Honor Everyone, Love the Brotherhood.

This week's bison article:

The title for this article comes from the words in 1 Peter that I couldn’t help but think after hearing about the latest fight between Rob Bell and an assortment of other Christian leaders.

For those of you who don’t know what’s going on, the basic story is this: Rob Bell is coming out with a new book at the end of this month called Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. The book doesn’t come out until March 29, but already a publisher’s blip and a video in which Bell discusses the content have got people going crazy.

For those of you who don’t tweet, (I honestly don’t know why I end up writing about twitter so much these days.) twitter will always display ten “trending topics” which are the things that the most people are talking about at that moment. You can see them for your country or for the world. Well, on Saturday night, Rob Bell was a trending topic worldwide.

WORLDWIDE.

To say the least, that’s impressive.

But if you look at the content of those tweets, it is terribly frustrating. John Piper said simply, “Farewell Rob Bell.” and linked a blog post which discussed Bell’s new “universalism.”

I watched the video that everyone is upset about. Does Bell ask some very hard relevant questions? Yes. Does he ask them in a manner that might point that he’s leading a direction that might push against the limits of orthodoxy? Yes. But ultimately, he doesn’t say anything. He asks some questions and says, “These are important questions, so I wrote about them in my next book.”

So maybe in his book Rob Bell is going to be a universalist. But if he isn’t, there are a lot of prominent Christian leaders that owe him a fat apology.

Ultimately, I think that this is Bell just being himself. He likes to push people’s buttons and make them think. Honestly, I can’t believe everyone is so surprised. And really, this is one of the best marketing strategies I’ve seen in a long time. People who love him were already going to buy the book. Now, so will people who hate him and people who just want to see what all the noise is about (myself included). The fastest way to sell books is to make people angry. Congratulations, Rob Bell. If you aren’t already rich, you are about to be.

So my biggest concern is not with the book—because frankly, no one has read it yet so no one knows what it is going to say. But it is very upsetting to me the flagrant dismissal given so flippantly by people who are so prominent within the church.

Some people say that it is uncool to talk about God’s wrath. I disagree. I say that a deep search into God’s love and the meaning that gives to the fact that all people are not believers is a much harder subject to wrestle with in modern Christianity. Why is it orthodox to explore God’s wrath and not his love? And why is it that as soon as someone starts asking hard questions in order to find truth with regards to God’s love, Christians begin to crucify him?

I’m not saying Rob Bell is right—like I said, I haven’t read the book. I don’t know what it says yet and neither does anyone else. But can I say that I have integrated my faith and learning if I’m ready to attack him based on the idea of what he might say in a book I haven’t read yet? And does it love the brotherhood to dismiss him so simply, readily, and hatefully? Even if, as Piper seems to think, Bell’s theology places him outside the Christian community (again, we haven’t read the book yet!) we are still called to honor him. Honor does not include hate and slander. These behaviors are unacceptable always for those who follow Christ.

At times like this, I am amazed that we think anyone outside the community would want to become a Christian. Look at how we treat each other, let alone those outside! It’s ridiculous. One blogger referenced 2 Cor. 11:14-15, which says, “And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.”

We are so ready to be right that as soon as someone questions our ideas we attack them, holding nothing back. Christians are judging Bell too harshly and too quickly. As people who are dedicated to becoming thinking followers of Christ, I pray that this campus will reject this behavior and raise up leaders who deal with one another in peace, love, and grace.