars besides Tom Holland would be helpful.

    I also wish that Bell and Golden had fleshed out their reasons for opposition to violence more. Several times in the book, the way of Jesus is contrasted with the way of violence (p. 87-8 and 133, among others), but no mention is made of the ambiguous passages in the Bible with relation to violence (like the conquest of Canaan) or of the fact that many Christians through the centuries have not been categorically opposed to violence. Entire books could be and have been written on this subject, but perhaps just a nod in the direction of some good ones for the benefit of readers would be good.

    Third, I don’t think that America is an empire in exactly the same way as ancient empires were empires. That is not to say that America isn’t empire-ish in some things that it does. But obsession with security and self-preservation can be critiqued biblically without busting out the “E-word.” My concern here is that the word will start to lose its meaning if it is thrown around so much. If what is meant by “empire” is “a state bent on violent means of self-preservation,” or “a state which uses a disproportionately large amount of resources,” then use a different term (maybe “hegemonic state”), because that’s not what “empire” means. I wish the authors had been as specific in this book as Don Golden was when he later wrote an article at God’s Politics that took a different angle on this issue. He wrote,

    America is not an empire like Rome; it’s a nation contingent upon a Beast of its own creation.

    What is that Beast?

    Instead of arguing about empire, we should be talking about Beasts because history has a new one, and it’s not America.

    The force that accepts no boundaries to its acquisition of wealth, whose disregard for the poor is matched only by its betrayal of the wealthy, is not a political state at all. The power that rules planet earth in our age is the unrestrained force of raw capitalism.

    I really do appreciate the clarification, but it would have been nice for Golden to acknowledge that the reason people are arguing about empire is that he’s the one who brought it up in the first place. If he doesn’t want people to get exercised about whether America is an empire, or if he thinks it distracts from the main issue of unfettered capitalism, then he should be more careful about the words he uses.

    Finally, I wish that they would move away from this spaced-out typesetting style. It makes me feel good that I can get through a 218-page book quickly, but it does get a little annoying after a while. I sure hope Zondervan isn’t paying these guys by the page.

    Despite my quibbles about the book, I think that this is a book that is needed in 21st-century America. It calls attention to aspects of the gospel that have been ignored for too long. The trick now is to live out a complete gospel, instead of just focusing on different (but still incomplete) aspects.

    P.S. – Scot McKnight has written a good review here.

  • Mars Hill on a Wintry Night

    This past Sunday I went to Rob Bell’s Mars Hill Church in Grandville, MI (not to be confused with Mars Hill Church in Seattle, or Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, none of which are related).

    I read Bell’s book Velvet Elvis last year and found it to be an entertaining read. I’ve also listened to a few of his teachings online. He is quite informal in his speaking style, and conveys a great deal of excitement about what he is speaking about. He also devotes a lot of attention to the Jewish cultural background of the New Testament, and I must say that I have benefited from that.

    This Sunday, though, was an atypical Sunday. Not only was Bell not speaking (though he was there, introducing the speaker and playing a guitar as part of the band), but there was also a snowstorm that had started early in the afternoon and was raging by 6 p.m., when the evening service started. My dad and I walked in and were underwhelmed by the amount of people there. We sat down, and people continued to trickle in, but the seats were only about half full (this is highly unusual, as there were a couple of jokes made about how many people were there in the morning compared with the hard-core people who showed up for the evening). Even though nowhere close to all the seats were filled, I’d say there were easily more than 500 people there (it could have been closer to a thousand; I’m not so good at estimating crowd size).

    The service (or Gathering, as they are called at Mars Hill) was very simple: we sang a few songs, listened to a sermon (or teaching), sang a few more songs, and then it ended. The services take place “in the round,” with all of the seats arranged around an elevated platform in the middle. This works out very well for the teachings, I think. Though Rob Bell didn’t speak, Ed Dobson did, and he seemed at ease with moving around and directing his attention to the four sides of the audience.

    In my opinion, the way the room was organized didn’t work out as well for the worship. A few worship leaders are stationed on each side of the platform, but instead of facing out toward the people, they face inward, toward the platform. There are four screens above the platform, one facing in each direction, that display song lyrics and notes during the teaching. I suppose the worship leaders face inward in order to minimize the feeling that we are watching a band instead of worshiping. But since we all face those screens, it looks a little bit like we are all worshiping a big cube.

    (As an aside: I once went to a Russian Orthodox worship service in a church that had a fantastic choir, but you couldn’t see them. They were in a special balcony just above the rear door. So their beautiful sound filled the sanctuary, but when you looked up at the front all you could see was the altar. Maybe something like that could get rid of the worship-leaders-as-rock-band problem?)

    But the worship was good; we sang traditional Christmas songs with new, rocking arrangements. Ed Dobson was also a very engaging speaker, and I definitely benefited from his talk about peace. Afterwards, I heard from my aunt that he suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease. I was even more impressed with his speaking ability after that.

    On the negative side, I thought that on the whole it was a little too stripped down for my tastes. I tend to like a little more in the way of liturgy. Like prayer, for example. I’m not saying that they don’t pray at Mars Hill, since I looked at some of the things they have scheduled during the week, and prayer definitely seems to be a part of their life as a community. But I was uncomfortable with the fact that prayer was not part of this large group gathering. Maybe they have a good reason for that, but I don’t know what it is. Also, though Dobson was a very engaging speaker, I thought that he perhaps bit off more than he could get through in one talk. After all, peace is big in the Bible. I thought he spent a whole lot of time doing a word study of “shalom,” when perhaps he would have done better to narrow his scope a bit.

    But this is just nitpicking. Overall, it was a positive experience, and I worshiped God in that experience. I’ve never been part of a megachurch myself, but I find the way different large churches “do” church to be fascinating.