'See? It completely contradicts itself.' And it does, unless you read it as an unfolding story and you realize that these two different passages were written at two different times, and they reflect a growing sophistication in thinking. Now we have something very interesting. We see that people were growing and evolving in their thinking about the divine. That’s a story that we are much more likely to find ourselves in.
Well, why shouldn't Rob Bell go for progressive revelation?
After all, it's a convenient justification for jettisoning things in the Bible he objects to . . . like hell. To Rob Bell, hell isn't an example of our current state of evolved, sophisticated thinking, so the interpretive principle permits him to relegate it to an earlier, now obsolete stage of God's revelation to man.
But progressive revelation is also basic to the dispensational theology of Bell's former Evangelical faith.
You can take the man out of the Evangelicalism, but you can't take the Evangelicalism out of the man.
The modernist prejudice behind the theory of progressive revelation here is obvious, if
little noticed by its critics, implying that the Biblical ancients weren't as enlightened as we are.
This is the sort of dismissive attitude toward the past which makes it impossible to understand them on their own terms, meaning there is a predisposition to misunderstand them.
But Evangelicals, former or otherwise, are particulary vulnerable to this lurch because of the degree to which their own heritage struggled with and assimilated modernism.
Rob Bell is only late heir of an age which long before us was already digesting modernism from the Christian point of view, for example in Thomas Dehany Bernard's The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament, the Bampton Lecture from 1864.
More specifically, however, progressive revelation was the essential modernist presupposition of J. N. Darby's dispensationalist theology, without which we wouldn't have Evangelicalism in the first place, with its easy compartmentalization of features of God's revelation which are an effront to post-Enlightenment reason: food laws, animal sacrifice, capital punishment, just war, etc.
Apart from the obvious, that there is a development of ideas in the Bible which can be demonstrated historically, the very idea of progress itself remains, however, an unquestioned value of our time which we've inherited from modernity, which overthrew the ancient world's agriculturally inspired ideas of cyclicality, birth and death, and eternal return.
And Christians and secularists alike share it . . . in droves.
But it must be asked: Is it really progress in divine thinking to travel from the age of faith under the Patriarchs, to the slaughter of animals under Moses, to the human sacrifice of the Son of God under Paul, to the mass murdering of tens of millions of the age of the Enlightenment?
The more I look at the ceaseless ages run the more the pattern looks like degeneracy to me.
Over 7 billion people inhabit the planet today. But by 1 AD over 40 billion were already dead. What do we know that they did not? Only that Princess Leia is dead, too.
The prophets of the Old Testament, whose heirs John the Baptist and Jesus were, dreamed by contrast with our Christian world of the interminable Sacrifice of the Mass of a world finally founded by God eternally upon justice, without violence, without tears and without death, however mediated that must be through judgment. Appropriately, they were tortured and killed.
I fancy that we have been fooled into thinking that we have made progress at all by the times in which we have been living, that is, by the Holocene, which began approximately 11,700 years ago.
We don't grasp that we bask in the glow of a dying interglacial, and cannot bear that The Ice Man
returneth.
The next round is on me!
