QUOTING: "Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith"

Quotes from "VELVET ELVIS" by Rob Bell:

[inside front-cover] “We have to test everything. I thank God for anybody, anywhere who is pointing people to the mysteries of God. But those people would all tell you to think long and hard about what they are saying and doing and creating.
Test it.
Probe it.
Do that to this book. Don’t swallow it uncritically. Think about it.
Wrestle with it.
Just because I’m a Christian and I’m trying to articulate a Christian worldview doesn’t mean I’ve got it nailed. I’m contributing to the discussion.
God has spoken, and the rest is commentary, right?”

[p.14] “I am learning that what seems brand new is often the discovery of something that’s been there all along – it just got lost somewhere and it needs to be picked up, dusted off, and reclaimed. I am learning that I come from a tradition that has wrestled with the deepest questions of human existence for thousands of years.”

[p.18 – TRAMPOLINE STORY]
“Several years ago my parents and in-laws gave our boys a trampoline. A fifteen-footer with netting around the outside so kids don’t end up headfirst in the flowers. Since then my boys and I have logged more hours on that trampoline than I could begin to count. When we first got it, my older son, who was five at the time, discovered that if he timed his bounce with mine, he could launch higher than if he was jumping on his own.
I remember the first time he called my wife, Kristen, out into the backyard to watch him jump off of my bounce. Now mind you, up until this point he was maybe getting a foot higher because of his new technique. But this one particular time, when my wife was watching for the first time, something freakish happened in the space-time continuum. When he jumped, there was this perfect convergence of his weight and my weight and his jump and my jump, and I’m sure barometric pressure and air temperature had something to do with it too, because he went really high.
I don’t mean a few feet off the mat. I mean he went over my head. Forty pounds of boy, clawing at the air like a cat thrown from a second-story window, and a man making eye-contact with his wife and thinking, This is not good.
She told us she didn’t think our new trick was very safe and we should be careful. Which we were. Until she went inside the house.”

[p.?] “An atheist is a person of tremendous faith. In our discussion about the things that matter most, then, we aren’t talking about faith or no faith. Belief or no belief. We are talking about faith in what? Belief in what? The real question isn’t whether we have it or not, but what we have put it in…
Everybody follows somebody… We got our beliefs from somewhere. We have been formed, every one of us, by this complicated mix of people and places and things…we are each taking all of these influences and living our lives according to which teachings we have made our own.”

[p.12] “They knew that they and others hadn’t gotten it perfect forever. They knew that the things they said and did and wrote and decided would need to be revisited. Rethought. Reworked.”

[p.22 – Springs]
“This is where the springs on the trampoline come in. When we jump, we begin to see the need for springs. The springs help make sense of these deeper realities that drive how we live every day. The springs aren’t God. The springs aren’t Jesus. The springs are statements and beliefs about our faith that help give words to the depth that we are experiencing in our jumping. I would call these the doctrines of the Christian faith.
They aren’t the point.
They help us understand the point, but they are a means and not an end. We take them seriously, and at the same time we keep them in proper perspective…
In fact, its stretch and flex are what make it so effective. It is firmly attached to the frame and the mat, yet it has room to move. And it has brought a fuller, deeper, richer understanding to the mysterious being who is God. Once again, the springs aren’t God. They have emerged over time as people have discussed and studied and experienced and reflected on their growing understanding of who God is. Our words aren’t absolutes. Only God is absolute, and God has no intention of sharing this absoluteness with anything, especially words people have come up with to talk about him. This is something people have struggled with since the beginning: how to talk about God when God is bigger than our words, our brains, our worldviews, and our imaginations.”

[p.25] “If there is a divine being who made everything, including us, what would our experiences with this being look like? The moment God is figured out with nice, neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control. And so, in passage after passage, we find God reminding people that he is beyond and bigger and more.
This truth about God is why study and discussion and doctrines are so necessary. They help us put words to realities beyond words. They give us insight and understanding into the experience of God we’re having. Which is why the springs only work when they serve the greater cause: us finding our lives in God. If they ever become the point, something has gone seriously wrong.”

[p.34, 35] “A trampoline only works if you take your feet off the firm, stable ground and jump into the air and let the trampoline propel you upward. Talking about trampolines isn’t jumping; it’s talking. Two vastly different things. And so we jump and we invite others to jump with us, to live the way of Jesus and see what happens. You don’t have to know anything about the springs to pursue living “the way”.