Annoyed

I’ve got a pretty good way to evaluate how someone processes the points being made in a religious controversy. See if he/she uses the words “annoyed” and “denounce” to speak of one side of the debate and you can make a pretty educated guess as to which side he/she thinks has the weaker argument. “Annoyed” and “denounce” are dismissive words. One is not described as being merely “annoyed” at Al-Qaeda’s position on terrorism, for example, and when someone is said to “denounce” something, you start looking for Inquisition racks.

We can apply this to this morning’s entry in the Statesman’s “Of Sacred and Secular”--

Rob Bell, the megachurch pastor with a huge following, has been getting a lot of attention lately for a book that I haven’t seen yet, “Love Wins.” (The book’s publication date has been moved up to today, but was originally scheduled to be released at the end of the month.)

Presumably, a few people saw review copies and galleys and started raising hell in the blogosphere, denouncing him for heresy and twisting God’s word.

In “Love Wins,” USA Today reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman reports, Bell annoys some segments of the Christian population.

Curiously, in the blog post Bell can call the traditional view of eternal judgment “toxic” without being regarded as expressing mere “annoyance” or hyper-sensitive “denunciation.”

Ah well.

Reacting to an influential pastor’s dance with universalism is so much more than mere annoyance at a naughty provocateur. This is such an important issue. It involves definitions of God’s love—and also God’s justice. It involves evaluation of God’s competence to save. It involves the question of how significant this life is as a time to come to terms with God. It involves the question of how urgent and sacrificial believers should be in personal evangelism and global missions.

So, thank God for Martin Bashir at MSNBC, who seems to “get” how weighty the whole subject is as he interviews the influential pastor. Or maybe he’s just annoyed: