What We Talk About When We Talk About God. Rob Bell

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       EPIGRAPH

      Like all great things in the world, women and religion and the sky . . . you wonder about it, and you don’t stop wondering about it.

      —Tom Waits

      CONTENTS

EPIGRAPH

CHAPTER 1 - HUM

CHAPTER 2 - OPEN

      CHAPTER 3 - BOTH

      CHAPTER 4 - WITH

      CHAPTER 5 - FOR

      CHAPTER 6 - AHEAD

      CHAPTER 7 - SO

      EPILOGUE

      RESOURCES, NODS, NOTES, AND A FEW SHOUT-OUTS

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      ALSO BY ROB BELL

      CREDITS

      BACK AD

       COPYRIGHT

      ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

       CHAPTER 1

       HUM

      I realize that when I use the word God in the title of this book there’s a good chance I’m stepping on all kinds of land mines. Is there a more volatile word loaded down with more history, assumptions, and expectations than that tired, old, relevant, electrically charged, provocative, fresh, antiquated yet ubiquitous as ever, familiar/unfamiliar word God?

      And that’s why I use it.

      From people risking their lives to serve the poor because they believe God called them to do it, to pastors claiming that the latest tornado or hurricane or earthquake is God’s judgment, to professors proclaiming that God has only ever been a figment of our imagination, to people in a recovery meeting sitting in a circle drinking bad coffee and talking about surrendering to a higher power, to musicians in their acceptance speech at an awards show thanking God for their hit song about a late-night booty call, when it comes to God, we are all over the place.

      Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

      And then there are the latest surveys and polls, the ones telling us how many of us believe and don’t believe in God and how many fewer of us are going to church, inevitably prompting experts to speculate about demographics and technology and worship style and this generation versus that generation, all of it avoiding the glaring truth that sits right there elephant-like in the middle of the room.

      The truth is, we have a problem with God.

      It’s not just a problem of definition—what is it we’re talking about when we talk about God?—and it’s not just the increasing likelihood that two people discussing God are in fact talking about two extraordinarily different realities while using the exact same word.

      This problem with God goes much, much deeper.

      As a pastor over the past twenty years, what I’ve seen again and again is people who want to live lives of meaning and peace and significance and joy—people who have a compelling sense that their spirituality is in some vital and yet mysterious way central to who they are—but who can’t find meaning in the dominant conceptions, perceptions, and understandings of God they’ve encountered. In fact, those conceptions aren’t just failing them but are actually causing harm.

      We’re engaged more than ever by the possibilities of soul and spirit, and by the nagging suspicion that all of this may not be a grand accident after all; but God, an increasing number of people are asking—what does God have to do with that?

      I’ve written this book about that word, then, because there’s something in the air, we’re in the midst of a massive rethink, a movement is gaining momentum, a moment in history is in the making: there is a growing sense among a growing number of people that when it comes to God, we’re at the end of one era and the start of another, an entire mode of understanding and talking about God dying as something new is being birthed.

      There’s an ancient story about a man named Jacob who had a magnificent dream, and when he wakes up he says, “Surely God was in this place, and I, I wasn’t aware of it.”

      Until now.

      The power of the story is its timeless reminder that God hasn’t changed; it’s Jacob who wakes up to a whole new awareness of who—and where—God is.

      Which brings me back to this moment, to the realization among an increasing number of people that we are waking up in new ways to the God who’s been here the whole time.

      I’m aware, to say the least, that talking about this and writing a book about it, naming it and trying to explain it and taking a shot at describing where it’s all headed, runs all sorts of risks.

      I get that.

      We’re surrounded by friends and neighbors and family and intellectual and religious systems with deeply held, vested interests in the conventional categories and conceptions of belief and denial continuing to remain as entrenched as those traditional conceptions are. There are, as they say, snipers on every roof. And being controversial isn’t remotely interesting.

      But love and meaning and joy and hope?

      That’s compelling.

      That’s what I’m after.

      That’s worth the risk.

      The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour’s need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.

      And the truth is, we have a problem—we have a need—and there’s always the chance that this may in fact be the hour.

      First, then, a bit more about this God problem . . .

      When I was twenty, I drove an Oldsmobile.

      Remember those?

      It was a four-door Delta 88 and it was silver and it had a bench seat across the front with an armrest that folded down and it fit seven or eight people easily and in a feat of engineering genius the rear license plate was on a hinge that you pulled down in order to fill up the gas tank and the trunk was so huge you could put five snowboards in at the same time or a drum set, several guitar amps, and a body if you needed to. (I’m just messing with you there, about the body.) My friends called it “the Sled.”

      It was a magnificent automobile, the Sled, and it served me well for those years.

      But they don’t make Oldsmobiles anymore.

      They used to be popular, and your grandparents or roommate may still drive one, but the factories have shut down. Eventually the only ones left will be collector’s items, relics of an era that has passed.

      Oldsmobile couldn’t keep up with the times, and so it gradually became part of the past, not the future.

      For them, not us.

      For then, not now.

      I tell you about the Sled I used to drive because for many in our world today, God is like Oldsmobiles. To explain what I mean when I talk about God-like Oldsmobiles, a few stories: my friend Cathi recently told me about an event she attended where an influential Christian leader talked openly about how he didn’t think women should be allowed to teach and lead in the church. Cathi, who has two master’s degrees, sat there stunned.