Hell and Rob Bell

I’ve almost completed reading Rob Bell’s latest book, Love Wins. It appears that the pre-release press effort for the book and its supposedly controversial material were successful. A buzz has been generated.

It is important that we read perspectives we disagree with along with those opinions that echo our own. For too long conservative Christians (I consider myself one) have resonated loudly, but not always charitably, with those with whom we agree without giving serious consideration to the voices of others. Disagree if you must. But, disagree with what Bell is saying.

I encourage you to read the book and consider what he proposes. At its basis I don’t believe what he has said so far is that new. I do not believe he is promoting universalism but a perspective on hell that looks a lot like C.S. Lewis’s take in The Great Divorce along with what the Orthodox church teaches regarding hell. Perhaps the most important point he makes is that heaven and hell are to be taken seriously on this plane of existence and not limited to experiences of the after life.

Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Seminary and a Calvinist theologian and philosopher, has a good but general, review on Bell’s book. You can find it here:  Richard Mouw on Rob Bell.

“What happens in the eucharist…” (communion for us Protestants)

“What happens in the Eucharist is that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, this future dimension is brought sharply into play. We break this bread to share in the body of Christ; we do it in remembrance of him; we become for a moment the disciples sitting around the table at the Last Supper. Yet if we stop there we’ve only said the half of it. To make any headway in understanding the Eucharist, we must see it as the arrival of God’s future in the present, not just the extension of God’s past (or of Jesus’s past) into our present. We do not simply remember a long-since dead Jesus; we celebrate the presence of the living Lord. And he lives, through the resurrection, precisely as the one who has gone on ahead into the new creation, the transformed new world, as the one who is himself its prototype. The Jesus who gives himself to us as food and drink is himself the beginning of God’s new world. At communion we are like the children of Israel in the wilderness, tasting fruit plucked from the promised land. It is the future coming to meet us in the present.” – N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Canticle of Thomas Merton

The following is a prayer of Thomas Merton that I consider one worth making my own. It comes from his book, Thoughts in Solitude.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

James Bryan Smith on the Good and Beautiful God

This Saturday night my church, The Wheatland Mission, will be hosting James Bryan (Jim) Smith as he shares about his latest book The Good and Beautiful God. You won’t want to miss this special time as Jim shares about coming to know, love and follow the God that Jesus knows.

My Father, Maker of the Trees

This week, Tracey (Diaz) Lawrence, will be sharing about her most recent book which she co-authored with Eric Irivuzumugabe. It’s a story of survival, forgiveness and hope after the Rwandan genocide.

Join us at the Wheatland Mission, this Saturday, at 5:30.

Dallas Willard, Richard Rohr and St. Francis Walk Into A Bar

Recently I have been reading Dallas Willard’s book The Divine Conspiracy with some friends. It has been refreshing, challenging and a joy. Willard, in his discussion about how anger often sabotages the kingdom heart, reminded me of a great passage by the Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr. Enjoy… tell me what you think… wrestle with this.

“You can take it as a general rule that when you don’t transform your pain you will always transmit it. Zealots and contemporary liberals often have the right conclusion, but their tactics and motives are often filled with self, power, control and the same righteousness that they hate in conservatives. Basically, they want to do something to avoid holding the pain until it transforms them. Because of this too common pattern, I have come to mistrust almost all righteous indignation and moral outrage. In my experience, it is hardly ever from God.

‘Resurrected’ people prayerfully bear witness against injustice and evil—but also agree compassionately to hold thier own complicity in that same evil. It is not over there, it is here. It is our problem, not theirs.The Risen Christ, not accidentally, still carries the wounds in his hands and side.” – from Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety, pg. 23

The Prodigal Son via Kenneth Bailey

Ken Bailey has been working quietly behind the scenes for many years. Now many of his studies are available to a wider audience. Here are some of his books that are available today: Ken Bailey at Amazon.

Switchin’ Sides: #1

This is a first in a series. I have several “firsts in series” but maybe this one won’t become an orphaned post in the archives of Tangence.

A.N. Wilson has written biographies on many of Christianity’s heavy hitters. People like C.S. Lewis, Tolstoy, the Apostle Paul and Jesus. (The heaviest hitter?) He has been a long time skeptic of faith close to the camp of folk like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. However, after going through a kind of renaissance in his own faith he has returned to the church.

Here is an article of his where he shares his experience of Palm Sunday: Religion of Hatred by A.N. Wilson.

Also, check out this one: Why I Believe Again

John Updike on the Resurrection

SEVEN STANZAS OF EASTER
By John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

From Updike, John. “Telephone Poles and Other Poems” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1961).

John Updike: Requiescat in pace

John Updike

One of America’s greatest contemporary writers died today. A novelist, short story writer and poet who was fascinated with faith, American middle class life and all the conflict, mostly unseen, to be found there. Updike was most well known for his novel about an American man trying to make sense of his life and escape it. The novel is Rabbit Run.

He is also famous for his novel The Witches of Eastwick and most recently its sequel, The Widows of Easwick.

One of my favorite poems is his “Seven Stanzas at Easter”. Here are the 4th and 7th.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

- from Telephone Poles and Other Poems © 1961 by John Updike.

The International Herald Tribune has a great article on the man. You can read it here: John Updike, lyrical American writer, is dead at 76