Does Rob Bell Know What He’s Talking About?
as per Out of Ur – credit where it’s due.
I wanna say right off the bat that this is in no way an attack on Bell who has done brilliantly as a pastor and church leader. Much respect and props there, and I dig the glasses and the emergent thing. But in a recent interview Bell was asked to define evangelicalism to which his answer betrays some of the vagaries the emergent church has been accused of:
Q. What does it mean to you to be an evangelical?
A. I take issue with the word to a certain degree, so I make a distinction between a capital E and a small e. I was in the Caribbean in 2004, watching the election returns with a group of friends, and when Fox News, in a state of delirious joy, announced that evangelicals had helped sway the election, I realized this word has really been hijacked. I find the word troubling, because it has come in America to mean politically to the right, almost, at times, anti-intellectual. For many, the word has nothing to do with a spiritual context.
Q. OK, how would you describe what it is that you believe?
Read the full interview here.
I dunno. It just seems a very shallow answer for a deep thing and Bell has gotten into trouble for this before…
what tickles me even more is a comment on Url’s blog:
I don’t see any value in trying to reclaim “Evangelical” as a term, since the meaning it would convey, if reclaimed, is increasingly irrelevant to where practicing American Christians are today. I think we’d all do better to let the term die, the quicker the better.
The problem with this statement is twofold:
On the one hand it thinks evangelicalism is a strictly “American” thing. Why do Americans always think (we) are the center of the world? To consider evangelicalism strictly “American” is an insult to millions of Christians outside of the States.
Secondly, it shows that too many associate evangelicalism with (American) politics and have failed to grasp it’s larger historical significance tracing back to Wesleyanism, to Moravianism, to Pietism, to Lutheranism. It is the closing thing that we have to describe a religion of the heart over against a religion of obligation. It is totally a meaningful designation and should emphatically not be tossed out.
So I’ll stop there. Thoughts?
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Preach it brother. Evangelical is an increasingly useful term precisely because it is a handle we can use to describe “emerging” global Christianity. In that context it is coming to mean, I think, adherence to the historically basic doctrines of Christianity. For some complicated reasons that I don’t quite get Emergent seems to have a blind spot here: hugely critical of american Christianity as it is, it doesn’t break through americentrism.
I think Rob Bell and others of his ilk enjoy distinguishing themselves from other evangelicals though there is probably not a hair’s worth of difference between him and what he believes and what those he criticize belief. Personally this sort of quasi-elitism bothers me no end. I don’t know Rob Bell and I don’t want to dismiss him out of hand, but frankly I think he’s just one of those people who want to enjoy the praise of man.
I’ve heard some of Rob Bell’s messages and read one of his books. The book came across better than the messages, but I was perturbed in reading the transcript of the interview that he typically refrains from mentioning Jesus. He refers to Christ as “the Jesus message”, a phrase I find irreverent.
I actually stopped going to one church in Colorado when I lived there because they just basically stopped mentioning Jesus; in that case, it was to focus on extraneous matters, but whether to make the message more accessible (as with Bell, it seems) or to preach the evils of public schools (as in the church in Colorado) any avoidance of the name of the Christ is just wrong.
That makes me wonder. To what extent is the name “Jesus” the measure of our relevance in a society? I’ve got my opinions on this but just wondering.
I’ve heard the term “relevance” used in relation to the church (very often, actually), but I’m not quite sure of the exact definition of it. Ultimately, of course, our relevance has nothing to do with anything the church does, but with Christ and Him alone. Without Christ, we are all doomed; that’s the essential relevance of the cross.
Of course, I do understand some of the avoidance of using the name of our Lord too loosely. I’ve been in some places where the name of our Lord has been used almost flippantly and sometimes by people who don’t represent well the name that they use so readily. In those circumstances, I’ve been somewhat (though not entirely) reticent about my faith simply because it’s something that non-believers hear perhaps too easily from other sources. Whether my reticence is correct or not and whether it served to aid the gospel or not, I don’t know. I still wouldn’t want to make a philosophy of it, correct or not.
@elderj You don’t think there’s any substantive difference in Bell’s belief and other evangelicals? That’s interesting. From his answer above, there is no mention of Christ. Of course it seems like he is generalizing his belief and distinguishing it from other evangelicals more than he is defining the actual word evangelical. But then again I don’t know much about Rob Bell other than a few of his sermons which I’ve listened to online.
@randplaty
I’m late on my answer, but here goes…. I don’t know well enough what he believes, but I suspect he could without much difficulty sign off on the basis of faith of some evangelical organization or other. That being said, I believe it is a rather dangerous thing to want to distinguish oneself always from other “evangelicals” because they don’t go in for the kinds of things we do. It seems as Wayne said a shallow answer to a deep question and if Jesus is not mentioned in answer to a question about what a Christian believes that is definitely a problem.