Velvet Elvis

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine....about Church and several sub-topics about Church when he asked have you read Velvet Elvis?  I hadn't and was a bit resistant to the idea because I am familiar with some of the authors (Rob Bell) work.  I had seen several of the NOOMA videos and had heard a few of his sermons via podcast / youtube etc.  While Rob seems to be making a rather large impact in his Church and now in many other Churches via his videos, his preaching, and theology  philosophy are bad medicine.  I have read other books that are theologically corrupt and figured that if this was one big expanded NOOMA video that it would pretty much be the same.  I purchased the book (do yourself a favor if you just have to read it because you are confident that I am dead wrong about this you can borrow mine)  If you just have to have your very own copy.... cause mine has all kinds of little notes written in the columns and a bunch of HIGHLIGHTED stuff (mostly the stuff that he got wrong).  Do yourself another favor and save yourself some money and get it from the link below at Christianbook.com  I paid a little over $14.00 for the paperback and they have it for $11.99 so either way it saving you a bit and after you read it I am sure you will be glad that you didn't pay anymore for it.

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith By Rob Bell / Zondervan We know there's something more. We sense it, we feel it, and we want it. But how do we find it---a spirituality that stands up to the questions of an honest, searching mind? "This book is for those who need a fresh take on Jesus and what it means for us to live the kind of life he teaches us to live," writes Rob Bell. "This pursuit of Jesus is leading us backward as much as forward ... I am learning that what seems brand new is often just the discovery of something that has been there all along---it just got lost somewhere and it needs to be picked up, dusted off, and reclaimed." Velvet Elvis offers original and refreshingly personal perspectives on what Christianity is really about.

Again let me make this clear......... I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS BOOK.  There are to many questions asked and almost none of them answered.

There are many examples that I could list it starts almost from the very beginning.  I am going to start with this one from page 26 of Velvet Elvis. 

Somebody recently gave me a video tape of a lecture given by a man who travels around speaking about the creation of the world.  At one point in his lecture, he said if you deny that God created the world in six literal twenty-four-hour days, then your are denying that Jesus ever died on the cross.  It's a bizarre leap of logic to make, I would say.  

But he was serious.

This is an argument about the literal interpretation of the Bible and the creation story.  It is a very slippery slope to be on when we choose to negate the literal creation story in scripture and begin teaching or contemplating that six days means something other than six days.  If we take it figuratively that each day could have been an indeterminate period of time we open the door for millions of years or the very foundation of what evolutionist build their theory on, that it took millions of years for humans to evolve.  Rob goes on to say this on the same page #26 very next paragraph

 It hit me while I was watching that for him faith isn't a trampoline; it's a wall of bricks.  Each of the core doctrines for him is like an individual brick that stacks on top of the others.  If you pull one out, the whole wall starts to crumble.  It appears quite strong and rigid, but if you begin to rethink or discuss even one brick, the whole thing is in danger.  Like he said, no six-day creation equals no cross.  Remove one, and the whole wall wobbles.

Okay here in the next paragraph is where he starts to express his example of how we as Christians should be flexible and by being flexible like a spring and not rigid like a brick wall we actually are better Christians.  Hold on to your hat cause this is were you are going to say huh?  (or you should be saying huh?)

 What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archaeologists 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 the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, who's 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 who's mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse?

 What if that spring was seriously questioned?

 Could a person keep jumping?  Could a person still love God?  Could you still be a Christian?

 Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?

Yep that is what he says in the book......this is just one of many things that he is willing question and allow his readers to question.  Rob gives inaccurate information about Mithra and Dionysus, he fails to include that they are not real, they are mythical and that Jesus is actually a historical person that is recorded as fact, having lived and died and been resurrected.  These facts having been recorded by sources outside the biblical account.  If we can take liberties with these claims in the Bible and if there were false things written in the Bible to appeal to people of other beliefs.  Well Rob the answers to your questions are:  NO a person couldn't keep jumping.......Yes we could continue to love God but he now becomes a liar.....Yes you could still be a Christian but it would mean nothing more than being a Tampa Bay Bucs fan and we know how far that will get you these days.  (MAN!!! those Bucs are really starting to make it hard to even watch)....and finally he asks is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?.... well Rob in light of what you just brought up that makes him just a dude, like Mohammad, Buddha, and all of the other so called deities.  We might as well follow Larry his fictional father!  I hear he was a pretty nice person that didn't really break a whole lot of rules  ( he did have that weird thing about biting his toe nails but we could all set around and do that as a ritual or something).  Maybe we should just follow him we could all be Larry-ans and live good and right. 

Rob is trying to say that Christianity has evolved from the beginning, it will continue to evolve and that we should be willing to be flexible and evolve with it.  Bottom line the core of the Gospel cannot be flexible, it is made clear in the scripture and it is not open for debate.....even though many will and do just that.  The fundamentals of Christianity (I know the use of that phrase will draw debate as to what those are but I am going to use it anyway)  have not evolved they have stayed the same and will continue to stay the same.  People have tried to put a new spin on them since the beginning and will continue, Rob Bell is on that road. 

Take a look at 1 Corinthians 15 Paul exhorts the Corinthians about preaching anything other than the Gospel as it has been given.  (by the way at the end of the book Rob Bell calls in to question the validity of the uniqueness of the Resurrection by stating that the church didn't even discuss the Resurrection because it wasn't unique that no one would have refuted it because he says everyones god had risen from the dead in the first century)

Bottom line Rob Bell is willing to muddy all of the lines of Christianity to appeal to nearly anyone of any religion.  He is compromising in order to appeal, it is an A le' carte Christianity that lets you take what you want and mash it in to what you want to make it.  He has made it humanism among other things and disguised it as Christianity.

I could go on, give many more examples but I am not.  I will leave you with a couple of links that will give you insight into this book from individuals that are much more qualified than I am to say your wrong Rob.  You have come this far check out the links and put the notion of wasting any time reading this book to bed.

Discerning Reader <-----take a look here for another review

Barnabas Ministries <----- you can click here too.

Well there you have it, after reading it I feel like I have been talking to a dishonest car salesman for the past week!!!  Ever had to deal with one of those?