The man bent over his guitar,I think the reviewers of Rob Bell's Love Wins are a bit like the folks complaining to Wallace Stevens' blue-guitar player.
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."
--snip--
And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
To bang from it a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings�
IV
So that's life, then: things as they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.
A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,
And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?
The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,
And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.
--snip--
A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;
Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place
Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,
Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;
For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar
Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.
--snip--
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
--snip--
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
"The Man With The Blue Guitar" (Excerpts)
Wallace Stevens
They said, "You have a blue guitar,This might be over-determining Rob Bell's little book a bit. While it certainly contains some theological ideas, it is hardly "theological". While its subtitle seems grandiose - A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived - it doesn't really address matters relating to these weighty subjects in a manner befitting them. While it wrestles with pastoral issues, the books would be a difficult one through which to search for help in addressing pastoral issues in a local church setting. Finally, the book offers nothing final, certainly nothing definitive, but offers only an introduction to a conversation on all sorts of matters.
You do not play things as they are."
Except, of course, the conversation Bell wants to have isn't with the kind of people who write nasty book reviews. Which makes them even more angry, so they write things like the following:
I am not against conversation. What I am against is false teaching. I did not go to the trouble of writing a review because I worry that God can’t handle our questions. The question is never whether God can handle our honest reappraisals of traditional Christianity, but whether he likes them.
Before he wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn wrote a detailed account of what he called in the title The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. On pages 225-226, he discusses the hostility to Galileo's use of the telescope as a defense of Copernican cosmology.
Galileo's obversations met initially even greater opposition [than Kepler's or Tycho Brahe's], though from a different group. With the advent of the telescope Copernicanism ceased to be esoteric. It was no longer primarily the concern of highly trained mathematical astronomers. Therefore it became more disquieting and, to some, more dangerous. . . . The telescopic discoveries . . . provided a natural and appropriate focus for much of the continuing opposition to Copernicus' proposal. They showed the real cosmological issues at stake more quickly and more clearly than pages of mathematics.Maybe I'm overdetermining Rob Bell's little book. Neither earth shaking, nor even all that revelatory, it does offer a glimpse of a new way of seeing, of hearing, of living - all tied to a new way of believing - that, it seems, makes many people uncomfortable. Which is why we get reviews that end like this:
The opposition took varied forms. A few of Galileo's more fanatical opponents refused even to look through the new instrument, asserting that if God had meant man to use such a contrivance in acquiring knowledge, He would have endowed men with telescopic eyes. Others looked willingly or even eagerly, acknowledged the new phenomena, but claimed that the new objects were not in the sky at all; they were apparitions caused by the telescope itself. . . .
I am praying that God uses this review, among others, to strengthen God’s church in sound doctrine and to protect the church from deceptive teaching. May God’s name be glorified.What all these reviews share is, I believe, the assumption that "orthodoxy", however defined, is a body of received Truths, unalterable because they are rooted in specific statements of Scripture which root any proper hermeneutic. Bell cuts across all sorts of sacred cows, reading Scripture as both a newcomer with fresh eyes as well as someone acquainted with the original language, searching for a grounding in some sense of what the first readers might have heard. In that sense, he isn't that much different from a very long line of primitivist approaches to Christian faith; by cutting through the detritus of two millennia of accumulated interpretations, arguments, disputations, anathemas, and mutual misunderstandings, the hope has always been to arrive at something like an original understanding as a first step toward real appropriation. That is what lies at the heart of N. T. Wright's massive scholarly triptych. That is what lies at the heart of the Historical Jesus movement. It lies at the heart, really, of any earnest search for the meaning of Scripture.
Imagine for a moment you are with a group of people, sitting around having a conversation. All of you are speaking English with that kind of flat, slightly nasal intonation that is a generic American accent. Someone enters the room and joins the conversation, only this person is speaking Urdu. All of you sit around, staring at one another, then the newcomer. One of the group says, "Dude, if you want to join this conversation, you need to speak English." The newcomer seems to understand the statement, but responds, continuing in Urdu. All of you shake your head and leave the room for someplace this foreign-speaking interloper can't intrude.
To me, that is what is happening with the reviewers' responses to Bell's book. They are speaking one language, Bell another. They are insisting that there is only one language allowed if they want to join the conversation, and they bar the newcomer from joining in.
After a short conversation with Joel Watts on Facebook as I was attempting to write this post, I have come to the conclusion that the reviewers, for all their vitriol and denunciations, have done Bell a service. If for no other reason than creating controversy where none exists, Bell has received the greatest reward any writer can dream of - free publicity.
Beyond that, they need to pick up their blue guitars and start playing.
