Rob Bell’s repainting of false teaching looks like a merger of the dialectic philosophy of Hegel, the liberalism of Rudolph Bultmann and the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth. Rob Bell has embraced these and other errors and merged them into postmodernism, an anti-Christian philosophy teaching the impossibility of absolute truth. Both postmodern 21^st century philosophy and 20^th century “modern liberalism” have influenced Rob Bell. A more appropriate title for Rob Bell’s painting, his “Velvet Elvis”, is “Postmodern Liberalism”. Rob Bell accomplishes what he sets out to do. His painting includes “every person everywhere who has asked big questions of a big God” even when their answers deny the truths of the Bible.

The false teaching that the Christian faith needs to be repainted for every culture has a long history. Sadly, these historic attacks on Christian truth are alive and well. Hegel replaced the Christian faith with declarations about a thesis always having an antithesis that results in a synthesis that becomes the new thesis in a never-ending quest for truth. Truth is redefined as the never-ending quest itself. There is no absolute truth. Truth is a constant experience of paradox. Every time you think you have truth, its opposite enters into your experience of reality. Rob Bell repaints this error. (Postmodern Liberalism: Repainting a Non-Christian Faith [I] )

Casey Freswick