Re: Rob Bell, Antichrist?

So for the record I don't think Rob Bell is the antichrist. Well, actually I think Rob Bell is the anti of antichrist. No, that would make him Christ I guess. Ok let's suffice it to say that I really like Rob Bell and his ideas. I've only read one of his books. I don't actually even know if he has more but anyway I really enjoyed the one I read. So now that being clarified, since Jimmy seems to think my opinion of Rob Bell lies in whether he gets every scripture interpreted correctly or not ... the questions.

I have lots of questions. I will probably always have lots of questions. And since Jimmy's post about the other question I had about Rob Bell's teaching touched on yet ANOTHER question i ponder on occasion, I thought I'd sort of do a Re:post of sorts. I started out writing a "Comment" on JImmy's blog but when it got to be a small novel I decided to convert it to a post of my own.

I don't understand how we look at "Christian literature" or statements by "Christian people," particularly stupid stuff or stuff we don't agree with, and say "oh they're just human so they made a little mistake no big deal" and then look at the letters in the Bible and say they're stuff God said and that they're right. I'm not trying to get people up in arms here, so just calm down. I'm just asking. I don't give it tons of thought most of the time, but when I do give it thought, it confuses me a lot. Paul was just sitting around in prison, or wherever, being a human being just like the rest of us, writing some letters of advice to his buds and then one day they're part of the Bible. I don't think he would've said he was writing scripture, just some letters. I understand the part about what was written in the books chosen to be the Bible lining up with things Jesus said and his character and that makes good sense to me. And i even understand and am in high agreement that God uses people to make himself known to other people, whether it's through writings (like with ol' Robbie) or sermons or friendships or whatever. But I guess I started thinking about this whole issue one day when I was leisurely reading through 1 Corinthians 7 and Paul started saying things like "in my opinion ..."(ch. 7 v. 40) and "I say, not the Lord, ..." (ch. 7 v. 12) and I said to myself hmmm not to be rude but i really am not all that interested in paul's opinion . So then i started wondering why paul's opinion even gets to be in the Bible at all. I talked to Pastor Ken (who knows a lot of stuff about the Bible and who I think is honest and truthful and doesn't feed me BS) about it once and he is the one who gave me Velvet Elvis, which is Rob Bell's book, to read b/c it sort of touches on some questions like that, as well as a lot of other stuff. Anyway, I still don't totally understand and since most christian people get pretty offended when you ask questions that supposedly imply that the Bible isn't "infallible" i think is the word, I just stopped asking. But thanks be to Jimmy for bringing it back to my mind and directly from there onto the pages of my blog.

so now you know. I don't just ask questions about modern day writers, I ask them about old ones too.

And I don't think Paul is the antichrist either, Jimmy.