I sometimes get caught up in what people I respect say about other people I know nothing about, which isn’t bad in and of itself — it’s reacting and/or forming a belief based on those statements before I can examine them for myself that can be dangerous.
I’m not going to get into differing theologies, and I’m not going to talk about Reformed or Emergent or anything in between, except to say that I formed an opinion about a guy named Rob Bell before I took a look at what he has to stay and what he stands for.
This one guy whose podcasts I sometimes listen to actually called Bell a heretic. That’s a dangerous claim to level at anyone.
But because I more or less respect this guy, and he seems to know a lot about what’s been tagged the Emergent Church movement, I immediately decided that what he said had to be true.
What made me kind of stop in my tracks and decide, hey, maybe I shouldn’t be blindly accepting what everyone says without investigating it for myself was when Lauren Barlow talked about Bell’s book Velvet Elvis on a recent podcast and lists it and his other two books, Sex God and Jesus Wants to Save Christians, as her favorite books on her Facebook profile, and talks about his podcasts and how brilliant they are all the time.
Basically everything I know about her faith and her beliefs lines up with mine — she might actually be more theologically conservative than I am in some areas — and so her opinions tend to hold more weight with me than a guy who, truth be told, is every bit as controversial as Bell in his own regard. (Ironically, their two churches have the same name.)
So what I ended up doing was taking this re-evaluation one step further. I mean, at the end of the day, no matter how similar Lauren’s beliefs are to mine, I don’t know her, and so I decided to go to my friend Doug (the pastor I talked about in my last post, who helped deliver me from the darkest period in my life to date) and my own pastor, Jeff Harris.
I emailed Jeff and got a response literally five minutes later. It was short and succinct: “If Rob Bell’s a heretic, then I’m the pope. He may challenge conventional belief at times, but he’s well within orthodoxy.”
Doug more or less said the same thing last night.
And so I picked up a copy of Velvet Elvis and will begin reading it for myself in the upcoming week.
