Rob Bell's Missed Opportunity

Maybe you've seen it. Most of the evangelical world has. It's an interview with Rob Bell on msnbc. The interviewer is Martin Bashir. If you haven't seen it, here it is. Be forewarned: the images you're about to see are uncomfortable...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg-qgmJ7nzA


Bashir's first question is one most Christians have heard before: Given the tragedy we're seeing in Japan, which of these is true: Is God all-powerful and not loving? or is he loving but not all-powerful? My reaction as I heard this was "That's an easy one. Ask him something hard!" Not only was it framed as a logical fallacy--either or reasoning--it's also an easy one for any good, thinking Christian to knock down because there's a clear answer, a 3rd option.


So I waited for him to knock it down.


And I waited.


But Bell just talked in circles (the circles would take up the next 7 minutes). Then I realized something--that Rob Bell wasn't going to knock it down because he didn't have an answer, and he didn't have an answer because his theology had eliminated the third option. So in Bell's case the either-or question is not a fallacy at all but a real question that can't be answered because he's removed God's Holiness and Justice as the third - and correct - option.


God is love, and God is all-powerful, but God is also holy. When God intervenes in human tragedies and relieves our temporal suffering, he's showing us mercy--undeserved, as any mercy is. When he leaves us to our suffering, he's showing us his justice--rightly deserved, as all justice is. And he is sovereign over both. That was the right answer, but I think Bell gave up right answers a long time ago when he gave up an orthodox understanding of original sin.


I used to listen to Rob Bell. I went to his church for a summer. He seems like a really nice guy. I sincerely hope that he doesn't have to learn about God's justice the hard way, that God will show him mercy instead. Not the Rob Bell kind of mercy that goes out like halloween candy to everyone, but the sovereign God kind that loves and saves its own.


But either way, God Wins.

good preachin, Pat

Pat Quinn preached from Hebrews last night on Christ being both God's exalted son and our incarnate brother. One part stands out for me, not because it was new, but because it's very, very old, and because I've thought of it many times.

He talked about microscopes.

Actually, what he said was that Christ is Lord over both the macro and the micro, that the creation was spoken into existence through Jesus, and that Jesus now holds the galaxies and quasars together by his power and will. He's the designer, engineer, and maintainer of big things like planets and stars and gravitation and electromagnetism.

But he's also Lord of the small, the atomic and subatomic. He is the strength behind the forces that hold the various parts of atoms and molecules together. After the sermon, as I was talking to the kids about this, I used a spring as an analogy for God's strength in the universe. If I squeeze a spring together and hold it, it doesn't move, but it has energy behind it, energy that would be released if I let it go. In the same way, the universe--at both the micro and macro levels--is being held together by God; and behind everything we observe or theorize, there is great energy. That energy is Christ's hands holding all things together.

The unbeliever looks into a telescope and sees the size and grandeur of the universe and claims that if there is a god, we're too small to merit his attention. But have the skeptic turn the telescope around and look in at the microscopic and he'll see that things go on in that direction in the same way. We're not at the little end of things--we're suspended between, with infinity on either side. It still means we're small, of course, but it makes God something else completely. It puts him beyond size itself, beyond big or small.

Like I said, it's not new to me, but every time I think of it I'm amazed. At any given time, the very atoms of my own body and the world around me are at that moment being held together by Christ because he wills it. How could I not acknowledge such a one as Lord?

Thanks for preaching, Pat. And thanks for the reminder.