Book Reviews -- By: Matthew S. DeMoss
Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 171:682 (Apr 2014)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss
BSac 171:682 (April-June 2014) p. 238
Book Reviews
By The Faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary
Editor
What We Talk about When We Talk about God. By Rob Bell. New York: HarperOne,
Bell is “a bestselling author and international teacher and speaker” (dust jacket). His latest book is “about seeing, about becoming more alive and more aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights, and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else” (p. 15). He identifies his starting point this way: “First, I’m a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world” (p. 14).
His intended audience is also clearly identified. As a pastor, Bell had many conversations with people about God and faith. “What I’ve experienced time and time again is that people want to talk about God. Whether it’s what they were taught growing up or not taught, or what inspires them or what repulses them, or what gives them hope or what fills them with despair, I’ve found people to be extremely keen to talk about their beliefs and lack of beliefs in God. What I’ve observed is that while we want more of a connection with the reverence humming within us, we often don’t know where to begin or what steps to take or what that process even looks like” (pp. 14-15). And this is true, he believes, for many Christians as well as non-Christians.
The book is written in typical Bell style, with a conversational tone. It is divided into chapters with one-word titles: God is “with us,” “for every single one of us,” and “ahead of people, tribes, and culture” (pp. 18-19). Two introductory chapters argue that we should be “open” to God and recognize that “language both helps us and fails us in our attempts to understand and describe the paradoxical nature of the God who is beyond words” (pp. 16-17).
In “Open,” Bell discusses the bigness and the smallness of the universe. From black holes, neutron stars, and Einstein’s theory of relativity to Higgs Boson, gluons, and the Heisenberg principle, he opens the reader’s eyes to the complexity and diversity of the universe and thus to the wonder of its Creat...
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