The latest episode of furor over Rob Bell has prompted me to come out of blog retirement. I have made some observations in the reactions of many people over this book, both before its release and after, in response to his advertising and in response to his previous work. I need to get these of my chest so that I can go on with life.

I will first establish that I had previously been firmly against Rob Bell. His name made me react viscerally without even giving thought to him. My reaction was based on what I had read about him. Many, many reliable sources and, as a friend recently put it, ‘senior church leaders’ had critiqued his work in the form of the books Velvet Elvis, Sex God and The Gods Aren’t Angry. Their conclusions made me feel unwell. Thus I was always repelled from him. An example of the conclusions can be seen here. I also heard a lot of rubbish teaching delivered by people, who attributed it back to what they read in his book.

Nonetheless, as an academic I recognised the importance of always referring back to primary material when making a point about it. Anything you say is absolutely void of credibility unless you have done so and in my opinion, you are an idiot if you don’t.

So recently as the furor over Rob Bell’s new book Love Wins began to erupt, I figured it was time to make worthy my criticism and at least honour God before commenting on it. I got my hands on a copy of Velvet Elvis and began to read.

I didn’t get far into it before I began to realise a travesty has occurred.

They were wrong.

All of them.

Somehow all of these reliable men and women had made declarations that Rob Bell’s doctrine was screwy based on what they claimed to have read in his book, when in actual fact it was beginning to look more and more like they hadn’t actually read the book properly.

You can’t skim read something and then purport to warn people of what it says. Particularly when it’s dealing with complexities.

How can you say that you are honouring God if you are not taking anywhere near reasonable care to ensure that you are teaching others the truth?

‘Senior Church leaders’ and other reliable (and unreliable) sources told me that Rob Bell misrepresents Jesus. In actual fact they have misrepresented Rob Bell. And deceived people who trusted them. Betrayed.

I can confirm from having actually read his material that Rob Bell believes in the importance of the following doctrines that he has been accused of saying are not important:

- The Virgin Birth

- (To use Evangelical language) Conversion

- Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life and only through him can a person come to the Father and be saved

He clearly affirms these thing. He just questions the way that mainstream Christianity has gone about it of late. And frankly, so do I.

Now, I’m neither for nor against him at this stage. I don’t really agree with everything he says, but the things that I have reservations about aren’t enough for me to go about saying he’s not a Christian.

The latest accusation (which really is the same one they’ve always levelled against him) is that he is a universalist. A very coarse and by no means exhaustive definition of universalism is simply the notion that Jesus is not in fact the only way to the Father and that God has set certain provisos around the place that allow people to get away with not having put their faith in him. There are different kinds of universalism that I haven’t the time to discuss right now, but I suppose the main kind that they are accusing him of is some kind of notion that you can have a second chance after your carnal death.

The curious thing is the Rob Bell (knowing what he is being accused of) flatly denies that he is a universalist or that he believes this.

Nonetheless, because ‘senior church leaders’ – the same ‘senior church leaders’ who can’t read something that’s written on the page in front of them in plain English – have decided that he is a universalist neither his word nor his affirmation of sound doctrine seem to matter. He is not being heard. A prejudicial implication that everything he says is coming from the position of universalism means that no matter what is written in his books, it will be determined to be against the Christian faith.

He is being denied justice. Lam 3:35, Prov 21:3, Eze 18:5.

By ‘senior church leaders’.

The fruit of these people is hatred, deception, dishonour (particularly of God), lies, envy and judgment.

Rob Bell looks more like Jesus than these people.

I was just having a chat with someone, when I realised that generally if your focus is on yourself things won’t be well with others around you. It was in the context of discussing how we’d been in a position where someone was talking about something to us, we had been exhibiting clear body language that we really didn’t care, and yet this person passionately dribbled on for about 45 minutes despite our attempts to change the subject. Why? Because all he cared about at that moment was himself and his interests. These things somehow blinded him to the fact that within 2 meters of his face three people were so sick of the topic they all looked like they wanted to become one with the table over which we were eating. He was really communicating to us that he didn’t give a rats about us, what he wanted was to be the centre of focus. I think right can have this effect on us.

How can you tell if one of your rights are being infringed? By looking at yourself and seeing how you are affected. Where rights are focussed on you can essentially ignore everyone else in the world and focus on yourself, and expect everyone to behave in such a way as you are catered for. Next thing, everyone’s doing it, and you have a situation where everyone is so self interested that people can’t live together and work through arguments. It’s such an anti-social way of living.

Enter judges. When each person is so impassioned by their own situation that they simply can’t agree on a better way to deal with things, someone has to decide the outcome for them. It kind of resembles two children fighting over something, which they will because their development hasn’t allowed them to get to a stage where they can practically reason some situations yet, and then the adult has to step in and adjudicate. The problem is, when we look at it like this, all of a sudden we’re elevating the status of judges from just another person who has to make a decision to resolve the argument that we’ve become to selfish to resolve ourselves to the status of a morally and intellectually superior being. But this is simply not true. A judge is just someone who’s savvy with the law.

When judges have to apply themselves to the rights issue, we end up with someone who we think is more qualified to tell us what our rights are forcing their opinion on us, and too bad if they’re wrong, because they’re in a position to punish us if we disobey. In Australia we’re in a position where judges generally shouldn’t be able to do that, but in countries with a political focus on individual rights its a whole different story. Whereas in Australia judges are legal professionals who are somewhat (and I have to say not completely) limited to working with the law, when you add a bill of rights to the mix you end up with a legal professional who has superior moral status and powers over 99.999% of the population. Why? Because people can’t agree on what rights everyone should have. So they edit the rights and the edit them down to the point where they became a shapeless, vague, amorphous statement that could mean absolutely anything so that everyone can be happy with them. What’s the problem with this? Somebody then has to decide what these statements mean, which means that those people get to declare what is morally good and right for everyone. And these people are judges. I’ll give an example.

A popular right in the Western world is the right to free speech. But what is free speech? Literally it means I can say anything I want and not have to answer for it. But we know this isn’t true, because at some point our right to free speech will end up doing damage to somebody’s reputation (reputation not really being considered  a right). So the judge gets to decide the line between you’re ability to exercise your right and and your responsibility to not damage someone else’s reputation unfairly. In the case of free speech that can sometimes be fairly uncontroversial, and not necessarily morally-centred. Until you get to the point where judges decide to read by implication a right to political communication from a Constitution that was deliberately and expressly intended not to enumerate any rights. But that’s another gripe for another day. For a more controversial matter, the US Supreme Court decided that abortions should be legalised because of their moral reading of the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. There was other stuff involved obviously, but when it came down to it, this right was pivotal in the decision. How can you make such a moral decision based on such a general statement? It’s simple, if everyone agrees on it, it’s because everyone can read it in a way that suits them. Which means you can make it mean anything based on your moral persuasion. Which means that 5, 7 or 9 lawyers sitting around a bench with wigs and capes shouldn’t be the ones who get to decide what’s wrong and what’s right when the decision extends beyond law and into morality. And how can we stop them from getting that power? By not establishing a bill of rights. Simple.

Conviction is not a dog, that you might become it’s master and train it to respond to your commands. Before you presume to loose it, be prepared for it to turn back and bite you in the way you intended it to bite someone else.

Rights are a massive topic in the world today. They seem to shape the way people think, and behave, the way that people think in terms of politics, the way people interact with ther people. Really this is only a relatively new phenomenon, that is to say, the idea of individual liberties and rights has found favour with the academic community and the wider society (speaking in terms of Western Society) since the 1700′s, but they’ve really only begun to gain worldwide interest and cultish popularity in the 2oth Century. There has certainly been much political consideration since before then, the Constitution of the United States being ammended several time to include statements about basic rights, and consideration being given to the way that rights are governed and protected in the formation of the Swiss Confederation, and the consitution of many other nations including Australia. All of this has coincided with with the development of a more egocentric society, who rather than looking at the interests of others and considering how they can contribute, focus first on themselves and how society can conform to their needs. Would JFK’s famous words from 1961 ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’ be an accurate reflection on the modern collective conscience? Would he receive the a public display of affection and approval, only to be treated with contempt by the true intentions of the people? Is society a hypocrite?

To further discuss this issue I will give my personal working definition of a right. A right is something that is claimed by individual or groups that makes a demand on other individuals or groups to act, omit, forebear, or permit in such a way that the individual or group claiming the right can restrict the freedom of any other party in order to gain certain freedoms of their own. It is my view that a claim to a right is a self-centered claim. This is a very controversial topic to try to sum up in on statement however, and there is much more to discuss.

My final point to this introduction is that I don’t think rights are Biblical. This may be a radical and very controversial statement, particularly in Western Liberal Democracies where we really don’t like to think that the world isn’t about us. I intend to attack the Western Liberal hybrid of Christianity with vehemence for the remainder of my life, and one of the things that has sparked my train of thought on rights are the number of Christians who blog, call talk-back radios, preach and ignorantly proclaim that they have a God-given right to anything. It is my goal to destroy misconceptions that Christians have regarding rights, and to destroy the ignorance of Christians in relation to this. The Church has been ignorant and unempowered for too long and something has to give.