Started and finished a great book today - Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis - Repainting the Christian Faith. Bell is a thirty-something pastor of Mars Hill church in Michigan, USA. The way he thinks and writes is very much as a postmodern pilgrim - asking lots of questions, challenging dominant orthodoxies.
I loved the book. Bell sees faith as more about journey than destination, Christian faith more about following A Way' rather than intellectual assent to doctrine. For this and other reasons he would get right up the nose of those who want God constrained to a nice, neat box. For Bell, God is a mystery where one question leads to another, leads to another and... you get the picture.
Velvet Elvis is a conversational piece. It reads as a loosely linked series of essays to provoke further thought and reflection. Bell's fascination with Jesus' Jewish roots is infectious and illuminating. His sketches on what it meant to be a Rabbi's disciple in Jesus' day is worth the price of the book alone. Topics covered include faith, doubt, ecology, the Bible, mission, discipleship, stress and burnout and the stuff of everyday life.
The book is full of quotable quotes. Here are just a few:
'If anyone didn't have a Messiah complex, it was Jesus.' (p169)
'The greatest truth of the story of Adam and Eve isn't that it happened, but that it happens.' (p139)
'And if you do see yourself carrying God to places, it can be exhausting. God is really heavy.' (p88)
This is a really good book. I know, because I will be turning over in my mind Bell's ruminations for some time. And I think that was his aim all along.
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