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Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis
‘This pursuit of Jesus is leading us backward as much as forward.’
In 1961 A.W. Tozer introduced his classic The Knowledge of the Holy to the world with the sentiment that if people were reading Augustine and Anselm, there would be no need to publish his book at all. However, as they weren't, here was a small book 'neither technical nor esoteric' that would illuminate truth for 'plain persons whose hearts stir them up to seek after God himself'.
A brief book about truth for normal people.
A generation later, and Rob Bell is doing something similar. His nooma DVDs have little new content, but they are as fresh as lime twisted into gin for the twenty-first century Christian. His book likewise: whether or not you will agree with publisher Zondervan’s opinion that the post-modern reader needs paragraph breaks nearly every other line, and two blank blue pages to divide each slender chapter, I don’t know, but the content itself is a remarkably spry take on old truths, refreshing the parts that other books do not tend to reach.
‘If it is true, then it isn’t new.’
(On the layout, I for one found it distracting and a little condescending, although it did produce the effect of making what is essentially a very short book appear longer. The whole book is hasty – when Bell says ‘let’s spend some time here’ it means two tiny paragraphs – but the benefit of the brevity is that it finishes while you are still enjoying it, and for me, it became the only Christian book that I completed in 2007).
So what truths? That the Bible was written for our joy not so we get to be right; that we are invited as church communities to explore and enjoy and interpret God’s words for today; that our partly useful dualisms about God’s presence/absence, worship, sacred/secular, what is spiritual are hardly the real picture; that the story of Jesus lasted somewhat longer (in both directions) than thirty-three years; that all truth is God’s truth and the whole world is his; to live out of the peace of who God made you to be; of suffering, reality and openness.
Sound familiar? Rob Bell toured the UK in 2007 and stood in July on the stage at West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge (where we meet), preached informally and with irreverent humour (as we do) about the renewed heaven and earth and God’s restoration (which we had been teaching for the preceding six months). This book will enlarge your view of God, yet it will also for many make sense of what CLC is already about, as though it were a relaxed manifesto for who we are and our contribution as a church.
In other words it is well worth a read. It makes sense of the current church landscape. And it has an authority to it. Bell is not afraid to wander into conservative territory with a distinct yet studious Biblical viewpoint and be more than comfortable sitting there compelling others to see things differently. It’s the kind of book that you find yourself drawing from and quoting in a surprisingly large number of situations.
There are those who might prefer to head straight towards his source material – mostly N.T. Wright and Robert Farrar Capon – but I suspect the majority as likely to do so as to pick up Tozer in the first place.
Rob Bell is the man for this generation. Let the generation read.
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| | | Maria Cullen | 29/01/2008 21:43 | We do reviews...!
I think I shall start a recipe page...
| | | | Carlene Mackenzie | 31/01/2008 02:59 | Maria.....I think you should
| | | | Zoe Sanderson | 31/01/2008 09:03 | I read Velvet Elvis a few weekends back. I felt empowered and encouraged as I found several aspects of my own understanding of the world (which I've always felt was dubiously Christian, if that) reflected back to me by someone who is seeing God at work in a similar culture to ours in an amazing way. Read it!
| | | | Lucie Shuker (Guest) | 03/02/2008 17:38 | Yes - it's a great book. It's helping me to realise more that God is not somewhere else. And how liberating is the belief that all truth is God's truth? No need to go crusading or defending.
| | | | Jason Davies | 04/02/2008 16:09 | I just read a 1-star review on Amazon.co.uk, which says Mr. Bell's message is "confusing" and contains "questionable theologies", such as:
"A strange analogy of building one's faith on a trampoline (when Christ tells us to build our faith on the Solid Rock)"
Hehe.
| | | | Rachel Thorpe (Guest) | 05/02/2008 13:41 | What a great book. I read it over Christmas and wrote a review for the Church website back home... now I feel inferior. But seriously, good book if you get past the Americanisms, tenuous metaphors and, as Gabriel mentioned, the blank pages... which in the copy I read were flourescent orange!?
| | | | Gabriel Smy | 05/02/2008 13:56 | That's much worse.
| | | | Annie Holmes (Guest) | 07/02/2008 02:03 | I thought it was beautiful, and it made the bit of me that never really left art college skip around in delighted circles...
Now I've got that off my chest, I also found it liberating (I never understood why we do theology/ the bible the way we do in CLC before!) and I really like the stuff he says about freedom and vulnerability.
And if I can read "real" theology after a long work-day and still understand it, that's great!
| | | | Dave Halse | 25/05/2008 15:46 | Anyone got a copy I could borrow?
| | | | Gabriel Smy | 25/05/2008 20:46 | Yup.
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