Your God Has No Edges

“Test it. Probe it. Do that to this book. Don’t swallow it uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it.”(86-87)

So says the rockstar of youth groups in english speaking churches everywhere, his message gel capped in 10-15-minute segments on NOOMA DVDs, perfect for the MTV generation whose attention span is best measured in 30 second intervals. Some of what I’ll say here has been previously discussed with Mikey Remix and J.Gallant after I read a review of Rob Bell’s 2005 book Velvet Elvis, so I understand that this is somewhat dated. I wanted to actually read the book myself before I made any lasting conclusions about Bell or his teachings. So I opened up my wallet and Amazoned a copy of the book whose subtitle is “Repainting the Christian Faith.”

There are a lot of good things in this book. A lot. But I also think that there were a lot of good things about Jerry Fallwell for example – though I pretty much disagreed with every other word he spoke. Let that be said from the get-go, that I do affirm the good in things, people, books, and movements where I find them. Rarely do you find a person, movement or book that is wholly corrupted.

Velvet Elvis is an example of the former, with many good insights and teachings. I’m not going to mention them because any commentary of mine would amount to either “ditto” or “I like your eschatology, and that’s pretty bold, going post-mil the other side of a holocaust; but hey – more power to ya.”

Academic Dishonesty

Listen up: let’s say I told you that Paris in the 1920’s was a veritable Mecca for expatriate American authors like Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and Stein. That word – Mecca – gives you an idea about the situation I am trying to describe. But never in your wildest dreams would you think that I meant that while in Paris, Hemmingway and Fitzgerald performed religious rituals circling the Arc de Triomphe.

Calling a certain place a “Mecca” is a term borrowed from the religious rituals of Islam, and it carries over some of the connotations the word has, but certainly not all or even most. The same goes for the word “Resurrection.”

Rob Bell writes:

“It is important to remember that we rarely find these first Christians trying to prove that the resurrection actually occurred. For one, a lot of the people who saw Jesus after he rose from the dead were still alive, so if people had questions and doubts they could talk to somebody who was actually there. But there’s another reason: Everybody’s god in the first century had risen from the dead. To claim a resurrection had occurred was nothing new: Julius Caesar himself was reported to have ascended to the right hand of the gods after his death. To try and prove there was an empty tomb wouldn’t have gotten very far with the average citizen of the Roman Empire; they had heard it all before.” (164)

The idea of ‘Resurrection’ as we understand it today is a Christian term for:
1) The Resurrection of Christ
2) The General Resurrection á la Daniel 12.2, 1 Corinthians 15, and Isaiah 26.19

It is something very Jewish. It is a concept that the Greco-Roman world of paganism had no category for.

The most recently published volume in Tom Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God series is an 800-page exhaustive study of the doctrine of the Resurrection. It is a massive work by a man who is one of the sharpest minds in academic theological studies today. Tom is a shrewd debater, prolific writer, brilliant systematician and someone whose works you need to be familiar with if you expect to have a serious discussion on the first century world.

In the second chapter Wright writes: ”Christianity was born into a world where its central claim [Resurrection] was known to be false. Many believed that the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism, nobody believed in resurrection.” Wright, N.T.. The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). 35, Emphasis mine.

This bluntly contradicts what Rob Bell has taught in between the covers of Velvet Elvis on the first century world as it pertains to Resurrection. Wright’s point, in examining the original texts of the ancient Greek and Roman world, is that they did not have a category for Resurrection. When Bell writes that “Julius Caesar himself was reported to have ascended to the right hand of the gods after his death” we tend to think this describes the type of Resurrection the Gospels describe. We tend to think “oh; Caesar ascends to the right hand of the gods after his death, that means that Caesar must have an empty tomb.”

But if we did that we’d be committing a historical fallacy. We would be using Jewish terminology to describe a Greco-Roman event, and it does not make sense. The tombs of the heroes of Greek mythology played an important part in their “…post-mortem cult; nobody supposed their graves were empty.” (Wright, 57) The pagan writer Celsus, writing a treatise attacking the early Christians, writes that they “believe in the absurd theory that the corporeal body will be raised and reconstituted by God” (as quoted in Wright, 522-523). When we read of Resurrection in Greco-Roman accounts, we read that their soul ‘went to heaven,’ or something to that extent. Their bodies stayed in the grave. Always. Death was the end. They went somewhere else; they never came back. Don’t be confused into thinking that this is a semantic issue – the Christian kerygma was that the tomb was empty, not that Jesus’ soul went up into the sky and his body stayed in the ground like everyone else’s. It was something radical, something the Greeks and Romans had never heard of before.

Rob Bell is an intelligent guy. He demonstrates this in his studies in the Mishnah and Talmud (though Scott McKnight points out that he often erroneously projects 3rd – 9th century post-second temple Jewish practices back into the New Testament). Therefore, I am forced to conclude that Rob Bell must be familiar with Wright’s works. If I’m familiar with this material, then there is no excuse for the teaching pastor of a 10,000 member church in Grand Rapids who writes books, makes DVDs and makes authoritative statements on the world of second-temple Judaism every Sunday not to be familiar with it.

So what’s the big deal? Has he not read Tom Wright? Did he merely gloss over that chapter? How can you ignore something as big and as important to the study of the first century as this? Or is it that he deliberately obscures the facts in order to make the first century church resemble his own church in Grand Rapids, attempting to prove his own position that “…people are rarely persuaded by arguments, but more often by experiences?” (164) Furthermore, who says that people are rarely persuaded by arguments? If not, then how does one explain the thousands who have been persuaded by the teachings of Velvet Elvis?

I don’t know, and I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but if I was a teacher - who is going to be held more accountable on the Last Day - I’d really really want to be sure in my assertion that the first century Christians didn’t try to prove that Jesus rose from the dead because everyone else had heard it all before – because they didn’t hear it all before. In fact, they had never heard of anything like it.

Examine the reaction that Paul got at the Areopagus in Acts 17.18-20: “Then certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him, and some said, ‘What does this babbler want to say?’ Others said, ‘He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods,’ because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, ‘May we know what this new doctrine is of which you speak? For you are bringing some strange things to our ears. Therefore we want to know what these things mean.’”So Paul delivers the famous Mars Hill sermon. Everything is going along smoothly until Paul mentions that awful little R-word – you guessed it – Resurrection: “And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, ‘We will hear you again on this matter.’” (Acts 17.32)

I Don’t Bounce
And so we come to it at last. The great trampoline analogy. In a sentence?

It is absurd.

Bell writes on page 26:“What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry’s tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? […] What if that spring was seriously questioned? Could a person keep jumping? Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live? Or does the whole thing fall apart? […] if the whole faith falls apart when we reexamine and rethink one spring, then it wasn’t that strong in the first place, was it? […] God is bigger than any religion. God is bigger than any worldview. God is bigger than the Christian faith. […] I am far more interested in jumping than I am in arguing about whose trampoline is better. You rarely defend the things you love.” (26-27)

Before I respond, let it be known that there is absolutely room for mystery, doubts and questions about God. There is room for honesty with God, to tell God exactly how you feel. Period. Brutal honesty. I’ve done it. Years ago I remember telling an aggressive Irish fundamental Baptist deacon that sometimes I absolutely hate God. His response was to just blink with indifference and continue talking to me as if I had only said “I love puppies,” because he believed in grace, humility and conversation. Trust me, if I can find grace in a church that has the words “Independent” and “Fundamental” on the sign out front, then there’s still hope for evangelicalism. There’s always been room for doubt and honesty, somewhere.

Let’s not talk about the Virgin Birth, let’s talk about another one of the five fundamentals, like the Resurrection. I wrote a segment of my thesis on it last year as it was treated in John Dominic Crossan’s works. How does the trampoline analogy hold up then?

“What if that spring [the Resurrection] was seriously questioned? Could a person keep jumping? Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live? Or does the whole thing fall apart?” (26)

“…if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. [...] if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! [...] If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.” (1 Cor 15.14,17,19)

Paul says that if Christ is not raised, then our faith is empty, futile, we are still in our sins and we are pathetic. In other words, you can’t jump if that spring is taken away. I don’t want to jump if that spring is taken away, because that means wild dogs probably ate Jesus’ body. Regardless of whether or not it’s the best way to live, if it’s all based on lies, then it isn’t true. Now I know that Bell says the truths of the Bible are true only because they were true for certain communities at a certain place and time (see 62), but in this case we’re not talking about abstract ideas like “God is light,” or “be you Holy, even as I am Holy,” but historical events no different from “I went to the gym yesterday.” It did happen or it did not happen. And I really do understand that Bell would argue that certain events (like the fall, the exodus, etc [58-61]) are not primarily true because they happened, but because they happen, but then we’re reducing it do that false dichotomy again! Why either/or? If it didn’t happen originally, then how could it happen again?

Christianity is not mythology, events that happened “…once upon a time.” It is a religion based on historical events. The metanarrative that is unfolding is one that has, as it’s core conviction, a belief that God has so invaded human history in the person of Jesus Christ that in any attempt to divorce God from his interactions with humanity, both are lost. God is now inseparable from his eikons, and if his relations with humanity really didn’t happen, then God doesn’t happen. It’s an irrelevant question, really - Bell’s “What if…” question on page 26. What if it turns out that I am my own mother? Can that question have a response? Or is it just nonsense?

Lastly, I agree with Bell that persons rarely defend the things they love. But you will find people defending the persons they love, and Christ is a real person. God has edges and contours (see 25). He is something and he is not something else. Proper morality or Holiness is not whatever we “bind” or “loose” it to be and neither is God himself. Yahweh is not a giant purple armadillo. Yahweh is “not a man, that he should lie, Nor a son of man, that he should repent.” He does have edges, and if you’re not careful you will get cut.

“Jesus is not honored most by the exploration of various Christologies, any more than your wife would be honored by your indecision concerning her character […] Jesus is honored by our knowing and treasuring him for who he really is.” – John Piper

All I’m doing here is merely disagreeing with Bell (on some points) the same way he disagrees with persons he mentions in the book, and then makes his case as to why he disagrees. What the hell, I’m contributing to the conversation, right?

~ by Tyler on September 14, 2007.