Velvet Elvis and "Heavy Petting" with Heresy

Wow! It's really crazy that today's evangelical church, instead of lamenting and repenting its abandonment of Scripture, continues to flirt with heresy -- that ancient, painted prostitute who in the shadows looks young and inviting but laughs the morning after at the disease the church has contracted from her.

Notice how Rob Bell in his recent book Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith [2005], playfully questions the necessity of the Virgin Birth while personally affirming its validity [Bell compares Biblical doctrines with the metaphor of springs underneath a trampoline]:

"What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was really just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? But what if as you study the origin of the word virgin, you discover that the word virgin in the gospel of Matthew actually comes from the book of Isaiah, and then you find out that in the Hebrew language at that time, the word virgin could mean several things. And what if you discover that in the first century being 'born of a virgin' also referred to a child whose mother became pregnant the first time she had intercourse? What if that spring was seriously questioned? Could a person keep jumping? Could a person still love God? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best way to live? Or does the whole thing fall apart?" [pp. 26-27]

This is really nothing more than "heavy petting" with heresy. Innocently maintaining that you haven't "gone all the way" won't hide the fact that the perfumed bed is only inches away.

Paul, at the end of his grand systematic theology, says it this way to his brothers and sisters in Rome:

"I appeal to you brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own appetites, and by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive." Romans 16. 17-18