I spent part of my morning listening to Cameron Strang interview Rob Bell. I tried to jot down some of the points I enjoyed while I listened along – partly for my own “records,” and also to share here.
You can listen to the podcast in its entirety here. These are my notes:
On the title choice for his new book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians
Jesus wants to save Christians from missing out on the joy of being true to [their] identity. He wants to save Christians from indifference. He wants to save Christians from boredom. He wants to save Christians from greed. Jesus wants to save people from thinking that somebody else is supposed to do all the good things.
Incarnation is not a New Testament idea, you know what I mean? You see it early on, God looking for a body of people. And when the church gets converted, the world trembles. I mean, you show me a group of people deeply connected to each other, telling each other the truth, going to each other first and not gossiping and back-biting; you show me a group of people who are learning how to live with each other well and then are engaging in the great causes of our day together in a spirit of humility and courage. I mean that changes things. It’s almost like, when the church gets her own message, and starts living it, things change and people think, ‘There just might be a God. Hope might be real.’
On a narrative understanding of Scripture
I think what Christians sometimes do is show people the second-to-last scene of the movie and then wonder why they’re not moved. And the Scripture is a story. And it would nice if the Bible was like, ‘A.) God is good; B.) you should be good, too; C.) we’re all sinners…’ It would be nice, but it’s not; it’s a series of stories and poems. There are sections in the Bible that are kind of linear and logical, kind of ‘this leads to this’ – like the book of Romans, but even that is actually a story. It’s a letter written by one guy to another group of people.
But I would say that what happens, when you begin to see the whole story, is all of these things start to make a whole lot more sense. So when Jesus tells a story about a father who has two sons, and the one son goes away to a foreign land but then returns home, you can take that as an individual story about how God welcomes us home no matter how much we’ve screwed up – lovely and true and very powerful – but to speak to Jews in the first century about a son who went away and came home was to speak to a whole nation of people who knew something about that.
So much of what Jesus is doing – and I have friends who would argue that Jesus isn’t doing anything new – I mean he’s doing all sorts of things new, but it’s all commentary, it’s all connected with the story before that.
[For example,] exile – that’s a scene that comes up throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, and then you find Jesus speaking to a people who are kind of estranged. Like the phrase Christians use, Jesus says, “I am the Way, I am the Truth…” – well the Way… that’s a phrase Isaiah used. So to use that phrase [today], we might miss all of the depth and significance of it if we don’t realize that Isaiah used it, but then Isaiah actually used because it was a phrase used in Exodus. God had spoken of the Way out of Egypt. So when Jesus says he’s the Way – and John has Jesus saying he’s the Way – that’s a reference to Isaiah but that actually goes all the way back to the redemption from Egypt.
And so I think it’s dangerous when Christians are using phrases that – no matter how powerful they are – without maybe getting plugged in to how that phrase has been used throughout the story.
On the need for changing our adaptation of the Jesus story
I think the Church is in the endless process of – as we progress and learn and grow and follow the resurrected Christ – it’s always going to open up new tomorrows. In one sense, we’re going to find out that we missed a bunch of things that may be central to the Way of Christ.
So I would argue that lots of people now are realizing, ‘Hey, wait, how we care for the earth, our stewardship of the earth and the environment, is a very central issue to what it means to be a follower of Christ.’ So what’s happened is there’s something that kind of got left behind along the way and we need to reclaim it. Somewhere along the way, some one kind of left that out and now we’re going, ‘Hey, wait, what was that again? Because I think we need that.’
The flip side is there are also things that have gotten attached to the Jesus movement that perhaps aren’t central to the Jesus movement, and we need to have the guts to leave them behind.
I would argue that mysticism is central to orthodox Christianity, an awareness that there is a deep mystery at the heart of who God is, and you must always leave a bit of room… When you become too dogmatic and too absolutely sure that your particular perspective is the only one, something dangerous happens to the mystery of the Divine.
I would argue that in the past several hundred years you have this amazing amount of effort and energy spent on making precise definitions and propositions that may, in fact, cut us off from the love and mystery and grace of God. And [mystery] is just this endless beautiful process.
The Reformers didn’t use the word “Reformation.” They used the word “Reforming.” Always, always making sure that we haven’t picked up some junk that we need to let go of, and making sure we [haven’t] left something behind that we need to grab hold of.
The Eucharist and the new humanity
To me the beauty of the Church is that, She, the Bride of Christ, should be showing people what it looks like to be fully human. If it’s Christian, then it ought to be about what it means to truly be human, in every sense of the word. To be everything God made us to be.
On power and empires
One of the things you have again and again [in Scripture] is this warning about power. It’s almost like you could say that Bible is a warning against the proper use of power.
On critics
First off, it’s personally very painful. I started off awhile ago – I’ve always been compelled with Jesus – and I just wanted to make the resurrected Christ known for people who weren’t interested. So there’s a part of me that, on a very personal level… it’s just painful. To be misunderstood or hated… I don’t Google my name, so I only hear things kind of second-hand, and it’s… it’s just sort of heartbreaking. And it takes a personal toll. So I’ll just be honest there.
Secondly, I do know that the nature of religion can be to calcify and harden. It gives a certain sense of security and so that security needs to be maintained. And then, also, energies are given to making sure we don’t go down the slippery slope, forget, lose, [etc.]. And that’s a good impulse, but it can turn quite dark quite quickly. And I don’t know what to do about that.
