Rob Bell Gets Grilled on MSNBC

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I'll be the contrarian on this thread (please, restrain your amazement). While I am glad to see an interviewer who really seems to care about the truth, and who is careful to frame theological questions with an unusual degree of accuracy, I think by being so aggressive, by making assertions in the form of questions, he actually gave Bell an opportunity to practice being slippery while looking decisive. Thus Bell is able to say very firmly, "No, that's not right" or "No, that's not true". I think it might have been more effective to stay more narrowly focused and let Bell trap himself with his own words.
But of course I doubt I would have done as well.
 
Oecolampadius said:
This verbal exchange is EPIC.
Rob Bell: "And my experience has been that a lot of Christians have built whole dogmas about what happens when you die. And we have to be very careful that we don't build whole doctrines and dogmas on what is speculation. Jesus..."
Martin Bashir: "I'm not talking about what happens when you die. I'm asking how you respond here and now. And the question I'm asking you, what you seem to be saying in this book is that God will love, will melt everyone's heart eventually, some even postmortem, in death. So you're the one making the speculation about the afterlife."
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That is a great punch, he really nails him on the whole subject right there!


py3ak said:
I'll be the contrarian on this thread (please, restrain your amazement). While I am glad to see an interviewer who really seems to care about the truth, and who is careful to frame theological questions with an unusual degree of accuracy, I think by being so aggressive, by making assertions in the form of questions, he actually gave Bell an opportunity to practice being slippery while looking decisive. Thus Bell is able to say very firmly, "No, that's not right" or "No, that's not true". I think it might have been more effective to stay more narrowly focused and let Bell trap himself with his own words.
But of course I doubt I would have done as well.
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Ruben, I guess I understand your point, Bashir should have given Bell more rope instead of keeping it so tight. While making the right questions so it would be Bell tying the knots on himself. Could have worked too!

I don’t know much of Journalism but in Europe journalists mention often the art of making the contradictory (I’m translating word by word here). Of course that means making their homework right.

But in the field of Religion there, in most of the cases, interviews are so poorly informed that everything goes and the most politically correct the better.

So I was quite pleasantly amazed by Bashir’s skills, he punched Bell to the ropes and kept him there.

I think he did a pretty good job and made a clear case to warn the viewers that Bell’s position has a lot of holes in it. :2cents:
 
I was looking forward to his answer on Japan, only the most potentially devastating human disaster since WW II. And very relevant right now.

[And since Rob is all concerned about LOVE then he would have said something encouraging to the people, especially as they would be most likely taking the non-Jesus route to Rob's idea of heaven...]

He could not have cared less.
 
James White played an interview with Rob Bell by some sort of forum where he was being publicly interviewed about his book. At one point, the "interviewer" (a young Jewish woman), asked: "Aren't you just a mainline Protestant posing as an Evangelical?"

This stuff is so old. I find it kind of boring after a while with people finally catching up to the 19th Century and writing books about it. It seems that American Fundamentalism and Revivalism is waking up to the one-inch depth of their theology and see in Protestant Liberalism a way to rescue them from their shallowness.
 
We can have a field day on those sideways glances he makes at 4:13 to drum up a story to make Christianity seem harsh.

I really hope that was a true counseling session... Pastor...
 
I just had a listen to that. I remember him from the Princess Diana interviews and the Michael Jackson interviews. I never knew he was a Christian though, but I guess that makes sense in hindsight. Really good to have such a well respected journalist who is a Christian :)
 
torstar said:
We can have a field day on those sideways glances he makes at 4:13 to drum up a story to make Christianity seem harsh.

I really hope that was a true counseling session... Pastor...
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Perhaps we could; but we probably shouldn't. Joe Navarro writes:
When interpreting eye behavior, many misconceptions exist. Little or no eye contact is erroneously perceived by some as a classic sign of deception, especially during questioning, while the truthful should "lock eyes." This is not supported by research or experience and is completely false. In fact, Alder Vrij and others have found that liars tend to engage in greater eye contact because they know we are looking there for signs of deception.
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And we don't need to look for sources of hypothetical condemnation: his teaching has been publicly expressed, and can be publicly critiqued.
 
py3ak said:
torstar said:
We can have a field day on those sideways glances he makes at 4:13 to drum up a story to make Christianity seem harsh.

I really hope that was a true counseling session... Pastor...
Click to expand...

Perhaps we could; but we probably shouldn't. Joe Navarro writes:
When interpreting eye behavior, many misconceptions exist. Little or no eye contact is erroneously perceived by some as a classic sign of deception, especially during questioning, while the truthful should "lock eyes." This is not supported by research or experience and is completely false. In fact, Alder Vrij and others have found that liars tend to engage in greater eye contact because they know we are looking there for signs of deception.
Click to expand...

And we don't need to look for sources of hypothetical condemnation: his teaching has been publicly expressed, and can be publicly critiqued.
Click to expand...


Thank you for what someone posits in Psych Today. I'll go with the training of the police and customs and cross-examinations of proven liars.

Eye positioning isn't evidence but it helps weed out the suspects very quickly under intense questioning.

Appears that Rob thought he could flounce in and have softballs lobbed to him like everybody else did for him.
 
torstar said:
Thank you for what someone posits in Psych Today. I'll go with the training of the police and customs and cross-examinations of proven liars.
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You're very welcome. You might want to consider some statistics on people's ability to discover deception.

In any case, however, the more crucial point is not what we can do, but what we should. I have no sympathy for Rob Bell's teaching, but it is on the basis of that teaching, not speculation, that he should be critiqued.
 
That's a fantastic interview - was worth every second watching Bell squirm. And for someone who has such a "pastoral concern" about people - he really didn't seem to care much at all about the people in Japan. More interested in skipping that question so that he could continue hawking his wares.

As for people excited by this guys' stuff, they would do well to remember that there's nothing new under the sun!
 
Rich,

You nailed it!!!! This is analogous to the 19th century liberal reaction to dead orthodoxy and pietism redux.

Al Mohler quoted H. Richard Niebuhr who famously once distilled liberal theology into this sentence: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”

Sadly, the emergent movement has rediscovered the theological cul de sac that failed so miserably in the 20th century, thinking that if you add a little more art, a dash more mystery, and hide behind the shield of paradox, people might like it more in the 21st century. Remember that it was evangelicalism that replaced liberalism for the simple reason that liberalism was so open minded that its corporate brain leaked out.

From what I can discern, the cool guys with the funny glasses and haircuts (do we really need one more faux mo?) have come to a fork in the road. Yogi Berra once observed that when you come to a fork in the road . . . take it. Rob Bell and his congregation have done just that. Dan Kimball and Mark Driscoll (both with really funny haircuts) have gone in the other direction.

Bell cherry picks his history, arguing that any fool idea associated with anyone claiming to be Christian in the last two millennia, represents a legitimate path for the Christian pilgrim. But, if 2,000 years of church history has taught us anything, it is that the church has turned its back on any number of damnable lies, ruling them illegitimate and dangerous departures from the "narrow way" of the Gospel.

For guys so interested in paradox, antinomy, and tension . . . I'm shocked. Didn't anyone ever tell them that the love of God, a love that DOES win, shines brightest when held in tension with the correlative truth of eternally rejected love?

The only thing "new" about Bell is that he has a newly "ready made" audience to appeal to with this stuff. Last night I decided to watch an evening of network television. Watching the comedies on NBC (most of them for the first time; hey, I'm a 24-7 news junkie and almost never watch "entertainment" tv). It was shocking to see how mainstream homosexuality has become. No wonder a generation of young people taught that it is "bigoted" to oppose gayness ("not that there is anything wrong with that" Seinfeld used to say!) rejects traditional evangelical teaching. And, with the indoctrination into multi-culturalism, there goes the pluralism card too. Our mass media is reinforcing messages sent by our public schools making John 14:6, Romans 1, and 1 Tim 2 look about as attractive as a KKK hood and a "good" lynching. No wonder Bell can build a mega church by saying what this generation is programmed to want to hear.
 
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Poor Rob.

Imagine having your "Daddy issues" exposed on TV in that manner.

The Paul Edwards/Bashir interview yesterday was one of the best I have ever heard.
 
Over on Gospel Coalition Martin Bashir says that he and his wife are committed Christians who attend Keller's Church
 
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LeeJUk said:
MSNBC’s Martin Bashir on The Paul Edwards Program

Martin Bashir was interviewed by Paul Edwards.

He & his wife are committed Christians who attend Redeemer Presbyterian. Very cool.
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I thought that his response to the question Edwards asked was very telling: it wasn't about faith, but about good journalism. To me, that's a great witness---the fact that a Christian would ask these questions not out of bias, but out of journalistic integrity. I can't think of a better expression of Christianity in journalism than that kind of integrity.
 
P. F. Pugh said:
LeeJUk said:
MSNBC’s Martin Bashir on The Paul Edwards Program

Martin Bashir was interviewed by Paul Edwards.

He & his wife are committed Christians who attend Redeemer Presbyterian. Very cool.
Click to expand...

I thought that his response to the question Edwards asked was very telling: it wasn't about faith, but about good journalism. To me, that's a great witness---the fact that a Christian would ask these questions not out of bias, but out of journalistic integrity. I can't think of a better expression of Christianity in journalism than that kind of integrity.
Click to expand...


Excellent responses by an individual who clearly makes painstaking efforts to be correct, researched, and applicable to his audience.
 
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