I decided to get back into the spiritual reading world again after a hiatus from those “types” of books. When I first picked up this book it was in the shadow of quite a bit of controversy in the twitter world. Even some mainstreamers in the evangelical world were writing off Rob Bell for his words in this book as no longer “part of the fold” so to speak. Greg Boyd makes a great point on this here.

All I want to say about this book is that it was inspiring and said a lot of things that not only I have been thinking about, but I know other “doubting Christians” have been thinking for a long time. And even though some might argue that this books encouragement toward questioning and its suggestion of new answers might be “unhealthy” or a threat to Christianity, I believe that this is a hopeful book that makes God bigger than perhaps we have viewed Him as in our current Christian faith circles.

And to those who find this book threatening I would just like to say that it is important for many of us to reflect on how accurate you believe you are concerning your accuracy of your theology. Don’t hear me wrong, I appreciate critical readings, and feel free to read this book critically, but if you read it and if it doesn’t agree with your church or your personal theology try to remember that we are all trying to figure it out and do not have it all together all of the time. To read this with that in mind, might give more life to your reading. I can appreciate those that want to find the “final” answer, but I guess in my mind (right now) that doesn’t seem to be the point.

One thing that I appreciated from Rob’s book that I would like to share here is that Rob looks at the many different views of atonement in Chapter 5 and makes a great point that many of the explanations provided by the writers in the Bible (and thus interpretations from others since) were ways to describe the life eternal and not to point to one final theory. We would do well to embrace more theories in order to expand on the richness of the gospel itself. This in turn makes God bigger to me, not smaller. I think we would all be amazed how many of those theories we embrace even though most evangelical Christians say they only embrace the substitution theory.

I think this is an important book and give 5/5 on my CP scale.

Resurrection: Rob Bell from The Work of Rob Bell on Vimeo.

Once again Rob Bell leaves me inspired. I am really looking forward to seeing him live in February in Vancouver. There is something in the way he writes that names my experience. In this book I couldn’t help but find a huge connection between suffering and creativity. It may sound sad, but I am most creative when I am suffering.

Would I rate this for church planting… I can’t sorry. If I did I would feel wrong. I am not sure why. No rating today.

I recommend this book, but not in the knowledge way. I recommend you buy it, read it, dream and then give it away. Of course someone might find you a little odd giving away a coffee table book… yes its that big. But its not a book I can keep around. Someone will get this book from me this holiday season. I hope they are as inspired as I was.

Rob Bell and Don Golden release a very important book for the church. The reason I say it is a very important book is because this book sums up much of where Rob Bell is coming from in his theology. There are a lot of people that I run into who question why I might follow a lot of what Rob Bell teaches or read a lot of his influences (brueggemann, wright, mclaren, rohr, etc.), they can be very cynical and I think this book gives a great overview of Bell’s ideas on the “new exodus” way of reading the bible and after reading it I think more people may be less cynical and consider this view of the bible as something to consider.

Rob also takes time to develop a way of seeing the bible that allows for more practical information later, when he brings in a number of stats concerning the current state of affairs in our world. It is amazing to me how Rob brings to light so many of the regular day to day activities that we take part in and how some of them are part of destructive systems in our empire, but we are quite blind to them.

To summarize then, I would say that basically the book is a walk from Egypt (the empire that enslaved) to Sinai (the covanent God made with Israel), to Jerusalem (which then became its own empire under Solomon) to Babylon (when the Israelites were exiled). And then everything flows from that as we engage the prophets, Jesus and the Eucharist. I will leave it at that and say that its a 4.5/5 on my CP rating and that it reads almost like poetry. Well done Rob.

Scot Mcknight has a great review here, if you care to read it.