I was recently involved in a forum discussion about the new book by Richard Dawkins, entitled The God Delusion. A forum member suggested that we undertake a little cultural exchange - he would buy and read the new Dawkins book if I agreed to read a book he suggested. His choice was Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell. My review of this book is below..
Rob Bell is the founding pastor of a church called Mars Hill in Grandville, Michigan. The subtitle of his book, “Repainting the Christian Faith,” is a perfect synopsis of its aim - to present a Christianity for the 21st century: a flexible, all-encompassing church that allows worship while understanding and embracing the realities of modern life.
My relationship with this book very nearly ended before it had really begun, when I came very close to throwing it across the room in disgust. On page 19, Bell is discussing the nature of belief systems. The offending line is one often regurgitated by people of faith who don’t have a real understanding of what faith is.
“An atheist is a person of tremendous faith.”
Bell needs to buy himself a dictionary. Faith is “belief that is not based on proof.” This isn’t a question of a “difference of opinion” or “two ways of looking at the issue.” Bell is simply wrong. An atheist believes there is no God because of a lack of evidence, a Christian believes there is a God despite a lack of evidence. Atheism is not a faith-based position.
Despite it falling at the first stumbling block, I decided to press on with the book. Bell is clearly trying to come across as a hip guy, but all too often he stumbles into being condescending. He writes in very short sentences. Like this.
And very often he has paragraphs consisiting of just one line.
As if every sentence has to be a soundbite.
Catchy and and easy to digest.
The hidden subtext seems to be that he regards his audience as idiots who can’t process long, complicated and interesting sentences and so must be drip-fed small snippets of information so as not to confuse their delicate little brains.
Standing side-by-side with condescension is hypocrisy, and like many people who claim to offer their “take” on a religion, Bell provides this in spades. He spends the entire first chapter attacking “traditional” Christians who claim their literal interpretation of the Bible is correct and those who don’t follow it will certainly rot in hell. He laughs at their “bizarre leap of logic” and finds it hard to accept that they could possibly be serious in believing these preposterous things.
He then spends the rest of the book putting across his own more liberal interpretation of scripture, constantly referring to his “realisations of truth” and making it clear that he is right and the rest of the human race is wrong. But how can he not see that his position is exactly equivalent to that of the fundamentalist? They are both reading the same Bible, but have come up with different interpretations of its contents. Neither has any evidence that his position is correct. Neither is “right” or “wrong”, they both simply have an opinion, each of which is as valid (or invalid) as the other.
The book is not without merit. “Movement 5″ of the book, entitled Dust, is a fascinating history of the first century world in which Jesus (may have) lived, and how the Jewish faith he was a part of worked at that time.
In general, it is extremely difficult to form any vitriol towards Bell (notwithstanding the exception noted above) in the same way that fundamentalists can so easily generate rage in their perversions of science and bizarre moral positions. His religion is one of peace (”Shalom”) and generosity, and he rallies again the churches which are run for profit, both financial and moral (in people desperate for attention for every good deed they perform). He passionately believes in protecting the environment. He says that acts of selflessness and generosity should be “underground” and stealthy, never selfishly asking for any praise.
Rather than anger, the overwhelming feeling that remains after finishing this book is one of sadness. Rob Bell opens his curtains in a morning and looks out on the world, and sees the same sky and the same landscape and the same diversity of life as the rest of us, but he sees it through the lens of God. He sees God’s hand in every part of nature and human existence and morality, and he believes that he feels a greater sense of beauty and fulfilment through these experiences of God.
But that beauty and wonder is accessible to everyone, whether religious or not, and believing that it is anything other than part of a natural process diminishes it greatly. Seeing God wherever you look in the world diminishes the greatest wonder of all - the very fact that we, as a part of billions of years of continual sculpting by natural selection, are able to experience all this beauty at all. We are conscious and curious beings living in a vast universe of mystery which we can explore and begin to understand, and that must surely be the most humbling and breathtaking thought it is possible to have. God removes that mystery by filling it with a meaningless dead-end explanation. Bell’s book about understanding the “real” Christianity has got nothing on the “real” world.
Nice, if a bit too “involved” review, J. I disagree with most of what you have said, but you said it in a good way!
The book has no appeal to me really, but then neither do the views of Dawkins and his crew. So reiews of these kind of things are good to read. Cheers.
Right, back to my position of open-minded scepticism. Read some Charles Fort next. His books used to be freely available on the ‘net. Probably still are.