December 19, 2019

Postmodernism, Rob Bell, and donkeys with manes

Toward the end of the New Testament you’ll find a short letter titled Jude. When Jude penned this letter, he wrote the following to his friends in the faith: “Dear friends, although I was eager to write you about the salvation we share, I found it necessary to write, appealing to you to contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all” (Jude 3).

In his love for Jesus and his friends, Jude encouraged his friends to contend for their faith – to protect the Gospel that had been entrusted to them. This has always been a central part of Christian community. In the gospels Jesus warned his disciples to avoid the teaching of the Pharisees, who thought they could earn the righteousness of God with their good works, and also to avoid the teaching of the Sadducees, who rejected Jesus’ words on judgment and eternal life. And in the epistles Paul, Peter, John, James, Jude, and the writer of Hebrews all warn their readers to beware of teachers who reject the Gospel.

To be a Christian requires faith in Jesus and what he taught. The gospels make that abundantly clear. However, we are finite human beings, prone to weakness and sin. Sometimes the afflictions of life stir up deep questions in us, and we can begin to wonder whether Jesus or the Bible is all that reliable. This is common, and it shouldn’t surprise us.

Allow me to use the covenant of marriage to illustrate a point: When a husband and wife make vows to one another, they make a lasting covenant. Marriage won’t let you hold anything back; it’s all or nothing. We either fully commit, or the commitment doesn’t mean much. But marriage is hard, and sin is real, and sometimes the afflictions of life cause a married person to wonder if they did the right thing. Questions loom, doubts are formed, and struggle sets in.

How can such a person find help? What they need is help in two directions: First, they need to find a community where they can be honest. It won’t get better unless the darkness is filled with light. The questions must be aired, the doubts faced, and the struggle exposed. But that alone is not enough because what they also need is a community that honors faithfulness, a community that doesn’t give up when the going gets tough, a community that believes obedience to Jesus is eternally significant.

Now the point of that illustration is to convey the kind of community a church must strive to be. Overly religious communities tend to stuff their feelings: the truth is avoided so the struggle remains hidden, but outward moral conformity is still expected. Overly secular communities, on the other hand, tend to exalt their feelings: honesty is encouraged so the struggle is exposed, but the doubts and misguided feelings are not appropriately challenged in light of the Scriptures.

All churches face a tremendous uphill battle: They must strive to be a community where feelings are not stuffed, but also where they aren’t exalted. They must strive to make room for struggle, but also stand firm in confident, biblical faith. The goal isn’t just moral and doctrinal conformity, nor is it just honesty and open-mindedness: The goal is joyful obedience to Jesus.

The following piece has been written to address an old error dressed up in new apparel that has taken our culture by storm. My aim in writing it is to help you contend for the faith – to protect the Gospel that’s been entrusted to you. It’s written to address real issues and to help us create a culture of standing firm in the faith so that seasons of struggle don’t unhinge us, but instead strengthen us.

The occasion for this letter is the growing influence of postmodern deconstruction in our culture and one of its most ardent supporters: Rob Bell. I hope you find it edifying and helpful.

Here’s to contending for the faith that Jesus delivered to us once for all, walking in the light, and standing firm in the Gospel,

Pastor Ryan
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Certainty and Humility

In recent years authors such as Rob Bell and others have begun to redefine what humility should look like in the life of a Christian. They say that humility and certainty don’t belong together, which is to say, if Christians want to be humble, they must maintain a degree of uncertainty within their faith convictions.

On the surface, this seems rather reasonable. We’ve all known people (or at least known of people) who are difficult to get along with because they are unwilling to understand or even consider perspectives other than their own.

But does certainty always lead to such behavior?
Can a person be both certain and humble?
We can answer this question by thinking about a parent helping a child.

Parents are certain about all kinds of things that their children do not yet understand. When my son gets angry because he doesn’t get his way, for example, I know where that anger could lead him.

In fact, I have a strong sense of certainty about it.

Eventually it could make him into a person who lacks emotional stability and pushes others away, unless I help him understand why he’s angry and what to do with it. Because I love him, I strive to meet him where he is. I am certain about what needs to happen in him, but my heart is soft, not hard (after I set aside my own sinful anger, of course). My certainty fuels humility.

I aim to engage. We talk. I listen.
I ask questions to understand him, and I do my best to help him see why ungodly anger is out of place.

Now at this point, you might be thinking, “But that’s totally different. A parent can be certain about things with their children, but a Christian cannot be certain because faith, by nature, is something uncertain.” I know this is a common understanding of faith, even within Christianity, but the problem is it’s not an accurate understanding of Christian faith. Let me show you why.

A Profound Knowing

In the example I shared about my son, why is it that I can have a strong sense of certainty? Where does the certainty come from? It comes from the fact that I know him. I don’t simply know about my son, I know him. Now this is a tremendously important point because Jesus talks about faith in a similar way. Jesus tells us we can be certain about many things, and he roots that certainty in knowing Him.

Listen to these words of Jesus:
“He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
When he has brought all his own outside, he goes ahead of them.
The sheep follow him because they know his voice.
They will never follow a stranger; instead they will run away from him,
because they don’t know the voice of strangers” (John 10:3-5).

In this passage, Jesus refers to himself as a shepherd caring for sheep – a common biblical word-picture. Jesus says that he calls his sheep by name, which means he knows them. He also says that his sheep follow him. Why? Because they know his voice.

Jesus doesn’t say that faith in him is a shot in the dark or an uncertain belief in an abstract web of spiritual ideas. Jesus says that Christian faith is rooted in a profound knowing of him, a certainty that comes from recognizing the presence of the Shepherd in his teaching.

Rob Bell’s understanding of Christian faith in his book What We Talk About When We Talk About God lacks this profound knowing of Jesus. He criticizes religious people for their certainty and says, “You can believe something with so much conviction that you’d die for that belief, and yet in the same moment, you can also say, ‘I could be wrong…’” (93).

This seems to me a rather silly statement.

Did the apostles and disciples in the early church die for their faith in Jesus with such deep conviction while thinking to themselves, “Well, I could be wrong, but at least my belief is really sincere.”
I don’t think so.

Take, for example, the death of Stephen in Acts chapter 7. He was stoned to death for his faith in Jesus. It’s obvious to any reader that there wasn’t uncertainty in Stephen’s faith. In fact, it was his certainty that led him to talk about Jesus with people who were hostile toward him in the first place.

Why was Stephen so certain?
Because his faith wasn’t rooted in some abstract idea.
He wasn’t passionate about a belief.
He was passionate about a Person.

Stephen was one of Jesus’ sheep. He knew the presence of the Shepherd in the Scriptures.

What else does Jesus say his sheep can know with certainty?

He says we can know that he has the “authority to forgive sins” (Matthew 9:6),
that he is the “Savior of the world” (John 4:42),
that he is the “Holy One of God” (John 6:69),
that “this is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent – Jesus Christ” (John 17:3).

Real Humility

The Bible doesn’t pit certainty against humility, and in reality, they go hand-in-hand. Scripture actually shows us that certainty in our knowing of Jesus is crucial for humility. How? Because Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies, to walk in radical grace and forgiveness, to serve others with gratitude, to love the truth, to repent of their sins, and to be sacrificially generous, among many other things.

Now why would Christians humble themselves in such a comprehensive way, unless they really were deeply confident in Jesus, even believing with certainty that he truly is the Holy One of God who has the authority to command them?

A Christian who wants to grow in humility will not be helped by holding their faith a little more loosely. That’s not the solution because it’s actually why there’s a problem in the first place. No person was humbler than Jesus, and no person had more certainty in the authority of the Scriptures than Jesus. A Christian who is hungry for humility needs a tighter grip on Jesus and the Scriptures, not a looser one.

What we now come to see is that the real problem with Rob Bell’s teaching is much deeper. He says that Christians need less certainty so they can have more humility, but as it turns out, he actually thinks Christians should be less certain about the teachings of Scripture because he doesn’t think the Bible is all that reliable.

Bell or the Bible?

In his newest book What is the Bible, Bell argues that Jesus didn’t really need to die for the forgiveness of sins, even though the New Testament epistles teach otherwise. He claims that the apostles and early disciples simply interpreted Jesus’ death in light of the Old Testament sacrificial system, but that Jesus Christ didn’t really die for the atonement of sin (244-245).

The Apostle Peter writes that Jesus “bore our sins in his body” when he was crucified (1 Peter 2:24),
and the Apostle Paul writes that Jesus came to be “an atoning sacrifice” for sin (Romans 3:25).
Rob Bell disagrees.

According to Bell, the writers of the New Testament, including the apostles and all the disciples of the early church, misunderstood who Jesus was and why he came, so Bell sets out to clear all that up for us. His hubris reminds me of an extended quote from C.S. Lewis, an expert in ancient literature. He writes:

“All theology of the liberal type involves at some point – and often involves throughout – the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by His followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory elsewhere… every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull American don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearian play really meant… The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous” (Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism, 1959).

Do you see what Lewis is saying? The writers of the New Testament, the apostles, and the disciples of the early church all have an enormous advantage over any modern person when it comes to understanding Jesus: They shared the same culture, language, and context. They were closer to him in every sense.

So who is more likely to actually understand who Jesus is and what he said?
The apostles and disciples of the early church, or an American author of popular religious books?

Read it “Literately”

One of the most valuable parts of What is the Bible is Bell’s encouragement that people should not read the Bible literally, but “literately” (80). He’s right about that. A person must understand at least a little about literary genre to read the Bible well. For example, you can’t read Proverbs the same way you read epistles, or Psalms the same way you read narrative.

Now this is wonderful counsel, and I only wish Bell would fully abide by it. He does not seem to understand the radical literary uniqueness of the gospels. He doesn’t let the gospels speak for themselves because he doesn’t see them for what they are. Consider what Lewis has to say about this:

“Turn to John. Read the dialogues: that with the Samaritan woman at the well, or that which follows the healing of the man born blind. Look at its pictures: Jesus (if I may use the word) doodling with his finger in the dust. I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage… Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read” (Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism).

Lewis’ point is simple: the gospels are radically unique, unlike anything else in literary history. They read like “reportage” as Lewis puts it – like eyewitness accounts that have been compiled and ordered to introduce us to a Person named Jesus of Nazareth.

Repackaging Old Errors

What Bell doesn’t fully explain is where the origin of his thoughts on the Bible come from. He’s been deeply influenced by skeptical scholars such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). Theological liberalism was birthed largely through the work of Schleiermacher and Rauschenbusch who argued that the Bible is a purely human book with no divine origin, designed to promote particular agendas and views.

Bultmann built on this foundation and popularized the “demythology” movement around the Bible. He contended that although the Bible is just a collection of fabricated myths and folk stories, modern people can still draw helpful principles from it by finding some kind of personal meaning from the myths.

The problem with these views, of course, is that they are expressly non-Christian and historically untenable. They assume from the outset that the Triune God doesn’t exist, that Jesus is not the Son of God incarnated into human history, that the Holy Spirit is a fabrication, and that the Bible is a purely human product with no divine origin. From the get-go, Bell assumes the posture of his theological forefathers, which is to say, he’s not even interfacing with legitimate biblical theology.

He’s either unaware or unwilling to reference more recent developments in theological scholarship like Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2008), which debunks the Higher Criticism of Schleiermacher and Rauschenbusch and successfully shows that Bultmann’s conception of the Bible lacks historical integrity. Bell is taking old ideas and repackaging them into a new, fashionable form of rejecting the Gospel.

In his book Love Wins Rob Bell unveiled his particular brand of universalism (the belief that there really is no hell and that everyone is free to find their own way to “god,” however they conceive of him), and in his subsequent books he continues to insist that everyone is a forgiven child of god, despite the fact that the Jesus we meet in Scripture expressly teaches otherwise.

What it Means to Me

Bell is a postmodern thinker, and when it comes to reading the Bible, postmodernism loves to ask this one question:

“What does it mean to me?”

This often gets in the way of a person understanding the Bible. Too little effort is invested in really grasping what the biblical writer is saying; too much confidence is invested in the musings of a modern skeptic.

An author who writes about the Bible should function as a lens through which we can see more clearly, a guide who points us beyond ourselves and beyond the author, but in so much of postmodernism, all real meaning is stripped away, except, of course, the meaning we choose to give it. This is what Bell does to the Bible. He says the Bible is a book about “what it means to be human” (4), whatever that may mean to him.

He describes the Bible as a collection of stories, ideas, and beliefs that can help us live an enlightened life (281), whatever that may mean to him (once again). The problem with all this is that, in the end, it confines a person within their own self as they build a version of god that suits them,

giving meaning to the Bible as they see fit,
being enlightened as they see fit,
becoming human as they see fit.

A god Like Me

Lewis understood the danger of this in a way Bell doesn’t.

He writes: “We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves.” (An Experiment in Criticism, 85)

Rob Bell cannot help me know the Jesus of the Bible in a profound way because the only person I experience in Rob Bell’s definition of the Bible is Rob Bell.

In Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia the final book in the series introduces a character named “Shift.” Shift doesn’t honor or love Aslan, the lion who represents Christ in Lewis’ story. So what does Shift do? He creates his own version of a lion.

He ties a mane onto a donkey and attempts to convince all the Narnians that he has found the real Aslan.

Rob Bell is a disciple of Shift, and that’s rather apparent because the Jesus that Bell describes is quite pathetic, and nothing like the Jesus of the Scriptures.

Bell is free to tie a mane around a donkey and try to pass it off as Christ, but he’s not fooling me. And all who know the voice of the Shepherd in the holy Scriptures won’t be fooled either.

In Bell’s treatment of the Bible, I am not drawn beyond myself to reflect on the holiness of God that Isaiah saw in his vision of the throne room, or the majesty of Jesus that Peter saw in the transfiguration, or the power of the Holy Spirit that the disciples saw when Lazarus was raised from the dead, or the beautiful scandal of God on the cross:

Jesus Christ crucified for the forgiveness of my sins, giving me his righteousness through humble faith, and transforming me into a new creation in Christ.

Instead, I’m left with something far inferior, something quite uninspiring. I’m left with Rob Bell’s thoughts on the Bible, and his encouragement to only give the Bible authority when it suits me (272).

As far as I can tell, it appears that Rob Bell’s god is a lot like Rob Bell, and all those who choose to follow his teaching must be warned that eventually their own god will also look a lot like them.

The ancients used to carve idols out of wood and stone, imagining what their god might look like, creating something that suited them. In our age idol building is just as common, but the Scriptures have become a new form of raw material. We chisel and carve until we get down to the chapters and verses we’re willing to accept. It’s a little less primitive, but in the end, it’s still just an idol: donkeys with manes.

By God’s grace, may we not muzzle the Scriptures and worship none but the real Lion of Judah, the eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ, born into human history, crucified for our sins, risen from the dead, reigning in heaven at the right hand of the Father, and soon to return for final redemption and righteous judgment.