A riff on Genesis hits a few sour notes

A review of Rob Bell’s Everything is Spiritual

by Lita Sanders

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Rob Bell has received acclaim for his Nooma videos, criticism for a weak soteriology in his book Love Wins, and is perhaps one of the most controversial figures in Christian circles today. His DVD Everything Is Spiritual has been around for several years now, but it still warrants a review because of his influence, particularly among the youth in the church.

To fairly critique Bell, one has to realize that he never really claimed to be a scholar or a serious exegete. He’s primarily a communicator—his messages seem more like performance art than sermons. In a way, his popularity in the church is more an indictment of the church’s discernment than on Bell. But when Bell speaks publicly and makes money from bad teaching, we have a responsibility to critique that teaching when it’s warranted.

Bell opens by quoting Genesis 1—unfortunately Scripture doesn’t feature as heavily throughout the rest of the video. And almost as soon as he starts interpreting Genesis, things go badly awry. He calls Genesis a poem—despite the lack of essential characteristics of Hebrew poetry—and he promotes the framework hypothesis.

He also displays a fondness for numerology, highlighting recurrences of 3, 7, and 10 in the creation narrative. However, some of them (such as words in a particular verse) are artificial constructions (because the chapter and verse divisions were added thousands of years after the original text was composed), and others seem coincidental. To put it another way, if I took a chapter from Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy's famous book Anna Karenina at random and made four my ‘special number’, I’m sure I could find it in all sorts of significant places. It seems mainly a product of the human mind’s tendency to look for patterns. Interestingly, Bell doesn’t cite the most obvious seven in the creation narrative—the seven days (which incidentally are responsible for nearly all the other sevens)!

Bell’s presentation is engaging, but sometimes the connections aren’t as plain as they could be. It’s as if someone is mapping a route from Chicago to Los Angeles, and somehow ends up on Mars—you didn’t expect to get there, and you’re not quite sure how you got there or how this relates to Los Angeles. One moment Bell is giving an exposition of Genesis 1, and then he’s giving an astronomy lecture. There’s certainly a very ‘post-modern’ feel to the disconnectedness of it all.

Scientific errors

The scientific portion of Bell’s presentation contains factual errors in literally nearly every sentence. Bell claims that each galaxy has 100 billion suns, and each of those suns has 100 billion stars—apparently Bell doesn’t know that the sun is a star. Bell says that each galaxy has 100 billion black holes, but the largest estimate I could find in an Internet search is 100 million-1 billion.

His argument for the fine-tuning of the earth’s placement, rotation, etc, is overstated a bit. For instance, he says that the earth is 93 million miles away from the sun, and a million miles in either direction would result in no life on earth. But in actuality, the earth’s orbit is slightly elliptical, about 91.5 million miles away from the sun at its closest and 94.5 million miles away at its furthest. He claims that the earth’s axial tilt is unusual in that the other planets have no axial tilt—actually, all of the other planets have axial tilts (Mercury’s and Jupiter’s are very slight).

It would be tedious to list all of the errors in Bell’s scientific analysis—to sum up, one would probably want to double-check any facts before using them. But Bell is a pastor, not a scientist, so the theological errors are really much more disappointing.

Wikipedia: David Shankbone

Theological oddities

It’s interesting how often Bell in his talk refers not to Christian exegetes, but Jewish rabbis, for theological points. These rabbis rejected Jesus, so were wrong on the most essential theological point—how can they be regarded as authorities for anything else? In places, a quote from another part of Scripture would do to make his theological point, but instead he refers to an apostate rabbi.

Bell’s wrong view of Genesis leads him to other errors in his presentation. He argues that when God revealed Himself to Moses as a spirit, without form and forbidding Moses to make images of Him, that was a totally new idea in all of human history. But if we take Genesis as history, people originally would have known about the true God, and this knowledge would have been corrupted or forgotten over time. Some false gods could be a distorted form of ancestor worship, especially taking into account the long lifespans of the couple generations directly after the Flood compared with the drastic drop in the following generations.

Everything is spiritual

The title “Everything is Spiritual” doesn’t really begin to make sense until around 55 minutes into the presentation. Bell argues that everything in Genesis is either purely spiritual with no physicality (like God), or purely physical with no spirit (water, trees, etc), until man is created. Bell says that there is actually no word in the Hebrew for “spiritual”. What he fails to realize is that the lack of a certain word doesn’t mean that the idea didn’t exist. It would be like saying, “There is no word in English to differentiate fraternal love from marital love like the Greek language does, so English speakers obviously don’t differentiate the two.”

Bell claims that Genesis 1 is a chiasm, which he defines by saying that the poet hides the meaning in the middle. But chiasm is a literary device not confined to any one literary genre (it’s used in apocalyptic literature, poetry, narrative, and discourse, and in both the Old Testament and New Testament), and it’s a very strictly defined device using inverted parallelism around the climax of the discourse, narrative, or poem. Without the inverted parallelism, there is no chiasm, whether or not the climax is somewhere in the middle. For instance, there is a notable chiasm in Genesis 17:1–25:

A 17:1a: Abraham’s age

B 17:1b: God appears to Abram

C 17:1c–2: God promises a covenant

D 17:3: Abram falls on his face

E 17:4–8: God names Abraham

X 17:9–14: God gives the covenant of circumcision

E′ 17:15–16: God names Sarah

D′ 17:17-18: Abraham falls on his face

C′ 17:19–21: God promises a covenant through Isaac

B′ 17:22–23: God goes up from Abraham; Abraham obeys God

A′ 17:24–25: Abraham’s and Ishmael’s ages

This is a fairly tight chiasm on the level of the pericope (in other words, this particular section of the wider Genesis narrative).

Furthermore, Bell was earlier promoting the Framework Hypothesis which requires a very different and mutually exclusive structure for Genesis. If Day 4 is the center of the chiasmus as Bell claims, then Days 3 and 5 have to be related, and Days 2 and 6, and Days 1 and 7—trying to link them to form even a loose chiasmus would be a stretch. But the Framework Hypothesis links days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6. There is really no way to have both at once (of course, we would argue that there are problems with both, and serious ones in the case of the Framework Hypothesis). Furthermore, the climax of Genesis 1 is not on Day 4, but in Genesis 1:27, indicated by the only and brief use of true poetry in the creation account, on Day 6 (the verses before and after are not poetry).

But Bell wants Day 4 to be the center of a chiasmus to make a point about the word “seasons”, which he claims is a central word for anyone who follows God. He says that it is a reference to the Sabbath, and a lesson about what it means to be human, that one’s worth does not come from what one produces, but from being in the image of God. The problem with this though is that it imposes a gooey postmodernity onto the institution of the Sabbath. In reality Jesus is saying something much deeper (see box).

More than that though, Bell argues that Jesus came to show us that “everything is spiritual”. But while it is certainly part of Jesus’ teaching that our actions have eternal consequences, the essence of Jesus’ teachings would certainly be that the Kingdom of God has arrived, that Jesus is the one who has brought it, and Jesus is the only way into it. The center of Jesus’ message is the Gospel—and “everything is spiritual” is not much of a Gospel.

Conclusion

Bell is a gifted communicator—he’s fun to watch and his humor is great and well-timed. His message is memorable; one wishes that it were a better message. The thing is, the Church today doesn’t need to hear that Genesis gives us a spiritual message to the exclusion of the historical message. Of course Genesis tells us about God; of course it’s theological in nature—the whole Bible is theological. But it’s also historical, and if it’s not historical, then it doesn’t really tell us about God, because the central premise of the Bible is that God exists and has intervened and interacted with creation at crucial points to bring about salvation through Jesus Christ. And if He has done that at all, it had to be in real history.