Bet you thought I’d have given up on this daily flashback post bit by now.
From March 25, 2011, “That chair doesn’t belong in this play“:
For Mohler, as for most of Team Hell, we can see that there are two distinct categories. On the one hand there is what is “clearly revealed in the Bible … teachings … doctrine.” And on the other hand there’s this evasive, fuzzy-wuzzy, extra-biblical, anti-biblical notion of “the character of God.”
And with that preconception stuck in his head, he cannot accept or imagine or even hear what is actually being said to him. He cannot accept or imagine or hear the argument that the character of God as clearly revealed in the Bible is incompatible and irreconcilable with his fondness for Hell. The character of God is a “teaching” or “doctrine,” but it’s also much more than that. It is, in Mamet’s terms, the meaning of the play. Anything that contradicts it does not belong on stage.
That’s how Rob Bell reads the Bible. And that’s how Eugene Peterson reads the Bible. And that’s how I read the Bible. “Everything has to be interpreted through Christ,” Peterson said.
That’s also a Pauline approach to the Bible. It’s how Paul read the scriptures himself, and it’s how he wrote his own letters to the early believers, letters which we have since canonized as our own scriptures. The evangelists who wrote the Gospels of the New Testament wrote them this way too. And they tried to live that way too.
But this is not how Team Hell reads the Bible. They regard the idea of reading the entire Bible as “driving toward” any one point as a dangerous approach that prioritizes some passages over others. That opens the door to all sorts of “evasions” and “revisions.” For them every word in the Bible is sacred. And thus every word in the Bible is equally sacred. To allow for some grand theme or interpretive scheme or some larger picture of the character of God would be to challenge that equal sacredness of every single word.
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