What We Talk About When We Talk About God

168 Pages·2013·0.72 MB·English

by  Rob Bell

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
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1 HUM
CHAPTER 2 OPEN
CHAPTER 3 BOTH
CHAPTER 4 WITH
CHAPTER 5 FOR
CHAPTER 6 AHEAD
CHAPTER 7 SO
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
RESOURCES, NODS, NOTES, AND A FEW SHOUT-OUTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY ROB BELL
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
PREFACE TO THE SPECIAL EDITION
I’m thrilled you’ve picked up this new edition of my book What We Talk About
When We Talk About God. There’s a good chance you’re reading this because
you’ve come across my work through the Life You Want tour or one of my
projects with the OWN network. So before we go any further, I want to give you
an idea of where I’m coming from.
I was at a birthday party recently and I met a man who’s a rocket scientist. It
turns out that he’s not just your average rocket scientist, he’s in charge of pretty
much everything we put into space. It was, as you can imagine, fascinating to
talk with him. At one point in our conversation he was explaining how there are
certain characteristics required for a planet to sustain life and from what he
knows, he’s confident that we’ll find life on other planets in the near future. He
said this like it’s the most straightforward, sensible thing in the world. Or other
worlds, for that matter. He then leaned in and looked me in the eyes and said
And that, Rob, will be devastating for the Christian faith.
Which wasn’t what I was thinking.
I was thinking, Wow, that would be amazing.
I tell you about this fascinating man at this birthday party because of his
assumption that the discovery of life on other planets would be a threat to faith.
He isn’t alone. Lots of people in our world see faith as stuck, rigid, narrow,
behind, unable to cope with the new discoveries and challenges of our modern
world.
I don’t see it that way. If your faith is threatened by something that’s true, then it
wasn’t much of a faith to begin with, was it?
As I reflect on my work over the past fifteen years, I’m struck with how central
the importance of discovery and exploration have been to my understanding of
faith. In my first book, Velvet Elvis, I described a Velvet Elvis painting that I got
in college. In the lower left hand corner the artist painted the letter R with a
period next to it. Imagine if R had announced that there was no more need to
paint because R had come up with the ultimate painting. That’s crazy, because
we understand that art is about exploring and discovering and constantly creating
something new. You’re never done painting. The same is true with faith—you’re
never done learning and growing and evolving. The moment things become
static, frozen, stuck, you’ve lost something central to what it means to have faith.
Jesus called disciples to follow him, and a disciple is a student. For many of us,
our understanding of a student is shaped by the modern classroom where the
goal is often to learn the facts and then regurgitate them back on the exam or in a
paper. But in the first century, a disciple was someone who was learning how to
do what their teacher did. It wasn’t just about the mind and what you knew, it
was about your entire life, about you learning how to live in the world in a
certain way.
I find this understanding incredibly freeing, and I want people to pick this up in
my writing. I see myself as a student, learning the Jesus way, doing my best to
put what I’m learning into words for others. We don’t have to understand it all or
have all the answers: that’s one of the first assumptions of a student. You’re
learning, and you’ll always be learning. So when you don’t get it right the first
time, you take it easy on yourself because you’re learning. And whatever you
have learned, there will always be more. That’s where the thrill is, the surprise,
the joy—there’s always something new around the corner.
There’s a great line from one of the New Testament letters that goes like this:
All things are yours . . .
I love that line. It’s such a big, buoyant, beautiful, affirming view of the world.
Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it,
embrace it, enjoy it. We will always be hungry to make sense of things, always
looking for meaning and connection and depth in our experiences. Faith is here
to stay, the question is what kind of faith will people have. I want us all to have
faith big enough to handle whatever challenges come our way and open enough
to celebrate whatever new discoveries we make in this world. Or other worlds.
I hope that you pick up this sense of wonder and joy in my work.
June 2014
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.