Commentary for Chapter 2 of Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Speak 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 20, 2009

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

http://peterrollins.net/blog/

This is the website/blog put together for Peter by his publisher. It contains an

amazing archive of his work.  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 2 

The Aftermath of Theology

The dictionary definition of Aftermath is interesting and shows something of the importance of unpacking metaphors. Accordingly we find that an Aftermath is something that results or follows from an event, esp. one of a disastrous or unfortunate nature; consequence: the aftermath of war; the aftermath of the flood.

So what are we to do with this idea of “the aftermath of God?” Rollins writes: “While our religious traditions may not define God, they can be seen to arise in the aftermath of God, both as a means of provisionally understanding what has occurred in the life of a person or community that has been impacted, and as a response to God.   I know that there is a way of speaking about the encounter with God as if it is a disaster, a calamity or shock that blows away what you had been and awakens in you a new more Godly self.  Our attempts to explain this kind of violent paradigmatic shift may well be described as an aftermath theology.  


There is a story that might shed some light on this aftermath of God notion.  So it goes that there were five Rabbis at prayer one day when a Roman Centurian accosts them with a demand from the Emperor.  He wanted a new mosaic at his palace to contain a portrait of the Jewish God and needed to know what God looked like.  Well, it is forbidden to make  images of God so the Rabbis sought to do some research and so delay the request. They offered to write the most boring prayer in the world which each of them would recite five times a day. Surely God would tire of hearing these prayers and show himself.  So for five years the Rabbis offered this prayer five times a day. As they predicted, God tired of this boring prayer and manifested himself.  The first Rabbi fell down dead.  The second Rabbi went stark raving mad, tore off his robes and ran into street. The third Rabbi looked around and said, "see ya, I'm off to India to become a Hindu." The fourth Rabbi said "I didn't see anything. Did  you see anything? I saw nothing at all." The last Rabbi, said, "well doing all this research was totally unnecessary, I knew that God was an over weight dark haired guy with a big white beard, just like me."

Nevertheless, this is as a metaphor neither necessary nor does it describe the encounter all of us have to have had with God.  Are we to imagine that theology is necessary to explain some  kind of personal altered state of consciousness? Do we need theology only after a calamity has occurred? Do we need theology to explain why bad things happen to good people, as the title of the best seller would have it?  Do we need to appease God so his terrible swift sword does not visit us with more disaster?  Is the nature of our worship primarily an acknowledgement that things get out of hand and we need a divine hand to put them back in order again?   Frankly, I am not too happy that this hot potato has been dropped in our laps with so little explanation or discussion in this chapter, since the aftermath of God does not necessarily seem to be the central focus of this chapter.

What does seem to be the central focus of this chapter is the old chestnut of the failure of language to describe that which is beyond language by definition: God.  I take Rollins' point that some of the God franchises in our community put a great deal of faith in their doctrinal statements seeing them as essentially statements that are not to be questioned.  Our own Anglican Creed is one of these. Not a few good people have perished on the bloody sword of this creed, not so many recently as anciently. But nevertheless there was a time when brightly burnished Roman steel put the fine point to the significance of this creed.  We have experienced schism and fracture in the community of the faithful over foolish distinctions, not unlike the Lilliputian squabble over whether to open the egg from the big end or the narrow end.

Rollins in this chapter is a bit guilty of speaking to his academic colleagues and neglecting the general reader with his use of hyper philosophical language. For example Rollins writes:  “The idea is that God out to be understood as radically transcendent, not because God is somehow distant  and remote  from us but precisely because God is immanent.”  The great Sufi Poet Kabir was so much better at saying this:  Kabir writes

Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
you will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine
rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding
around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but
vegetables.

When you really look for me, you will see me
instantly --
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.

Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.

 Or this

Within this earthen vessel are bowers and groves,

and within it is the Creator:
Within this vessel are the seven oceans

and the unnumbered stars.
The touchstone and the jewel-appraiser are within;
      and within this vessel the Eternal soundeth,

and the spring wells up.
Kabîr says:

"Listen to me, my Friend

My beloved Lord is within."

What Rollins is trying to say is not well said in prose of any kind. It is the province of poetry. Only poetry can take language beyond language where he seems to want to go.

Rollins persists. He writes: “In the same way that the sun blinds the one who looks directly at its light, so God’s incoming blinds our intellect. In this way the God who is testified to in the Judeo-Christian tradition saturates our understanding with a blinding presence. This type of transcendent-immanence can be described as hypernymity. While anonymity offers too little  information for our understanding to  grasp . . . hypernymity gives us far too much information. Instead of being limited by the poverty of absence we are short-circuited by the excess of presence”” [24].

Hypernymity indeed. Do we really need such jargon? In the first place we should understand that transcendent-immanence is a paradox. That is to say that which is outside of consciousness beyond the universe is at once inside the universe and inside ourselves.  As Rollins writes: “Immanence and transcendence are one and the same point. [25]. 

Kabir puts it this way

Between the poles of the conscious and the unconscious,

there has the mind made a swing:
Thereon hang all beings and all worlds,

and that swing never ceases its sway.

Millions of beings are there:

the sun and the moon in their courses are there:
Millions of ages pass, and the swing goes on.

All swing! the sky and the earth and the air and the water;

and the Lord Himself taking form:
And the sight of this has made Kabîr a servant.

I love his discussion of the Russian hole worshipers. Who knew such madmen were loose in Orthodox Christianity?

I think his discussion in “Christianity as a/theistic” is really confusing the point.  We have to remember that much of what Rollins is an approach reflecting the work of early Christian thinkers such as Justin Martyr, St. Pantaneus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Gregory of Nyssa.  Between these writers and ourselves lies an extraordinary abyss that Rollins conveniently ignores to our peril. That is the abyss between the Ptolemaic system of astronomy and the modern Copernican system, a system developed and extended by generations of great modern astronomers and an enormous number of technological generations. 

In fact, why Rollins turns to these ancient church fathers is puzzling and seemingly self-contradictory. In an earlier chapter Rollins wrote: “In the wake of these [Postmodern] thinkers many have claimed that the only way to think about reality is in terms of a human construct that is formed purely from a complex network of social interactions” [10].  The immediate response of many in the Western church was to reject this outright and flee back into the naiveté that existed before all this calamity occurred.

It would seem this is exactly what Rollins himself is doing by finding his touchstones of truth in these ancient writers who wrote before all this Postmodern calamity existed.  The great irony here is that the Ptolemaic system of astronomy itself postulates this unknown God, this hidden one who is beyond our understanding and comprehension.

The Ptolemaic system of astronomy is the result of thousands of years of observation by ancient astronomers trying to comprehend the incredible display of stars that glistened overhead in the ancient night sky.  The ancients thought that the Gods lived in these heavens. The ancient Jews seemed to have believed that the throne of God itself was directly above the great temple in Jerusalem.  Earlier all the great pagan traditions held that all the named Gods were associated with stellar phenomena so that constellations were named for them and so forth.  These constellations and the dominance of the God associated with each of them shifted about once each 2,000 years. So we had in Egypt an age dominated by the Apis sacred bull God associated with the constellation Taurus, an age dominated by the Ram God Osirus associated with Aries, an age dominated by the constellation Pisces which accounts for the fish imagery in Christianity, which has just come to an end to be replaced with the so called "Age of Aquarius."

 

When it was realized sometime around 1300 BC that there was a grand precession of the constellations, ancient astronomers realized that this implied the existence of a hidden God who ruled over the others and placed them among the stars.  Some think that the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV in response to this insight overthrew Egypt’s ancient religion, created the solar religion of the Aten, built a whole new capital on the west bank of the Nile called Armarna to be the center for this new religion, and renamed himself Akhenaten.  From this new monotheistic religion many believe the Abrahamic religions rose.

 

Modern astronomers realized in the 1880’s—some 3,200 years later—that this grand precession of constellations is the result of a wobble in the earth’s axis which creates the way the constellations can be seen.  Consequently, we might call this idea of a hidden God beyond all the ancient constellation gods, the wobble god hypothesis.  The problem with the wobble god is that it did not have the personal accessibility apparent in the older gods such as Osirus and Isis and Amun Ra.  That is the ancients could look up into the heavens and see the constellations, but they could not see the wobble, all they knew was that something or someone very powerful was causing the constellations to drift across the heavens in a 2,000 year precession, something that was literally beyond their comprehension and imaginations.

 

Because they had no language to describe it, or conceptual ground to explain it, the wobble god became the unknowable one, our hidden god. Because it is much harder to have a personal relationship with a god created by a wobble they could not understand at the time, as soon as Akhenaten died, the Egyptians quickly returned to the worship of the older gods they could visually comprehend. Moreover, the 2,000 year change of the precession was far beyond their brief life times and hence impossible for them to comprehend the timescale involved in the recognition of this new super god. For hundreds of years as the different ancient religions came into contact with each other, they recognized that each was an expression of these constellational divinities, so that they recognized Zeus as Osirus, Apollo as Ra and so forth.  It was only the descendents of the Armarna experiment, as Jan Assman calls it in his book Moses the Egyptian, who persisted in worshiping the wobble god rejecting all other constellation Gods as inferior to it. 

 

 What we are left with then is the Abrahamic religions who all reject the constellation Gods in favor of the unknowable force which set them in the heavens in the first place. And so we have the hidden god who is without a name because its existence is literally beyond the ancient’s ability to comprehend as they had no knowledge of the spherical earth or its wobble which caused their view of the constellations to shift in a 26,000 year precession. This is similar many fundamentalist modern believers inability to imagine the enormity of the billions of years inherent in the geological concept of Deep time. This modern concept of Deep Time makes evolution so hard for those of us granted only three score and ten in our life cycles to comprehend that most of us reject it out right in favor of a much more familiar creation story from Genesis. 

My point here is that Rollins is wrestling with language that has evolved by the labor of brilliant men trying to deal with the Ptolemaic paradox of this hidden God, and they did that by this jujitsu of saying that this God who is beyond our ability to comprehend is within us as well. That is the mystery of our being and the mystery of this hidden God are somehow one in the same, presumably because both are beyond our capacity to comprehend. Indeed, it has become a cliche in Transpersonal Psychology to remark that the brain cannot comprehend itself just as the teeth cannot bite themselves.

Again reveling in paradoxes, Rollins writes: “Christians were called atheists because their own affirmation of God involved a rejection of the gods advocated by the Roman Empire [who were astronomical in origin]. Yet the atheistic spirit within Christianity delves much deeper than this for we disbelieve not only in other gods but also in the God that we believe in” [25].  To translate what I think Rollins is playing at here. We not only disbelieve in the Roman stellar gods but we also distrust the language we use to describe this unknown God, since he is beyond language and hence beyond our ability to know since our knowing is so language based.

Because their astronomy was so impoverished during the early Christian tradition, these Ptolemaic theologians had to come up with a strategy that took this lack of kowledge and turned it into an attribute of the unknown god.  Because of the failure of our imaginations to deal with things like Deep Time, we could not imagine that the processes of creation could manifest themselves without a designer at hand. Even so many of us who have managed to comprehend Deep Time still prefer to believe in a designer, only one possessed of a a much larger and longer bag of tricks.

Moreover, our imaginations had not yet given us the psychological grounding to handle the workings of our fantastic brain, states of consciousness, and alterations in these states which might provoke transcendent experiences. The truth of the matter is that in the last 40 years we have learned more about the workings of the human body than we knew during the last 4,000 years.  

These early church fathers lived in a time so impoverished in science that they had to rely on such language as Rollins proposes: “Here we witness a way of thinking that seeks to go beyond saying both what God is and what God is not. Union with the divine, on this reading involves a knowing unknowing in which the individual is radically undone” [28].   Union with the divine is a phrase that calls up an altered state of consciousness that we have encountered and studied in Transpersonal Psychologies as a direct result of our encounter with the entheogens of other cultures. Our understanding of transcendent experiences--metanoia--is very much more advanced today after our encounter with entheogens and the work of Transpersonal Psychologists such as Charles Tart. Our Ethnobotanists have done amazing work sleuthing out these sacred plants and the ways they have been used by other cultures—dare we call them “primitive” cultures—to enable the individual to experience union with the divine. 

The historic impoverishment of European cultures in the absence of their encounter with entheogens which seem so richly furnished in the New World causes its theologians to fumble about with the language that Rollins plays with here. “Anselm . . . writes that when gazing upon the Lord, the eye is darkened, noting that: ‘surely it is both darkened in itself and dazzled by you. Indeed it is both obscured by its own littleness and overwhelmed by your vastness’ ”[28].

One wonders what Anslem would say if he could gaze upon the images of deep space we have collected from the Hubble telescope. Would he have said then that God is “ ‘something that which nothing greater can be thought.” Indeed, one wonders what Anselem would say if he could have met Ram Dass when Ram Dass was travelling the globe with his bottle of Sandoz LSD testing holy men, trying to discover how they'd mesh their language for describing the sacred with an encounter with this synthetic entheogen.

What would he have said if he could have witnessed a nuclear explosion in which the energy source of the Sun itself is harnessed?  What would Anslem [or one wonders about Rollins himself] say about the probability of the technological Singularity which Ray Kurzweil has predicted is the inevitable result of the current arms race in super computer technology. The resulting transhumant evolution of our species will transcend much of what we know and most of what we have known.

Rollins' last paragraph in this chapter is notable in that he persists in his claim that “For while we do not grasp God, faith is born amidst the feeling that God grasps us” [30].  I would revise the word “feeling” to read “hope” as that is what all Godfearers do. We hope that God grasps us, for otherwise we may really live in the calamity or aftermath of God.