By Luke Moon (Twitter @lukemoon1)
It should not really be a surprise to anyone who has been following Rob Bell’s career of late that the former mega-church pastor turned writer-provocateur has come out in favor of same-sex marriage. How better to incite people to buy your latest book than to jump on the bandwagon of so-called “marriage equality.” Rob’s evolution on same-sex marriage is timed like well-trained politician, but for a minister of the gospel is a sad testimony to how doubt and unbelief can lead one to affirm that which God abhors.
Rob Bell’s comments came in response to a question asked by the Very Reverend Jane Shaw, Dean of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. This Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco has been the center for the Religious Left’s advocacy on behalf of same-sex marriage. Just over 40 minutes into the hour-long conversation, Rob is asked his views on same-sex marriage to which he replies,
“I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it’s a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man. I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs…I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.”
Devoid of any attempt to justify his position through scripture, Rob simply affirms that since the World seems to be embracing same-sex marriage it’s time for the church to catch up. Of course Rob did make a video recently where he told a bunch of teenagers that they need to “say ‘Yes’ to the world.”
The saddest part of this conversation came as Rob describes his upbringing and then how his church grew from a handful of people to over 8000. At one point in the story one can hear the longing in his voice as he recalls how the Holy Spirit moved powerfully on the hearts of the people of his church. He mentioned how his plan to slow the growth of his church was to preach on Leviticus. Rob remarked,
“For a year and a half I preached Leviticus verse by verse by verse and even more people came. I am live 28 or 29 and we have 1000 people, 2000 people, 3000 people, 4000 people, 5000 people 6000 people, 7000 people, 8000 people. I am talking, like a baptism service where we were baptizing some people and people begin to get up out of their chairs, fully dress, and coming to the front and saying, “Please baptize me! Whatever I am experiencing now, I have to be a part of this.” So we were baptizing 100, 110, 120, 130 people at a time.”
It was in the midst of this spectacular growth and ever increasing busyness that he begin to doubt his faith. The New Yorker article describes his journey into doubt,
“He started to doubt the inerrancy of the Scriptures, which made him doubt the faith that had sustained him; he was leading a church, but he wasn’t even sure he was still a Christian. He was exhausted, and, one Sunday, after the nine o’clock service, he hid in a storage closet, dreaming about running away so that he wouldn’t have to preach at eleven. He says, “I remember having moments of, O.K., I’m only going to say things that I know are true. ‘It’s better to be generous than stingy’—O.K., I can do that.”
The journey may have started with personal doubts about the inerrancy of Scripture, but his proven effectiveness as a communicator has allowed him to spread his message of doubt to all who will listen. His book “Love Wins” reached millions and falsely assured them that “hell” is no big deal.
But “hell” is not the only doctrine under attack. In a recent interview with Jonathan Merritt, Rob was asked whether it is “appropriate to pray to one’s heavenly mother” as well as to one’s heavenly father?” To which Rob replies, “Well, you certainly have Isaiah using a mother image for God and Jesus talks about longing to gather like a mother hen gathers her chicks. But that is a great question, and one we should be asking.” In perfect re-imagining form, Rob intentionally confused metaphor with identity. Following Bell’s logic since Jesus likened himself to a door, perhaps we should pray to our Heavenly Door?
Whether it’s Universalism, Mother God, or same-sex marriage Rob Bell seems bent on embracing every popular heterodoxy in his march towards obscurity. Like many who have gone before him, this journey will only be punctuated by the occasional worldly ovation confirming his sad trajectory.
Comment by Jane L. Bonner on March 19, 2013 at 9:43 am
It is tragic the Rob Bell is a poor scholar. He has fallen into the same error of every false teacher. He is reading the Bible from his emotion rather than the real text. If he truly studied scripture and knew the language, he could not say the things he says. What or who does Rob love? Does he even understand love?
Comment by cleareyedtruthmeister on March 19, 2013 at 10:10 am
Perhap we are paying too much attention to Rob Bell. He is drifting further into the anti-Christian sea.
This may well be a financial decision for Bell. If he is to maintain any livelihood among California liberals endorsement of same-sex marriage is a must these days.
(What’s so ironic is that a few decades ago rejection of marriage was a staple among West Coast libs–I remember quite well, as kid, the standard disclaimer that “we don’t need a piece of paper to hold us together”….thus giving us the shack-up culture).
Comment by Donnie on March 19, 2013 at 10:29 am
The problem is that so many people today try to justify EVERYTHING using Mark 12:31. They don’t seem to understand that you can love gay people without championing gay “marriage.”
Even more disturbing to me was the UMC church in NC that refuses to perform marriages as long as the UMC does not officially endorse gay “marriage.” Their pastor was quoted as saying the UMC needs to catch up with today’s culture. THAT statement should disturb everybody.
Comment by Billyy McMahon on March 19, 2013 at 10:58 am
I’m curious about your comments concerning “Mother God”….. are you advocating for strict usage of describing God as father? But that would seem to not sit well with your metaphor/identity problem- after all, does God have male reproductive organs? Or would you suggest understanding God as a genderless/eternal/divine being? I think this option would be more exegetically faithful to passages such as Gensis 1 (Let us make humankind in our image…. male AND female God created them….).
Also, how would you evaluate medieval Church leaders such as Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich, who at times described God as a loving mother?
FYI- I understood Love Wins to be more similar to CS Lewis’ theology outlined in the Great Divorce and not universalism… but I won’t go there, ha! 😉
Comment by Luke Moon on March 19, 2013 at 11:43 am
Detached from the bigger picture of Rob Bell’s embrace of Liberal theology his comments would be pretty insignificant. Rob offers some examples of God being understood metaphorically, but then deflects by saying maybe we should be thinking about whether God is Mother or Father. Where to the New Testament authors say, Mother God or God our Mother? Many feminist theologians refuse to call God “Father” and even one seminary president has taught her daughter the Lord’s Prayer by saying, “Our Mother who art in heaven…”
Keep up with what we write here at the IRD and you will begin to see that Rob’s comments are not like those of Julian of Norwich, but more like Serpent of The Garden. “Did God really say…?”
Comment by Billyy McMahon on March 19, 2013 at 2:40 pm
While I certainly don’t agree with Rob Bell on everything, I’d be hesitant to compare him to the Serpent…. keeping the traditional evangelical interpretation of that particular text in mind, it seems to imply an ad hominem comparison to Satan.
Comment by raybnnstr on March 20, 2013 at 5:32 pm
People often refer to Lewis’s The Great Divorce as if it teaches universalism. It does nothing of the kind. Lewis definitely did believe in an eternal hell. The Great Divorce, was, he emphasized, a work of fiction, not theology. The real point of the book is that, even if the people in hell have a chance to leave their situation and live in heaven, most will choose hell. This perfectly fits with Lewis’s view that the door to hell is not locked by God but by the unrepentant sinner.
Regarding the “Mother” God thing: people always toss around this “factoid” that Julian and Hildegard spoke of God in feminine terms. True, but the exception proves the rule. ALL Christian writers through the ages, including women (Julian and Hildegard too, usually), spoke of God in masculine terms, for the obvious reason that that is how God chose to reveal Himself. If you don’t like God as Father, you can’t have much use for Jesus, since in the Gospels he continually uses the term Father (more than 100 times in John’s Gospel). One passing reference to Jesus as a “mother hen” who would gather the people together as chicks under his wings doesn’t actually show an equal-time approach to female and male images of God. We can admit that God is not “sexual” in the human sense, and the command against graven images was intended to keep the Israelites from regarding the true God as just another promiscuous divinity that the pagans worshipped. Nonetheless, God in the Bible is male, like it or not. To attack the male image of God is to claim that Jesus, Paul, Abraham, Isaiah, Moses, and company had the wrong idea about God, and if they didn’t know Him, who did? Anyone who thinks these inspired people were just part of some sexist conspiracy ought to do the obvious thing: exit Christianity and don’t stop running.
Comment by Billyy McMahon on March 22, 2013 at 7:29 pm
Raybnnstr- WordPress isn’t letting me reply to you so hopefully you’ll see this.
No, I don’t think that CS Lewis is a universalist (and after reading it, I also do not think Love Wins necessarily supported universalism either, but that’s another story… Ha!). I’m not sure how you interpreted my comment in that way. I also think the topics Bell explored in the book had more to do with refuting Calvinism- namely the possibility that hell might be a choice, not a condemnation that people make in this life AND beyond. Consider the following example from the book: a racist would not like being in heaven if s/he were to find out that many races were there. From what I know about Calvinistic theology, I do not think that idea would sit well with “irresistible grace.”
I’d also be a little bit more epistemologically humble in our judgments concerning who refutes biblical writers/heroes.
Comment by cleareyedtruthmeister on March 19, 2013 at 2:07 pm
Most people I’ve known who made a point of referring to God as Mother had a hidden agenda, usually a politico-sexual one.
Two important questions to keep in mind are these: Was Jesus male or female? How did Jesus refer to God?
We know that the answer to those questions is male and Father. Could it have just as easily been God the Mother and Josephine the daughter? Maybe. But here’s the point: it wasn’t.
Comment by Billyy McMahon on March 19, 2013 at 2:36 pm
I’d be very hesitant to assume Julian (writing in pre-modern times) had a sort of 21st c. feminist hidden agenda.
Yes Jesus was male and he prayed to God as father, but it looks like we disagree on this theological issue. Like I said in my original comment, does God the father have male genetalia?
Comment by cleareyedtruthmeister on March 19, 2013 at 3:47 pm
The masculine and feminine encompass many more things than just the physical, much of which is quite mysterious from a human perspective.
Comment by Ty McC on March 19, 2013 at 11:51 am
Way to go Mr. Bell! Thank you!
Several things:
1) Our Western concept of heaven and hell is found in Dante, not the Bible.
2) God has no gender, God is neither male or nor female. God is God.
3) God separates the weeds and the wheat, not the Church.
4) The bible has been misused to justify the discrimination of a people group. And no it is not a cut and dry issue. Put those 6 passage in a cultural, historical and literature perspective (aka exegetic) and the whole “gays can’t be Christians” falls apart. Also, there are 1,000s more verses that tell us to love the other… each and every other. So yes, Rob Bell and yes gay men and lesbian women. Articles like this are not loving. This is so negative. It just adds to the polarization of religious and political discourse and is far from being ecumenical.
I know on a post its easy to label me as the angry-gay in the room, I’m not. I just get frustrated when Christians besmirch other Christians because they are doing Christianity differently. Our God is big enough to hold the Rob Bells of the world and the fundamentalist. Same team.
I know I’m going to be a lone voice on sites like this, but I am grateful in the real world, I’m not. Thank you for your time.
Comment by gregpaley on March 19, 2013 at 1:34 pm
I have read the Bible numerous times, and I am not familiar with these “1,000s more verses that tell us to love the other.” Can you cite some, I mean, beside the obvious ones like “Love your neighbor”? I don’t expect you to actually quote “1,000s” or even “100s.” However, I will say, respectfully, that there are not 1,000s, nor 100s.
Also, the definition of “love” as “accept whatever people do” is not the definition of love found in the Bible. The secular world, and the so-called “Christians” whose worldview is completely shaped by the secular world, has this view, but it is not Christian. The tradition is, love the sinner, but hate the sin. If you have a child, friend, spouse, or whoever, and they are engaged in destructive or self-destructive behavior, you do not say “Whatever you want to do, that’s cool with me.” that is not love, that is laziness. If I have a gay friend who is HIV-poz, and he’s sleeping around and spreading the disease to others, would it be “loving” to say “You go, man!” I don’t think so.
Christians have to stand our ground on moral standards, even if that involves against going against the grain, and it usually does. If you see articles like this as ‘negative” and “unloving,” that is unfortunately. The world’s shallow definition of “love” can’t be allowed to silence the truth.
Btw, I am most definitely NOT on the same “team,” as you put it, with Rob Bell, not by a long shot. He pretty much defined himself by “Say Yes to the world!” Whatever that religion may be, it is decidedly NOT the Christianity of the Bible. When you encounter the word “world” – the Greek is kosmos – in the NT, it is almost always negative. Bell’s religion of conforming to the immoral world is not the “narrow way” that Jesus taught his disciples, it’s the “broad way” that leads to destruction. Lazy people want a religion that makes no demands and allows them to look and act just like their agnostic friends. Christianity does make demands. Sorry you don’t see it that way, but I take Jesus, not Rob Bell, to be the Master in these concerns.
Comment by noelanderson on March 20, 2013 at 1:22 pm
Bell is no theologian; he is a populist. His “honest” wrestling with Christianity looks more like false humility than noble truth-telling. Every hot question enables him to strike a pose for the edification of his enormous audience. His inward battle is more likely his own ongoing discomfort with fortune and fame–a midwestern boy fighting the denial of his growing egotism–than anything resembling religious angst.
What we see is his awkward, twitchy(and very public) dance with the historical Faith–a faith for which fortune and fame apparently authorize the right to progressively edit–with the end result being one spasmodic, but crowd-pleasing, witness.
The little-known pastors who–in the same situation–would have honestly defended the historical faith and been vilified for it; each one of them are worth a thousand Rob Bells.
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