Is Rob Bell Jumping the Shark?
I am not going to write to Rob Bell under the guise of an “Open Letter”… which usually isn’t an open letter… it is just someone giving their opinion, or even gossiping about the person that the “Open Letter” is directed to. I am just going to write my opinion.
I love Rob Bell. I love him as a brother in Christ. I love him as a leader in my city. He has been kind to me. After my accident, he mentioned me in their church services. He even put a page in his book Drops Like Stars about my story. I have no beef with Rob Bell.
I think that the problem with Love Wins is that Rob is in danger of becoming irrelevant.
In 1977, the ratings of the hit show “Happy Days” were declining. The writers thought up very screwy episode where Fonzie is waterskiing, and he literally jumps over a shark. Many people point to this episode as the demise of the series. So much so, that there was a website jumptheshark.com whose creator said that jumping the shark is “a moment. A defining moment when you know that your favorite television program has reached its peak. That instant that you know from now on…it’s all downhill.” This phrase “jumping the shark” is becoming a cultural idiom for anything that is becoming absurd and irrelevant that was once very important. I think Rob Bell is in danger of jumping the shark.
In 2001, when Brian McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian came out, his new way of talking to middle-class evangelicals spread like wildfire in my circle of friends. The idea that questions were okay, Catholics were okay, Lutherans were okay, Greek orthodoxy was okay, church being done in a very communal way was okay, going door to door and saying, “where would you go if you died tonight… heaven or hell” wasn’t the only way to evangelize… you could evangelize with your life… wow
I began to study postmodernism. Leonard Sweet’s Soul Tsunami was a landmark book for me as far as understanding postmodernism and the emerging church. I read postmodern philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard. I started a roundtable group of young pastors that would get together every six months and talk about the state of the church. Doug Pagitt (one of the figureheads of the Emergent Church conversation) attended one of these roundtable retreats. He was a great guy as well.
I guess the point is this… in the beginning of the 2000’s, there was a rush among pastors (especially young pastors) to understand the brand–literally–of Emergent and to understand postmodernism (which has become a dirty word to most young pastors now). I believe that this was a good thing. It helped us understand how postmoderns (most of the Western world) look at life, truth, and the supernatural. This is so vital if we desire to minister in the 21st century.
Rob (wisely) stayed out of this rush until 2005, when he published Velvet Elvis. The big uproar after Velvet Elvis was that Rob didn’t believe in the virgin birth of Christ. He never actually came out and said he didn’t believe in it, but he said if somehow it was refuted, what would it do to our faith. He went on to say that our beliefs should be more like springs on a trampoline… enabling movement… then they should be like bricks in a wall… when one or two get removed, the whole thing falls down.
But I am beginning to think that Rob hasn’t moved past this thought. It seems that Love Wins uses the same premise of, “questions are okay…,faith should be flexible… let’s look at this from a completely different way…” okay. We get it. We got it in 2001.
We have deconstructed (a very postmodern term) the church ad nauseam. Mega-church bad. Rigid faith bad. White homogeny bad. Cantatas bad. Guilt based evangelism bad. Teetotalers bad. And on and on…
When does the Reconstruction begin? When do we begin to take solid definitive ideas and put them into place to build 21st century Church? When will Rob say “I believe in X, Y, and Z. I would die for these things.” I don’t think he will say that. I don’t believe that he thinks that way. I think that Rob is working out his demons in books, and in public… and I think this is the problem. Rob and the Emergent movement have been vital in asking the questions that have helped us deconstruct the harmful and excessive elements of the Western church. But I don’t think that they have a place moving forward in building the 21st century Church because they can’t make definitive Reconstructionist statements. And I think that this is the biggest thing that Love Wins says to me.
