The heart of the article is something I agree with and have been saying some time about the conservative American church - a lot of the church's reaction is based in fear. Pick any topic in the church and start asking questions that are seldom asked and you will get some strong reactions. From my experience the subconscious thought pattern is this; if you don't comply to a (our) particular application of scripture then you probably do not have a good (correct) understanding of scripture; and if you are lacking in understanding of scripture then you probably do not hold a correct view of Jesus and God; and if you do not have a correct view of Jesus and God then we question your faith and/or salvation. This is one side to which the pendulum swings. Not all take it to this extreme, but this is where fear can take some circles of conservative Christianity. From my reading, I can agree with the article on this level.
But this is where I must depart from my agreement with the article for I believe the article may be pushing the pendulum to far the other way. The other side the pendulum swings to is where we are all too inclusive in the name of love and uncertainty. The article swings this way by a misunderstanding of how categories work and not mentioning something about Rob Bell's "sin".
One thing that has helped me in my learning of philosophy and theology and pretty much everything else is building categories. Building categories helps me better understand a subject and how said subject relates to another appropriately. [If you would like an introduction to the categories that I speak of check out Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Categories here. This is all I did in systematic theology classes. I built categories in my mind and attempted to become more and more consistent with my beliefs. As I constructed categories I then began to see more clearly how some things related to others.
I bring up this topic of categories because this is how I approach the topic of orthodoxy. This is something that seems like Pavlovitz (the author of the article) sarcastically takes for granted;" There are two religious menu options when it comes to orthodoxy: totality or heresy." Well... Yeah. He then continues, "the moment that anyone, however prayerful or thoughtful or earnest they may be, comes to a conclusion other than what has been defined as acceptable, they get kicked to the curb." Well... Yeah. That's how orthodoxy and heresy has always worked.
Within Christianity you know how you fall into certain camps by what boxes you check. You check the boxes a certain way, you're catholic, another way, you're a Presbyterian, another way, you're a baptist. When you check boxes (or don't) that these groups have all agreed upon since the early councils then you are a heretic. It is a category and, as some say, "if the boot fits".
The article does bring up questions about what heresy looks like now. In our pop culture, post reformation era, is social media outcries and blog post condemnation the new format as opposed to exile? How does the church, in unity, identify heresy today? What does a formal rejection of teaching look like from Protestant camps? These are all questions for another post.
Let this post remind us that if Rob Bell did not do anything wrong, he did not do anything well either. I'm not sure if Bell is a heretic, to be fair. Truth be told, Bell has not declared enough for me to confidently declare on this blog that no one reads that the boot does, indeed, fit. But what I do know is Rob Bell's "sin", his book Love Wins, sucked. I know I'm strange, I believe that academic formats and channels are actually the proper and helpful ways to sift through the world of ideas. I'm not talking about Bell's stylistic format but more the lack of citations, references, and comprehensive argument. Pavlovitz was right; it did bring up a lot of questions. But those questions left us nowhere and warranted many of the questions of Bell's stance that followed the publication. Pavlovitz critiqued Christianity for the lack of Dialogue, but I believe Bell did not help the opportunity for conversation by the way he initiated it. Because in the end the book read as if it was halfway through a thought. The sad reality is that we never got the follow up.
Let me conclude with this; the goal of this post is to find the golden mean and avoid the continuation of the pendulum. Let us not fall into the fear of who's in and out but let us also not fall into the fear of seeming unloving because we're rightly using categories. As Christians we love God and we love people, as Pavlovitz said, but the best way to do both is through truth and the application thereof.
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