Rob Bell's New Yorker Biography

Fighting for the Faith

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Now, Rob Bell is somebody that we have been critiquing and biblically challenging here on this program since it started, and even before that, when

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I was merely a blogger, you know, living in my mother's basement, eating Cheetos and living on a beanbag and stuff like that.

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And I don't... You see, it's just an ad hominem. But anyway, there is a new article out in the

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November 26 issue of The New Yorker, okay? And I'm telling you folks, this is the most important, or at least in the top three, most important religion stories of the year.

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And in fact, it's worth the purchase of a copy of The New Yorker just for this article.

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The article, by the way, is called The Hellraiser, and it's in the profiles section of The New Yorker magazine, and it's written by Khalafah Sinan.

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Now, there is a... In fact, hang on a second, I'm going to turn this off on my program.

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There's a website called Michigan Live, in fact, you can find it at mlive .com, a gentleman by the name of Matt Van Bunt, B -U -N -T -E, has written an article called

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Love Wins Raised Hell for Rob Bell at Mars Hill, The New Yorker says. And what this story does, in fact, if you kind of want to get just a flavor for some of the different angles that this story is, that you can tease out of the story, it's actually a pretty long article,

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Matt there over at Michigan Live teases out the aspects that pertain to the flack and the heat that Rob Bell and the elders of Mars Hill faced as a result of the book

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Love Wins. And I'm not going to talk about that per se. Let's just say that there's a lot of people who are covering that angle, and it's fairly clear that Rob Bell left as a direct result of the fallout of the book

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Love Wins, which, in my opinion, and I'm basing my opinion based on Scripture, that's exactly what should have happened, okay, because Rob Bell was flat out teaching heresy.

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What I find more interesting, though, in the story, having read it, is that there's a history here that is being discussed openly that has not been discussed openly yet, which then leads to us needing to point some fingers and ask some questions, okay?

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For instance, in the story there, it talks about how Rob Bell eventually came to be pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, and how a gentleman by the name of,

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I think it's Ed Dobson of Calvary up in Michigan, had helped to place

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Rob Bell in ministry there. And there's a quote in here that has just, you got to read it to believe it.

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So let me, I'm going to read just a few small portions of the article itself and ask a few questions, but this is from the

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New Yorker magazine. Here's what it says. Bell loved California, and he imagined that he would probably settle there, but then during a trip home, he agreed to accompany his parents to Calvary Church in Grand Rapids.

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Calvary was a big non -denominational congregation led by a great orator named

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Ed Dobson. Bell remembers being astonished Dobson was a small man, like 100 pounds, soaking wet with big hands and a deep voice, willing to hurtle the flower display in front of the pulpit if it would help make a biblical teaching stick.

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Bell befriended Dobson and wrote him letters from California. When Dobson finally saw

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Bell preach, he was impressed. Bell's style is conversational, but theatrical, full of meaningful pauses that makes listeners lean forward, and Dobson persuaded the leadership at Calvary to give him a chance.

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Not all of the elders felt like I did. Some of them were concerned that he was inexperienced,

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Dobson says, and he continues, but I told them, look, he can communicate.

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He really doesn't know the Bible, but if we can add the Bible to his communication skills, we'll have a winner.

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Gonna stop right there, okay? Let me read that again. Not all of the elders felt like I did, but I told them, look, he can communicate.

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He really doesn't know the Bible, but if we can add the Bible to his communication skills, we'll have a winner.

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Right there, something is very clear. Rob Bell was not biblically qualified to be a pastor when he became a pastor.

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He was not biblically qualified to be teaching in the church, and here's the reason why.

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He didn't know his Bible. He had not studied and showed himself approved as a workman who need not blush with embarrassment, who rightly handles the word of truth.

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Read the pastoral epistles. Being able to teach sound doctrine and refute those who contradicted is one of the mandatory, not optional, mandatory requirements for anybody in teaching ministry within Christ's church.

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It's not our church, by the way, it's his, okay? But Ed Dobson there at Calvary up in Michigan basically said, hey, listen, he really is a gifted communicator.

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He doesn't know the Bible, but hey, maybe we can add the Bible to his communication. If we do that, we will have a winner.

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So what happened there at Calvary was that he was put in charge, Rob Bell was put in charge of the Saturday night young adult service, which sometimes include rock bands and informal discussions, okay?

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And then in 1998, he left to start his own church, Mars Hill, taking with him hundreds from Calvary and the proceeds of a special offering, which came to about $30 ,000, okay?

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So already if you now know Rob Bell's history, and where was Rob Bell prior to this? He had spent some time at Willow Creek and the folks at Willow Creek didn't recognize that Rob Bell didn't know his

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Bible. That should tell you something about Willow Creek, okay? Now we continue though, a little later in the article,

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I'm going to read an excerpt here from the story that I think is the most telling, okay?

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The first few years of Mars Hill should have been thrilling. Bell was barely 30 and suddenly he was one of the country's most acclaimed young preachers.

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How? How is that possible? He didn't really know his Bible. He was married. His wife,

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Kristen, had been one of his best friends at Wheaton, and his first son had just been born. But as the church was thriving,

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Bell was digging into biblical history, learning about the Jewish traditions that shaped Jesus' life, and about the competing agendas that shaped his message after his death.

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It started to make sense and become real, he recalls. Oh wait,

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Herod actually lived, and a lot of what Jesus was saying was about first century politics. It became harder for him to view the

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Bible as a hermeneutically sealed box, as he had been taught. He started to doubt the inerrancy of the scriptures, which made him doubt the faith that had sustained him.

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He was leading a church, but he wasn't even sure he was still a

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Christian. This happened early on, early on.

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He was exhausted, and one Sunday after the nine o 'clock service, he hid in a storage closet dreaming about running away so that he wouldn't have to preach at eleven.

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He says, I remember having moments of, okay, I'm only going to say things that I know are true.

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It's better to be generous than stingy. Okay, I can do that. Notice liberalism has already crept in.

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In many churches, Bell's newfound skepticism wouldn't have been at all out of place, i .e.

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mainline liberal denominations. In a sense, he had belatedly discovered liberal theology, which treats the

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Bible as a collection of divinely inspired but humanly authored texts subject to multiple interpretations.

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Fifty years ago, it seemed obvious to many theologians that the future of the faith belonged to skeptics and doubters.

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In 1963, an Anglican scholar named John A .T. Robinson published a bestselling book called

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Honest to God, in which he argued that crude claims of biblical inerrancy had long ago been debunked.

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Okay, a number of theologians went even further arguing that Christians should view not just the fall, but also the resurrection as an allegory.

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In an age when religions seemed to be in decline, some were eager to provide a less religious version of Christianity.

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In retrospect, Robinson and his contemporaries were too quick to dismiss the extreme fundamentalist.

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The early part of the 20th century saw a revival of grassroots Christianity. Some of these Christians embraced the term fundamentalist and they invade against the dangers of modern culture.

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Others who sought to engage with culture called themselves evangelicals. This was a new movement and its innovation was to realize that a stern doctrine could thrive in a casual and contemporary context.

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Nowadays, the evangelical label has been adopted by a loose alliance of Protestants who share a faith that emphasizes both clarity and intimacy, a perfect Bible and a personal

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Jesus. Despite the recent downturn, this movement has been astonishingly successful.

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30 % of white Americans are evangelicals, more than all the mainline Protestant denominations combined.

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Bell was born in 1970. He grew up in the world that evangelicals made, and when he invited

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Jesus into his heart as a 10 -year -old, he was speaking the expressive language of evangelicalism, though he didn't know that this tradition had a name.

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His college, Wheaton, has long been one of the most influential evangelical institutions in the country, and a seminary,

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Fuller, was founded to provide an evangelical alternative to the elite mainline seminaries.

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Bell's mentor, Dobson, was also a product of the evangelical movement. Starting in the 1970s, he was one of Jerry Falwell's closest associates and a board member of the

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Moral Majority, Falwell's political organization. At Calvary, Bell says he came to regard the word evangelical as a kind of secret handshake.

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When worshipers asked if the church was evangelical, he understood them to be asking, is it safe, good, and okay?

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Is it kosher? By affirming his evangelical identity, he could put people at ease.

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At Mars Hill, he cultivated a careful ambiguity, allowing worshipers to think that he was however evangelical they wanted him to be.

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He wanted to make a wide range of worshipers feel comfortable, until after his crisis, he decided that he didn't.

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Yeah, did you catch that? He was being ambiguous. Do you remember the Saturday Night Live character,

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Pat? They could never figure out if Pat was a guy or a girl. Yeah, the ambiguously, you know,

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Pat, the ambiguous person or whatever. You can't tell, so are you a guy or a girl, Pat? And you can never really tell.

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I mean, there was sometimes you think Pat's a guy, and other times you think Pat's a girl. Well, Rob Bell was playing the role of a theological

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Pat. Being ambiguous and more so, and he had already embraced liberalism.

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Now, this doesn't come as any kind of surprise to me. As somebody who's read all of Bell's books and followed

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Bell very closely for the better part of a decade now, okay? This makes sense.

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This explains why Bell invited Doug Padgett to preach at Mars Hill. This explains why Rob Bell invited

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Phyllis Tickle to preach at Mars Hill. This explains why Rob Bell invited Brian McLaren to teach at Mars Hill.

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This explains why Shane Hipps was called to co -pastor with him at Mars Hill. Because Rob Bell is not an evangelical.

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Rob Bell is nothing more than a postmodern liberal, and his theological ambiguity and deconstruction of historic

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Orthodox Christianity are not the hallmarks of somebody who embraces the Christian faith, but are the hallmarks of somebody who is skeptical and a doubter, and somebody who's trying to overthrow the historic

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Christian faith. But he has been a darling among evangelicals and seeker -driven types, and been literally promoted like all out the wazoo by such churches as Willow Creek for years, despite the fact that it's been clear for anybody who has like a theological, you know, couple of brain cells to rub together in their head that he's not an evangelical and he does not believe the historic

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Christian faith, that he's been promoted by those folks, which leads to the question, why were they promoting him?

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Yeah, he's a gifted communicator, but it was clear he was not qualified to be a pastor when he became a pastor.

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And worse, worse, not only were they not able to give him the Bible, he doesn't believe it.

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You see? I continue reading for just a little bit more. Bell eventually strengthened his faith.

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He knew that the Bible was redemptive because he saw its message transforming the estranged couples and struggling addicts he counseled, but his crisis taught him to distrust anyone who claimed that biblical interpretation was a simple matter of following rules, i .e.

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hermeneutics. It also spurred him to consider the limits of evangelicalism, which makes room for all sorts of sincere expressions of faith, but not often for sincere expressions of doubt.

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As the God in his sermons became more abstract, he retained the habit of preaching about the sacred importance of seemingly secular topics like generosity.

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Outside the church, he created a popular series of stylish and moody DVDs called Pneuma, which means breath or spirit.

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The videos were achingly sincere, with Bell tramping through washed out forests and airports and alleys, gazing meaningfully into the camera.

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Many of them looked like rejected treatments for Coldplay videos, but they resonated among young believers who were relieved to discover that the

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Christian message could be hopeful without always being cheerful. So the

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Pneuma videos, according to the New Yorker, were made after Rob Bell had his crisis and began to embrace liberal theology.

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And this is why people like me have been warning the church for the better part of a decade about Rob Bell's false theology.

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He's being paraded around as a major leader in evangelicalism, as an important thought teacher and leader and author and stuff like that, and you know what he is?

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He's nothing more than a skeptic, scoffer, and liberal.

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He's bought into a form of rationalism and denies the inerrancy of scripture and challenges and teaches against the core doctrines of the

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Christian faith. He's nothing more than a hip and cool and young version of John Shelby Spong, and anybody with any theological acumen knows this and has known it for a long time.

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And yet, there has been very little said by any major leaders in Christianity against Rob Bell.

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Well, the cat's out of the bag. We now know the truth. Early in his ministry, he had a crisis and came to deny the

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Christian faith. He doesn't believe the Bible. He holds it true, but he looks for more secular messages like generosity and feeding the poor and stuff like that, just like all the other liberals out there.

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So there are some people that have some explaining to do, particularly Ed Dobson, particularly outfits like Leadership Network, particularly

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Zondervan, particularly Bill Hybels, and others at Willow Creek.

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Why is it that they couldn't figure this out, yet it was obvious to so many that Rob Bell wasn't teaching the historic

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Christian faith? How is it that he got a pass and was able to literally wreak destruction within evangelicalism and teach not just any group, but the youth of evangelicalism, his new and hip form of liberalism?

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And here's the deal. There are kids that grew up on this stuff in the early 2000s, in these

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NUMA videos, who are now in seminary, and they think they believe the historic Christian faith because they learned it from Rob Bell, and they don't really believe it.

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They're the next generation. In fact, these are the kids who are running many of the youth groups right now, and they're feeding their youth groups these

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NUMA videos, right? And they're the ones who are going to be taking the pulpits very soon.

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They're going to be of age to be the head pastors in many of these megachurches in evangelicalism.

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And the thing that they were brought up on, their bread -and -butter spirituality, was the false theology and the new liberalism of a man who's a skeptic, a doubter, and a scoffer, and we now know it.

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It's historically written for us there in the New Yorker, none other than Rob Bell. There are folks that have some explaining to do, and not only that, there needs to be a very rigorous campaign within evangelicalism to de -Rob -Bell -ize the teaching in their churches and repudiate his false doctrine because now we know what it is, as if we didn't know that to begin with.

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But it's right there. In black and white, in the New Yorker, a short biography written about Rob Bell.

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Worth getting. Like I said, probably the most important religion story this year.

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You gotta get it if you haven't got it already. All right, we are up on our second break. When we return,

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I'm going to be playing an interview I recorded earlier with Jonathan Fiske, and I think his book is a perfect antidote for Rob Bell's false theology and a lot of what's going on in evangelicalism.

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You're not going to want to miss it. The name of the book, by the way, is Broken Seven Rules that Christians Really Need to Break.

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That's my... That's not exactly how it goes, but I'll explain it on the other side of the break. We'll be right back.

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If you think God is a black woman named Papa, then you need to get out of the shack and read your Bible. You're listening to Fighting for the