The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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trouble. Which we’d probably all agree with. Their conclusion was that because sex is so dangerous, it should just be avoided altogether. But to avoid sex, you need to avoid romance and affection and all that comes with them, and of course you’re going to need to eliminate marriage altogether. So this religious group forbade their followers from getting married.
They had a similar practice in regard to food. There were foods sold in the markets of the cities that had been offered to the local gods in the local temples as part of their worship rituals. The leaders of this religion decided that if something had been offered to a god they didn’t believe in, they wouldn’t eat it. Their response was to make lists of foods the members of their religion could and couldn’t eat.
Do you see the problem with their religion? Anytime things got ethically complicated, anytime the waters got even slightly murky, anytime there was something to be held in tension, they simply avoided the issue.
Instead of dealing with the ambiguity and the lack of clarity that many things in life can bring when a person first encounters them, they would simply throw the whole thing out.
This is where the first Christians come in. One of them, a man named Paul, who wrote many letters to the early churches, addresses this issue in a letter to the Christians at Ephesus. He warns them about those who “forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods,” telling them that those are things “God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth.”11
Paul’s point is brilliant. He makes a distinction between the inherent good of something and the abuse of it. People may have seriously distorted the good gift that sex is or offered food to gods that lead people into destructive ways of living, but that doesn’t mean that sex or food are inherently wrong. He continues, “For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.”12
He insists that everything God created is good, and we come to see this through what he calls “the word of God and prayer,” which is the hard work of study and reflection and meditation and discussion and debate. The temptation is always to avoid things that are difficult and complex. To go around them rather than through them.
Think about the parents of a junior high girl who has just hit puberty and all of a sudden her body has changed in some significant ways, and she’s being noticed in ways she wasn’t before and now she’s starting to notice that she’s being noticed. Her parents have to talk to her about all of this. They have to wade into the complexity and confusion and mixed messages that our culture is sending their daughter. If they indulge one way, telling her to use her body to get what she needs and encouraging her to draw as much attention to her body as she can, they’re encouraging her to act like an animal. But if they ignore these changes and hope the whole thing just goes away, they’re sending her an equally destructive message. They’re treating her like an angel. Her sexuality and her body and her beauty are good things. They were given to her by God. Her parents must embrace this and all that comes with it. And they have to teach her how to embrace it in an honorable, dignified way. They must live in the tension and then show her how to do the same.
And so Paul addresses this religious group with their narrow and restrictive lists, claiming that they are actually working against God’s purposes in the world. Things that God has made, things that are good, things that God created to be enjoyed, are being ignored and avoided because these religious people refuse to live in the tension.
And now for the opposite end of the spectrum. A friend of mine recently interviewed Hugh Hefner, founder of the Playboy empire, for a book she was writing.13 They did the interview sitting on a couch in the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles. As he answered questions about his upbringing, he said, “I was raised in a setting in which [sex] was for procreation only and the rest was sin.”
What’s he saying, essentially? He was raised by parents pretending to be angels.
He continued later in the interview: “Our family was Prohibitionist, Puritan in a very real sense. . . . Never hugged. Oh, no. There was absolutely no hugging or kissing in my family. There was a point in time when my mother, later in life, apologized to me for not being able to show affection. That was, of course, the way I’d been raised. I said to her, ‘Mom, you couldn’t have done it any better. And because of the things you weren’t able to do, it set me on a course that changed my life and the world.’ ”
It isn’t difficult to understand his reaction to an angelic upbringing. He was denied something central to what it means to be human: affection. And so the rest of his life has been a journey to the other end of the spectrum.
In reaction to denial, people often head to the other end of the spectrum, which is indulgence. The pendulum swings. But we were created to live in the tension. And when you lose the tension, you lose something central to what it means to be human.
Living like angels can be just as destructive as living like animals.
In the first-century example, the religious group understood how destructive the physical can be; in the Hugh Hefner example, Hefner saw how destructive a lack of the physical can be.
We see this back and forth in individuals, in families, in cultures, and in churches. By painting sex as this horrible thing that is unclean and of the dark side, a parent or a church or a school can make kids want to do what? Of course! Go have sex.
Getting It Out
The impulse in our world when faced with tension is to come up with the seven steps or the formula so that if you do things in the right order the tension will go away. But that doesn’t always work. One of the marks of someone who has experienced significant growth in their soul is their ability to live in the midst of tension. Often people are told, “Just don’t have sex and you’ll be fine.” Well, yes, that’s true, to a certain extent. If you’re talking to a room full of junior high students, they will be much better off if they learn the fine art of self-control. But it’s larger than that. Because they are still full of raging hormones. Much like the rest of humanity. To simply tell them to ignore the animal and be the angel puts them in the awkward place of trying to ignore something that is very real and very new, something central to who they are.
We have to talk about everything we’re experiencing. Repressing and stuffing and refusing to acknowledge never works. Whether it’s a friend or a group of peers or a priest or a pastor or a counselor, we have to get it out.14 Some friends of mine started a website where people could talk about their struggles with their sexuality, and right away it received several hundred thousand visitors.15
Several hundred thousand.
You are not alone. Whatever you struggle with, whatever you have questions about, you are not alone. It doesn’t matter how dark it is or how much shame or weakness or regret it involves, you are not alone.
Some say the struggle is about eros, which is where we get the word erotic. Others call it testosterone and blame it on hormones. The Greeks called it the madness of the gods. The truth is, we’re crammed full of sexual energy. It’s how we’re made. We have cravings and desires and urges and temptations that can easily consume us and make us feel helpless in their presence. We have to talk about what we do with the forces that rage within us. We have to get it out or we will begin to die on the inside.16
Some of the most comforting words in the universe are “me too.” That moment when you find out that your struggle is also someone else’s struggle, that you’re not alone, and that others have been down the same road.
Tohu Va Vohu
Which takes us back to the beginning, to Genesis and the angels and the animals, which were both created before humans. We’re told in the first chapter of the Bible that God created all of this out of chaos. The earth was