The past handful of posts have been devoted to various reflections on different aspects of community...
Today I want to switch gears a bit and talk about one of my new found dialogical partners--Rob Bell.
I don't know Rob personally. In fact, I have never even met him. I have known of him for the past several years, but my grad school studies kept me from paying much attention to his writings, messages, videos...etc. I confess that I am no Rob Bell expert. I haven't even interacted with all his material. Until recently, I mostly just heard what others had to say about him--which was a mixed bag. All that stated, I recently spent some time reading his book Sex God--a book that explores the connections between sexuality & spirituality. I was positively surprised. I thought the book creatively and powerfully reinforced the sanctity of marriage in a culture where such sanctity is eroding at an incredible rate. I would recommend it to individuals--single or married--looking to be inspired when it comes to human sexuality.
Did I agree with everything Rob had to say? No. Did I agree with every major point he made? No. And see this tension is exactly what I want to address. I can't think of a single book where I agreed with everything the author had to say. Sure, I agree with some books more than others. Some books confirm my convictions more than others do. But do we read books to simply have our present convictions reinforced? I hope not. What I do hope is this: I hope that we read books in order to enter into ongoing discussions with the goal of hearing another individual's perspective. We then have numerous options with regard to how we respond to that perspective. But when I read a book, I am simply entering into discussion with another person whereby they become one of my dialogical partners for that moment in time. I am not required to agree with all that they say. But I don't dismiss them over the differences. To dismiss an author entirely because you disagree with them on one point is called a genetic fallacy. I am not writing to defend Rob Bell--to counter his critics. He can do that on his own. What I am trying to do is reframe how we go about reading. Because I have met numerous people that simply dismiss Rob Bell--and several other authors for that matter--over certain things they said or wrote. I think such dismissals are often based on a misunderstanding about the goal of reading.
The goal of reading is not agreement or disagreement, but conversation. And I think Rob Bell gets that. He says it well himself in the overview for his book Velvet Elvis: "We have to test everything. I thank God for anybody anywhere who is pointing people to the mysteries of God. But those people would all tell you to think long and hard about what they are saying and doing and creating. Test it. Probe it. Do that to this book. Don't swallow it uncritically. Think about it. Wrestle with it. Just because I'm a Christian and I'm trying to articulate a Christian worldview doesn't mean I've got it nailed down. I'm contributing to the discussion. God has spoken, and the rest is commentary, right?" We can test things. We can probe things. We can wrestle with things. We can even be critical. But we do so within the context of conversation--understanding that no single author has it all nailed down. And when we approach things that way, it changes the tone of the entire conversation. You see, it is not just how we read that is important. It is how we converse. When we realize that no one person has it all figured out, we are then in a position to engage in charitable dialogue with one another. The emphasis ultimately falls not only on how we read, but also on how we converse.
I recently found a charitable dialogue partner in Rob Bell.
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