The following is adapted from the Apprising Ministries post Rob Bell In A Nutshell: The Bible:

Emerging Church pastor Rob Bell

The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself–discovering the Bible as a human product,” as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. “The Bible is still in the center for us,” Rob says, “but it’s a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it.”

“I grew up thinking that we’ve figured out the Bible,” Kristen says, “that we knew what it means. Now I have no idea what most of it means. And yet I feel like life is big again–like life used to be black and white, and now it’s in color…”

The Bells, who flourished at evangelical institutions from Wheaton to Fuller Theological Seminary to Grand Rapids’s Calvary Church before starting Mars Hill,…[felt] that very world, as the Bells tell it, became constricting–in Kristen’s phrase, “black and white…”

And how did the Bells find their way out of the black-and-white world where they had been so successful and so dissatisfied? “Our lifeboat,” Kristen says, “was A New Kind of Christian.” (Online source, emphasis mine)

This is part of the problem with continually insisting that one of the absolutes of the Christian faith must be a belief that “Scripture alone” is our guide. It sounds nice but it is not true… When people say that all we need is the Bible, it is simply not true. (Velvet Elvis, 067,068, emphasis added) …

J.C. Ryle, Standing On A Rock 

On one point of vast importance in the present day, the reader will see that I hold very decided opinions. That point is inspiration. I feel no hesitation in avowing that I believe in the plenary inspiration of every word of the original text of Holy Scripture. I hold not only that the Bible contains the Word of God, but that every jot of it was written, or brought together, by Divine inspiration, and is the Word of God…

I am content to remember that all inspiration is a miraculous operation of the Holy Ghost, and, like every operation of the Holy Ghost, must needs be mysterious. It is an operation of which not forty men in the world have been made the subjects, and the manner of which not one of the forty has described. It stands to reason that the whole question of inspiration, like everything else supernatural, must necessarily contain much that is mysterious, and much that we cannot explain.

– But the difficulties of the “plenary verbal” theory appear to me mere trifles, compared with those which surround the counter theory of “partial inspiration”… Give me the plenary, verbal theory of biblical inspiration with all its difficulties, rather than the doubt. I accept the difficulties and humbly wait for their solution. But while I wait, I am standing on a rock… 

(HT: The Sacred Sandwich)

See also:

ROB BELL RESOURCES FROM APPRISING MINISTRIES

ROB BELL IN A NUTSHELL: THE BIBLE

ROB BELL SAYS “ALL-EE IN FREE…ALMOST”

ROB BELL: “TRAMPOLINIANITY” AND THE VIRGIN BIRTH

ROB BELL MAKES ME ANGRY: A PASTORAL RESPONSE TO VELVET ELVIS

ROB BELL AND NEW AGE GURU MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

WHEN ROB BELL TELLS YOU WHAT THE BIBLE MEANS, IT IS NOT TRUE

ROB BELL CONTROVERSY OVER DOCTRINE