Читать книгу Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith - Rob Bell - Страница 5

MOVEMENT ONE Jump

Several years ago my parents and in-laws gave our boys a trampoline. A fifteen-footer with netting around the outside so kids don’t end up headfirst in the flowers. Since then my boys and I have logged more hours on that trampoline than I could begin to count. When we first got it, my older son, who was five at the time, discovered that if he timed his bounce with mine, he could launch higher than if he was jumping on his own.

I remember the first time he called my wife, Kristen, out into the backyard to watch him jump off of my bounce. Now mind you, up until this point he was maybe getting a foot higher because of his new technique. But this one particular time, when my wife was watching for the first time, something freakish happened in the space-time continuum. When he jumped, there was this perfect convergence of his weight and my weight and his jump and my jump, and I’m sure barometric pressure and air temperature had something to do with it too, because he went really high.

I don’t mean a few feet off the mat. I mean he went over my head. Forty pounds of boy, clawing the air like a cat thrown from a second-story window, and a man making eye contact with his wife and thinking, This is not good.

She told us she didn’t think our new trick was very safe and we should be careful. Which we were.

Until she went inside the house.

It is on this trampoline that God has started to make more sense to me. Because when it comes to faith, everybody has it. People often tell me they could never have faith, that it is just too hard. The idea that some people have faith and others don’t is a popular one. But it is not a true one. Everybody has faith. Everybody is following somebody. What often happens is that people with specific beliefs about God end up backed into a corner, defending their faith against the calm, cool rationality of others. As if they have faith and beliefs and others don’t.

But that is not true. Let’s take an example: Some people believe we were made by a creator who has plans and purposes for his creation, while others believe there is no greater meaning to life, no grand design, and we exist not because of some divine intention but because of random chance. This is not a discussion between people of faith and people who don’t have faith. Both perspectives are faith perspectives, built on systems of belief. The person who says we are here by chance and there is no greater meaning has just as many beliefs as the person who says there’s a creator. Maybe even more.

Think about some of the words that are used in these kinds of discussions, one of the most common being the phrase “open-minded.” Often the person with spiritual convictions is seen as close-minded and others are seen as open-minded. What is fascinating to me is that at the center of the Christian faith is the assumption that this life isn’t all there is. That there is more to life than the material. That existence is not limited to what we can see, touch, measure, taste, hear, and observe. One of the central assertions of the Christian worldview is that there is “more.”1 Those who oppose this insist that this is all there is, that only what we can measure and observe and see with our eyes is real. There is nothing else. Which perspective is more “closed-minded”? Which perspective is more “open”?

An atheist is a person of tremendous faith. In our discussions about the things that matter most then, we aren’t talking about faith or no faith. Belief or no belief. We are talking about faith in what? Belief in what? The real question isn’t whether we have it or not, but what we have put it in.

Everybody follows somebody. All of us make decisions every day about what is important, how to treat people, and what to do with our lives. These decisions come from what we believe about every aspect of our existence. And we got our beliefs from somewhere. We have been formed, every one of us, by this complicated mix of people and places and things. Parents and teachers and artists and scientists and mentors—we are each taking all of these influences and living our lives according to which teachings we have made our own. Some insist that they aren’t influenced by any person or any religion, that they think for themselves. And that’s an honorable perspective. The problem is they got that perspective from . . . somebody. They’re following somebody even if they insist it is themselves they are following.

Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody.

We are all believers.

Way

As a Christian, I am simply trying to orient myself around living a particular kind of way, the kind of way that Jesus taught is possible. And I think that the way of Jesus is the best possible way to live.

This isn’t irrational or primitive or blind faith. It is merely being honest that we all are living a “way.”

I’m convinced being generous is a better way to live.

I’m convinced forgiving people and not carrying around bitterness is a better way to live.

I’m convinced having compassion is a better way to live.

I’m convinced pursuing peace in every situation is a better way to live.

I’m convinced listening to the wisdom of others is a better way to live.

I’m convinced being honest with people is a better way to live.

This way of thinking isn’t weird or strange; it is simply acknowledging that everybody follows somebody, and I’m trying to follow Jesus.

Over 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 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 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

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 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 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.

Questions are not scary.

What is scary is when people don’t have any.

What is tragic is faith that has no room for them.

We sponsored a Doubt Night at our church awhile back. People were encouraged to write down whatever questions or doubts they had about God and Jesus and the Bible and faith and church. We had to get a large box to hold all of the scraps of paper. The first question was from a woman who had been raped and didn’t press charges because she was told that doing so wasn’t “the Christian thing to do.” The man then raped several other girls, and this woman wanted to know if God would still forgive her even if she hadn’t forgiven the man who raped her.

Did I mention that this was the first question? Here are a few more asked that night:

“Why does God let people die . . . so young?”

“Why does it seem that mean people get the most money?”

“Why does the killer go free and the honest man die of cancer?”

“Sometimes I doubt God’s presence in starving Africa.”

“If we can ask God for forgiveness at our last breath, why strive for a godly life in the present?”

“Either God is in control of everything and so all the crap we see today is part of his plan (which I don’t want to accept), or it’s all out of control (which sucks too). What’s up?”

This is just a random sampling. I have page after page of questions on my desk. Heaven and hell and suicide and the devil and God and love and rape—some very personal, some angry, some desperate, some very deep and philosophical.

Most of my responses were about how we need others to carry our burdens and how our real needs in life are not for more information but for loving community with other people on the journey. But what was so powerful for those I spoke with was that they were free to voice what was deepest in their hearts and minds. Questions, doubts, struggles. It wasn’t the information that helped them—it was simply being in an environment in which they were free to voice what was inside.

And this is why questions are so central to faith. A question by its very nature acknowledges that the person asking the question does not have all of the answers. And because the person does not have all of the answers, they are looking outside of themselves for guidance.

Questions, no matter how shocking or blasphemous or arrogant or ignorant or raw, are rooted in humility. A humility that understands that I am not God. And there is more to know.

Questions bring freedom. Freedom that I don’t have to be God and I don’t have to pretend that I have it all figured out. I can let God be God.14

In the book of Genesis, God tells Abraham what he is going to do with Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham fires back, “Will not the Ruler of the earth do right?”

Abraham thinks God is in the wrong and the proposed action is not in line with who God is, and Abraham questions him about it. Actually, they get into a sort of bargaining discussion in which Abraham doesn’t let up. He keeps questioning God. And God not only doesn’t get angry, but he seems to engage with Abraham all the more.15

Maybe that is who God is looking for—people who don’t just sit there and mindlessly accept whatever comes their way.

Moses tries for two chapters to convince God that he has picked the wrong man, and God seems all the more convinced with each question that he has picked the right man.16

David says this to God in Psalm 13: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer.”

What’s the first thing Mary says to the angel who brings her the news that she’s going to be the mother of the Messiah?

“But how can this be? I’m a virgin!”

Questions. Questions. Questions.

What are some of Jesus’s final words? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus. On the cross. Questioning God.

Central to the Christian experience is the art of questioning God. Not belligerent, arrogant questions that have no respect for our maker, but naked, honest, vulnerable, raw questions, arising out of the awe that comes from engaging the living God.

This type of questioning frees us. Frees us from having to have it all figured out. Frees us from having answers to everything. Frees us from always having to be right. It allows us to have moments when we come to the end of our ability to comprehend. Moments when the silence is enough.

The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder.”17

The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can’t be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.

Most of us are conditioned to think of mystery in terms of a television show or a novel or a film in which the mystery is solved at the end.18 Often right before the credits we find out who did it, or who is actually the long-lost son of whom, or that she is actually a he. Or that Bruce Willis was dead for most of the movie and we just now figured it out.19

Mystery is created when key facts are hidden from the viewer. What the writer/director/creator does at the end is pull back the curtain and show us the things that had previously been hidden.

So the mystery gets solved and our questions get answered.

But the Bible has an entirely different understanding of mystery. True mystery, the kind of mystery rooted in the infinite nature of God, gives us answers that actually plunge us into even more . . . questions.

Take this example from John 3:16. The first part of the verse reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.”

So why did God give his son?

Because God loves the world.

But what does it mean for God to love the world?

Does God love evil people? Mean people? People who don’t think that God exists? People who think that God loves only them? If you do enough evil, can you exhaust God’s love?

Because God loves the world is an answer to the question, why did God give his son? It’s a real answer; it’s an answer you can trust; it’s an answer you can base your life on. It’s an answer you can know. But it also raises a new set of questions.

Why does God love the world?

What motivates God to love like this? What does God get out of it?

The writers of the Bible, especially one named John, would answer this way: “Because God is love.”20

Which is an answer, of course, but as you probably have figured out by now, it raises even deeper questions: How can God be love? Is every experience of love an experience of God? Is every experience of God an experience of love?

So God is love is an answer to the question, why does God love the world? But as an answer, it raises even more questions. And we could go on and on and on.

Truth always leads to more . . . truth. Because truth is insight into God and God is infinite and God has no boundaries or edges. So truth always has layers and depth and texture.

It’s like a pool that you dive into, and you start swimming toward the bottom, and soon you discover that no matter how hard and fast you swim downward, the pool keeps getting . . . deeper. The bottom will always be out of reach.

One of the great “theologians” of our time, Sean Penn, put it this way: “When everything gets answered, it’s fake. The mystery is the truth.”21

The mystery is the truth.

Or take the Trinity, for example. Even the best definitions end up sounding like a small child trying to play Mozart on pots and pans in the middle of the kitchen floor. The more you study the Trinity and what has been said about it over the years, the more you are left in wonder and awe about the nature of God.

As one of my friends often says: “If you study the Bible and it doesn’t lead you to wonder and awe, then you haven’t studied the Bible.”22

The very nature of orthodox Christian faith is that we never come to the end. It begs for more. More discussion, more inquiry, more debate, more questions.

It’s not so much that the Christian faith has a lot of paradoxes. It’s that it is a lot paradoxes. And we cannot resolve a paradox. We have to let it be what it is.

Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it.

The Eastern church father Gregory of Nyssa talked about Moses’s journey up Mount Sinai in Exodus 19. When Moses enters the darkness toward the top of the mountain, he has moved beyond knowledge to awe and to love and to the mystery of God. Gregory insists that Moses has not arrived when he enters the darkness of the mountaintop. His journey and exploration have only really begun.23

Which leads to a really obvious observation: A trampoline only works if you take your feet off the firm, stable ground and jump into the air and let the trampoline propel you upward. Talking about trampolines isn’t jumping; it’s talking. Two vastly different things. And so we jump and we invite others to jump with us, to live the way of Jesus and see what happens. You don’t have to know anything about the springs to pursue living “the way.”

In brickworld, the focus often becomes getting people to believe the right things so they can be “in.” There is often a list of however many doctrines, and the goal is to get people to intellectually assent to these things being true. Once we believe the right things, then we’re in. And once we’re in, the goal often becomes learning how to get others in with us. I know this is harsh, but in many settings it is true. It is possible in these settings to be in, and to believe all of the correct things, and even to be effective at getting others in, and yet our hearts can remain unaffected. It’s possible to believe all the right things and be miserable. It’s possible to believe all the right doctrines and not live as Jesus teaches us to live. This is why I am so passionate about the trampoline. I want to invite people to actually live this way so the life Jesus offers gradually becomes their life. It becomes less and less about talking, and more and more about the experience we are actually having.

And what is the point, while we’re at it, of a trampoline?

Joy

The point is our joy. That is when God is most pleased.24 They aren’t two different things: God’s joy over here and our joy over there. They are the same. God takes great pleasure in us living as we were made to live. He even commands it in the Psalms: “Take delight in the Lord.”25 It’s such an odd command, isn’t it? You will be happy or else. But God is serious about this. Now this joy doesn’t rule out suffering, difficulty, and struggle. In fact, taking Jesus seriously almost guarantees that our lives will be difficult. History proves it. And very few actually set out to live such a focused, beautiful life. Narrow is the way, and only a few find it.26 But the kind of joy God speaks of transcends these struggles and difficulties. I love how one writer put it: “The peace of God, which transcends all understanding.”27

Sometimes when my boys and I are jumping and one of us starts laughing, we all start laughing. We’re jumping and we’re short of breath and we’re sweating and we’re having such a great time. When we’re too exhausted to jump anymore, we’ll lie down on the mat and stare up at the vast blue sky above us and watch the clouds go by and listen to the breeze as it moves the leaves overhead. I’ll be there on my back, and I’ll say a short prayer: “God, I can’t believe I get to live this life.”