From my “hippie” days prior to conversion in 1973, I
remember rock legend Bob Dylan (1941- ) (real name Robert Zimmerman) very
well. It was in 1962 that Dylan legally changed his name and produced his
debut album. His famous song “The Times They Are A-Changin” appeared in
1964. I had started listening to rock music intently in the early 1960s, and
I was consumed with that type of music until I was saved in 1973. That was the heyday of Dylan’s career, and I still
recall the haunting, sensual nature of his music. He helped to popularize
the merging of folk and rock music and sang some very immoral songs as well
as songs with pacifistic, civil rights, socialistic, humanistic, aHis songs
posed nd New Age themes. He was one of the chief poets of the ’60s rock
generation. His songs asked many interesting
questions, but he had no answers. In
“Blowing in the Wind,” he asked such things as,
“How many roads must a man walk down before he is
called a man?” What is the answer? “The answer, my friends, is blowing in
the wind...”
What does that mean? It means he
doesn’t know the answer and he is not sure anyone knows the answer. Sadly,
that is the philosophy of most of Dylan’s fans because they have rejected
the Bible.
Dylan’s vast influence has been anything but
wholesome and godly. It was Dylan who introduced the
Beatles to marijuana (Peter Brown, The Love You Make: An Insider’s
Story of the Beatles). Dylan “went through some profound drug experiences
during 1964-5, taking up Baudelair’s formula for immortality: ‘A poet makes
himself a seer by a long prodigious and rational disordering of the senses.’
He &Mac183; tried just about everything he could to
‘open his head’ as biographer Tony Scaduto puts it” (Waiting for the
Man, p. 144). Many of Dylan’s songs were about
drugs, including “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” “Subterranean Homesick
Blues,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
There was even violence at some
Dylan concerts. For example, in Slane, Ireland, in July 1984, the police had
to barricade themselves inside their station as mobs of Dylan fans besieged
them, rioting, breaking windows, and overturning cars.
Dylan’s backup group, which was known only as the Band,
was formerly called Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. They “had a reputation for pill popping, whoring, and brawling that
was second to none” (Robert Palmer, Rock & Roll an Unruly
History, p. 3).
The cover to Dylan’s Desire album
(1976) depicts him smoking marijuana in one corner, a black magic tarot card
in another corner, and a huge Buddha in the bottom corner. Next to the
Buddha are the words: “I have a brother or two and a whole lot of Karma to
burn Isis and the moon shine on me” (Muncy, The Role of Rock, p.
167).
Dylan divorced his wife Sara Lowndes in 1977, after
seven years of marriage.
In 1978, Dylan attended
a home Bible study with girlfriend Mary Alice. She had recently
“re-dedicated her life to Christ” and was concerned that she was living with an unsaved man who was not her
husband. She invited two assistant pastors from the Hollywood
Vineyard Church (associated with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship under the
leadership of the late John Wimber) to visit Dylan’s home. Dylan’s testimony was as follows:
“One thing led to another ... until
I had this feeling, this vision and feeling. I truly had a
born-again experience, if you want to call it that. It’s an over-used
term, but it’s something that people can relate to” (Steve Turner, Hungry
for Heaven, p. 160, citing a November 1980 interview with Robert Hillburn
of the Los Angeles Times).
From this testimony, we can see the influence of false
Vineyard theology, which focuses on experiential feelings, visions, voices,
personal prophecies, healing, tongues, spirit slayings, and such things.
This experiential-oriented theology does not produce stability in the
Christian life. Dylan spent three and a half months at the Vineyard church’s
School of Discipleship, and his next three albums, Slow Train Coming (1979),
Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981), were gospel albums of
sorts.
Dylan soon repudiated any claim to the
Christian faith and went back to his standard rock music. Dylan never
attended church regularly and soon quite altogether. Even rock historian Steve Turner, who has attempted to justify
Dylan’s apostasy, admits:
“The womanizing and drunkenness
that Dylan once saw as evidence of the old life have apparently continued
almost uninterrupted” (Turner, “Watered Down Love,” Christianity
Today, May 21, 2001).
Dylan’s 1983 album was titled Infidels. The July 21, 1983, issue of the Washington Post noted that
Dylan believes in reincarnation and that “everyone is born knowing the
truth.” An article in the San Luis Obispo (California) Register for
March 16, 1983, quoted Dylan as saying:
“Whoever said I was Christian? Like
Gandhi, I’m Christian, I’m Jewish, I’m a Moslem, I’m a Hindu. I am a
humanist.”
In recent years, Dylan has practiced
Lubavitch Hasidism, an ultra-orthodox form of Judaism, suggesting he has
returned to his Jewish roots.
In September 1997, Dylan
performed before Pope John Paul II at a Roman Catholic youth festival in
Bologna, Italy. A crowd of 300,000 young people attended the festival. The
56-year-old Dylan sang two songs directly to the Pope. Dylan then took off
his cowboy hat and bowed before him. The Catholic organizer of the festival,
Cardinal Ernesto Vecchi, said that he had invited Dylan because he is the
“representative of the best type of rock” and “he has a spiritual
nature.”
David Blue, who played with Country Joe & the Fish and
who toured with Dylan as part of the Rolling Thunder Revue, died in 1982 at
age 41 of a heart attack while jogging. Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager
during the 1960s, died in 1986 at age 39 of a heart attack.
(David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service,
P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, [EMAIL PROTECTED]) -
