Rob Bell to start a TV show?

I just found this post from Jesus Creed that says Rob Bell is getting ready to move to L.A. to begin work on a spiritually themed TV show. It's also going to be somewhat biographical of Bell. As someone who has been a big supporter and defender of Bell and who has been enriched by his books and sermons, I'm not that excited about this. Definitely not something BIlly Graham would do. For whatever reason he feels this is the next proper step, I hope that it is and that God blesses this action. That said, every ounce of literature loving, anti-consumerist, anti-TBN, anti-vague spirituality... ness, does NOT want to see this happen. Good luck, Bell. We'll always have Velvet Elvis.

Enthusiasm and the Spirit? (via The Immanent Frame)

A blog that I stumbled upon a few months ago, called The Immanent Frame, recently posed a question; What comes to mind when you think of spirituality? Attached to the very brief article is a description of a project the blog is hosting with another blog where it asks artists, writers and scholars what they think of when it comes to spirituality. The first post on that website is titled "Enthusiasm" and I think it's a great look at the way in which the idea of "letting oneself go" to a non rational agent of some form has been discursively suppressed. What strikes me about this is that, while highly academic and not explicitly Christian, I think it is something to keep in the back of your mind with the recent influx of "Spirit led" Christianity in the world sphere. The money passage for me, in this regard, comes from a quotation of John Wesley;

Hume’s contemporary, John Wesley, argued that if enthusiasm was taken to mean “a divine impulse or impression, superior to all the natural faculties,” which for a brief time suspends reason and the other senses, then:

"both the Prophets of old, and the Apostles, were proper enthusiasts; being, at diverse times, so filled with the Spirit, and so influenced by Him who dwelt in their hearts, that the exercise of their own reason, their senses, and all their natural faculties, being suspended, they were wholly actuated by the power of God, and “spake” only “as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”

But this, Wesley notes, is not what most of his contemporaries meant by enthusiasm. Instead, they meant by it a kind of madness, a specifically religious madness, in which the sound mind preserved by true religion was destroyed. The enthusiast, for Wesley, is the person who believes he has grace when he does not, or who understands herself to be a Christian when she is not. Enthusiasm is a kind of self-deception against which Wesley must warn those to whom he preaches. For Wesley the criteria for distinguishing between what we might call true and false enthusiasm, or between true religion and enthusiasm, are themselves spiritual.

It's an incredibly complex quote and I think, in one sense, it rings very true with what the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians (roughly chapters 12-14) regarding the gifts of the Spirit; that there are many different aspects of the Spirit, but that there are litmus tests and that a Christian must be willing to discern between them. While Amy Hollywood is interested in charting the course of the limiting and evolving ideas of enthusiasm, with a religious background, I think in some sense her words can give us a unique insight into why perhaps there has been a "quieting of the Spirit," in Christian history. This in turn can potentially help us to see why there has been a hesitancy in Western Christianity to engage fully with a Pentecostal and Charismatic notion of faith. I will contend though that I am taking Hollywood's argument a tad further, but I think it is warranted.

I write this blog post largely because, as a non-Pentecostal/Charismatic Christian*, I have had that branch of Christianity come into my view in many ways recently. This is my attempt to deal with the issues in some sense, but also to hopefully start some dialogue on the nature of what is means to be a "Spirit led Christian."


 *I do realize there is an issue with using Pentecostal/Charismatic interchangeably; however, for the sake of space and meandering blog posts, I don't want to get into it here.