I took Bashir's baiting of the guest completely the opposite from you I guess.
What you’ve done is you’re amending the gospel, the Christian message, so that it’s palatable to contemporary people who find, for example, the idea of hell and heaven very difficult to stomach. So here comes Rob Bell, he’s made a Christian gospel for you, and it’s perfectly palatable, it’s much easier to swallow. That’s what you’ve done, haven’t you?”
Uh. Pardon me, but it sounds like he's kept trying to make the point essentially that the Christian message is thus: NOT palatable, DIFFICULT to stomach and that this Rob Bell was trying to put a slick veneer on a detestable religion.
Maybe I just didn't like his delivery?!
Yes, sam, we see it the same way...the true Christian message is NOT “palatable” in that it DOES claim that Jesus is the only way...Martin Bashir sees that Mr. Bell has made that orthodox claim null and void, thus making Mr. Bell’s “brand” of “Christianity” more acceptable to those who would recoil at the claims of orthodoxy.
I hope that makes sense. :)
I don’t know all of what Rob Bell believes but I’ve seen several of his “NOOMA” segments related to various aspects of the Christian walk....I thought it was very good, very accurate, encouraging and informative.
I did not get a sense from this series that Rob Bell was anything other than a Christian.
Am I not seeing something? Comments?
Living for Christ isn't going to make your life easier. In fact it will make it tougher. What makes it different from non christians is that we now have a means to handle it. Bell, in his new book, feels that there is no eternal condemnation for those who choose not to believe in Christ. That living for Christ does not mean you follow a certain path or such. This in turn, means that it will be easier, as you would have no set path to follow.
The Christian Gospel is indeed not palatable to most humans.
Basically we are evil and can not earn our own salvation.
We are so reprobate that nothing we can do even helps.
Our wickedness is so off the charts that we can not balance it ourselves.
So bad that atoning for it either requires a finite being to suffer unspeakable pain for an infinite amount of time...or an infinite being must suffer unspeakable pain for a finite amount of time.
There is a real hell, and it is a place of unspeakable pain.
We can't earn our own redemption.
God offers redemption to us as a free gift - but only if we accept that God took on human form and paid our fully justified dues for us.
Yup, a lot of people find that unpalatable.
The Bible tells us that they will, so I am not surprised to see that they generally do.