Rob Bell Tolls on the Bible

By Ken Silva

Apprising Ministries

Bell Says Sola Scriptura “Is Not True”

While making the rounds promoting his book Velvet Elvis: Repainting The Christian Faith (VE) Emergent Church pastor and communicator Rob Bell told BeliefNet.com:

The Bible itself, he writes, is a book that constantly must be wrestled with and re-interpreted. He dismisses claims that “Scripture alone” will answer all questions. Bible interpretation is colored by historical context, the reader's bias and current realities, he says. The more you study the Bible, the more questions it raises.

“It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says,” Bell writes. [1]

Then in VE, after laying out a neo-orthodox understanding of some of the Biblical writers, Bell specifically says:

This is part of the problem with continually insisting that one of the absolutes of the Christian faith must be a belief that “Scripture alone” is our guide. It sounds nice but it is not true… When people say that all we need is the Bible, it is simply not true. [2] 

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. [3]

In his recent article The Colossian Heresy and the Sufficiency of Scripture on Shaper Iron Dr. Kevin Bauder writes:

Verse 8 issues a caution to beware of people who want to carry Christians into spiritual captivity (a clear reference to the heretics of Colosse). This captivation can take three forms. The first is through “philosophy and empty deceit,” by which Paul means philosophical and theological speculations that carry them beyond the warrants of revelation.

The second is “human traditions,” or rites, forms, and customs that people have made up for themselves. This is a reference to the Gnostic side of the heresy and its invented liturgies. The third is the “elements of the world,” an expression that is connected in Galatians with the transmission of Judaistic forms into Christian observance. In other words, Paul warns that when doctrine and order go beyond what is revealed, this excess reduces Christians to captivity—whether the imported teachings and customs arise from deceitful speculation, from human invention, or from Judaistic retention. [4]

The Emergent Church in general and Rob Bell in particular are perfect examples of what Dr. Bauder was just talking about. By kicking out the Bible as the final authority for their corrupt view of Christianity they are doing their best to drag the Christian Church back into the “spiritual captivity” of the apostate Roman Catholic Church  through their postmodern “philosophy” and the “empty deceit” of the Reformation-denying practice of Contemplative Spirituality. Bell and the Emergent Church preach a philosophy that causes questions and doubt about how to relate to God through the text of the Bible itself while offering the empty deceit of some experience-oriented spiritual encounter with Him instead.

Without a solid Biblical foundation deceivers like Bell are then free to repaint the Christian faith into an existential spiritual journey while sowing a social gospel while reducing Jesus to a cause to live for. Growing up in a culture where pursuit of fast-paced pleasures has all but erased attention spans the Emergent Church offers a very diverse and eclectic liturgy. And by blurring the lines of Holy Scripture we are now free to pick and choose whatever we happen to like from virtually anything that ever referred to itself as Christian.

Denigrating The Word Of God

What I have been pressing forth lately concerning the Hollow Men of the Emergent Church is beginning to sound a bit like a tape loop. There will be nothing good that is going to come in having “conversation” and dialogue with men who have already decided to pursue the faulty philosophy of postmodernism which leaves them as Christian agnostics.

We get a little peek at this in The Emergent Mystique:

Mars Hill's teaching pastor, Rob Bell, hair tousled and reddish brown, hops on stage in the center of what must have been the mall's anchor store… “This is not just the same old message with new methods,” Rob says. “We’re rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion, as a way of life. Legal metaphors for faith don’t deliver a way of life. We grew up in churches where people knew the nine verses why we don’t speak in tongues, but had never experienced the overwhelming presence of God…”

The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself –“discovering the Bible as a human product,” as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. “The Bible is still in the center for us,” Rob says, “but it’s a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it.”

“I grew up thinking that we've figured out the Bible,” Kristen says, “that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again–like life used to be black and white, and now it's in color”… The Bells, who flourished at evangelical institutions from Wheaton to Fuller Theological Seminary to Grand Rapids's Calvary Church before starting Mars Hill, were by their own account happy and successful young evangelicals. Yet that very world, as the Bells tell it, became constricting–in Kristen’s phrase, “black and white.” [5]

They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. [6]

You have just read Rob Bell giving you a good explanation of the neo-orthodox view of the Bible. And in Part Two, we’ll contrast this with how Jesus Himself approached Holy Scripture.

By Ken Silva Click here for bio and archived articles