The Internet can be a very ugly place.
On Saturday, Justin Taylor posted to his blog about Rob Bell’s movement into universalism. The post centered on thoughts about Bell’s new book Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Taylor reflected on some chapters that he’d read and on a video released to promote the book. Ultimately Taylor concluded that Bell is a universalist and that Bell “is moving farther and farther away from anything resembling biblical Christianity”.
The post caught like a wild fire and Rob Bell ended up as a trending topic on Twitter. The post has been recommended over 18,000 times on Facebook and there are nearly 1,000 comments on the post. Perhaps more dangerous than Bell’s alleged universalism, is the tenor of the conversation surrounding it.
Once the post began to spread, both proponents and opponents of Rob Bell took to their keyboards to defend their position. Much like the battle scene at Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers, adversaries were launching arrows at each other through tweets and Facebook status updates. Then, once the arrows had been exhausted, the hand-to-hand combat of commenting, replying and trolling commenced. And once the smoke had cleared, it was difficult to tell who, if anyone, had won amidst all the carnage and collateral damage.
And now, because of the advent and accessibility of social media, there is a lot more collateral damage.
Before, our ability to share our thoughts and ideas was limited to the number of people we could actually tell. If I thought that Rick Warren was a heretic I could tell my friends and as a group we could have a discussion. Any disagreements in that discussion would be handled in a face-to-face context. That context would provide the opportunity for an actual conversation, the ability to resolve the conflict and the potential to strengthen the relationship.
When we take to comment boards, Twitter and Facebook to have that conversation, though, we still have the disagreements but no opportunity to move beyond them. When that kind of one-sided, unharmonious conversation happens among Christians, it puts our discord and vitriol on display for the entire world to see. Unfortunately this commonplace behavior is a far cry from Jesus’ desire for us: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
It is difficult to love one another when we’re calling each other names, trying to poke holes in each other’s arguments and inflexibly standing upon either side’s rhetoric.
As followers of Jesus we’re going to disagree. If there’s any constant in the history of the church, it’s our ability to disagree. How we disagree, though, speaks volumes to a watching world. If we can disagree with grace and compassion, then we will show the world the power of Jesus to not only transform people at their best, but at their worst as well. But if our disagreements are marked by discord and vitriol, then our actions will do more harm that whatever it is we were disagreeing about in the first place.
I am all for pursuing right doctrine but we cannot allow the pursuit to keep us from the right practice of that doctrine – online or anywhere else.
Even when disagreeing, how can Christians show Christ’s love?
interesting. this is evidence of hyperbolic talk on many topics. from obama being a muslim to the blizzard on the east coast.
It’s the phenomenon of talking about the weather. Before people would only talk about the weather when interacting with another human being. Now, people can talk about the weather whenever they want. So an inherently boring topic, which was once relegated to awkward small talk, is now commonplace.