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Slice of Silliness
I know that there’s not been a lot of activity here, but having had a few people comment on my choice to start reading fundamentalist diatribe, I thought that I just had to share this pearler:
Rob Bell of the emerging church says that he has the answer to stop the fighting, “the teachings of Jesus, who pioneered a brilliant way of loving nonviolence…” However was preaching this “loving nonviolence” really why Jesus was brutally tortured and crucified?
- taken from Rob Bell and the Calling All Peacemakers Tour
Is it just me, or is the answer to the rhetorical question posed here a whole-hearted “yes”? Maybe that’s not all he was crucified for, but I did have to laugh at this one.
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7 Comments
I wonder if Jesus was crucified for a number of reasons, maybe the chief reason being that he challenged and threatened the religious power of those who were meant to be the spiritual leaders of the day.
Of course the main reason he was killed was so Gods plan for salvation could be fulfilled, what Satan did because of hate and evil, God used for good.
I’m not so sure about the statement that he was killed because he preached ‘loving non violence”.
Having said that, I am big fan of Bell’s and not a fan at all of people who devote hours and gigabytes of the internet to criticising other Christian leaders.
You’re probably right, and I’m probably guilty of heading too far in the other direction as a reaction to a comment that I think is deeply unfair and ludicrously posed. I do think that to a certain degree the reason that Jesus “challenged and threatened” those in power was because he did base his ministry on a kind of power and methodology that the authorities neither understood nor could counter, but I’m not sure that this was what Rob Bell was really saying in the first place.
Thanks for the wise words Mark – they’re always appreciated even when I think you’re wrong
Gentleman the point of my post is that Bell doesn’t stress that one needs to be regenerated before they have any hope of living out the teachings of Jesus. I pray this helps.
Ken, I understand what you’re saying, but here’s where I find it difficult. I’d understand if you were taking issue with something that Rob Bell is saying – if he was proclaiming something that could be considered to be theologically in error, for example. But taking a one-line quote and then taking issue with what he hasn’t said: surely you can see that it is impossible for anyone to honestly represent someone’s views like that.
Exactly right Geoff, In mv view there is no doubt course someone can live out the teachings of Jesus without being a Christian. That does not mean they know God, as God requires them too, but I have met and dialogued with many gracious and reasonable people who are not Christians, and turn out to be more loving that some people who do call themselves Christians.
I have to admit, and to coin a mickism, I have been “delvaging” into the debate and reading my own slice of slice. There’s some interesting and heated dialogue out there!
Its nice to see some diverse views even amongst the SBC, I’ve been reading a blog i found through a link to a link from your blog… http://mcelroycounseling.com/notes/ which got me reading slice, and some other stuff as well.
It strikes me that the emergent movement is just a percentile thing… people have been saying similar things for many decades, but its only in recent times that communication and technology have allowed the dissillusioned minority to discover that they are more normal, perhaps even, dare I say it, more common, than they previously felt. What disturbs me, parrelel with the recent trend of punk outfits being sold in department stores, is the idea of counter-culture becoming pop-culture.
I had to read about sola-scriptura to make head or tail of the allegations being made against Rob Bell in some of those posts, and I came to the conclusion I dont believe in sola-scriptura either… and I don’t think its a scandal. Whose intepretation is it that is so self evident? Which translation? Why do they always seem to tell me that its the old king james bible that the reformation belief (named in latin) of sola-scriptura defines as the self evident word of God?
Why did the Americans declare it to be self evident that all men are created equal, and have to be divided over unrelated politics before abolishing the slavery that, naked, and blissfuly ignored, mocked the foundation of their independance?
If it was self evident, why did so many of the founding fathers have slaves, and not think to free them when they penned and claimed beif in the statement “all men are created equal”.
Which is a roundabout way of giving another example of how ideas change. Its irrisistable to ask why ’sola-scriptura’, which as I understand it, was mostly about breaking the power of the interprative institution of the catholic church, rather than blocking the interpretaive freedom of the individual, came about during the reformation. How many hundreds of years after christ? You’d think if it was utterly foundational, He might have mentioned it Himself at some stage. No, it seems to be (if wiki can be trusted) traced back to Luther, who was in fact, an unpopular reformer (and probably called a liberal) in his day.
Liberalism and liberty tend to become nonsense words, and perhaps do begin to represent moral decline, when we stop remebering to ask the important questions “what are we being liberated from?” and “What are we being liberated for?”
Wow what a rant. Feel free to edit me or ditch it… just that you got my brain ticking over and it bubbled out. So thanks…
)
Oh in case that all seems a little left field… one of the websites had a more in-depth critique of Rob and accused him of “rejecting the foundational doctrine of sola-scriptura.”
Perhaps I am just a lunatic existentialist. I’m probably going to hell, since the writings of gay french atheist existstentialist, post-structuralist, communist (and then not-communist) friend of simone de Bouviour and other miscelaneous evils, Micheal Foucault, make a lot of sense to me. Or maybe I’m a feminist. It gets confusing.
Anyway there’s a name for dogged dedication to a long departed way of knowing: naive-realism: the belief that the way “I” see the world IS the world. That’s why God is frequently stuck speaking King James English. Clearly no English teachers have made it to heaven since the day they departed from teaching the Kings English. And its no wonder Jesus sweat drops of blood the night before his crucifiction… in order to understand the Father’s will, he had to translate Olde Englishe into Aramaic without a dictionary.
Any dogged unbending dedication to the Reformation, or the Nicean council or any other post-ascention update on Christian Ideology, is a dead theology (although all of those theologies live on in dialogue). A century from now, if we dont scorch our own planet, Rob Bell and Brian McLaren will be remembered as the prolific writers, and voices of a changing era, and people will cling to their teaching doggedly, shunning the voices of whatever shake-up is renewing life in that century.
Today’s trend will be tomorrows Tradition.
I’m pretty sure anyone who can be bothered will shoot 12 guage holes in everything I’ve just said… but hey… thats okay (if its okay with Geoff that is) hope I haven’t lost the topic too much Geoff. Anyway a few holes are good… nice view of the sky and trees and so forth.