Commentary on the third Chapter of Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Talk of God

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, September 27, 2009

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

 http://peterrollins.net/blog/

This is the website/blog put together for Rollins by his publisher. It contains an amazing archive of his work and is constantly evolving with new materials.  Highly recommended.

http://rollinsbedlam.blogspot.com/

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 3 

A/theology as icon

Rollins reviews the progress so far as having explored two failed avenues: the certitude characterizing God franchises who think they know, and the alienation of defeatists who have given up on the very idea of God. He offers a third option that takes us beyond these into the concept of hypernymity which brings  the reader “into an awareness of his or her limitations and [into] a space of knowledgeable ignorance. Here the religious participant is addressed, transformed and grasped by that which they cannot contain: they feel themselves to be the subject of an object that cannot be objectified” [31].

If the general reader can look beyond this unfortunate hyper-philosophical language, they are likely to discover a really bold effort to define something new after two thousand years of plowing this Christian theological ground. The challenge, of course, is to overcome denominational barriers while at the same time maintaining denominational differences. Obviously, this is one of those proverbial having-the-cake-and-eating-it-too occasions. 

As Rollins puts it somewhat more accessibly: “This emerging a/theology can thus be described as a genuinely ecumenical device for by unsettling and decentering any idea of a one, true interpretation held by one group over and against all the others, a network of bridges is formed between different interpretative communities who acknowledge what we are all engaged in an interpretive process which can never do justice to the revelation itself” [31].

This discussion is postmodern language shredding at its best worst, I fear.  As when he says circularly that “speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God” [32].   Of what is this not true? Speaking of Truth is never speaking of truth but only ever speaking about our understanding of truth. Pick any abstraction and the same can be said of it and so on, and so on, and so on.

I like what he says later, however, when speaking of the “hallowed mystery” itself. This approach he writes, “maintains a conceptual distance between ourselves and God, one which approaches the divine mystery as something to be transformed by rather than solved.”   This is of course, the sticky wicket, as the British say when describing a difficult circumstance where unpredictability is the chief problem.  Transformation is never an easy thing as the Zen men have found in Renzi Zen especially. There the Zen Koan is used in a particularly frustrating discipline to disrupt the normal expectations of the linear and rational thinking process. The end result is what they call Zen sickness where the student is rendered slightly and sometimes not so slightly mad.  The theory goes that the mind in the process of transformation is then carefully managed by adepts so as to produce a particular and recognizable transformation. The Buddhist understanding of the psychology of transformation is profound and well documented. It is perhaps the most sophisticated understanding of religious transformation available to students of religion.   If transformation of the worshiper is the goal of this emerging conversation, then its practitioners had better be aware of the difficulties and psychological disturbances inherent in religious transformation.

One particular implication comes to mind, given the Zen experience. That is that the Zen audience is as Milton said, “a fit audience though few.”  Transformation is the hoped for consequence of most religions, but it is achieved by only the devoted and zealous few because it is at once so disruptive and intrusive.  How do we know that the transformation that takes place is a productive one rather than a destructive one?  Rollins does not here address the mechanism of transformation, nor even its psychology. Perhaps he will elsewhere.

Rollins’ discussion of doubt is one of the most intriguing elements of this chapter as his treatment is so counter to traditional thinking about doubt.

Doubt, Rollins says “can be seen as an inevitable aspect of our humanity but also can be celebrated as a vital part of faith. . . . it is only in the midst of undecidability that real decisions can be made” [33]. 

I am very interested in the way he discusses the decision to marry in which doubt provides the context out of which real decision occurs and real love is tested.  “Love will say yes regardless of uncertainty” [34].    Rollins goes on to write “To decide for marriage knowing that all manner of things may conspire against the union is to make a truly daring and authentic decision.”

The problem with this analogy is that the physical bond between a mated/ing pair which propels the pair into this decision is not wholly an intellectual thing nor is it much like the bond between the believer and his/her God.  The intellect plays some role in marriage I am sure, but there is also an intense physical—dare we say chemical bond. Helen Fisher, anthropologist and well-known love researcher from Rutgers University, identifies two chemicals, dopamine the pleasure chemical which produces the feeling of bliss and Norepinephrine which is similar to adrenaline produces the “racing heart and excitement produce elation, intense energy, sleeplessness, craving, loss of appetite and focused attention.”  She also says, "The human body releases the cocktail of love rapture only when certain conditions are met and ... men more readily produce it than women, because of their more visual nature" [http://people.howstuffworks.com/love6.htm]. 

Now if love of God could replicate the chemical stew rushing through the body of the bonded pair which leads them to passion, and to marriage potentially, that would be a potent event. Such ecstatic things have happened in early Christianity. Take for instance Bernini's extraordinary sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila portrays that supreme moment when an angel with a flaming golden arrow pierced her heart repeatedly. It was the caressing of soul by God. In Hindu tradition there is an enormous literature in which the Beloved is at the center of spiritual discipline. The Bhakti Poet Mirabai is known for her ecstatic lyrics as in this famous one.

Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,
kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night.

If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,
I would have asked to be born a fish in this life.
If we could reach Him through nothing but berries and wild nuts
then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came from the womb!

If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves
then the goats would surely get to the Holy One before us!
If the worship of stone statues could bring us all the way,
I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.

My point is that while Rollins’ analogy may not work exactly, it does point to a significant tradition across religious traditions which Emerging Christianity might learn from.

Rollins calls the encounter of doubt which does not cause the renunciation of faith but instead uses it to affirm it a “Holy Saturday Event” drawing another analogy to the Easter Week testimony of the early Christian women who witnessed the murder of their teacher and yet did not lose faith.  I say women, because many scholars believe the men had mostly fled abandoning Jesus to his fate on the cross out of terror of Roman persecution. Rollins writes “A faith that can only exist in the light of victory and certainty is one which really affirms the self while pretending to affirm Christ, for it only follows Jesus in the belief that Jesus has conquered death” [34].  This is important reasoning I think, difficult but important.

“Yet a faith that can look at the horror of the cross and still say ‘yes’ is one that says ‘no’ to the self in saying ‘yes’ to Christ. . . . Only a genuine faith can embrace doubt, for such a faith does not act because of a self interested reason . . . but acts simply because it must.”

Then there is this true golden insight: “the believer ought to acknowledge and even celebrate the dark night of the soul, understanding that this is not a threatening darkness which conceals an enemy but rather is the intimate darkness within which we embrace our faith. For when we can say that we will follow God regardless of the uncertainty in-volved in such a decision, then real faith is born—for love acts not whenever a certain set of criteria has been met, but rather because it is in the nature of love to act” [34-5].

Rollins’ discussion of Power Discourses is really illuminating I think. In the section titled: “The end of apologetics” Rollins reviews the tradition of the formal justification or defense of doctrine.  His discussion of the “word and wonder” arguments is really useful.  On the one hand, the word apologetic tries to use reason to logically convince the reader/listener that the case for Christianity is compelling and unquestionably rational.  On the other, the wonder apologetic uses the miracle stories to demonstrate the Divine presence within the faith.   It is against these, Rollins argues, “that the emerging community must take its stand, offering instead a genuinely Christ-like and effective alternative” [35].

Against these strategies, Rollins points out that Paul uses what might be called the “aroma” discourse.  In this Paul is offering not “wise and persuasive words” but “a demonstration of the Spirit’s power . . . on God’s Power” [1 Corinthians 2.1-5]. By this Paul is focusing on the example of his own life, a life lived in humility and in obedience to the crucified Christ.  

Rollins’ example of the difference between a hint and an order is useful. An order given by an authority figure must be obeyed while a hint “speaks to the heart and will only be heard by those with a sensitive and open ear” [37].

His discussion of the idea of Iconic God-talk is useful. He writes “To treat something as an Icon is to view particular words, images or experiences, as aids in contemplation of that which cannot be reduced to words, images or experience. Not only this but an Icon represents a place where God touches Humanity” [38]. 

The discussion that follows where Rollins’ explores three ways of experiencing other people’s flesh is most illuminating. Rollins describes the first way as the way of lust, the second way as the way of indifference, and the third way as the way of love.  This discussion is quite wonderful. But I think it omits something interesting. 

It is said that Mother Theresa of Calcutta taught her sisters of the Missionaries of Charity at the abandoned Hindu temple she converted into a hospice called the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a beautiful way of looking at the flesh of those who were suffering their last agonies.  She taught them not to see the wounded and putrefying flesh of the patient but to visualize it as the wounded and bleeding flesh of our Lord.  They were unable to minister to our Lord after he was scourged or when he was nailed to the cross, but they can visualize his suffering body in the broken bodies lying before them.  So in this way the flesh of the dying patient becomes itself a vision of Christ and their ministrations to that dying patient becomes their offerings of succor and healing to the beloved himself.  The flesh becomes then a magical substance which transports the contemplative to another time and place—to the foot of the cross kneeling before the broken body of our lord.

A/theology as Transformative

Here I think Rollins is searching for something he has not quite caught hold of.

That is that the union with God is not something that strikes us as a lightning bolt out of nothing.  The union with God is the result of practicing a particular discipline, whether it be lectio divina, centering prayer, or the prayers of the divine hours to name a few of the better known disciplines, or for that matter the sitting meditation of Zen or even the asanas of Yoga.  This discipline requires serious daily practice where over time—some suggest 10,000 hours is required for expert performance—the opening to the divine becomes regular and intense.  The holy leisure such practice requires has been the province of monastic communities in the main but more and more lay communities are beginning to appear which offer this possibility.  If transformation is what the emerging conversation seeks, then there is a rich tradition of spiritual disciplines across many traditions which provide powerful avenues which should be explored.

I like very much what Rollins is driving at in this section in his discussion of Evangelism.  I for one have always been very suspicious of evangelism as practiced in many of our American God franchises.  He writes: “In contrast to the view that evangelism is that which gives an answer for those who are seeking, we must have faith to believe that those who seek will find for themselves” [40].

“The emerging community,” he writes “is in a unique place to embrace a type of communication that opens up thought by asking questions and celebrating complexity.”  I want to like what Rollins writes when he says “The silence that is part of God-talk is not the silence of banality, indifference or ignorance but one that stands in awe of God” [41].

But I am troubled by his juxtaposing quotations from Jean Luc Marion (born 3 July 1946) who is among the best-known living philosophers in France, with that from Saint Gregory Palamas (1296 - 1359) who was a monk of Mount Athos in Greece and later the Archbishop of Thessaloniki writing at the height of the black plague in Europe as if what they are saying is part of the same discourse on silence.  Surely we have come a great distance from St. Gregory’s declaration that “The super-essential nature of God is not a subject for speech, thought or even contemplation, for it is far removed from all that exists [it is] incomprehensible, ineffable to all forever.” Moreover, that is not at all what Marion seems to be saying.

We have to remember that we live in a time when the amount of knowledge we have about the world is doubling every 24 months.  The contemporary explosion of new word coinage is unprecedented.  We have learned more about anatomy and physiology in the last 40 years than we knew in the preceding 4,000 years, and the same can be said of many other sciences as well. Given this deluge of awareness and capability I have great difficulty with the medieval command uttered in the midst of the carnage of the Black Death to hold anything “incomprehensible and ineffable forever,” as much must have seemed to him at the time.

I am frustrated by the discussion surrounding what Rollins calls but does not well describe as the “Christ Event.”  Rollins writes: “the faithful attempt to create a space where the Christ Event is encouraged to arrive both in themselves and in others. The religious individual tears out all the idolatrous ideas that have impregnated the womb of his or her being, becoming like Mary, so that the Christ-event can be conceived within him or her—an event whose transformative power is matched only by its impenetrable mystery” [41]. And with that Rollins leaves this pungent metaphor and curious language undeveloped. Somewhere is an audience who knows in great detail what the “Christ Event” is as he describes it.  Here we have yet another of these hot potatoes that Rollins drops in our laps as if we should all know exactly what they mean.

Regardless of this faux pas, what follows is nearly magical. Rollins writes “Our approach must be a powerless one which employs words as a way of saying that we have been left utter breathless by a beauty that surpasses all words. This does not mean we have to remain silent, far from it.  The desire to get beyond language forces us to stretch language to its very limits. As Samuel Beckett once commented, we use words in order to tear through them and glimpse what lies beneath [42].

I love what he says when he writes, “When we speak into the void, we create lifeless idols; when God speaks into the void, the void teams with life.”