Nooma reviews

Greg Gilbert, who is the director of research for the president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an elder at Third Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, has written three long articles reviewing Rob Bell's popular Nooma videos. He communicates his issues with them far better than i ever did.

In the end, the view of Christianity that Rob Bell communicates in Nooma is just too lifeless, too colourless, too anaemic, and sadly in some cases... just wrong. Any message that claims to be Christian and yet comes out with ' My understanding of Jesus’ message is that he teaches us to live in the reality of God now—here and today. It’s almost as if Jesus just keeps saying, ‘Change your life. Live this way'. Not only misses the point to such a large degree as almost to be off the scale, but also runs the risk of misleading both Christians and non believers alike...

The lack of emphasis on the cross is obviously troubling as well. But understandable. If you don't look at the cross long enough, and in the sweep of the whole Bible, you miss the glory, you miss the gutsy, full blooded hope that it gives to sinners, all you see is something that just doesn't fit into an 'emergent' model. All you see is a demonstration of something rather than anything objective. You end up thinking that Caesar killed Jesus. As Gilbert says 'That’s the real tragedy of Bell’s approach to the cross. He’s not willing to stare at it long enough to see its glory. The wrath inherent to it is so distasteful to him, so off-putting to the audience he’s speaking to, that he ends up, sadly, without the resources to tell his listeners about the most profound and most beautiful love in the universe.'

***Update: Carson on Rob Bell***