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Removing the Velvet from Elvis

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Removing the Velvet from the Elvis: A Critical Review of Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis
Justin P. Bond

            Rob Bell is a very unique character. He definitely has a style that attracts the youth and has great ability with speaking.  Rob as the founding pastor, leads one of the fastest growing churches in the country Mars Hill in Grandville, Michigan.  Bell’s articulation and presentation puts him as one of the top spokesman for the postmodern theology that summarizes so much of the Emergent Church. Although Bell would try to distance himself away from this conversation (movement), his book Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith abounds in the theology the Emergent Church claims.

            Bell opens this book by giving an analogy as the theme for his book. He begins to describe a Velvet Elvis statue that he has. He then goes into the idea that the Christian faith is like art. Artists must continue to paint and repaint things and it would be nonsense for the artist of this velvet Elvis to make the claim that all art should come to a cease because he finally painted the perfect piece. The times change and so must the art. Art is something that shows expression and explains our deepest experiences. Just like art, the Christian faith must be painted and repainted over and over again. Bell goes on to explain this repainting as the Reformation and that the Reformers did not use the word Reformed but Reforming because they knew they did not have it figured out forever.[1]

Bell begins to go through what his idea of doctrine looks like and argues that the doctrine of the Christian faith are like “springs” that hold up a trampoline which we all jump onto with faith. The “springs” are not the main focus but are the tools to “finding our lives in God. [2] At first this might sound good. We are able to take a “spring” out. We can examine it, discuss it, probe it, they stretch and they flex. This can be problematic which we will see a little later.


            He then compares the trampoline to a brick wall. The wall is built one brick (core doctrine) at a time. If you were to remove one brink then the whole wall (faith) would fall down not allowing any room for stretching and flexing. Holding to this view, Rob makes the claim that when Jesus claims to be the way, truth, and life, He is not claiming that He is the only way to the Father. Kevin DeYoung in his book Why Were Not Emergent goes on to make a point that authors such as Bell try to get away from finding a right or wrong view of a text. They are willing to talk about verses and then be okay with not really coming to a conclusion and just settle for not picking an absolute way of interpretation. They simply are trying to pick an interpretation that might be able to fit all groups of people and offend the least amount of people as possible. [3]

            Bell’s trampoline view leads us into some trouble. We see problems occur when Bell states that a big problem for Christians is when they try to hold to scripture alone to be our guide.[4] Bell is saying that it is a problem to make the Bible our only authority. This leads into the first main issue, the Virgin Birth. Bell explains how the brick wall would fall down if archaeologists had dug into a tomb and found DNA to a man Larry the father of Jesus and that the gospel writers were a bit mythological and threw in the virgin birth.[5] According to Bell this is something that would not shake his faith but would make the brick wall fall to the ground. Kevin DeYoung goes on to say that Bell is not only trying to get away from orthodoxy but also is trying to put orthopraxy a few notches above orthodoxy. [6]

            Bell then takes another spring out and tries to stretch it and in doing so it distorts the doctrine of the Trinity. He starts off by saying that this “spring” is central to the historic, orthodox Christian faith. There is only one God and he somehow presents himself everywhere and people begin to call this power of God His “Spirit.”[7] He is not just present in Spirit but the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity; He is God Himself. God does not simply display himself to be in the mode of Spirit but the Spirit is a different person from the Father. Bell comes close to falling into the heresy of modalism, which says God appears in different forms. Rob wrote: They don’t claim to have an absolute word from God on the matter; they at best claim guidance from the Spirit of God, but they even hold that loosely.”[8] Because of this, Mark Sohmer stated in his article:
Rob is 100% wrong. He doesn’t understand the deity of the Holy Spirit. “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit” is indeed an “absolute word from God.” In saying that the disciples merely had a word from the Holy Spirit, but not from God, Rob demonstrated that he denies that the Holy Spirit is an actual person, 100% co-equal with the Father and the Son. This is a damnable heresy.[9]

            Next, Rob Bell tries to define “heaven” and “hell.” He begins to explain this reality from being on earth right now and it depends whether you live right or not. Bell brings up what happened in Rwanda and calls it a hell on earth and that hell can be a place, event, or situation that is absent of how God would want things to be. He says famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, and slaughter are all hell on earth.[10] He then gives the example of the rich man and Lazarus and makes the claim that not helping the rich man was the reason for Lazarus living in hell on earth. This is missing the point of the parable. The things that Rob explained are awful and I do not want to downplay the wickedness of them but the understanding of hell in regards to scripture is much different. Not only will there be weeping and gnashing of teeth, but the people there who are sent by God will be thrown into the lake of fire and will be tormented day and night. The things that happen on earth come nothing close to what the bible says about hell. Revelation 21.8 says, “the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone: which is the second death”

            Also something very concerning is Rob Bell’s view of the atonement. When reading his book it is very easy to come up with the conclusion that Jesus has died for everybody and that all men are reconciled to God. Dale Van Dyke sums it up nicely when saying, “Everyone is already loved by God the Father as a reconciled, forgiven sinner in Christ. They simply need to choose to live in that reality or not.”[11] You get this conclusion when Bell starts saying that this is a reality and this forgiveness is true for everyone. Not only is Bell trying to make this claim but he is also insisting that Paul is teaching such a thing.

             Rob then says, “Heaven is full of forgiven people. Hell is full of forgiven people. Heaven is full of people God loves, whom Jesus died for. Hell is full of forgiven people God loves, whom Jesus died for. The difference is how we choose to love, which story we choose to live in, which version of reality we trust. God’s reality or ours.”[12] This is allowing for an unjust God. Bell finds himself in a bind by holding to this view and goes against orthodoxy. If Christ died for all people and their sins and the people in hell are forgiven of their sins (including the sin of unbelief) then they should not be in hell. Heaven is for those people who have their sins forgiven. Thus what God did on the cross must not have been a sufficient enough sacrifice or he isn’t truly a loving God if he is allowing people whose sins are forgiven to stay in hell and suffer. This kind of looks like universalism gone wrong. Every body has their sins forgiven. But you get to stay in hell. 

            Rob Bell has a lot of good things to say and he can offer a lot of good things. But there comes a time when we must not budge in our orthodox views like Bell does. We cannot give up and turn main doctrines into heresy. My advice for Bell is to keep his Elvis in the basement. We must be careful when calling him out and remember to do it in love and turn him to the truth, but also be aware that Paul warns us about a gospel like Bell’s in Galatians. May God’s grace be with us all as we try to faithfully study God’s holy and infallible Word.




Bibliography 

Bell, Rob. Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Zondervan, 2006.

DeYoung, Kevin, and Ted Kluck. Why We're Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be. Moody Publishers, 2008.

Sohmer, Mark Edward. “Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show a review of Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis,” 2007. http://www.sohmer.net/Velvet_Elvis.pdf.

Van Dyke, Dale. “Jumping Off the Mark: A Response to Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis: A Review Article.” OPC, 2008. http://www.opc.org/os.html?article_id=89.



[1] Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (Zondervan, 2006), 12.
[2] Ibid., 25.
[3] Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck, Why We're Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be (Moody Publishers, 2008), 83-84.
[4] Bell, Velvet Elvis, 67.
[5] Ibid., 26-27.
[6] DeYoung and Kluck, Why We're Not Emergent, 111.
[7] Bell, Velvet Elvis, 22.
[8] Ibid., 57.
[9] Mark Edward Sohmer, “Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show a review of Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis,” 2007, 20, http://www.sohmer.net/Velvet_Elvis.pdf.
[10] Bell, Velvet Elvis, 148.
[11] Dale Van Dyke, “Jumping Off the Mark: A Response to Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis: A Review Article” (OPC, 2008), http://www.opc.org/os.html?article_id=89.
[12] Bell, Velvet Elvis, 146.

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