Quotes from Rob Bell

What's the Best Question to Ask When You're Reading the Bible? Why did people find this important to write down?...Why did people write this down? What was going on in their world that this was important to them? Why did they feel the need to put words to this? Start with that question. Start with those questions. And see what happens.

Why didn't they just skip the whole sacrificial system all together? That would have been amazing. Just scrap the whole thing. Announce that the final sacrifice has been offered and there's no more need to do such things. Declare that the temple is going to be torn down. Proclaim that it is finished. Oh wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves, aren't we? (Please tell me you enjoyed that last paragraph.)

You dance with the Bible, but you also interrogate it. You challenge it, question it, poke it, probe it. You let it get under your skin. We read it, and we let it read us, and then we turn the gem, again, and again, and again, seeing something new over and over and over again . . .

Sometimes we've accepted rules and codes and limits without realizing it.

Some things that religious people make a big deal of are rather pointless. Avoid the insanity.

Strange, how the writer doesn't explain why Abraham leaves other than saying he hears a divine voice. Something intimate and infinite is calling to him, and he listens.

the one about Abraham leaving, is revolutionary. It's a step forward in human consciousness. You can step out of the cycle? You can leave? And head into the unknown? You can step into something that hasn't happened yet, that doesn't exist yet?

He heard something? That's the best the writer can do? That's so vague. Ambiguous. Fuzzy. Exactly. Sometimes the most powerful truths in a story are the ones that are never explicitly stated.

Your body is made up of around seventy-five trillion cells, every one of those cells containing hundreds of thousands of molecules with six feet of DNA in every cell containing over three billion letters of coding. These cells are a potent blend of matter and memory—bones and hair and blood and teeth and at the same time personality and essence and predispositions and habits.

Even the slightest tremors of bitterness can block the flow of love.

What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split. I was split. I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other ... people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn't measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head.

A church is an organization that exists for the benefit of nonmembers.