If you are a Rob Bell fan, this is must reading.
Update February 26, 2007
Witherington has now reviewed all of Bell’s videos. He thoroughly appreciates all of them. He questions a couple of his Jewish rabbi comments but still thinks they are outstanding.
Update February 18, 2007
Ben Witherington has written a more comprehensive and gracious appreciation and critique of Rob Bell at "Velvet Elvis and the King"– Has he Left the Building? Read it. He encourages Bell to consult the standard commentaries and to ignore some fringe scholars who would liken Jesus to a third century AD Jewish Rabbi.
Original Post:
Ben Witherington has posted his assessment of Rob Bell’s presentation last night in Lexington: Rob Bell hits Lexington and a Packed-Out House. Ben is a professor of New Testament at Asbury Seminary and a prolific commentary writer. Rob is the most downloaded preacher on the internet (perhaps behind Joel Osteen) and pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, MI.
(See ITunes "Religion and Spirituality" category – Bell’s ITunes podcast link is here).
Witherington praises Bell’s style but critiques his substance saying that Bell doesn’t know the difference between 3rd century AD Rabbinic judaism and Jesus’ context and he critiques Bell for waffling on homosexuality. I guarantee that this post will be the hottest one in the Christian blogosphere today and this week.
I commented saying that I don’t know how Bell puts together his creative, brilliant presentations each week. With his influence, he should speak a little less and research a bit more. (By the way I love listening to Bell). I also say that perhaps Bell was addressing pastoral responses rather than actually stating his doctrinal position. Brian McLaren took some heat for this a while back on the Out of Ur Leadership journal blog.
I also mentioned that Bell was the most downloaded preacher on the internet. Those statistics change regularly though. See the iTunes Religion & Spirituality podcast page for the latest rankings. Like other iTunes store links, that link will only work if you have iTunes (which is free to download and install on your computer) installed on your computer.
5 replies on “Ben Witherington on Rob Bell”
Andy,
Jesse here (Taylor ’02). I’m at Asbury Sem now and we met last Fall before the semester started (the picnic). Anyway, I was at the Rob Bell thing myself and chatted with Ben Witherington briefly beforehand. As a fan of Ben, I must say that I appreciate his review. I agree that Bell is a great communicator and translates an often cliche-laced gospel message into something palatable and genuine for the year 2007. I also side with Ben in his diversion from Bell’s stance on homosexuality. Ben is right when he says that Bell was “evasive.” He never seemed to fully answer the question about gays. But he certainly wanted everyone to know that he was not in the “moral right-wing” on this one. Witherington had a problem with Bell’s accusation against Christians who have no gay friends. While I agree that this is a logical fallacy (i.e. shut up if you don’t know someone’s who’s xyz), it still remains a challenge for those of us who live with little or no contact with gay people. I believe that most Christians need to do something about their lives if they are not rubbing shoulders with all sorts of “different” people. If anything, that will help us to better bring the gospel to them and (yes) learn from them too.
Let’s keep up, Andy
-Jesse Joyner (Taylor ’02)
You might be interested to know that Dr. Witherington has posted 3 new blogs reviewing all of Rob’s Nooma videos. It helps give an even clearer picture of what he thinks about Rob. Favorable overall.
I have heard that the most downloaded preacher is either Mark Driscoll and/or Erwin McManus. Guess it might depend on who is doing the measuring and how it’s measured..
awesome, thanks for the links. just added them to my rob bell resources page.
Amazing….six years later and Rob Bell has married a man. Shameless heresy.