The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place

Take, for example, the doctrine—the spring—called the Trinity. This doctrine is central to historic, orthodox Christian faith. While there is only one God, God is somehow present everywhere. People began to call this presence, this power of God, his “Spirit.” So there is God, and then there is God’s Spirit. And then Jesus comes among us and has this oneness with God that has people saying things like God has visited us in the flesh.4 (#ulink_9461c7c8-53f4-5d51-8f90-e068bb3532d3) So God is one, but God has also revealed himself to us as Spirit and then as Jesus. One and yet three. This three-in-oneness understanding of God emerged in the several hundred years after Jesus’s resurrection. People began to call this concept the Trinity. The word trinity is not found anywhere in the Bible. Jesus didn’t use the word, and the writers of the rest of the Bible didn’t use the word. But over time this belief, this understanding, this doctrine, has become central to how followers of Jesus have understood who God is. It is a spring, and people jumped for thousands of years without it.5 (#ulink_b7918579-61f1-51ce-ada6-5a7f357f2ca5) It was added later. We can take it out and examine it. Discuss it, probe it, question it. It flexes, and it stretches.

In fact, its stretch and flex are what make it so effective. It is firmly attached to the frame and the mat, yet it has room to move. And it has brought a fuller, deeper, richer understanding to the mysterious being who is God.

Once again, the springs aren’t God. They have emerged over time as people have discussed and studied and experienced and reflected on their growing understanding of who God is. Our words aren’t absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to talk about him. This is something people have struggled with since the beginning: how to talk about God when God is bigger than our words, our brains, our worldviews, and our imaginations.

In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses reminds the people that when they encountered God, they “heard the sound of words but saw no form.”6 (#ulink_f141e11e-b4aa-5042-8e02-e382d507d5e9)

No form, no shape.

Nothing you could see.

In Moses’s day, the way you honored and respected whatever gods you followed was by making carvings or sculptures of them and then bowing down to what you had made. These were gods you could get your mind around. Moses is confronting people with an entirely new concept of what the true God is like. He is claiming that no statue or carving could ever capture this God, because this God has no shape or form.

This was a revolutionary idea in the history of religion.

You are holding a book in your hands. It has shape and volume and weight and all the stuff that makes it a thing.

It has thingness.

This book has edges and boundaries that define it as a finite thing. It is a book and nothing else.

But the writers of the Bible go to great lengths to describe God as a being with no edges or boundaries or limits. God has no thingness because there’s no end to God.

Or as the question goes in the book of Job: “Can you probe the limits of the Almighty?”7 (#ulink_8808f36f-c440-5291-8646-2c5334fb7ca9)

It makes sense, then, in a strange sort of way, that when Moses asks God for his name, God replies, “I am.”8 (#ulink_77c982b9-5045-5678-b2b6-2036d5de9060)

Doesn’t really clear things up, does it?

Moses is looking for a being he can wrap his mind around. Is this the god of water or power or soil or fertility? All the other gods made sense; you could understand them—who they were and what they did and what they stood for. But this God is different. Mysterious. Unfathomable.

“I am.”

The name’s origins come from the verb to be, so some read it as “I will be who I will be.”

Others suggest it should be read like this: “I always have been, I am, and I always will be.”

Perhaps this is God’s way of saying, “If your goal is to figure me out and totally understand me, it’s not going to happen. Even my name is more than you can comprehend.”

Later Moses says to God, “Now show me your glory.”

Which is our way of saying, “I need more. I need something I can see. Something tangible.”

God’s response? He tells Moses to go stand on a rock, because he’s going to pass by. He explains to Moses that no one can see him and live, so he’ll cover Moses with his hand (God’s hand?) as he passes by, and then he says, “I will remove my hand and you will see my back.”9 (#ulink_0eab4b38-7fae-596f-920f-7ca50add2e33)

The ancient rabbis had all sorts of things to say about this passage, but one of the most fascinating things they picked up on is the part about God’s back. They argued that in the original Hebrew language, the word back should be understood as a euphemism for “where I just was.”

It is as if God is saying, “The best you’re going to do, the most you are capable of, is seeing where I . . . just . . . was.”

That’s the closest you are going to get.

If there is a divine being who made everything, including us, what would our experiences with this being look like? The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more.

This truth about God is why study and discussion and doctrines are so necessary. They help us put words to realities beyond words. They give us insight and understanding into the experience of God we’re having. Which is why the springs only work when they serve the greater cause: us finding our lives in God. If they ever become the point, something has gone seriously wrong. Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.

The springs are huge—they hold up the mat—but they aren’t God. They aren’t Jesus.

Bricks

Somebody recently gave me a videotape of a lecture given by a man who travels around speaking about the creation of the world. At one point in his lecture, he said if you deny that God created the world in six literal twenty-four-hour days, then you are denying that Jesus ever died on the cross.10 (#ulink_9584bce2-5bcf-5e39-b1ff-ce2a0d888967) It’s a bizarre leap of logic to make, I would say.

But he was serious.

It hit me while I was watching that for him faith isn’t a trampoline; it’s a wall of bricks. Each of the core doctrines for him is like an individual brick that stacks on top of the others. If you pull one out, the whole wall starts to crumble. It appears quite strong and rigid, but if you begin to rethink or discuss even one brick, the whole thing is in danger. Like he said, no six-day creation equals no cross. Remove one, and the whole wall wobbles.

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archaeologists find Larry’s tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if as you study the origin of the word virgin, you discover that the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word virgin could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being “born of a virgin” also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse?

What if that spring was seriously questioned?

Could a person keep jumping? Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian?

Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?

Or does the whole thing fall apart?

I affirm the historic Christian faith, which includes the virgin birth and the Trinity and the inspiration of the Bible and much more. I’m a part of it, and I want to pass it on to the next generation. I believe that God created everything and that Jesus is Lord and that God has plans to restore everything.11 (#ulink_e444d7ae-4b77-59e7-8b99-cccd8d53643f)

But if the whole faith falls apart when we reexamine and rethink one spring, then it wasn’t that strong in the first place, was it?

This is because a brick is fixed in size. It can’t flex or change size, because if it does, then it can’t fit into the wall. What happens then is that the wall becomes the sum total of the beliefs, and God becomes as big as the wall. But God is bigger than any wall. God is bigger than any religion. God is bigger than any worldview. God is bigger than the Christian faith.

This truth clicked for me last Friday in a new way. Somebody showed me a letter from the president of a large seminary who is raising money to help him train leaders who will defend Christianity. The letter went on about the desperate need for defense of the true faith. What disturbed me was the defensive posture of the letter, which reflects one of the things that happens in brickworld: you spend a lot of time talking about how right you are. Which of course leads to how wrong everybody else is. Which then leads to defending the wall. It struck me reading the letter that you rarely defend a trampoline. You invite people to jump on it with you.

I am far more interested in jumping than I am in arguing about whose trampoline is better. You rarely defend the things you love. You enjoy them and tell others about them and invite others to enjoy them with you.

Have you ever seen someone pull a photo out of their wallet and argue about the supremacy of this particular loved one? Of course not. They show you the picture and give you the opportunity to see what they see.

The first Christians announced this way of Jesus as “the good news.” That tells me the invitation is for everybody. The problem with brickianity is that walls inevitably keep people out. Often it appears as though you have to agree with all of the bricks exactly as they are or you can’t join. Maybe you have been outside the wall before. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Jesus talks about this “in and out” a lot in his teachings. He keeps insisting that the people who assume they are in may not be in and the ones who everybody thinks are out for whatever reason may in fact be in. In one parable, he has the Judge of Everything telling some religious people, “Depart from me, for I never knew you.”12 (#ulink_b10b5fab-3308-576f-bccd-e2a48ffe3e35) Stunning. And in another parable, a man has a feast and none of his invited guests come, so he sends word to all the marginalized, disgusting, unclean people who are “out” that they are invited to come “in” and celebrate with him.13 (#ulink_c61c43cf-8e9f-593f-8c52-4bb2a0263078) Again, stunning.

Jesus invites everybody to jump.

And saying yes to the invitation doesn’t mean we have to have it all figured out. This is an important thing to remember: I can jump and still have questions and doubts. I often meet people who are waiting to follow God until they have all their questions answered. They will be waiting for a long time, because if we knew everything, we’d be . . . God. So the invitation to jump is an invitation to follow Jesus with all of our doubts and questions right there with us.

Questions

A Christian doesn’t avoid the questions; a Christian embraces them. In fact, to truly pursue the living God, we have to see the need for questions.