Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has penned a letter to Rob Bell:
Here’s what I’m driving at: all of your instincts are healthy, all of your wants to break out of narrow theological prisons are good, all of your urges to reach out to the world at large are good, and your talents are certainly good, and God wants you to use them for his greater glory. But I do think they can drive you astray if they are not–I’m going to use a bad-sounding word here–bound by a Tradition. Not a
tradition. A Tradition. “The life of the Spirit within the Church,” as Vladimir Lossky defined it. The Tradition that liberates us not by giving us all the answers but by putting us on the right path. What I’m saying, Rob, is that you need to convert to Catholicism.
I know it may sound crazy. Catholicism sounds like the most rigid religion on Earth, with all these dogmatic formulae, this thousand-plus-page catechism that you must not deviate from. And yeah, to some people it’s only that. But the living Tradition of the Church, as Augustine said, is a beauty ever ancient and ever new. It’s the Tradition that leads you to ask new and right questions. It’s the Tradition that got Hans Urs von Balthasar and so many others to find new things to write even though it seemed that everything had been written, and Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa to build outposts of the Kingdom on Earth. The Tradition is less like a straitjacket than an arsenal: it’s all these cool new things at your disposal to, like, blow stuff up. To light a fire.
But see, here’s the even more important thing: if God is who the Bible says he is, then he is nothing if not Emmanuel. He is the God-with-us. And I don’t understand how that works if it’s not God-always-with-us. I’m talking about the Eucharist here. If there’s anything crazier than the idea that God, the all-holy, all-transcendent, who would become and truly become a man and die on the Cross, then it’s the idea that He would become, and truly become bread and wine. Not symbolically become, not abstractly become, not kinda-become, but truly, fully become, which is what the Catholic Church says and what the early Christians believed (see Ignatius of Antioch). If God is Emmanuel, if Jesus is the alpha and the omega, which doesn’t just mean “everything” but “the biggest and the smallest“, then he is not just “spiritually present” the way he is spiritually present in a beautiful sunset or a symphony or this couch, although he is. He is also trulypresent in the Eucharist. Just like he was not just “spiritually present” on the Cross but he was an actual being of flesh and blood, naked, beaten up, deformed, “despised and rejected of men”, utterly abandoned and truly present.
And if Jesus is who he says he is, then all our lives must be about getting closer to him, right? And if the Eucharist is what Jesus says it is (Jn 6, phagein, trogein, etc.) then that’s about the most explosive thing we can imagine, and we need to do everything we can to get it, right?
Swim the Tiber, Rob. I know it sounds crazy. But the Bible also teaches us that right almost always sounds crazy.
There's much, much more.
Read it and consider that maybe, just maybe, it's a letter written not just to Rob Bell but... to you.
Carry on.