Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Rob Bell

time when you purposefully try to live the way of Jesus, you start noticing something deeper going on. You begin realizing the reason this is the best way to live is that it is rooted in profound truths about how the world is. You find yourself living more and more in tune with ultimate reality. You are more and more in sync with how the universe is at its deepest levels.

      Jesus’s intention was, and is, to call people to live in tune with reality. He said at one point that if you had seen him, you had “seen the Father.”2 He claimed to be showing us what God is like. In his compassion, peace, truth telling, and generosity, he was showing us God.

      And God is the ultimate reality. There is nothing more beyond God.

      Jesus at one point claimed to be “the way, the truth, and the life.” Jesus was not making claims about one religion being better than all other religions. That completely misses the point, the depth, and the truth. Rather, he was telling those who were following him that his way is the way to the depth of reality. This kind of life Jesus was living, perfectly and completely in connection and cooperation with God, is the best possible way for a person to live. It is how things are.

      Jesus exposes us to reality at its rawest.

      So the way of Jesus is not about religion; it’s about reality.

      It’s about lining yourself up with how things are.3

      Perhaps a better question than who’s right, is who’s living rightly?

      Springs

      This is where the springs on the trampoline come in. When we jump, we begin to see the need for springs. The springs help make sense of these deeper realities that drive how we live every day. The springs aren’t God. The springs aren’t Jesus. The springs are statements and beliefs about our faith that help give words to the depth that we are experiencing in our jumping. I would call these the doctrines of the Christian faith.

      They aren’t the point.

      They help us understand the point, but they are a means and not an end. We take them seriously, and at the same time we keep them in proper perspective.

      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 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 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

      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

      It makes sense, then, in a strange sort of way, that when Moses asks God for his name, God replies, “I am.”8

      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

      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