(The controversial figure Rob Bell has created another firestorm with his latest provocative book What We Talk About When We Talk About God. Raven Foundation Board Member Tripp Hudgins and I will share our thoughts on the book in this blogalogue. We invite you to join the discussion by leaving a comment below.)
Hi Tripp,
Sadly, this is our last post on Rob’s book What We Talk About When We Talk About God. As you stated my previous post was a lengthy missive, and yet I feel like we have just scratched the surface of this book. I promise to make this concluding post shorter, but I’m tempted to inflict upon you the longest post ever because there is so much in these final 30 pages.
I want to talk about Rob’s overview of the history of religion and sacrifice, but that would take too long. (An important related aside: Here’s an amazing video interview with Michael Hardin of Preaching Peace of that history, put together by Kevin Miller, the director the documentary Hellbound? The video will cost you $2.00, but it’s the best $2.00 you will ever spend on this topic. You can re-watch the video for a year.)
I also want to look at Rob’s story about his comedian friend Tim, who dressed up as a priest, took a cardboard confessional booth, went to a comedy club, and invited members of the rowdy crowd to join him onstage to confess their sins. And they did. There was a sense of liberation, because confession is not about appeasing an angry god, who as Rob says, “just can’t wait to crush us.” Rather, confession is about “liberation, freedom, naming the darkness and pain that lies within and, in naming it, robbing it of its power” (191).
I really want to talk about those things because they are so powerful. But instead I’m going to talk about human desire, God, and, yes, Italian monkeys. So, I’ll start with this quote:
God gives us desires, heart, passion, and love—gives us desires for justice, compassion, organization, order, beauty, knowledge, wisdom—and when we become separated from these desires, we lose something vital to who we are. For many of us, we learn quickly how to adapt, what authority figures wanted from us, and how to play the game. This can be good, and profitable, and can earn us all sorts of attention and accolades, but this can also violate who we are. We can become enslaved to the expectation of others, losing our true self in the process. (196)
There is so much in this one paragraph that needs to be unpacked. The problem it identifies is that there is a pernicious lie that infects our culture. It’s the lie of individualism. “Be your own person, Tripp!” “Think for yourself, Adam!” The truth is that our personhood, our thought patterns, and our desires are all created in the image of an other!
God gives us desires, heart, passion, and love. We receive our identity from God. The radical message of the Genesis creation story is that we are not self-made individuals. Rather, we receive our identity from God. According to the ancient Hebrews, all humans are created in the image of a non-violent and lovingly gracious God. Other cultures claimed that only kings and rulers are created in the image of God, but the ancient Hebrews insisted everyone, even those Egyptians and Assyrians and Babylonians who conquered us, even they have God’s image imbedded deep within them. Other ancient creation stories claimed that the gods created the world from a cosmic battle of good versus evil. The Genesis creation story doesn’t project violence. It simply claims the spiritual, if slightly boring, truth that, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…”
So, why does this matter? Because of what neuroscience tells us about the human brain. Rob tells the story about Italian neurobiologists who were studying monkey brains. They discovered that, “When a monkey ate a peanut, a certain motor neuron in the monkey’s brain would light up” and “when the monkey watched one of the researchers eat a peanut, those same motor neurons lit up again” (200).
This matters because humans have the same motor neurons as monkeys, which are called mirror neurons. When we see someone else doing something, our mirror neurons snap as if we were doing it. “Your actions cause my brain to act in very specific ways” (200). We cannot control our mirror neurons. They are a non-conscious element of being human and allow us to see just how inter-connected we are. The anthropologist René Girard would agree with Rob that we are not “individual, isolated human units” (201). Rather, René claims that on the level of desire, heart, passion, and love we are inter-dividual.
This is good, as Rob claims, but it also becomes problematic. For example, he writes, “Ever reach for your glass in a restaurant to take a drink and realize that you’re doing it because your friend across the table just took a drink?” (201) But here’s the question Rob doesn’t get to – what happens if there’s only one glass on the table? What happens when two friends desire the same thing and can’t, or won’t, share it? The same glass on the table? The same significant other? The same promotion at work?
What happens? Rivalry. Conflict. And the very real potential for violence.
What’s the solution? We desperately need the church to be the body of Christ. Many people have accused Rob of being anti-church. I don’t see it. But as you mentioned in your first post, people are asking Rob questions of authority – who is he accountable to now that he isn’t the pastor of a church? It’s a fair question, but I suggest we look at it like this: An authority figure is our model of desire. As Rob wrote in the quote I began with, we learn “what authority figures want from us.” The question is: Who is our ultimate model of authority? Rob wants us to consciously choose Jesus as our model of authority. When the church chooses Jesus, then it becomes the body of Christ, empowered not with the authority of coercive power, but empowered by the Holy Spirit to follow Christ in service and love.
I will end our conversation with this quote from Rob. It’s about the importance of churches, spirituality, religion, and rituals. It’s about coming together around the table of Jesus so that we will receive the kinds of desires, hearts, passions, and love that God wants for us.
…church services and worship gatherings continue to have their place and power in our lives to the degree to which moms and businesspeople and groundskeepers and lawyers and plumbers and people who stock the shelves of the grocery store and teachers and toll-booth collectors and farmers and graphic designers and taco makers all gather around a table with bread and wine on it to participate in Jesus’s ongoing life in the world as they’re reminded that all life matters, all work is holy, all moments sacred, all encounters with others encounters with the divine. (183).
Tripp, this conversation with you about Rob’s book has been a breath of fresh air, reminding me that nothing simply “is what it is.” Indeed, if we have the hearts to see, everything points beyond itself to something more. This conversation has allowed me to glimpse that “something more.” I know it’s done the same for you. And I pray it does the same for others.
Grace and peace to you, my friend,
Adam
Other parts in the Rob Bell blogalogue series:
Note: These posts will be hosted on the Tripp’s blog anglobaptist.org, on the Raven Foundation blog, and on Sojourners’s God’s Politics blog. Follow along on any site you like. Or on Twitter #whatwetalkabout
Part 1: An Open Letter (on Sojo)
Part 2: The God of Jesus: Beyond Religious Tribalism (on Sojo)
Part 3: What Do You Mean, “Open,” Rob? (on Sojo)
Part 4: Faith and Doubt Dancing on Good Friday (on Sojo)
Part 5: Awake Oh My Soul (on Sojo)
Part 6: God For Us and the Scandal of Being Good (on Sojo)
Part 7: Getting Ahead of Ourselves? (on Sojo)
The post The Rob Bell Blogalogue Part 8: God, Desire, and Italian Monkeys appeared first on The Raven Foundation.