Learning Not To Cut Ourselves

To those who read my blog,

This post is a long time coming.

So, over the holidays, a friend of mine had changed her status to something along the lines of “First day at Mars Hill Church, and they stick me in the nursery”. When I read this, I thought, 'Mars Hill? That’s where Rob Bell preaches! I love Rob Bell! He’s my favorite preacher! With that thought process in place, I quickly commented on her status in an excited fashion (in all caps so she would know how excited I was) exclaiming that I love Rob Bell and why had she not told me she was going to his Church.

Here is where I encounter a problem. A friend of hers quickly responded to what I said telling me that it was a different Mars Hill and that Rob Bell is a heretic who did not know his Bible.

Let that sink for a moment.

I then went to the defense of Rob Bell as he cannot defend himself from accusations that are said behind his back and are done without his knowing. As I have been listening to Rob Bell sermons for a while now, I know at least that he knows his Bible better than most and so far I have not seen any problems with his theology going against dogma (dogma being the things that are absolutely true about Christianity without question. A great example of Dogma is the apostle’s and the Nicene creeds). “Sir, I am sorry, but you are mistaken. Rob Bell is not a heretic and he knows the Bible better than most”. He responded with a quote from Rob Bell (and I am sorry, but I cannot for the life of me remember what the quote was) that sounded quite bad on Bell’s part. He then claimed that Rob Bell’s heresies were beyond counting.

I left it that. I did not want to start a fight with someone that I didn’t know on a subject I felt passionate about. Also, I wasn’t informed enough. I needed to do some thinking.

I mentioned to my friend that I was going to write a blog about this stuff and she told me to listen to the sermon of this one guy before I did. I didn’t think it would make a difference, but I did. I chose to listen to this guys sermon on the emerging church as I felt it would be the most relevant to what I was thinking and feeling.

I had a few issues with this guy, but he seemed to have his head on straight on a few issues and the ministry he’s involved with is growing, so I don’t want to bash him (which is why I’m also not mentioning his name) but he mentioned Rob Bell. And he talked about Rob Bell. And He said that Rob Bell denied the virgin birth in Rob Bell’s book, Velvet Elvis. I thought to myself, This can’t be, Rob Bell is on the level. He would never  deny the virgin birth which is considered to be dogma by the church!

Well, I had two choices. I could take this other guys word for it (let’s call this other guy Luke). I could take Luke’s word for what Rob said, or I could read Velvet Elvis. I read the book. Sorry, Luke, but I needed to see this for myself. I only saw one reference to the virgin birth of Christ in Velvet Elvis and I am going to quote it word for word in order to explain what I think Rob means by what he says because I am of the same thought process in this. Here is the quote:

“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 doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers through in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods have virgin births? But what if as you study the origin of the word virgin, you discover that the word virgin in the Gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at the time, the word virgin could mean several things. and what if you discover that in the first century being ‘born of a virgin’ also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse?” (Bell 26)

That is the only time Rob Bell mentions the virgin birth in the entire book. I know because one of the reasons I put off writing this blog for so long was because I wanted to finish the book first. Where in that paragraph did Rob Bell say ‘I don’t believe in the virgin birth’? No where. He merely poses a question. And if you read it in the context of what he’s saying, you understand why he’s asking the question. He wants people to not have their faith completely torn down if one thing from their faith experience is proven different from what they thought it was. The virgin birth is a great example because when Isaiah wrote the word virgin he probably did mean a woman who got pregnant the first time she had sex. Rob Bell was giving us Christians a way to still believe if something turns out different than we expected.

All of this to say that Luke, the guy who preached on the emerging church, was misquoting Rob Bell. How can I trust a man who misquotes someone in order to bring him down. I think a more relevant question to ask is why was Luke trying to take down Rob Bell in the first place? Isn’t Rob Bell a Christian? Isn’t Luke a Christian? Don’t they both have Jesus as their personal savior? Isn’t that the place they should start from? Actually, I once heard a sermon by Rob Bell on that very subject. He basically said that Christians should not fight over the small stuff.

Here is where I finally get to the point of this blog. Christians should not fight over the small stuff. Doctrine can be the small stuff. For those who don’t know, doctrine is what can be disputed about. The 7 day creation account is doctrine. Women being pastors is doctrine. This is stuff we need to hold loosely and when we come across someone who does not believe the same as we do, we need to sometimes just agree to disagree and go back to what’s really important: Jesus.

What happens if we continue attacking our brothers and sisters? Did anyone find it weird that I named this blog, Learning Not To Cut Ourselves ? Who are we, as Christians? We are members of the Church. What is the Church? It is the body of Christ. So what are we doing when we attack people unjustly who are in the Body of Christ? We are stabbing ourselves in the arm!

I am not saying that we should not go after things that are truly heretical, but we need to think critically about them before we go after them. We can’t just misquote people and attack them. This Luke guy, he is a big shot. He’s the teaching pastor at a huge multi-site Church in the states. He has loads of people in his congregation and he just blatantly lied to them about what a brother in Christ said.

These guys who go after Rob Bell (like the guy in my friends facebook status) are not thinking critically about these issues and are instead attacking people unjustly. They pull apart quotes from books and from interviews and they give a new meaning to what these other guys say and it is wrong!

I listened to a broadcast of what was called ‘Pirate Christian Radio’ and the name suited them. When I think of pirates the first thing that comes to mind (after Luffy and the Straw Hat Pirates) is an image of people who attack other things without mercy or bias. They are people who attack the other as long as it is different from them, and that is what these people did. They did not listen to what Rob Bell was saying in his sermon, but picked apart every sentence they did not understand at first. It could have made sense and even fit into what they thought about God, but they never gave it the chance.

Today (or perhaps yesterday as it is past midnight) was community day at my school and the ministry department had a guy come in and talk to us about a bunch of things. One thing he touched on was a group of two camps. ‘The New Reformers’ (who are starched Calvinists) and ‘The Post-Modern Thinkers’ and he said that both camps could learn a lot from one another instead of trying to tear each other apart.

I agree.

We need to learn from one another. We need to show love to one another and we need to stop stabbing ourselves in the arm. We are all in this body together, after all!

-Joshua

Trinitarian Baptism FTW??

To those who read my blog,

So, I am taking this Theology of Worship course at school and the big emphasis in this course is participating in worship with the focus on the Trinity rather than one aspect of God. I don’t get it. Well, it’s not that I don’t get it, but that it’s something I’m wrestling with.

James B. Torrance has a book that I’m reading for this course called,Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace where in it he says:

“Firstly, I have been a child of God from all eternity. Secondly, I became a child of God when Christ the Son lived, died and rose for me long ago. Thirdly, I became a child of God when the Holy Spirit... sealed in my faith and experience what had been planned from all eternity in the heart of the Father and what was completed once and for all in Jesus Christ” (Torrance 76).

Now Torrance is talking about baptism at this point in time. Here’s what I think: I believe in freewill over predestination. I do not believe God sits “up there” on a cloud and looks to heaven and makes a list saying, “yeah, he goes up, but him, he goes down”. I know there’s more to that thought process than all that, but that’s what I get out of it and I really don’t like it. I have an understanding of predestination because the Bible does speak of it but I don’t subscribe to it as God making the decision for us. It’s more that He knew before all things that I would choose. So when I first read this quote I thought to myself, “That’s all well and good, but how do you argue this whole Trinitarian thing from the whole freewill stance?” Then I realized that I don’t have to. Torrance (whether he meant it or not) argued it for me.

Maybe I’m just an optimist, but I look at this quote and think of God working in a stance of freewill. If God knows all things, then He would know that I would choose Him from when time began (and perhaps even from before that). He might have already cherished me as a child at that point.

If I was made a child of God when Christ lived, died and rose then perhaps my view on the cross is actually skewed. I look at the cross as something that was done once 2000 years ago. Now, doesn’t the Father exist outside of time? Then would He not look at the cross as not a moment in time, or as an eternal standing that is a significant today as it was yesterday and as it would be tomorrow? When I chose Christ, He took my hand and led me to the Father and it was the cross which He needed to get by in order to allow me to see the Father. He needed to bridge the gap with the cross. The cross that does not exist 2000 years ago, but here and now and also there and then, and even still there and soon. It did exist, it does exist, it will exist tomorrow. I really don’t think that means Christ is experiencing the cross all the time but more so that the Father sees the Cross when He sees those who chose Him and it is in the Cross that we are made children, even back then.

What really made it come together for me was when Torrance says faith and experience. He does not separate the two. He goes onto say that the Father planned this from eternity, but maybe the Father just knew about it from eternity. I don’t know. That experience thing really sticks with me. I don’t know if I would have gone to Christ if my experiences were different. If I didn’t have the people praying for me that I had, if I didn’t get so wrecked so many times in my youth, if I wasn’t so utterly broken that weekend, then perhaps I wouldn’t be musing on the Trinity at 2:40am and instead be  in a bed in Brampton Ontario wondering if there was more to life than my atheist views allowed me to see. I don’t know.

So what does this have to do with baptism? Well a lot, actually. We are called to baptize in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit. We are to baptize in the Trinity. What does baptizing in the Trinity mean if not recognizing how the Trinity has been active in our lives? It means to recognize that the Father knew you and what you would do from the get go, that the Son’s bridge was set up and is in place in eternity for all to cross if they wish, and that the Spirit takes our faith and our experience and draws us to that bridge so that we can meet with our adopted dad who has been waiting such a long time to embrace us and as I write this I am so filled with emotion right now. I am realizing this love, maybe even for the first time (truly for the first time) or perhaps I’m just re-falling for the same God that I fell for almost 7 years ago. This Father who has taken me out of such crap and blessed me with true love over and over again.

I am not saying that I understand the Trinity or that this is what Torrance meant when he wrote these words (in fact, he might be quite upset with the conclusions I’ve drawn up for myself) but I am saying that I love my dad, my ‘Father who arte in heaven’, my papa, and I’m glad I have Him to run too.

Back to work. Sorry for rattling on.

- Joshua