St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church
Adult Education Seminar
Considering
Peter Rollins’
How (Not) to Speak of God
(Paraclete Press, 2006)
Directed by
Dr. Roger R. Easson
Sunday, October 11, 2009
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
This is the website/blog put together for Peter by his publisher. It contains an
amazing archive of his work. Highly recommended.
This is a blog I am creating to go with this class. It contains many interesting videos, interviews with Rollins, and my notes and thinking about this book.
Chapter 5
The Third Mile
The more I sit here trying to understand the sequence of these chapters, the more I am convinced there is no sequence, that this is rather a series of unrelated talks sewn together to make a book. Certainly, what we have here in chapter 5 is remarkable, but it does not seem cohesively to build on what has come before. While this is unfortunate it underscores the expectations a reader of books has about the nature of non-fiction work, that is that they should contain an argument presented in some coherent progression. That this has not happened in this book, and this is not what happens in this chapter.
This chapter has to do with what it means to live in a “Christ-like” manner and continues with more of the Derridian analytics begun in the last chapter.
He begins this discussion with the effort to make a distinction between Capital T Truth, and lowercase t, truth. Here this Truth has to do with what “some philosophers have called the ‘Real.’ Here the word ‘Real’ refers to the ultimate source of everything that is. . . . Such thinking is called metaphysical because it refers to a realm that lies beyond the reach of the physical sciences, relating to questions such as the existence and nature of God, the underlying substance of the universe . . . ” [55]. I wonder what these philosophers are thinking now as the Cern large Hadron collider built beneath the border between Switzerland and France designed to either demonstrate or rule out the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, the so called “God” Particle becomes operational next month. As I understand it the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson will go a long way to explain how matter exists, that is to say what is it that allows the building blocks of matter to cohere.
Rollins wriggles out from under this interesting issue by asserting “that it presupposes a view of knowledge and truth that shares more in common with Athens than it ever did with Jerusalem” [55].
He develops this notion as he writes, “unlike the former perspectives which refer to the ability to make substantive descriptive claims concerning the Real or reality, the Judeo-Christian view of truth is concerned with having a relationship with the Real (God) that results in us transforming reality. The emphasis is thus not on description but on transformation. . . . here truth is the ungraspable Real (objective) that transforms the individual (subjective)” [56]. Generally, I think that when a writer has to resort to the parenthetical explanation of a thing he has failed at his task of explanation. It is obvious here that Rollins has tried to conflate two arguments by this process and in doing do has made a hash of the result.
In the first place the idea that we can have a “relationship” with the Real (God) is what we call in rhetoric a personification. That is we find it more meaningful to imagine the Real as a person (entity) with which we can have a connection. It brings the abstract into the concrete world so we can imagine grasping that abstraction as if we might grasp another person in a relationship. Secondly, that the end result of this grasping is transformation suggests that whatever it is that we are now is somehow now not what we should be, hence we need to be transformed into some new thing or new kind of person.
Rollins pursues this trope of personification when he writes, “when we read that Christ is the truth and that knowing the truth will set us free, we come face to face with truth not as the objective affirmation of a proposition (as if that would set anyone free), but rather as that which arises from a life-giving encounter. Truth in Christianity is not described but experienced. . . . In other words, Truth is God and having knowledge of the Truth is evidenced, not in a doctrinal system, but in allowing that Truth to be incarnated in one’s life.”
Ok, I’m game. How are we to do that? Rollins gives us a hint at how this might work when he writes: “ . . . . knowledge of God is evidenced in a life of love rather than in the affirmation of a theoretical, dogmatic system.” Quoting John he writes, “God is Love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him” [57].
I wish at this point that Rollins had referenced C.S. Lewis who writes memorably about this idea in his book, The Four Loves, since the English word “love” is so pitifully all embracing that it is almost meaningless. Lewis makes useful distinctions among the Greek variants for the word, Affection (storge), Friendship (philia), Eros, and Charity (agapē) lost to us in Rollins’ analysis of this passage.
Rollins continues his analysis by writing: “The idea that religious truth transforms reality in such a way that it reflects the kingdom of God renders some Bible stories far more intelligible . . .” [58]. Rollins then proceeds to describe two stories where acts of deception are actually blessed by God as promoting love. The problem here is that suddenly Truth (God) gets mixed up with truthfulness (honesty) versus deception (dishonesty), which does seem to me to conflate two dissimilar things altogether. Is God honesty? I suspect this is an unhelpful explanation.
The Prejudice of love
Rollins then begins an exploration of how we read/interpret the Bible. “By seeing Jesus as an ethical teacher we approach the Bible . . . as one would read a textbook—attempting to read it in a neutral manner so as to work out how we should act. In this approach we must endeavor neither to read into the text nor interpret it, but rather to draw out from the text its precise meaning” [59]. Rollins rejects this “New Critical” approach as we expect he might from his Derridian training.
He writes: “Not only is there no such thing as a neutral interpretive space, but also the religious idea of truth demands that we should have a prejudice when reading the text: a prejudice of love. Christ himself expressed this when he healed on the Sabbath, informing those who sought to condemn him that the law was made for humanity, not humanity for the law. . . . Here Jesus did not approach the law in a neutral manner, for the law of God was never meant to be read in this way. Rather, Jesus showed that we must read it with a prejudice towards love. . . . By acknowledging that all our readings are located in a cultural context and have certain prejudices, we understand that engaging with the Bible can never mean that we simply extract meaning from it, but also that we read meaning into it. In being faithful to the text we must move away from the naïve attempt to read it from some neutral, heavenly height, and we must attempt to read it as one who has been born of God and thus born of love: for that is the prejudice of God. Here the ideal of scripture reading as a type of scientific objectivity is replaced by an approach that creatively interprets with love” [59-60].
This is at once lovely, and I suspect dangerous. So if I am convinced that I am “born of God” I may read all sorts of mischief into the text, as many have certainly done in the past and will certainly do in the future. To my way of thinking Rollins’ approach sounds lovely but is really rather mushy headed. It assumes that we mere mortals can understand what is the prejudice of God, that we can assume what Divine Love would look like, a proposition most of us would agree is troubling. For example, what if I read into the text the idea that Love meant what has been called “Tough Love” as when someone treats another person harshly or sternly with the intent to help them in the long run. I can imagine a right wingnut projecting his idea of tough love on the poor by demanding that they pick themselves up, work two or three jobs at below living wage, in order to bootstrap themselves out of poverty. Rollins here opens the text up to serious mischief, I suspect.
His analysis which follows this is even more troubling. Referencing advances in life-saving techniques during the late twentieth century which have cast up problems in medical ethics which no Bible passage can give a definitive answer he is reminded of a Buddhist story in which the Buddha instructs his followers to amend the Vedic scriptures to fit his teachings. As Rollins writes: This reinterpretation of the law was often done by those who loved Christ and sought to follow the trajectory of Christ’s teaching, for Jesus taught us not merely to read the scriptures, but to enter into a dialogue with them: a dialogue that is saturated and directed by love” [62].
Rollins use of the Gosta-Gavras’ film Amen as an illustration of this principle has made me go out and order it. It is a powerful examination of this principle in the trauma of the Jewish Holocaust: as Rollins writes: “Amen asks a more radical question, namely, ‘would you kill your beliefs?’ In other words, would you be prepared to give up your religious tradition in order to affirm that tradition? Can you give up the very thing you would die to protect, not because of something even more powerful, but rather because of another’s suffering” [63]?
“Amidst the fires,” Rollins summarizes, “of the Jewish persecution [the central figure of the film finds his] Christian beliefs are subverted by the belief that Christ gave up all for the powerless. And so this priest gives up his Christianity precisely in order to retain his Christianity. It is the very narrative he loves which requires this exodus from the narrative—losing his soul while perhaps, unintentionally, finding it” [64].
Ethics and Love
I like very much what Rollins is saying here in his analysis of how we are to read sacred texts. “This . . . reading ensues that we are never absolved from the difficult job of making moral decision. [It] requires not only a commitment to listening to and serving the people we meet, but also a deeps respect for the Christian tradition. We must engage with our religious tradition, for it acts as a compass that enables us to navigate the world. Yet we must combine this compass reading with a knowledge of the terrain in which we find ourselves and a deep love in order to work out which way we must travel. Our interpretations of the Bible must then be understood more as temporary shelters than eternal structures. We never finish reading the Bible but always find ourselves standing on its threshold, ready to read again. Thus we can never rest easy, believing that we have discovered the foundations that act as a key for working out what we must do in different situations: for the only clear foundation laid down by Jesus was the law of love. This love demands that we use the scriptures not as an ethical textbook but rather as a text that extrapolates the Christ-like way of living in the world” [64].
I like Rollins’ inadvertent use of the term “deep love.” Perhaps he is stretching the idea of love into a new territory like the term “deep time” stretches our understanding of time. Deep love in this way would become a kind of transforming love beyond Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity into a kind of love that subverts the very ego structures on which our personalities depend. It would become a very dangerous kind of love indeed, dangerous and wondrous all at the same time.
From Knowledge to love: reading from right to left.
Now all of a sudden we drop this discussion to start a new discussion about the nature of heresy and orthodoxy, that is wrong belief and right belief. I find myself marveling at where Rollins takes us in this conversation—certainly not where I thought we were going. Ultimately, Rollins asserts that right belief or wrong belief has nothing to do with the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the community of believers but rather it has more to do with the efficacy of the belief community in facilitating the believer’s transformation into a more Christ-like individual.
He writes: “we must judge our various traditions according to whether they tend towards freeing their congregation from their burdens, helping them to transform into more Christ-like individuals. However, if a church is not helping in our transformation, then the problem need not be the church’s or our own; rather this may simply be the wrong context for us to be in. Rather than encouraging people to join our community . . . we ought to be trying to help people find the right community that will aid them in their further conversion” [67].
Somehow I doubt traditional evangelists would find this appealing even though it is certainly the right approach. This is obviously not the way to increase the number of “pew sitters” or to augment the “tithing units” in the church.
Acts of Love
Here Rollins ruminates on the idea that “true love offers everything as a gift rather than as an exchange (where we selfishly expect something in return), then we must wonder if we have ever really given a gift” [68-69]. Returning finally to Derrida he writes “Derrida . . . claimed that the perfect gift would have a third criteria: namely that the giver would not know that he or she had given it.” Here we are presented with three criteria for the perfect, loving gift—that is, one that we would not use in order to get a reward: (1) the receiver does not know he or she has been given a gift; (2) nothing is actually given (3) the giver does not know he or she has given anything.”
Recognizing that this sounds perfectly ridiculous Rollins hastens to add: “For a love that is born from God is a love that gives with the same reflex as that which causes . . . the heart to beat” or the breath to exhale. “The love that arises from God is a love that loves anonymously, a love that acts without such self-centered reflections, that gives without thought” [70].
It is very interesting to see Rollins quote Meister Eckhart here as Eckhart discusses acts of perfect . . . virtue. Are we to read this as yet another extension of what Rollins is stretching the word “deep love” to mean? Somehow I suspect virtue and Christ-like love are different beasts.
Even so Rollins takes the next step and asks us, “So what can we do?”
Letting go
Rollins has some very mystical notion here: “This underlying love cannot be worked up but is gained only as we give up. To be born of God is to be born of love. Here we come into contact again with Meister Eckhart, who claims that we must let go of ourselves in such a manner that we can become a dwelling-place in which God can reside and from which God can flow. Our own works and beliefs are here dethroned by the enthronement of God. What is important for Eckhart is not to think correctly, or to work hard, but rather to engage in a type of ego-death by which the divine is invited to enter the place which we have laid down. The hope is that in doing so love will flow from us” [71].
Just how we are to go about doing this Rollins does not indicate. Ego death or the death of the false self as we saw as one of the goals of Lectio Divina, seem to be pretty similar things.
Rollins goes on to write: “To affirm the approach that I am advocating means that we must accept that to be a Christian is to be born of love, transformed by love, and committed to transforming the world with love. This is not done by working ourselves up and trying to find the right way of thinking and acting, but rather in letting go and opening up to the transformative power of God. In so doing . . . we will become the iconic spaces in which God is made manifest in the world” [71].
This is all very well and good, as the saying goes, but what I find missing here is the practice that will make this real in the life of the individual. How are we to practice letting go. It cannot be as easy as flipping a switch just behind our left ears. “Letting go,” as Rollins puts it, has been the goal of many spiritual practices: Zen Meditation, Yoga, Lectio Divina, Fixed Hour prayer, Centering Prayer to name only a few of these. Letting go is a well known goal of the spiritual life and while Buddhists have long ago recognized that it could be achieved intellectually—Mahayana Buddhism embraces this idea—but it does not come without considerable work, work that Rollins has not begin to define for us.
In what follows, Rollins begins to offer us a working out of some of these ideas in services that might be transformative in their effect on those who participate. It remains for us to explore these services to see if what Rollins proposes does in fact have the desired effect.
