Don’t listen to Rob Bell
I thought I’d put my cards on the table in the title of this article. Do not listen to Rob Bell! A lot of people today are following this hip, trendy pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan. So I decided to get into him and listen to him preach. Here is what I found on a video.
Rob Bell is a bad teacher, a false teacher of the Emergent Church. He is not the worst and yet I am 100 per cent sure he doesn’t understand the gospel. I would also assert that he is dangerously close to ‘universalism’ in his theology – something to watch out for with all the ’emergent’ leaders. Here are some quotes.
The Bible, says Rob Bell, is a ‘human product … rather than the product of the divine’. But without the Bible as the inspired Word of God we have no moral basis for any of our arguments. Unless the Bible is absolutely God given, my Christian faith has no basis of substance.
Rob Bell describes hell as ‘a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter – they are all hell on earth’.
Whether Rob believes in hell after you die is a grey area he never talks about. But he goes on to explain his belief that when the Lord’s prayer says, ‘your kingdom come on earth’, it means that Christians are meant to get rid of poverty, AIDS and the like. This is the social gospel of liberalism re-hashed as ’emergent theology’.
Mr Bell also ‘rubbishes’ the virgin birth and claims that we don’t need faith in Jesus – we need faith in ourselves. There may be good moral truth in his videos and I am not saying that he is alone in his teaching. But Rob Bell – with all the other emergent teachers – are thinking themselves out of Christianity by twisting Scripture and mixing it with a bit of Eastern mysticism.
Call me old fashioned if you like, but I can’t see what was wrong with the original idea that the gospel is the power of God and the Bible is the bedrock for our faith. No one has disproved that for me yet!
I don’t want to sit here and accuse false teachers left right and centre, but I have watched some Evangelical churches adopt and enjoy some of the teachings of Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, and the like.
But let’s be clear, the problem with all these teachers is that they are slowly but surely undermining the biblical doctrine of justification by grace through faith. Tony Jones is ‘hammering’ original sin, Rob Bell wants to make the Christian message very internal, and Brian McLaren has simply lost the plot entirely with his ‘mother earth’ stuff.
Let’s get rid of this silliness. And get back to the Bible!
Jason Ramsey
