Points of View

I've been reading Rob Bell's book, Love Wins.

Where was I two months ago, right?

I often attended Mars Hill and typically appreciated Bell's teaching style, as well as the laid back atmosphere of his church, and the band's unique infusions of popular Rock/Indie/Disco/Funk tunes with modern worship songs. Also, the services started at 11. That goes a long way when you're delivering pizzas until 2 am.

I had a Love Wins bumper sticker on my last car, and still have one on a music book. I also have a Jesus Wins bumper sticker put out by another West Michigan church to contrast it.

Maybe love wins, but publicity definitely does. I heard buzz from plenty of Puerto Ricans (and Americans, and news outlets, and blogs, and relatives, and... yeah) about some unorthodox ideas from a pastor I knew fairly well, through many church services over many years.

They were saying all kinds of things
about what he was saying,
and what he was saying
didn't seem to be in line with
what
others
had
always
been
saying.

Questioning Gandhi's eternal resting place?

Universalism?

Must investigate.

I visited a Universalist church once. Didn't care for it. Their congregation was surprisingly aged, but the building was beautiful. I really couldn't see how embracing every religion and worldview gave them any kind of framework to make sense of God, the world, sin, death, anything. Their syllabus was far too open, kinda like taking a class on "Stuff." What are we going to learn about today? "Stuff." How do you study for that? How do you leave and go home and ponder that and come back the next week seeking something deeper, something concrete, something to stand on? How does that change your life? They had pagan verses in their hymn books. The sermon was self-helpish. It was Oprah church. I could have stayed home and watched Oprah.

A Christian church, on the other hand, has a framework. There's a Bible, there's tradition, there's a refined approach with a limited swath. You can gauge the Pastor's teaching against the Bible. Is he right or wrong? Why? It's in the Word. Go read it for yourself. At a Universalist church, you just kinda have to decide if the pastor is smart and take his word for it.

All that to say: Rob Bell isn't that kind of Universalist. I don't know what he is. He still uses the Bible as a framework, he still says Jesus is The Way. He just says it with a twist, one that I can't really refute, support, or explain. I'm not convinced he's a heretic or anything, though I do think there are some questions a laymen like myself can ask that a Christian pastor with a wide following probably can't, at least without complications and blowback. It's one thing for me to be at home, watching TV, wondering - What am I going to eat for dinner? What if God lets everyone into heaven anyway? Where are my socks? It's another for a pastor to write a book about it.

His book is okay, as far as readability goes. I'm about 80% of the way through it and mustering motivation to finish it. Some of what he says, I like. Some of what he says, I don't really have an opinion on. Some of what he says, I don't agree with. But for covering such a controversial topic, the book is pretty boring. Maybe that's because I often read it when my eyelids are already heavy (*Not a good state in which to read your Bible, btw.) He devotes a lot of it to asking questions, many of which he doesn't answer. And I think that's what he set out to do - ask a lot of questions. I'm cool with that. I'm all about getting to the bottom of why we believe what we believe.

We were riding up to church in San Juan on Sunday and I had the book in my lap. A friend was riding shotgun and asked me about it. He's pretty opinionated. He'd admit this. So he asked me about the book...

I articulated Bell's point of view as well as I could and diplomatically said there were some things about it I like and some that I don't. He went on to aptly debunk most of what I said, at least as he understood it, quoting scripture along the way.

I found myself defending Rob Bell's point of view. Which is interesting because it's not one I particularly agree with. I do this a lot, it turns out. In this instance, my inclination was to back up Rob Bell's book because the person debunking it by their own admission hadn't read it.

I don't consider myself very argumentative, and I don't really care about winning an argument or being especially convincing. I just like discussion. I often take a centrist viewpoint. Maybe that makes me wishy-washy. I've been accused of that before.

Or maybe it's just more fun to argue with someone you agree with. That way, they defend my point of view, and they typically do it better than I could.

Arguing

It is more fun to wonder about things than to be right. That's one of the reasons I call this "Naive Jim:" It absolves me from any responsibility to be right. (In a similar way, taking on a journalistic tone of writing as opposed to a poetic or prosaic tone absolves me from the responsibility of being deep. It's much easier to not try to be deep.) I pretty much have free reign to espouse any opinion or idea, no matter how ridiculous, because I readily admit to my own naivety. You know exactly what you're getting: One dude, just kinda wondering stuff. No one can come down on me because, hey, I'm just a naive guy. If you admit from the start that you're an ignoramus, things aren't so bad. You'll notice in real life, if you're proven wrong about something, saying, "I guess you're right," is the best way to diffuse the argument, and it can really frustrate someone looking for an argument if you give it up right away. At least it would do that for me.

For example, the other day during lunch a co-worker was doing a crossword puzzle. She needed to know how to spell Tae, as in Tae Kwon Do. I asserted that it was T-A-E, and I was right. Everyone else at the table flatly insisted it was T-A-I. I reminded them that I was the editor, and quickly broke out a dictionary - okay, not a dictionary, it was Wikipedia on a computer - and saw that it was, in fact, Tae. Wikipedia is, of course, a 100% reliable source. Very proud of my rightness, I shared my finding with everyone there. They were not impressed, and their accolades toward me were minimal at best. I don't know what I expected. I am seldom provably right in arguments. Odds are, if you argue with me about pretty much anything, you're going to win. I have lost a lot of arguments, and I can tell you that the most satisfaction comes not from the few that I have won, but the few that I have conceded easily. Because when we argue, being right is inevitably a pretty big letdown. At least it is to me. You reach an equilibrium, and the disagreement is usually forgotten almost immediately. How many times have you brought up an old, insignificant argument to emphasize your personal value? Probably not very often. "Dude, remember that one time you told me that Taco Bell would still be open and I told you I was pretty sure it wasn't and then we drove there and it was closed and I was right?" Only once have I used past argument-triumph to emphasize my coolness, and that was in this paragraph. And my coolness is well-established away from this victory.

For Amy, I'm sorry that it took me 11 days to come up with this. I've been meaning not to neglect the old blog. But I can only come up with stuff as truly inspired. You don't want perfunctory, uninspired blogging now, do you? I have a lot of ideas, religious ones, that I'm kicking around, and you'll probably see them soon. Turns out I'm a supralapsarianist.