I was fascinated by this CNN article on former megachurch pastor Rob Bell, who was ousted for expressing doubt about the existence of Hell. CNN’s John Blake attended his presentation in Atlanta, the heart of the Bible Belt, where street preachers were threatening attendees standing in line with a visit to, well, Hell if they persisted. I wonder how many were discouraged and left. This particularly caught my attention:
He told the audience he doesn’t like those YouTube videos where Christians “destroy” atheists in debates. Respect people’s doubts, he said. You can’t lead them to where they don’t want to go. Doubt is part of the biblical narrative, he said, quoting Jesus’ cry on the cross: “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?”
“The Bible is as much about the absence of God than the presence of God,” he said.
That element of doubt is a necessary element of faith, as I noted in this missive. The lack of same that I find in so many fundamentalists really marks them as folks who have shut up their minds, who have made ruts higher than even those a late-middle-aged man walks in. It may function as a quick-read recognition marker for like minded people, but the many requirements of the intellectual landscape that results makes them peculiarly vulnerable to manipulation, to the con-man.
Like the one in the White House.
So seeing a formerly influential man attended with great interest in the Bible Belt makes me wonder if we’re seeing the first signs of a retreat from the ramparts of desperate fundamentalism. I should think those ramparts won’t collapse anytime soon, but, then again, no doubt most observers were saying the same thing about the Berlin Wall on the evening of 8 November 1989. So, speaking as an agnostic, anything which opens the minds of my religious co-citizens to more flexible attitudes, less attached to dogma which hurts more than it helps, is a good thing.
And evidence that Bell is moving that way is implicit in this:
Do you belong to a church that says women cannot be priests or pastors?
Bad move, Bell said.
Any church that does so betrays the example of Jesus, who treated women as equals. Women in Jesus’ times couldn’t even testify as witnesses in court.
“Yet all the gospels have women as the first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection,” he said.
Any group which rejects the genius of half its members is a group paralyzed by the fight for power – and a group crippled by its failure to utilize the most important resource available.
