Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Rob Bell
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no matter how shocking or blasphemous or arrogant or ignorant or raw, are rooted in humility. A humility that understands that I am not God. And there is more to know.
Questions bring freedom. Freedom that I don’t have to be God and I don’t have to pretend that I have it all figured out. I can let God be God.14
In the book of Genesis, God tells Abraham what he is going to do with Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham fires back, “Will not the Ruler of the earth do right?”
Abraham thinks God is in the wrong and the proposed action is not in line with who God is, and Abraham questions him about it. Actually, they get into a sort of bargaining discussion in which Abraham doesn’t let up. He keeps questioning God. And God not only doesn’t get angry, but he seems to engage with Abraham all the more.15
Maybe that is who God is looking for—people who don’t just sit there and mindlessly accept whatever comes their way.
Moses tries for two chapters to convince God that he has picked the wrong man, and God seems all the more convinced with each question that he has picked the right man.16
David says this to God in Psalm 13: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer.”
What’s the first thing Mary says to the angel who brings her the news that she’s going to be the mother of the Messiah?
“But how can this be? I’m a virgin!”
Questions. Questions. Questions.
What are some of Jesus’s final words? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus. On the cross. Questioning God.
Central to the Christian experience is the art of questioning God. Not belligerent, arrogant questions that have no respect for our maker, but naked, honest, vulnerable, raw questions, arising out of the awe that comes from engaging the living God.
This type of questioning frees us. Frees us from having to have it all figured out. Frees us from having answers to everything. Frees us from always having to be right. It allows us to have moments when we come to the end of our ability to comprehend. Moments when the silence is enough.
The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, “I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder.”17
The Christian faith is mysterious to the core. It is about things and beings that ultimately can’t be put into words. Language fails. And if we do definitively put God into words, we have at that very moment made God something God is not.
Most of us are conditioned to think of mystery in terms of a television show or a novel or a film in which the mystery is solved at the end.18 Often right before the credits we find out who did it, or who is actually the long-lost son of whom, or that she is actually a he. Or that Bruce Willis was dead for most of the movie and we just now figured it out.19
Mystery is created when key facts are hidden from the viewer. What the writer/director/creator does at the end is pull back the curtain and show us the things that had previously been hidden.
So the mystery gets solved and our questions get answered.
But the Bible has an entirely different understanding of mystery. True mystery, the kind of mystery rooted in the infinite nature of God, gives us answers that actually plunge us into even more . . . questions.
Take this example from John 3:16. The first part of the verse reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.”
So why did God give his son?
Because God loves the world.
But what does it mean for God to love the world?
Does God love evil people? Mean people? People who don’t think that God exists? People who think that God loves only them? If you do enough evil, can you exhaust God’s love?
Because God loves the world is an answer to the question, why did God give his son? It’s a real answer; it’s an answer you can trust; it’s an answer you can base your life on. It’s an answer you can know. But it also raises a new set of questions.
Why does God love the world?
What motivates God to love like this? What does God get out of it?
The writers of the Bible, especially one named John, would answer this way: “Because God is love.”20
Which is an answer, of course, but as you probably have figured out by now, it raises even deeper questions: How can God be love? Is every experience of love an experience of God? Is every experience of God an experience of love?
So God is love is an answer to the question, why does God love the world? But as an answer, it raises even more questions. And we could go on and on and on.
Truth always leads to more . . . truth. Because truth is insight into God and God is infinite and God has no boundaries or edges. So truth always has layers and depth and texture.
It’s like a pool that you dive into, and you start swimming toward the bottom, and soon you discover that no matter how hard and fast you swim downward, the pool keeps getting . . . deeper. The bottom will always be out of reach.
One of the great “theologians” of our time, Sean Penn, put it this way: “When everything gets answered, it’s fake. The mystery is the truth.”21
The mystery is the truth.
Or take the Trinity, for example. Even the best definitions end up sounding like a small child trying to play Mozart on pots and pans in the middle of the kitchen floor. The more you study the Trinity and what has been said about it over the years, the more you are left in wonder and awe about the nature of God.
As one of my friends often says: “If you study the Bible and it doesn’t lead you to wonder and awe, then you haven’t studied the Bible.”22
The very nature of orthodox Christian faith is that we never come to the end. It begs for more. More discussion, more inquiry, more debate, more questions.
It’s not so much that the Christian faith has a lot of paradoxes. It’s that it is a lot paradoxes. And we cannot resolve a paradox. We have to let it be what it is.
Being a Christian then is more about celebrating mystery than conquering it.
The Eastern church father Gregory of Nyssa talked about Moses’s journey up Mount Sinai in Exodus 19. When Moses enters the darkness toward the top of the mountain, he has moved beyond knowledge to awe and to love and to the mystery of God. Gregory insists that Moses has not arrived when he enters the darkness of the mountaintop. His journey and exploration have only really begun.23
Which leads to a really obvious observation: A trampoline only works if you take your feet off the firm, stable ground and jump into the air and let the trampoline propel you upward. Talking about trampolines isn’t jumping; it’s talking. Two vastly different things. And so we jump and we invite others to jump with us, to live the way of Jesus and see what happens. You don’t have to know anything about the springs to pursue living “the way.”
In brickworld, the focus often becomes getting people to believe the right things so they can be “in.” There is often a list of however many doctrines, and the goal is to get people to intellectually assent to these things being true. Once we believe the right things,