The Christian blogging world exploded last weekend while I was away at Buck Creek Camp with the students from Re-Mix. A preview of well-known author Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins, was released by his publishing company. The preview video and bits and pieces of chapters that were released were just vague enough for some other well-known Christians to be able to jump all over it, and claim that Rob Bell was both a Universalist, and that his career as he knows it should be considered over.
After that, it seems that most blogs I follow all of the sudden had “Rob Bell” in the title, and had an opinion on the subject. And then there was the myriad of opinions that appeared on Facebook, and Twitter. It’s as if the entire Christian world had something to say about Rob Bell. And while the occasional blog or post was actually quite fair, a vast majority had something disparaging to say about someone. Because those that love Rob Bell now hate Justin Taylor and John Piper, and those that love Taylor and Piper have been looking for the moment when they could destroy Rob Bell.
And all of this came to be after a 2 minute video was released about a book that no one has even read yet. Christians are demolishing other Christians over a book preview.
My question is this: why in the world would anyone who doesn’t know Christ and is reading anything about this debate want anything to do with Christianity?
What good is a faith that claims to be rooted in grace and love and yet doesn’t show those traits to those who proclaim the same faith? Why must Christians eat other Christians alive, in order to supposedly protect Christianity and it’s values? Why couldn’t people have a conversation, instead of a one-sided monologue that essentially rips someone else apart, and is based on assumption? And why is this such a predictable pattern in modern Christianity?
I believe that Christians need to stop publicly bashing, and start privately engaging. Because realistically, not one of us has the ability to completely figure God out. So let’s stop trying to claim to know it all, and instead start really listening. Let’s not judge something or someone before we’ve heard them out. And let’s not assume that we are so much better than the Christian standing beside us.
And lets remember this…books like Rob Bell’s are only asking questions that people, particularly young people, are already asking anyway. When someone is considering Christ, they need to know that they can have the freedom to ask questions about a God who can be so very confusing. If you have grown up in the church, there are some things that you might have taken for granted, things you know or believe that seem basic, but to someone who is investigating faith for the first time, could seem very strange. And even if you have grown up in the church, there is so much to learn, and think about and try to understand, that we should believe that choosing to ask questions is a fair and worthy choice. I don’t want to be a person who smacks down questions because of fear of where they may lead, but instead engages with questions, wrestles with them, talks through them, prays about them, studies Scripture about them, and comes to a continually more complete view of God than what I started with, and shares that with others, in a loving way.
In an article that was posted this week on Relevant Magazine’s website, Scot McKnight writes:
“My contention is this: the approach to this generation is not to denounce their questions, which often enough are rooted in a heightened sensitivity to divine justice and compassion, but to probe their questions from the inside and to probe thoughtful and biblically responsible resolutions. We need to show that their questions about justice and God’s gracious love are not bad questions but good questions that deserve to be explored.” – Universalism and the Doctrine of Rob Bell by Scot McKnight
And we need to show a world that’s watching that Christians are mature enough to talk through our differences, instead of literally throwing the book at each other.
