Rob Bell, The Gods Aren’t Angry Tour

If you can still get there, go. 

I’ve been a Rob Bell fan since he spoke at Wheaton during college.  His style and plain spoken-ness placed in stark contrast much of the dull blather that most theologically orthodox speakers at chapel would spew. (Listen to the Staley Lecture Series: “Communicating Christ in Contemporary Culture,” day 1, day 2, day 3)  And maybe I was just in a weird place, but the words that he spoke made sense and I understood for the first time that Jesus was more than a philosophical ideal, or a religious know-it-all.  Jesus spoke to real people with real words in a real culture with real metaphors and social narratives and cultural mores.

Since I first heard Bell, I’ve been pursuing the whole “narrative theology” thing pretty hard.  N. T. Wright, JonDomCrossan, Walter Wink, Brian Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat, Kenneth Bailey, John Donahue, Don Everts, even Lauren Winner – this stuff is deep, but it puts flesh and blood on a guy whose teaching I loved, and whose person I’m learning to admire more and more each day.

You’ve got to check this stuff out.

~ by sholander on November 28, 2007.