May 10, 2014

Rob Bell and Don Draper – The Ad Man’s Gospel

By Clarke Morledge

As I was finishing up my blog post comparing songwriter Mark Heard to popular evangelical author Donald Miller, I was trying to figure out how to handle Rob Bell. Bell has been the most explosive figure in progressive evangelicalism today, though within the past few years he has gone out even further than many of his progressive evangelical colleagues are willing to endorse. Theologically speaking in my view, a confused ecclesiology is what unites the contemporary triune fellowship of Bell, Miller, and Brian McLaren. It is difficult for me to say this, because while I still know that these folks love Jesus and I can still learn some things from them, there have just been some other things there that continue to bug me. However, there could be more to the analysis. I think I have stumbled onto an idea, but I had to look “across the pond” to find it.

While some evangelicals in the U.S. still puzzle over the Rob Bell storm in recent years, a fire is currently raging in Britain. Recently, a debate between progressive evangelical Steve Chalke and more classic evangelical Andrew Wilson has intensely engaged thoughtful Christians. In reflecting on the debate, Andrew Wilson pointed to a specific problem in Steve Chalke’s argumentative method. In a nutshell, Wilson claims that Chalke sets up a type of “straw man” noting some extreme case, and therefore reacting to it with a different extreme case as THE solution, without acknowledging that there might be more moderate and alternative solutions that are being sidestepped. Wilson likens this to what Rob Bell is doing as a communicator of the “Ad Man’s Gospel”. Strangely, however, I do not think Rob Bell is alone in this. You can find folks equally on the more “fundamentalist” side of the evangelical movement who do EXACTLY the same thing in reverse. Wilson cites this post by Alastair Roberts as evidence. It says it better than I can.

On the downside, it does make me seriously question how viable the Internet; e.g. blogging, serves as an effective vehicle for thoughtful communication and dialogue. I am still doing it, but I have my doubts. Veracity readers: Are Andrew Wilson and Alastair Roberts right?

If you follow the whole line of thought, you will never think about Oldsmobiles the same way again….

Alastair Roberts's avatarAlastair's Adversaria

I find Rob Bell fascinating.

Sure, I disagree with his theology, but when it comes to engaging communication, the man is virtually without peer.

If you want to see a masterpiece in clever communication, look no further than a promotional video for a Rob Bell book.

This is Bell in his element.

Attention-grabbing.
Engaging.
Dynamic.

Take, for instance, this recent offering:

The dislocated camera shots.
The fractured statements.
It’s all there.

You start with the evocative image of the Velvet Elvis, reminding you of that summer you read through that book as a teen.

How that book resonated with you at the time!

Rob begins by telling us that a lot of people in our culture ‘can’t do the God-sort of belief system or idea.’ A ‘very, very popular movement’ tells us that this is all that there is. However, lots and lots of people, when they experience vaguely defined…

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May 9, 2014

Following the Emerging (Jazzy Blue) Heard

By Clarke Morledge

Back some years ago, one of my favorite singer-songwriters was (and still is) a guy named Mark Heard. Long before “Contemporary Christian Music” became an industry, Mark Heard was with his guitar singing folk songs about life and Jesus. But Mark was out there on the edge. In those days, his style of music was not as acceptable in the mainstream of evangelical Christianity as it is today. Yet neither was he welcome that much in the secular world of music.

From his 1981 album, Stop the Dominoes, you can get a flavor of his existential angst in the song “Stuck in the Middle“:

Well my brothers criticize me
Say I’m just too strange to believe
And the others just avoid me
They say my faith is so naive
I’m too sacred for the sinners
And the saints wish I would leave

Here is one of my favorite Mark Heard songs, “Dry Bones Dance“, harkening back to the vision of the prophet Ezekiel. Someone has put together a collection of all of Mark Heard’s lyrics, including Dry Bones Dance if you want to read along as he sings.

From time to time, I love to spin up one of Mark Heard’s albums, but over the years I have come to see also a darker side to Mark Heard’s spirituality. And I think a brief look at his story can show us how often stories like his can get repeated today and relatively few seem to notice.
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May 2, 2014

Irreplaceable: A Focus on the Family Film

By Clarke Morledge

Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family (FOTF) is promoting a special one-night viewing of a new film, Irreplaceable, at select movie theaters on Tuesday, May 6th. The film follows Tim Sisarich, FOTF’s New Zealand director, on a documentary quest to explore the nature of the traditional family and its current status in postmodern society. Even if you have missed the effective barrage of Christian-themed movies in the Spring of 2014, you might be surprised that this one-night showing has provoked some controversy.

Some in the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community have been working hard to effectively ban Irreplaceable from being shown in mainstream movie theaters. Why all of the fuss? Well, Focus on the Family has historically been outspokenly supportive of what some call “reparative” or “conversion” therapy, which represents types of psychological treatments intended to alter someone’s sexual orientation. In recent years, various groups have become vocally opposed to the use of such treatments describing them as abusive and causing more harm than good. Even some evangelical Christian ministries, notably the former Exodus International in 2013, have now distanced themselves from the use of such therapies.

My understanding is that very little if anything in the film will address reparative therapy, as my guess is that the main focus is on issues like fatherlessness, out-of-wedlock births, and divorce.  If the film is successful, it will help people realize that while the “crisis of the family” does have an impact on society at large, the real challenges are complex and very personal and they begin within our own families. Focus on the Family is following up the release of this film with a DVD-based study curriculum developed for churches and small groups, The Family Project, to be released in the U.S. later in the year, modeled after their popular “The Truth Project” from several years ago. The Truth Project itself became controversial within the evangelical church for taking on a whole set of complex worldview issues and oversimplifying them, as suggested by this friendly critic linked here.

In the Williamsburg, Virginia area, the film Irreplaceable will be showing at the Movie Tavern at High Street, at 7:30pm on Tuesday, May 6. If you are planning on seeing the film, we would love to know of your thoughts on it.

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May 1, 2014

Bart Ehrman’s Challenge to the Divinity of Jesus

By Clarke Morledge
How God Became Jesus, by multiple authors, is a rebuttal to Bart Ehrman's book, How Jesus Became God.

How God Became Jesus, by multiple evangelical scholars, is a popular-style, accessible rebuttal to Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God.

From the preface of How God Became Jesus, by editor and Australian scholar Michael Bird:

[Bart] Ehrman is something of a celebrity skeptic. The media attraction is easy to understand. Ehrman has a famous deconversion story from being a fundamentalist Christian to becoming a “happy agnostic.” He’s a New York Times bestselling author, having written several books about the Bible, Jesus, and God with a view to debunking widely held religious beliefs based on a mixture of bad history, deception, and myth. He’s a publicist dream since in talk shows and in live debates he knows how to stir a crowd through hefty criticism, dry wit, on the spot recall of historical facts, and rhetorical hyberbole. He also has a global audience…

For conservative Christians, Ehrman is a bit of a bogeyman… Conservatives buy his books if only for the purpose of keeping their disgust with him fresh and find out what America’s favorite skeptic is up to now… For secularists,… Erhman is a godsend. He provides succor and solace that one need not take Jesus too seriously, confirming that religion is the opiate of the masses and that the whole God thing might be just a big mistake.

Why is Bart Ehrman, a professor of religion teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on a lot of people’s radar?

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April 27, 2014

This Is My Father’s World

By John Paine

“…in the rustling grass I hear him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.”
Maltbie D. Babcock, This Is My Father’s World, 1901

Williamsburg, Virginia

A beautiful day in our town, Williamsburg, Virginia

It’s funny how things get connected when you stop long enough to think about them. Yesterday was one of those Thornton Wilder, Our Town kind of days. The weather was spectacularly beautiful, Marion went to a graveside funeral for a childhood friend who died of cancer, and I replaced the radiator in her minivan.

The radiator was a mail-order replacement that I gave her as a Christmas gift (lucky her—I’m just sayin’). Between work and family commitments and waiting for the weather to be just right for the job, it took me four months to get to it. While wrenching in the driveway, I was listening to music, and got into a bunch of songs by Chicago. Between the gorgeous weather and thinking about Marion’s childhood friend and the kind of life they lived growing up in small-town Williamsburg, when Old Days played, I found myself daydreaming about Wilder’s Our Town. It’s a beautifully crafted, melancholy play about the ebb and flow of life in small-town America. Everyone would love to live in Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners, and be part of that Pulitzer-Prize-winning community.

But the play ends with a fatalistic dialogue about life beyond the grave. “There are the stars—doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven’t settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk…or fire.” That kind of melancholy makes me wonder what kind of ‘scholars’ Thorton Wilder trusted.

Somewhere in my childhood, long ago and far away, the words to Maltbie D. Babcock’s pastoral hymn This Is My Father’s World got engraved in my soul.

This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.

This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; his hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father’s world, the birds their carols raise, the morning light, the lily white, declare their maker’s praise.

This is my Father’s world, he shines in all that’s fair; in the rustling grass I hear him pass; he speaks to me everywhere.

This is my Father’s world. O let me ne’er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.

This is my Father’s world: why should my heart be sad? The Lord is King; let the heavens ring! God reigns; let the earth be glad!

So what happened to Marion’s friend? That depends upon whom she trusted. Me? Thankfully, I have plenty of reasons to appreciate the beautiful world and wonderful family and friends all around me (and how that all came into being). Not everyone does. Got it. But if you’re inclined to pin your faith—or lack thereof—on your circumstances, consider the words of the apostle Paul:

“That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.”
2 Timothy 1:12 (NIV84)

The truth is everything is connected—whether we appreciate it or not.

Excursis

Courtesy of Grooveshark.com, here are some of Chicago’s Our Town songs I was listening to out in the driveway: Old Days, Dialogue (Part 1 & Part 2), (I’ve Been) Searchin’ So Long, and Alive Again.

 

 

 

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