The following is from an interview of Rob Bell posted online by Christianity Today. My comments will be in bold italics. The link to the interview is at the bottom.Rob Bell’s latest book, Jesus Wants to Save Christians (Zondervan, with Don Golden), is his most substantive yet. It’s nothing less than a holistic, biblical theology of salvation—written, paradoxically, in Bell’s typical sentence-fragment style. CT senior managing editor Mark Galli sat down with Bell, founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to probe him on some of the more striking statements in his book.
You say that “something has gone terribly wrong with humanity.” What do you mean?
I was born in 1970, a child of the Enlightenment. We put someone on the moon. We’ll figure out cancer soon enough. Look what we can do. And yet more people than ever have died in the last 100 years from bombs. So, we have been taught, give Steve Jobs enough time, and he’ll come up with something.
At the same time, Rwanda, 1994—we didn’t step in there. Then Darfur—didn’t we learn? So we have this profound sense of empowerment coupled with a profound sense of disempowerment, and I think you have a lot of people with a profound sense of angst.
Note the mentions of Rwanda and Darfur. In both cases, America was sending food and medical supplies, but there were major problems with the dictatorships there. My impression here is that Rob Bell would have liked to have seen the U.S. step in with our military. I agree that we should have.
As for his last sentence, that it really mean anything? If anything, this country has a profound sense of apathy toward anything that it is not interested in. People came out of the social experiment of the Sixties and discovered that sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll did not solve anything. Because they had already turned away from God and did not turn back, Americans have become apathetic to anything that does not affect their personal comfort.
Are you a pacifist, or do you think that a truly Christian church has to be a pacifist church?
My dad is a U.S. Federal District Judge and gets lots of death threats. On Father’s Day a couple of years ago, there were bodyguards in the driveway at our house. And I am okay with that. But I sit right in that tension. Sometimes people say no police, no armed forces, no anything. And the truth is, whether I am falling short of Jesus’ teaching or not, there are situations where I am really glad that there is a policeman standing right there and that he has a gun. So I don’t know how exactly you work that out in detail.
But my hope would be that as a Christian, you would have a larger imagination. Take Saddam Hussein. Your first impulse would be, “Man, if he wasn’t in power, it would be great—and the only way is to bring in a hundred thousand troops.” To me, the third way of Jesus is always asking if there is an imaginative, subversive, brilliant, creative path.
Here it would appear that Rob Bell would have rather that we did not step in with our military in Iraq. The dictatorship of Hussein was just as evil and potentially more destructive to the world. Why didn’t Rob Bell want the “the third way of Jesus Christ” to be used in Rwanda and Darfur? “Blessed are the peacemakers” sometimes means that the peacemaker has to carry a gun as Rob Bell showed us while talking about the threats to his father.
To be continued.