McClaren, Rohr, and Bell - a Trinity for our Times?
Brian McClaren, Richard Rohr, and Rob Bell – a trinity for our times?
In terms of personal appeal, sorry Brian, but I struggle more with finding your centre of gravity than with your friends Rohr and Bell. In recent months I have read, and enjoyed, Falling Upwards by Richard Rohr and I have listened to a stack of Rob Bell podcasts called appropriately The Robcast.
Early most mornings I’ve been out walking for a good hour or so and Rob Bell’s energetic verbal delivery has been in my ear.
To some questions:
John, why are you listening to Rob Bell and reading Rohr if you think they are mildly heretical?
We read in Luke’s gospel that Jesus matured through his childhood and early adult years ‘And the child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom and the grace of God was upon Him’ Luke 2 v 40. After Jesus’ baptism and the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, he taught and discipled the twelve apostles and many others.
The descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove was decisive. We read then that the Spirit ‘led Him into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil and afterwards He ‘returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee and the news of Him went out through all the surrounding region’.
I listen to Bell and Rohr, (not so much McClaren, maybe he’s like a rare cheese I haven’t developed taste buds for yet?) because they seem to have a handle on what it means to ‘become strong in spirit’ and ‘to be filled with wisdom and grace’ – in other words that have much to say about the human condition and the processes involved in progressing towards spiritual maturity, what it looks like, what might hold it up, the signs of progress and so on. And at different stages of life.
I haven’t found such a clarity and grip on spiritual maturity being taught in the Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic churches and literature I have stumbled across.
The problem I have, though, with this McClaren, Rohr and Bell trinity, is that Jesus’ discipleship and training programme was far more radical than a series of seminars on how to mature spiritually; it certainly wasn’t a ‘7 parables to perfection’ ministry. He wasn’t training the disciples (and therefore by extension us) to simply grow in grace and wisdom, like He had before the encounter with the Holy Spirit. The goal of the gospel, its endpoint, in fact, was to produce a new type of man, indivisible from Him – and that required going to the cross.
As Paul put it ‘For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God’ Rom 8v14.
But if you want to explore spiritual maturity, what it is to be truly human, perhaps like the ‘pre-dove Jesus’, Rohr and Bell will feed you well, and give you further insight and instruction.
The goal of the gospel, its endpoint, in fact, was to produce a new type of man, indivisible from Him – and that required going to the cross
All well and good, John, but you’ve ignored the charge of heresy, haven’t you?
Yes. But that doesn’t mean that the Evangelical/Pentecostal world isn’t lacking in some of the things they are saying. That may explain their popularity. Sheep will graze where the grass is good. But I agree, if, in the final analysis, we are eating from the wrong table we should be at least ‘on guard’.
Here are three questions I would ask Rohr and Bell and Maclaren.
Q1. Why do you speak of ‘the divine’ rather than God? Is God, in your understanding, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Is God the trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
Q2. You often refer to ‘spirit’ rather than the Holy Spirit. Why?
Q3. You refer to the scriptures, the Old and New Testaments as ‘ancient tradition’ rather than the word of God, inspired, inerrant, and infallible. The accounts in Genesis as referred to as poems for example. What is your belief about the Old and New Testaments?
You can see the danger.
Sounds a little like, in your view, John, there’s an Elephant in the Evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic room?
Dead right. Evangelicals and Charismatics (who may be found in all the traditional, historic denominations or more modern churches) routinely skirt round Romans 6 and 7 and other passages that deal with the cross, as applied to us, our crucifixion with Christ.
Leaving Romans 6 and 7 untaught, unbelieved, and unentered into, is as much a heresy as anything Rohr and Bell are accused of. The Romans 1-5 substitutionary gospel is an incomplete gospel. It’s not wrong. But it is incomplete.
In Romans 1-5 Paul constructs his arguments that show that Christ Jesus died for me, in my place. All my iniquities were placed on Him. The Just for the unjust. It is all wonderfully true: salvation, justification, acquittal, the gift of righteousness, eternal life, grace…it’s all wonderfully true. To truly understand that we are under grace not law will transform your life as it sinks in. That’s all found in Romans 1-5. And you’ll find ‘under grace’ preached faithfully in any number of evangelical churches of all denominations. Pentecostals and Charismatics point out, correctly, that as much as we need to know Jesus as Saviour and Lord, we also need to know Him as the One who baptises us in the Holy Spirit and be baptised in the Spirit. Such is the substitutionary gospel.
The clear teaching, however, of Romans 6 and 7 (and other passages – notably Galatians 2 v20 and Colossians 3 v 3) is that Christ’s death was also inclusive – it included you and me: ‘I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live I live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who love me and gave Himself for me’ Gal 2v20.
Faith - spelt differently
It is not just that our ‘sins’ needed to be placed on Jesus, dealt with, and taken away, so we can be forgiven, but that the ‘sinner’ needed to die, so we can be delivered from Adam and re-potted in Christ. He brought about our end. It was the end of John Stevens. That old, seemingly self-empowered John Stevens, who may have tried to be good at times, attempting to live the Christian life, or at least a good life with some measure of success and failure, to live a life fuelled by his own resources, a life independent of God, an autonomous being, a ‘human’…‘being’. That attempt works to some extent until you hear the gospel, the ‘good news’ that Jesus has appeared, not to improve us at a distance, but to end our exile from God, and our self-driven lives. The trouble is that so many are taught that Jesus took our sins but not us in Him on the cross. The result of this is that now we feel that we should be able to live the Christian life, especially if we have the power of the Spirit to give us the power and strength. Really, we have no excuse! Surely! But this misses the point. But the gospel is far more radical than this.
Left like this we think that sanctification is a process whereby we become progressively more like Jesus. But this is polishing a turd theology. This isn’t much better than self-help, as if it is ‘us’ that needs to improve rather than crucified and buried. The gospel becomes an inversion of its true message, and the centre of its universe becomes ‘me’ and one that could get caught in the Romans 7 trap.
But this is polishing a turd theology
By the time we reach Romans chapter 5, Paul presents us as ‘in Adam’ and the clues and the signposts to a completely new ‘in-Christ life’ are scattered around pointing to chapter 6. For example ‘…if by one man’s trespass death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ’ Rom 5v17
Our problem, then, is that we are rooted in Adam, and therefore the ‘me-in-Adam’ person, cut off from God, is deceived into trying to live a human life on our own inner resources. The ‘evangelical’ gospel attempts to solve this need for transfer from Adam to Christ by using the phrase ‘dying to sin’ (from Rom 6v2). ‘Sin’ in this context is the nature within us inherited from Adam, our tendency to sin. The problem with leaving the argument there is that it suggests that ‘we’ can, by our own decision, by the exercise of our own will, die to sin and live a righteous life. But this is not the solution that chapter 6 teaches.
‘Do you not know that as many of us as were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death…buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we could walk in newness of life…knowing this that our old man was crucified with Him…’ Rom 6 v 3-6
By this point in Paul’s argument, we see that it is not only our sins that were laid on Christ on the cross but we ourselves. Not just the sins but the sinner.
The phrase ‘die to sin’ is not something we do but something that, historically, has taken place in Christ. God has effected the transfer:
‘Of Him are you in Christ Jesus who has become for us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption’ 1 Cor 1 v 30
This was always the goal of the gospel, its endpoint, in fact: to produce a new type of man, indivisible from Him – and that required Jesus taking us to the cross, sins included, being buried and rising again in a new form, in Christ.
Now we can be led by the Spirit into the spiritual maturity that Bell and Rohr describe so well. We become Holy Spirit-led sons, ‘mini-Christs’ as C.S. Lewis was wont to say and the true meaning of the term ‘Christians’, the nickname given to the early believers.
Next: Barking up the wrong tree