New Testament scholar Ben Witherington has excellent reviews of Velvet Elvis, Sex God and the first ten Nooma DVDs. His main criticism of Bell is some sloppy exegesis and some misunderstandings of the New Testament context. Witherington is very convincing! Overall, he is extremely positive about Bell. Witherington’s comments on Bell on homosexuality attracted 75 [...]
Entries from September 2007
September 22, 2007
Nooma DVD 012 – Matthew : a short review
This Nooma sees Rob Bell in sombre mode; he doesn’t reach those heights of joyful intensity I saw in the previous Nooma I watched – Breathe – instead, he talks about grief and loss.
He tells the story of a friend of his who died – Matthew – and then he goes on to talk about [...]
September 16, 2007
Mark Strom’s new book
Back in 2001, Mark Strom’s book Reframing Paul was a hugely influential book on my life. It was the best critique of the current state of evangelical churches I had read and it offered some positive alternatives of ‘grace filled conversations’.
Finally in 2005, I wrote a long email to Mark telling him how much his book [...]
September 2, 2007
Interpreting the Bible in Velvet Elvis: binding and loosing
From an Anabaptist perspective, what excites me most about Rob Bell’s Velvet Elvis is the way in “Movement two: Yoke” it talks about using ‘binding and loosing’ to interpret the Bible together.
In Jesus’ world, it was assumed you had as much to learn from the discussion of the text as you did from the text itself. [...]
