Rob Bell - What We Talk About When We Talk About God

Like all great things in the world, women and religion and the sky... you wonder about it, and you dont stop wondering about it.

Tom Waits

Im thrilled youve picked up this new edition of my book What We Talk About When We Talk About God. Theres a good chance youre reading this because youve come across my work through the Life You Want tour or one of my projects with the OWN network. So before we go any further, I want to give you an idea of where Im coming from.

I was at a birthday party recently and I met a man whos a rocket scientist. It turns out that hes not just your average rocket scientist, hes in charge of pretty much everything we put into space. It was, as you can imagine, fascinating to talk with him. At one point in our conversation he was explaining how there are certain characteristics required for a planet to sustain life and from what he knows, hes confident that well find life on other planets in the near future. He said this like its the most straightforward, sensible thing in the world. Or other worlds, for that matter. He then leaned in and looked me in the eyes and said

And that, Rob, will be devastating for the Christian faith.

Which wasnt what I was thinking.

I was thinking, Wow, that would be amazing.

I tell you about this fascinating man at this birthday party because of his assumption that the discovery of life on other planets would be a threat to faith.

He isnt alone. Lots of people in our world see faith as stuck, rigid, narrow, behind, unable to cope with the new discoveries and challenges of our modern world.

I dont see it that way. If your faith is threatened by something thats true, then it wasnt much of a faith to begin with, was it?

As I reflect on my work over the past fifteen years, Im struck with how central the importance of discovery and exploration have been to my understanding of faith. In my first book, Velvet Elvis, I described a Velvet Elvis painting that I got in college. In the lower left hand corner the artist painted the letter R with a period next to it. Imagine if R had announced that there was no more need to paint because R had come up with the ultimate painting. Thats crazy, because we understand that art is about exploring and discovering and constantly creating something new. Youre never done painting. The same is true with faithyoure never done learning and growing and evolving. The moment things become static, frozen, stuck, youve lost something central to what it means to have faith.

Jesus called disciples to follow him, and a disciple is a student. For many of us, our understanding of a student is shaped by the modern classroom where the goal is often to learn the facts and then regurgitate them back on the exam or in a paper. But in the first century, a disciple was someone who was learning how to do what their teacher did. It wasnt just about the mind and what you knew, it was about your entire life, about you learning how to live in the world in a certain way.

I find this understanding incredibly freeing, and I want people to pick this up in my writing. I see myself as a student, learning the Jesus way, doing my best to put what Im learning into words for others. We dont have to understand it all or have all the answers: thats one of the first assumptions of a student. Youre learning, and youll always be learning. So when you dont get it right the first time, you take it easy on yourself because youre learning. And whatever you have learned, there will always be more. Thats where the thrill is, the surprise, the joytheres always something new around the corner.

Theres a great line from one of the New Testament letters that goes like this:
All things are yours .. .

I love that line. Its such a big, buoyant, beautiful, affirming view of the world. Wherever you find truth, wherever you discover something new, affirm it, embrace it, enjoy it. We will always be hungry to make sense of things, always looking for meaning and connection and depth in our experiences. Faith is here to stay, the question is what kind of faith will people have. I want us all to have faith big enough to handle whatever challenges come our way and open enough to celebrate whatever new discoveries we make in this world. Or other worlds.

I hope that you pick up this sense of wonder and joy in my work.

June 2014

I realize that when I use the word God in the title of this book theres a good chance Im stepping on all kinds of land mines. Is there a more volatile word loaded down with more history, assumptions, and expectations than that tired, old, relevant, electrically charged, provocative, fresh, antiquated yet ubiquitous as ever, familiar/unfamiliar word God?

And thats why I use it.

From people risking their lives to serve the poor because they believe God called them to do it, to pastors claiming that the latest tornado or hurricane or earthquake is Gods judgment, to professors proclaiming that God has only ever been a figment of our imagination, to people in a recovery meeting sitting in a circle drinking bad coffee and talking about surrendering to a higher power, to musicians in their acceptance speech at an awards show thanking God for their hit song about a late-night booty call, when it comes to God, we are all over the place.

Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.

And then there are the latest surveys and polls, the ones telling us how many of us believe and dont believe in God and how many fewer of us are going to church, inevitably prompting experts to speculate about demographics and technology and worship style and this generation versus that generation, all of it avoiding the glaring truth that sits right there elephant-like in the middle of the room.

The truth is, we have a problem with God.

Its not just a problem of definitionwhat is it were talking about when we talk about God?and its not just the increasing likelihood that two people discussing God are in fact talking about two extraordinarily different realities while using the exact same word.

This problem with God goes much, much deeper.

As a pastor over the past twenty years, what Ive seen again and again is people who want to live lives of meaning and peace and significance and joypeople who have a compelling sense that their spirituality is in some vital and yet mysterious way central to who they arebut who cant find meaning in the dominant conceptions, perceptions, and understandings of God theyve encountered. In fact, those conceptions arent just failing them but are actually causing harm.

Were engaged more than ever by the possibilities of soul and spirit, and by the nagging suspicion that all of this may not be a grand accident after all; but God, an increasing number of people are askingwhat does God have to do with that?

Ive written this book about that word, then, because theres something in the air, were in the midst of a massive rethink, a movement is gaining momentum, a moment in history is in the making: there is a growing sense among a growing number of people that when it comes to God, were at the end of one era and the start of another, an entire mode of understanding and talking about God dying as something new is being birthed.

Theres an ancient story about a man named Jacob who had a magnificent dream, and when he wakes up he says, Surely God was in this place, and I, I wasnt aware of it.

Until now.

The power of the story is its timeless reminder that God hasnt changed; its Jacob who wakes up to a whole new awareness of whoand whereGod is.