Você está na página 1de 3

Random Thoughts to Jesus Wants To Save Christians

February 10, 2010


Greg B. Rast, M.Div.

Just finished reading through Rob Bell’s book Jesus Wants to Save Christians. This book
arrived in my library at Christmas due to the generosity of an extended family member
who knows of interest in things emergent, post-emergent, post-Christendom and, well,
you name it. I’ve been looking forward to the read but haven’t had the time up until
today. With servers down in the States and my work here stalled until the sun came up
on the East coast, I figured it was as good a time as any.

With a subtitle like “A Manifesto For the Church in Exile” I had high expectations. For
those not involved in following the post-world movements in the church, Old Testament
exilic theology has become a popular way for viewing the church’s new, relatively
diminished, position in culture. It’s not the only biblical theology proving to be a
resource, but one of the most popular. So what does the book have to offer Christians
now living on the margins?

Theology. Lots of it. Bell tries to loosely retell some of the critical Old Testament
stories in a way that again uncovers some of their power. If there is simultaneously a
strength and a weakness to this book, this is it. Some stories like the Cain / Abel
narrative become far too one dimensional in an effort to cover ground. For the most part
though it’s good stuff. The biblical perspective on empire. The confrontation between
God and Egypt over His firstborn (Israel). The distance between God and the people at
Sinai. The purpose of God with the nation, and the nation’s failure to “get it.” The
prophetic critique of the mentality of entitlement and the abuse of the blessing of God.
All important Old Testament themes, and ones that I have been wrestling with on some
level myself. It’s good, very good, to see others wrestling with them as well. It has been
a conviction of mine for some time that one of the most important components of a
recovery for Christianity in the post-world will be the hard theological work needed for
Christians to again learn their own story and how to communicate it. In The Death of
Christian Britain, Callum Brown concludes that in the early 20th Century, evangelical
Christianity still maintained a very specific dialogue with Western culture. From his
social-historical perspective on what has happened to the Christian meta-narrative,
evangelical Christians simply failed to move on after the introduction of the television
and the developments of the 1960’s. Now, evangelicals continue to spout portions of a
cultural narrative that no longer exists and the major themes of the Bible are often simply
not heard. Sheerly from a communications perspective, when an average voice on the
street in Western Europe can argue that Christianity is about bigotry, narrow-mindedness,
politics, power, and war it’s clear that the central scriptural themes of love, grace and
redemption simply aren’t being heard.

That’s why Bell’s critique of empire is important. It points out the reality that even
religious people can make empire systems that oppress and fall wide of God’s purposes,
and calls us to consider our own involvement in today’s global political systems.
It was exactly here though that I was left longing for more. I’ll admit to being
uncomfortable with his interpretation of the Solomonic narrative. My impression from a
Biblical Studies perspective is that Solomon’s accomplishments in his early life come off
much more positive than they do negative. Even his building of massive systems and
military outposts. But o.k. We all know Solomon lost it in the end, went wide of God’s
purposes, and the coming years of rule in Israel trended in a destructive direction. More
to the point, though I’m left longing for the book to say more about the “Jesus
Revolution.” More about how Jesus related to the empire of his day. More about the
fundamental relationship between sacrifice and change in our fallen world. The critique
that America is a military force of unprecedented power can hardly be disputed. The
caution that our own fears of losing our abundance are robbing many Christians from
experiencing the very power of what they say they believe will be for some either a
revelation or a point of contention. More troubling for me, however, is that I find very
little mention of the Christendom problem here – that the American system of life itself,
considered a “Christian” reality by many, at too many points simply opts for greed and
excess rather than truly Christian realities like grace, salvation and dependence on God.

If the hammer doesn’t fully drop here, the practical solution is also failing. As I read, I
had a growing feeling of just how politically distant I have become in recent years. I
envy friends in the emergent movement for whom the question of how one relates to the
world system is solved by a set of 60’s style bumper stickers: “no war, no poverty and
we’ll all be alright!” But swapping conservative Christian political values for more
liberal ones can hardly be the solution to how Christians are to relate to an empire
system, especially when that value system itself is now being driven by secular
humanism. If a country like America roams the globe and pillages freely, what good
does it do if the “Christian” churches simply follow along behind and dole out aid in the
wake of what the empire system had done? Where are we simply adding our own
blessing on to what the empire system did, or paying out of our own pocket what was
stole from others out of a bad conscience? And is that the same as redemption? I don’t
think so. There’s also the not small matter of our own participation in a much larger, and
growing system of politics and global oppression. But precisely because we Americans
are so steeped in a mythology of freedom and so highly value individualism, it is
exceedingly hard, I think, for us to imagine solutions for how we might function as true
Christians first within our own cultural and governmental system. We would rather deny
that any system influences our behavior!

Answering how we really live in the world, without being of it, is clearly going to take
more reflection and more hard theological study. Bell’s book reminds me more at this
point of Erwin McManus’ The Barbarian Way. In The Barbarian Way McManus calls
readers to a particular ethos – to walk the primitive path of a barbarian and be prepared to
give all for your King! In a similar way here Bell is crying out in the last half of the book
for Christians themselves to grasp what it is that the word “salvation” means. And even
if “get saved!” (or in the langue of the book “get Eucharist!”) is more of a rallying cry
than a manifesto… that’s not a bad thing all. Not a bad thing at all.

Você também pode gostar