I've been reading some more of Pastor Rob Bell's books, and I have to say that he is one of the few Christian writers that I am familiar with who is not afraid to tackle the issue of why people don't believe/fall away in an honest, no BS position. I really think I could sit down with this guy and talk to him without being pressured, without being patronized. I think we could talk with equals. It's too bad that my pastor doesn't approve of this guy, because there's a lot of things I'd like to talk to him about. But I really don't know how he would react.
In "Velvet Elvis" Bell talks about a hypothetical Christian who has been raised in an all-Christian environment, who has been taught that Christianity is the only source of truth, and then who goes off to a secular college where she is exposed to all sorts of new ideas and perspectives. She studies biology, psychology, anthropology and before long she runs into a dilemma: believe the new things she is learning or the faith she was brought up with. I like the way Bell puts it in a nutshell: "intellectual honesty or Jesus?" We've all seen or known people like this, he says.
OMG! I am the one he is talking about. That is exactly what happened to me, and it is SO HARD to explain it to others. He says of these young people, "they are experiencing truth in all sorts of new ways and they need a faith that is big enough to handle it. Their box is getting blown apart and the faith they were handed doesn't have room for what they are learning."
But he says this shouldn't be a problem because truth is not outside the faith, to be a Christian is to claim truth whereever you find it. Once I would have agreed with him, but now I don't. I mean it's complicated. He is right on one level, but on another level he is wrong. And this problem isn't just confined to Christianity, it belongs to any religion that stakes its claim to truth on a set of holy writings written thousands of years ago.
First of all, and I speak from experience, anyone who attempts to have it both ways is going to run into a great deal of opposition because churches generally don't encourage their members to explore other avenues of truth. When my pastor says, as he has on several occasions, that not everything in a Christian bookstore is Christian, he is revealing something significant about how he feels his congregation should think even though on the surface this church advertises itself as being broad-minded and not legalistic. He doesn't want them exposed to other Christian views that he doesn't agree with. And so it boils down again to "intellectual honesty or Jesus?"
But secondly, and I think this is the more important point, the truths that Bell's hypothetical young woman is learning are not things that one can just add on to one's faith. She is learning things that directly challenge and contradict the Bible. She is learning that the Bible is wrong when it comes to how the earth and the universe are structured. Not little things. Big things. I've written about them before. What Pastor Bell is trying to offer is another version of the "uneasy compromise". And sooner or later if she is a person of intellectual integrity, she will have to admit this. She will have to choose. Because as the Bible puts it, "you cannot serve two masters." Yes, there are people who manage quite well with a foot in both worlds and see no problem with it. That's because they are good at compartmentalizing. They've either never tried to integrate both or they haven't looked very deeply into things, and so it isn't an issue. For those people their faith is an important part of who they are, and it would be cruel to rip it from them. Because "deconversion" can be a heartbreaking thing. It's useless to talk about issues of belief/non-belief with them because they don't really want to hear why you don't believe or no longer believe. They want answers in crisp sound bites. I'm sorry, but that really isn't possible. The answers are messy and complicated. And let's face it, most Christians are ill-equipped to deal with them because they involve disciplines that they haven't studied.
In "Velvet Elvis" Bell talks about a hypothetical Christian who has been raised in an all-Christian environment, who has been taught that Christianity is the only source of truth, and then who goes off to a secular college where she is exposed to all sorts of new ideas and perspectives. She studies biology, psychology, anthropology and before long she runs into a dilemma: believe the new things she is learning or the faith she was brought up with. I like the way Bell puts it in a nutshell: "intellectual honesty or Jesus?" We've all seen or known people like this, he says.
OMG! I am the one he is talking about. That is exactly what happened to me, and it is SO HARD to explain it to others. He says of these young people, "they are experiencing truth in all sorts of new ways and they need a faith that is big enough to handle it. Their box is getting blown apart and the faith they were handed doesn't have room for what they are learning."
But he says this shouldn't be a problem because truth is not outside the faith, to be a Christian is to claim truth whereever you find it. Once I would have agreed with him, but now I don't. I mean it's complicated. He is right on one level, but on another level he is wrong. And this problem isn't just confined to Christianity, it belongs to any religion that stakes its claim to truth on a set of holy writings written thousands of years ago.
First of all, and I speak from experience, anyone who attempts to have it both ways is going to run into a great deal of opposition because churches generally don't encourage their members to explore other avenues of truth. When my pastor says, as he has on several occasions, that not everything in a Christian bookstore is Christian, he is revealing something significant about how he feels his congregation should think even though on the surface this church advertises itself as being broad-minded and not legalistic. He doesn't want them exposed to other Christian views that he doesn't agree with. And so it boils down again to "intellectual honesty or Jesus?"
But secondly, and I think this is the more important point, the truths that Bell's hypothetical young woman is learning are not things that one can just add on to one's faith. She is learning things that directly challenge and contradict the Bible. She is learning that the Bible is wrong when it comes to how the earth and the universe are structured. Not little things. Big things. I've written about them before. What Pastor Bell is trying to offer is another version of the "uneasy compromise". And sooner or later if she is a person of intellectual integrity, she will have to admit this. She will have to choose. Because as the Bible puts it, "you cannot serve two masters." Yes, there are people who manage quite well with a foot in both worlds and see no problem with it. That's because they are good at compartmentalizing. They've either never tried to integrate both or they haven't looked very deeply into things, and so it isn't an issue. For those people their faith is an important part of who they are, and it would be cruel to rip it from them. Because "deconversion" can be a heartbreaking thing. It's useless to talk about issues of belief/non-belief with them because they don't really want to hear why you don't believe or no longer believe. They want answers in crisp sound bites. I'm sorry, but that really isn't possible. The answers are messy and complicated. And let's face it, most Christians are ill-equipped to deal with them because they involve disciplines that they haven't studied.
