By now, there is no way you have missed the controversy about Rob Bell's new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. The internet nearly exploded on Saturday when Justin Taylor posted a rather unhelpful piece essentially declaring Bell to be apostate for rejecting the idea of hell and embracing universalism. Taylor wisely amended his post soon afterward and noted that he had made his judgments without actually reading the book. Nonetheless, folks all over took Taylor's post to be the truth, and immediately proceeded to toss Bell aside as a heretic.
My knowledge of Bell's theology is limited, but I know that he has been a controversial figure for quite some time. Robin, my wife, is from Grand Rapids, and during the time we were dating we went to Bell's church a couple of times, although for all the ink spilled about his bad theology, I never heard him say anything overtly unbiblical. Nonetheless, I was not surprised to see his name dragged through the mud again for his views on how God deals with those who reject him.
I was not surprised, but I was very disappointed. We always need to have an enemy, it seems, and Rob Bell made the perfect target this weekend. And so without having read his book or interacted with him on the issue at hand, people all over set to judging him and condemning what they think they knew of his theology.
Eugene Peterson, in Practice Resurrection, spends a few pages discussing Martin Buber's book, I and Thou. Buber puts forth the theory that there are three ways humans typically approach their relationships with others: I-It, which objectifies the other in the relationship; Us-Them, which divides every relationship into good and bad; and I-You, which recognises the personality and humanity of each person in the relationship. Having the Bell controversy on my mind as I read this, I was struck by how often evangelicals view everything through the lens of Us-Them. Peterson summarises Buber's second category like this:
Us-Them: the world is divided into two, the children of light and the children of darkness. This is a very convenient way to think about the world because whatever is wrong, it's obviously because of 'them.' Complexities vanish. Everything is suddenly tidy. There are goats and sheep, and the sheep by the very nature of things will triumph – didn't Jesus say so? Us-Them has always attracted demagogues, and the demagogues have attracted great crowds. This in effect demonizes everyone who doesn't think or feel along the lines of Us... Us-Them turns others into the enemy.
I am not here to defend Bell's theology or to offer an apology for his book. And if you do a quick Google search, you will find lots of helpful (and not so helpful) responses already written about what happened this weekend. But the whole controversy brings to light again the need for Christians to stop glorying in ugly theological battles, especially when our understanding of the theology we are opposing is based on speculation.
John Frame, one my seminary professors, had such wisdom and humility in how he dealt with the thought of others, particularly those he disagreed with. I learned a great deal from him about this. We have a responsibility to have a thorough understanding of the thinking of those we disagree with before we set out to critique them. And when we do, Ephesians 4 is instructive, because our critique of the theology of others is not to tear them down, but to build them – and the whole body of Christ – up. So we must speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). What's more, we simply cannot be so casual when it comes to throwing around accusations of a false gospel. To be sure, we have a responsibility to carefully evaluate the teaching of others, and sometimes there will be a need to be frank and honest about someone teaching a false gospel. But to label someone apostate is a major charge, one that has immense implications. We are wise to use this label very sparingly.
Needless to say, this was largely absent from the internet discussions over the weekend. It is a lot easier to label someone apostate than to take the time to interact with their thought. But this hardly serves to build up the body of Christ.
I don't know what Rob Bell thinks about hell or universalism or how God deals with those who reject him. If the promotional video that caused so much of a stir is accurate, then there are some major theological issues that need to be addressed. But writing off Bell as a heretic or bidding him farewell should not be our first reaction. We need to carefully evaluate Bell's theology, interact with him about these issues, and speak the truth in love. Don't revel in division and controversy. Seek the unity and peace of Christ's church.
As children innocently prepare their costumes and empty bags or pillowcases for an enjoyable evening of collecting candy, evangelicals will be battling the forces of Satan on two fronts tonight: boycotting Halloween, and gathering together for a few rousing rounds of Rome-bashing.
Now, I don't enjoy Halloween (specifically what American culture has made of it), and have no problem with those who wish to abstain from participating in it; there are many good reasons not to. However, I am sure there are many doing so tonight who have no idea what they are actually boycotting. They prefer to ignore all that history and instead seize on to the opportunity to celebrate another day which nicely coincides with this awful pagan holiday—Reformation Day.
Lest I sound too cynical, let me note that I am, indeed, very thankful the Reformation happened—I am glad that the doctrines of grace were recovered, I am glad that the abuse of power by corrupt church leaders was curtailed, and I am glad that I did not have to pay for St. Peter’s to be built pay for my relatives to be sprung from purgatory. The Reformation is most certainly something to be thankful for. But one question continues to linger in my mind—would we even celebrate Reformation Day if it didn't conveniently fall on the same night as Halloween?
We might ask why we need a special night to celebrate the Reformation. On the one hand, it seems to be the equivalent of using Valentine's Day to tell your wife that you love her. As your love for her should be manifest each day, shouldn't our rejoicing in God's saving grace be something we do each day? This grace should pour forth from the preaching of the Word and we should taste it in partaking of the Lord's Table each Sunday. Do we really need a specific day to commemorate this?
Moreover, Martin Luther's act of nailing the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg was not the monumental act of defiance that many make it out to be. He only intended to raise a discussion about various issues concerning the Catholic Church with his academic peers. Luther's innocent action exploded into the major events that followed only because some random guy grabbed the piece of paper off the door, translated it into German, and sent copies of it all throughout the country. Do we need to a special day to remember that autumn day in 1517 when Luther walked up the stairs to the door of the Wittenberg church and made known his desire to have an academic discussion with his colleagues?
Hardly. So what is it, then, that evangelicals end up celebrating on Reformation Day? To be sure, there are those who will understand and acknowledge the theological implications of the Reformation. But for others, Reformation Day is, for all intents and purposes, a day to celebrate the disunity of the church. That, to me, is certainly not worth celebrating.
For some reason, people seem to forget that while Luther ultimately made the move to break from the Roman Catholic Church, he did not do so immediately. He spent years in agony deciding whether or not to leave the church he knew as mother and to go against Christ's call for unity in the body of believers (John 17:20-26, 1 Corinthians 1:10). People also forget that Luther was not the first Reformer, and that there were many who went before him who also tried earnestly to reform the church from within. Separating from the church was never the intention of these men, yet their valiant efforts to remain united seem to go unheralded. Instead, we prefer to celebrate the Protestant break from Rome, the second-most definitive and drastic split in the history of the church (the first being the Great Schism of 1054).Am I advocating a return to Rome? No. Do I think the church will ever be one this side of our Lord's return? Of course not. Am I thankful for the work of the Reformers? Absolutely—I count it a great privilege to be rooted in the theological heritage they left us. But we can't forget that the Reformation also produced a lot of collateral damage. When you have to start constructing graphs that look like the one below (and this is just the American Presbyterians!) something is terribly wrong. And it is nothing to celebrate.O Lord, make us one as You are one.
Some weeks ago, I posted about the recent trend among evangelical Twitter users to tweet the gospel. A couple of days ago, Anthony Bradley, associate professor of theology and ethics at King's College, discussed the same thing at the WORLD magazine blog, garnering a lot of attention and prompting Jared Wilson, who pastors a church in Vermont, to issue a lengthy response defending the practice. By no means am I a big player in the blogosphere, but since both of them linked to my original post on the subject, I wanted to offer a few additional thoughts in response to Wilson's post in particular. You will need to read both for the background to this post.
First, both Bradley and I argued that one of the problem with the gospel tweets is their lack of context, a point Wilson takes issue with. He argues that all tweets, regardless of content, assume a context and that to understand what a person is tweeting about, you need to know this context. This is a logical point, of course, but there is a difference of degree in the contexts needed. For example, let's say that I tweet something like, "Heading to Sanford to have dinner with some folks from the church." You will need to understand a few things to make sense of this: clearly, I don't live in Sanford as I need to travel to get there, but obviously I live close enough that I can go there to have dinner with people. You will not know where Sanford is unless you know that I live in the Orlando area, and so it must be in that area as well. Also, you will need to know that I am a member of a church, and quite involved to the point that I'd share a meal with some of the people who belong to it. But these are all things that are easily deduced.
As another example, recently I tweeted a link to a blog post discussing the problems of consumerism and poverty in America. The tweet contained a brief quote from the post, "While iPad sales show no sign of slowing, one in five children in America are living in poverty," and was followed by the link. What context do you need to understand this tweet? You need to understand that what the iPad is and that it is being sold in large quantities, and you need to understand that there is a significant portion of the American population living in poverty. Further, you need to understand that a comparison is being made between the two statistics in order to demonstrate that our culture values consumerism more than it does justice. Again, though, this is not difficult to figure out.
Now, let's take one of the examples of a gospel tweet I originally cited, which both Bradley and Wilson reproduce in their posts: "Legalism says achievement leads to approval, the gospel says that approval leads to achievement" (and by the way, Mr. Wilson, if I recall correctly this one belongs to Tullian Tchividjian. I didn't see the need to cite the authors of these sample tweets originally because it wasn't important for the purpose of making a general observation). What context will you need to understand this? In the first place, you will need some of the terms defined, particularly legalism and gospel, because the extent of the definition of gospel at this point is, "not legalism," and vice versa. Then, what is the achievement spoken of? Approval by or from whom? Unless you have some sort of theological foundation, these questions are not so easily answered.
Interestingly, Wilson also points to John 3:16 as an example of a presentation of the gospel in tweet-sized form (he notes that the verse is 126 characters long). It is true that this is a concise expression of the gospel—and indeed, much clearer than many of the gospel tweets out there—but again, it is not understood by everyone without further explanation; Nicodemus himself needed the entire discussion with Jesus in John 3 to make sense of what he was talking about. The point is simply that there is a much greater context needed to understand a gospel tweet. Now, while this in and of itself is insufficient reason to abandon the practice altogether, it should raise some questions about the how and why of tweeting the gospel.
If you do the gospel-tweet thing with the purpose of trying to evangelize, hoping that it might plant seeds, I cannot imagine this practice bearing much fruit. I certainly would not deny that in some cases it might, but I do not think that something like, "Only the gospel glow of the New Jerusalem can make the city lights of Tarshish appear as bling bling," (this one belongs to Scotty Smith, by the way) is going to bring people to their knees. It surprises me, too, that many of these who engage in the gospel-tweeting practice are the same people who emphasize the need for building relationships in the process of proclaiming the gospel to the world. If, instead, you do it as a means of discipleship, what level of depth are you bringing to that relationship? These are just some of the questions this practice raises in my mind.
Second, Wilson makes a big deal over the discussion of the simplicity of the gospel. I am not sure what the problem is here. Bradley is right to say that there are times where gospel-tweeters attempt to say something profound or clever and in doing so, "frustrate the simplicity of the message." There is a sense in which the gospel is profoundly simple, and trying to dress it up with a slew of over-the-top adjectives only obscures that. But this does not, as Wilson insists, contradict the fact that the gospel is also far bigger than any tweet can encompass. I simply don't see the tension here.
Third—and this is the biggest issue I have with Wilson's post—at one point, he mentions that gospel-tweeters understand that the gospel is a "big deal" and later goes on to say that because he believes in the Lordship of Christ over all of life (the title of his blog is a reference to that oft-quoted statement of Abraham Kuyper), he can't help but use his Twitter stream for proclaiming the gospel. What comes across in these statements is an implication that those who don't use Twitter for this purpose—myself and Bradley included—don't get how big the gospel is and don't believe in the Lordship of Christ. Now, I am sure that Wilson would not want to say this (his words could have been more carefully chosen at this point), and indeed it is not true.
In fact, I think that if you really believe in the Lordship of Christ, you will tweet more than your clever comparisons of the gospel and legalism or the gospel and religion (the latter of which, by the way, are not antithetical to each other). Your tweets will talk about all spheres of life because Christ is Lord over all of life. The gospel is not just about individual salvation (which is what receives the most emphasis in the gospel-tweets). It is about the transformation of all of life, and God's act of redeeming his whole creation. It is about the Kingdom of God that has come and the sovereign rule of Christ over all. I would think that your tweets would reflect that by going beyond the implications of the gospel for individual salvation and piety. Perhaps you might link to articles discussing how to think about politics, education, and justice from a Christian perspective. Maybe you would share some quotes from books you are reading on creativity and the arts. Even something more mundane, like mentioning that you are going to spend a quiet night at home with your family is not outside of this because it demonstrates that you understand the value of the family. What's more, it seems to me that this sort of thing would be a lot more effective if you want to reach non-Christians, because it gets them thinking about things they deal with on a regular basis. A good article on how to deal with the problem of poverty prompts your followers to ask questions: "Why does he think about poverty from this perspective?" That point of contact lays a greater foundation for a relationship instead of blasting them with the ills of legalism.
In the end, I think Bradley is right to say that this practice, in some ways, keeps believers on "spiritual milk." If the gospel doesn't go beyond the usual fare of the Twitter-gospel, it is not helping to transform all of life.
Do I think the gospel-tweeting should stop altogether? No. I've seen some genuinely good tweets out there. Do you need to only tweet stuff that everyone will understand? Of course not. My main objection, and I think Bradley would concur, is when it totally consumes a user. As Bradley says, there are times when it is hard to imagine that this is all nothing more than a popularity contest, just like those who only tweet things like "how to grow your business" or "how to get more hits for your website." Perhaps Wilson is right that part of our dislike for the practice is because we find it annoying, but that is the least concern here. It is the glut of overblown adjectives, often-bizarre comparisons, and in many cases, banality, that makes us wonder what the point of it all is.
Abraham Sangha, one of the contributors for the blog, The Institute, mentioned in his most recent post that he was once asked how you would tweet the gospel, to which he quickly replied, "You don't." I'm inclined to agree with him.
In recent months, I've noticed that some people involved in church ministry have increasingly been using Twitter as a platform for talking – though perhaps it would be better to call it preaching – about the gospel, in some cases almost exclusively (I'll attribute it to mere coincidence that this started to happen with more regularity once John Piper started tweeting). Below, I pulled a sample of some of these tweets so you could see what I'm talking about:
Reading the sample tweets I've posted above, there were a few things that came to mind. First, while I don't disagree with anything said above (although I might word them differently), these short tweets are lacking context. Now, in the case of the persons who tweeted these things, the vast majority of their followers will be Christians, with many likely coming from a similar tradition of the Twitter user and able to supply the needed context. In one sense, then, they are preaching to the choir. But perhaps one of their followers is in a place where they need to hear one of these messages, and are encouraged by it.
However, if you have people following you who are not Christians, none of this will likely make any sense to them. And though having followers who aren't Christians shouldn't stop you from tweeting thoughts that resonate with you or inspire you, it is worthwhile to consider your audience and the medium of the message. One other thing bearing consideration is the nature of social media relationships – is there some semblance of a personal relationship when following someone on Twitter such that you are sharing the gospel in the context of relationship, or is tweeting the gospel a 21st century varient of tract evangelism?
Secondly, these types of tweets seem to restrict the gospel message to the singular idea that we are saved by God's grace apart from anything we can do. While this is entirely true and was one of the major themes of the message Jesus came to proclaim, is this all the gospel is about? What about Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God? The presentations of the gospel that come out of this recent Twitter trend seems to focus solely on personal salvation and individual piety. Again, while these are parts of the gospel, it is not the whole message. Is it a good practice to present bits and pieces of the gospel 140 characters at a time?
At any rate, I am probably reading too much into it this, and could just be missing the point. These are just some of my initial reactions to this increasing trend of tweeting the gospel. What do you think? If you like to tweet the gospel, why do you do so? Can you really present the gospel in 140 characters?
Soong-Chan Rah is a professor at North Park Seminary in Chicago. He's recently written a book called The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. This video touches on the themes of his book, as he discusses American evangelicalism and the way it has become captive to the culture around it. There is lots of good stuff in here, and instead of trying to summarise it all, I'd encourage you to watch the video. If you've read Andy Crouch's excellent book, Culture Making, you'll hear some similar things from Rah. Likewise, if you've read Jamie Smith's also excellent book, Desiring the Kindgom, you'll appreciate a lot of what Rah has to say as well, particularly his reference to the mall as the centre of American religion. Additionally, Rah's emphasis on the need for the church to recognise the changing demographic's of America is important to understand.
Taylor wisely amended his post soon afterward and noted that he had made his judgments without actually reading the book. Nonetheless, folks all over took Taylor's post to be the truth, and immediately proceeded to toss Bell aside as a heretic.
