Most helpful customer reviews
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Velvet Elvis Book Review, Oct 26 2007
Velvet Elvis Review
(Bell, Rob: Velvet Elvis, Zondervan, 2005. 194 Pages)
As a young adult, born and raised in the modern age, I instinctively understand that while God never changes, culture and time do. I've always wanted to explore and wrestle with my faith but felt like I wasn't allowed because the church always had the final word and that to question that was to question my `salvation'.
Rob Bell is all about questions. In his book Velvet Elvis he asks all the questions I've ever had but have never been able to articulate or ask myself. Just like Rob's painting of the Velvet Elvis is not the final or best picture of Elvis, so to is today's portrait of the church not the final rendition. It will keep changing and growing because it must.
If you've ever seen Rob Bell's NOOMA videos, he writes like he talks. Velvet Elvis is very readable, short lines and paragraphs make this book simple and user friendly.
His personal stories, vulnerability and use of humour help us to identify with Rob and makes the issues he tackles more real.
Rob is not irreverent. He challenges us to look beyond religion and asks why we believe the things we do. What does the Bible actually say? What was the context?
For instance did you know that nowhere in the Bible does Christ say to identify ourselves first and foremost as sinners? (Bell,139) And yet this is usually the beginning of every Salvation prayer. You will also not find in the Bible the phrase "inviting Jesus into your heart." (Bell, 109), whish is again another phrase that has become common place in Christian circles. We do need to acknowledge our sin and allow Jesus to work in our lives, but Rob explains to us that there's a bigger picture. Salvation is not all about ME it's about God restoring creation. We can believe in Jesus but have we allowed him to heal our soul?
Rob also helps moves us away from an individualistic approach to Christianity. We've been conditioned to look at our faith inwardly through a personal prayer life, a personal devotional life and a personal walk with Christ, but God always intended our faith to be a shared journey. There is no final destination, we continue to grow together and the goal for Christians should not be getting into heaven but rather bringing heaven to earth.
Perhaps the biggest revelation for me personally was realizing that God chose me, believes in me and gets frustrated with me when I forget my potential for greatness. (Bell, 134)
This is a must read for the next generation of Christians and Christian leaders and while I could write for a very long time about how this book has changed my worldview, I'd rather you read it and together we can wrestle with the issues.
Let's begin the journey together.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great for small group discussion, Feb 11 2007
Our small group is currently studying this text - it has engaged us all in reflecting upon our beliefs and been the focus for many meaningful discussions. If you are buying this book check out the online book study about to begin at: http://groups.google.com/group/respondtoChrist
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Honey and Poison, Oct 5 2008
What good will it do if you mix truth and error, and present it to a child in the faith to feed on? Why are we doing this to the little ones in the faith ?
One quote from this book says a lot about Rob Bell's attitude towards the Good News of Jesus Christ. Even if he doesn't believe it wholeheartedly, it opens him, his students and followers up to tolerating all kind of future heresies. The history of the faith teaches us that it takes one concession to evil for errors to creep into the church and end up ruining lives. Doctrines are walls to protect the believer. They're neither prison bars nor optional guideposts. Creation in 6 24 hrs days is different than the Virgin birth. You can still have atonement and salvation without 6 24 hrs days creation, but you can't if Jesus had an earthly father!!!! God is His Word, and His Word is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father. We know about Jesus Christ through the historical Christian faith. Hence we can't have God without the Christian faith, because without it we don't have Jesus Christ who is the only way to the Father. While God is beyond all description, we can't be with Him without His historical self-revelation of Himself. He chose to become what He is not by nature, that we may become what we are not by nature (but by grace). If God chose to become man, that men may become like God, then that means that God who is beyond all description chose to confine Himself that we may experience Him. Now Rob Bell wants to downplay the importance of this confined description of God, which is our only means to move from what is limited to what is beyond description. He wants to do away with the bricks of doctrines which guide our way and protect us from wandering aimlessly, the incarnation of God, the voluntary self-confinement of God, His self-emptying, for the God who is beyond description but can never be accessed. He takes away the bricks of historical christianity, the narrow way to heaven, to give you a trampoline to jump on which will never get you up enough to God. God had to come down to you.
I saw it mentioned in one of the posts. Rob Bell relies too much on Rabbinic interpretation that he forgets that the Rabbis rejected Christ and still do. This means that many of his views about the Gospels will be tainted with anti-Christian views, resulting in confused paragraphs like the following on page 17:
"What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if as you study the origin of the word virgin, you discover that the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word virgin could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being "born of a virgin" also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse?"
Throughout the centuries Church fathers and apologists answered definitively these claims. To even speak this way about the apostles, the disciples of Christ and the New Testament reveals hidden doubts in the soul of the author. Even though I know that he's trying to prepare his readers for future "definitive scientific" proofs against the faith, I'd like to remind him that if these claims are true, then there is no need to prepare them for it's better for them to lose their faith in that "lie" and to move on with their lives. But what if the faith is not a lie, as all the faithful throughout Church history found out, and it is the only way for a true relationship with God, and for this reason Satan keeps on slandering it to keep people captive. If this is the case, what is Rob Bell doing exactly ?
If you want a fresh look at the Christian Faith as was always believed, check out the lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem which he gave to the new converts in 4th century Jerusalem. It's free on the web or you can buy the church fathers' volumes here on Amazon.I promise you you'll find all the good things that Rob Bell said in his book (honey) without all the poisons, in fact in those lectures you'll find the antidotes to those poisons. For the Christian faith has been around for so long now that every objection has been answered by the people who actually lived in the early centuries, who spoke the original languages and even died for what they believed.
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