Holy Trinity United Church of Christ
Adult Education Seminar
Considering
Peter Rollins’
How (Not) to Speak of God
(Paraclete Press, 2006)
Directed by
Dr. Roger R. Easson
September 30, 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.
SCHEDULE OF CLASSES:
1) September 30 Part 1 Heretical Orthodoxy, Chapter 1 God Rid Me of God. 1-19
2) October 7 Chapter 2 The Aftermath of Theology 20-30
3) October 14 Chapter 3 A/theology as icon 31-43
4) October 21 Chapter 4 Inhabiting a God-Shaped Hole 44-54
5) October 28 Chapter 5 The Third Mile 55-71
6) November 4 Part 2 Towards Orthropraxis: Bringing Theory to Church 73-75; Chapter 6 Service 1 ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani’ 77-85; Service 2 Prodigal 86-90
7) November 11 Service 3 Sins of the Father 91-96; Service 4 A/theism 97-102
8) November 18 Service 5 Advent 103-108; Service 6 Judas 109-114
9) November 25 Service 7 Prosperity 115-119; Service 8 Heresy120-124
10) December 2 Service 8 Corpus Christi 125-130; Service 9 Queer 131-137
INTRODUCTION:
When we read Rollins How Not To Talk Of God we immediately understand that the ordinary reader may well not be the audience intended for the book. The text is so thick with references to the writings of philosophers living and dead as well as to the writings of our ancient Church Fathers that it seems to have been originally either a dissertation or derived from a dissertation. Its intended audience then is most likely either academic or priestly. At the very least, we might observe that Rollin’s Doctorate in Philosophy is on display.
This makes our task as readers considerably more difficult. However, as the cliché goes, this problem is an opportunity, an opportunity for us to connect with a conversation about how to talk about God extending across many centuries. This is potentially a rich opportunity for us to extend our thinking about this complicated topic beyond what might be expected of the ordinary reader.
It is interesting that Rollin’s last book is strikingly different stylistically in that they focus on the Parable genre which is far more accessible to the ordinary reader. Perhaps he has learned something. A promising signal.
Introduction: The Secret
Rollins is very aware of the precarious nature of the subject matter he is pursuing. Not only does he hold up to us Wittgenstein’s famous statement: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
Yet this is not a book about silence: this is a book about language, as he writes: “This God whose name was above every name gave birth, not to a poverty of words, but to an excess of them. And so they wrote elegantly concerning the limits of writing and spoke eloquently about the brutality of words. By speaking with wounded words of their wounded Christ, these mystics helped to develop, not to a distinct religious tradition, but rather a way of engaging with an understanding already existing religious tradition: seeing them as a loving response to God rather than a way of defining God” [xii].
And so it is language that this book is ultimately about, but it is a special language, one focused on God-talk. And here’s the hard part, probably the most human part of the idea of God-talk. It’s the idea of the greatest secret that we must keep by telling everyone we know.
This book is aimed directly at what I like to call the emergency, a word like insurgency, which points to something dramatic afoot among us, an irrevocable change in how faith emerges in to the new day of this millennial transformation where nothing is the same as it was, and where everything seems slightly alien, odd and filled with portent.
What these emergents presage even they do not know, such is the epochal if glacial change in our way of church that is coming to us from across 2,000 years of faithful tradition. Rollins writes: “The energy and vitality that exists within this emerging conversation is exhilarating . . . .” Just as you will find this book exhilarating if you engage it energetically, I am convinced.
Rollins insists that “God is the one subject of whom we must never stop talking.” His territory then is well described as is his frustration that “no matter how fast I run, those who have long since died have already arrived at where I want to go.”
Chapter 1
God Rid Me of God
Eventough, we learn later that this title is taken from a quotation of Miester Eckhart, any one of us would probably admit that this is an odd way to talk about God. It sounds very much like the enigmatic Buddhist Koan: “If you meet Buddha on the Road, Kill him” even though the Buddhist koan is more violent and aggressive then asking God to rid you of God. It suggests that all the ways we have known God in recent practice seems like an old skin that needs to be shed. It served us well at one time, but it does not seem to be able to contain the new body growing silently within Christian faith tradition.
Rollins identifies several elements of this emergency that characterize emergers. One is their recognition that to be a Christian means to be on a journey of becoming. Christians are not Saved beings which suggests a state of being accomplished and completed. Emergent Christians are rather in process, under construction. They are pilgrims on the way out of here, journeymen learning anew their craft. For them it is the journey that is the destination. Interestingly, he wants to call this process a conversation. It isn’t a fight, nor even a conflict. It is rather a coming together of people who sense the change and are trying to wrap words around that thing they feel is coming but as yet is inchoate, unformed and unarticulated.
It is interesting that Rollins uses the word REVOLUTION. Does that mean emergers are in revolt? That they are revolutionaries? I would not say so, not in the traditional way we would use the word revolutionary. Rollins writes: “While most revolutions are instigated by people who seek to offer questions which they believe the denominations are unable, unwilling or ill-equipped to answer (thus setting up a new denomination) this revolution is of a fundamentally different and deeper kind” (7).
I think it is important to listen carefully to what he writes here: “those involved in this conversation are not explicitly attempting to construct or unearth a different set of beliefs that would somehow be more appropriate in today’s contexts, but rather we are looking at the way in which we hold beliefs we already hold.”
Rather, he writes, this revolution is one which provides the necessary tools for us to be able to look at the world in a completely different manner: in a sense nothing changes and yet the shift is so radical that absolutely nothing will be left unchanged.”
This is telling I think, because if one is looking for tools one is setting out to build something, to construct something.
Speaking of God
The idea of revelation is essential to any religion. How else can the created know of the creator if the creator has not revealed itself to the created? But Christianity especially holds that it has a special connection with the divine which dramatically reveals that which was formerly hidden.
Indeed, Theology expressly contains that notion that it is Theos (god) and logos (reason or word).
Yet Rollins writes the recent history of theology has contained the notion that human kind was able to grasp objective and universal truth. “Just as the scientist believed that the world was something that could be understood through the application of reason, so the theologian believed that God was open to our understanding insomuch as God was revealed to us through the scriptures” [8-9].
The end of ideology.
By the end of the nineteenth century thinkers such as Feuergbach, Marx and Freud had asserted that “our supposedly objective understanding of the world or God is always already affected by such factors as our education, upbringing, economic position and psychological make-up.”
Therefore claims that what we believe about the world or God for that matter were the result of objective reasoning were at root self deceptions.
Rollins concludes: “In the wake of these 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.
A second response has been to “claim that we must . . . forge a new Christianity . . . that is concerned with developing an ethical way of life based on the teachings of Jesus while rejecting the question of God as an irrelevant abstraction belonging to the past.”
One implication of this approach is to realize that the emphasis on the cross has obscured the teachings themselves, replacing them with a kind of theology of embarrassment that might explain how God could allow his own son to be crucified. The end result is that we have had a cult of death replacing the life enhancing teachings of Jesus.
Rollins asserts that both mistakenly conclude that if all our “theological constructions are deeply tainted by the limits of our intelligence, the influence of our culture and the unfathomable workings of our subconscious desires, then one must necessarily give up on a meaningful faith” [10-11]. If truth is merely relative, then what truth can there be?
However, he says wisely, “to think there is no meaning to the universe is itself a meaningful statement hence relativism is inherently a self contradictory position.
The Idolatry of Ideology
Where Rollins goes next is stony turf that we have to scramble to plow I suspect.
He says that these two positions are essentially dead ends and that the emergent conversation is struggling to find a third way preserving both Biblical revelation and Christian tradition. The key Rollins finds is in the Biblical rejection of idolatry. Idolatry and ideology have similar roots, Rollins argues that any attempt to bring God into aesthetic visibility or conceptual visibility is idolatry. Reducing God to a conceptual object reduces God to an intellectual object.
Now this is a bit of double talk, it seems to me. If the use of the mind God gave me to appreciate the nature of creation, God’s existence and my own relationship to God generates a conceptual idol then why did he give me such a mind and ability to think?
Then Rollins really begins to plow stone: “Idolatry does not rest in the idea of the object itself, but rather in the eye of the beholder. In other words, it is the way the beholder engages with the object that makes an idol and idol rather than some property within it”[12]. This all sounds pretty relativistic to me.
His analysis of biblical tradition seems pretty spurious to me as well. “In other words, the writers and editors of the text did not see any reason to try and iron out these inconsistencies—inconsistencies that make any systematic attempt to master the text both violent and irredeemably impossible. Unlike the modern ideal of systematization in definition, these people celebrated the fact that … the unnamable is omninamable” [13] to coin a phrase.
Now, of course, we moderns have tended to simplify the stories to try and wrestle some kind of understanding from the chaos that is the archive of ancient texts we have named the Bible. But please, let us understand that most of the time the folks who wrote the biblical texts had no idea they were writing sacred text that was going to be part of THE BIBLE.
The original authors had no notion they were trying to provide any name for the almighty except that they knew and accepted during the time and in the culture out of which they wrote. The Bible is an anthology of ancient texts the authors of which had no notion they were collaborating in a great enterprise to name the almighty once and for all. These texts represent a 1,400 year history of thinking and writing about God. It is a great archive of writings that celebrate the God they knew at the time they wrote constructed by the culture they lived in. The notion that they were celebrating the fact that the unnamable is omninamable is poppycock and a classic error or retrojection that Rollins should know better than to attempt.
Furthermore, we do not even know that the God celebrated by the New Testament texts is even the same God celebrated by the Old Testament texts. Consider the debate over the Yawhist texts and the Eliohimic texts in Genesis. The Elohim certainly seems to be an aggregate divinity very unlike the unitary divinity we normally expect in these texts.The certainty is that the Bible records a people evolving their understanding of the divine over many centuries in the face of their flight from the domination of Egypt, the great disaster of the destruction of the 10 northern tribes by Assyria, the Babylonian captivity and their confrontation with both Alexander’s Greek domination and Roman cultural domination later. In all these confrontations, their faith is often a counter faith, as Jan Assman has phrased it in Moses the Egyptian responding to the cacophony of religious diversity surrounding and competing with them. The God of the Bible is often whatever the other Gods are not. If they are nature religions, the religion of Israel is not a nature religion. If they are religions of oppression then the religion of Israel is a religion of freedom, and so on and on.
I find Rollins here trying to plow stony ground with a plow made from Jell-O.
Rollins writes: “the biblical text bars any attempt at colonization by individuals or groups who claim to possess an insight into its true meaning. The biblical text resists such idolatrous readings precisely because it contains so many ideological voices, held together in creative tension, ensuring the impossibility of any final resolution. The result is not an account that is hopelessly ideological, but rather a text that shows the extent to which no one ideology or group of ideologies can lay hold of the divine” [13].
What a quaking bog he stands on here. There is no such thing as Biblical Text, as if they were to represent some kind of cohesive and mysterious whole. We have an assemblage of texts, translated out of a variety of languages across an abyss of time, preserved by the sheer determination of a people who refused to be assimilated into the overwhelming culture war that surrounded them and threatened to engulf them repeatedly. There are texts we have assembled into a bible that may be called Biblical texts, but the idea of the Bible as a unitary whole is a fiction created by a binding and by editors and publishers. Indeed, apparently even during Jesus’s time there was no such thing as an Old Testament or Hebrew Testament. There was a library of texts many of which are now lost all of which were respected and revered. It was only in response to the Greek cultural dominance that the Septuagint drew this library together translating the texts from Hebrew into Greek sometime between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC. And it included many texts not now accepted as part of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Repeatedly in the next section, Rollins references the Old Testament—a politically incorrect designation for the Hebrew Scriptures—as if they were somehow a unit representing textual authority from which we can derive cohesive warnings about how to think about God. I understand this is a usual kind of misbehavior among preachers but it hardly ought to stand unchallenged in this conversation where we are trying to forge a third new way into an emerging something or other. That the Hebrew Testament is somehow the voice of God himself is like taking a bottle to the Mississippi River, filling it up and then saying Voila! I have captured the Mississippi River here in its essence for all to see. Study this and you will understand all there is to know about the Mississippi River. The flat truth is that the biblical texts are flotsam and jetsam from a fabulous textual culture which is mostly lost to us in its great depth and richness. They represent the ruins of an extraordinary wisdom preserved by herculean heroics by Priests and Rabbis who were scribes of unparalleled discipline and skill fighting against both the ravages of time and the hostilities of the conquering and assimilationist over culture. But these texts are not the voice of God, unless you want them to be.
I take his point mostly in this section on the biblical texts and conceptual idolatry,
On the name of God, which Rollins gives as YHWH [14] and which he allows preserves the mystery of God because it is unpronounceable he gives us more silliness. The name of God is not unpronounceable. It is made up of approximant consonants merely which are breath sounds, or wind sounds. It is hard to pronounce consequently as we are not used to pronouncing words of just breath sounds. But there it is without tongue or teeth or vocal chords—the whispering sound of the wind. That is to say that God is in the breath, life is in the breath, as many believed the soul itself was to be found in the breath. So when someone sneezes we say God Bless you because we used to think we had just sneezed out the soul and it had to find its way back into the body. Rollins needs to do more headwork and less bookwork, it would seem. Linguistics is a wonderful discipline, useful to theologians probably.
Furthermore, in the ancient tradition of scribes words are written without vowels. It was understood that the trained scribe knew how to insert these vowels as needed, so it was an economy of ink and vellum to omit them. So YHWH might easily have been pronounceable even as breath sounds YHaWeh.
Revelation as concealment
I like very much Rollins discussion of how we interpret art as a guide to how we interpret revelations. “When we ask ourselves about the meaning of the artwork, we are immediately involved in an act of interpretation which is influenced by what we bring to the painting. In a similar way, the revelation of God should e compared to a parable that speaks out of an excess of meaning. This means that revelation offers a wealth of meaning that will be able to speak in different ways to those with ears to hear” [16]. “Hence,” he writes later “revelation ought not to be thought of either as that which makes God known or as that which leaves God unknown but rather as the overpowering light that renders God known as unknown” [17].
[I begin to wonder only half in jest if Rollins is here not channeling that great theologian Donald Rumsfeld who said “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.” ]
“The problem arises,” Rollins writes, “when we claim that we have the right interpretation while all those who disagree with us are ignorant, deluded or sinfully turning their eye away from the clear light of revelation.” His insight that this “enslavement” to the idea of revelation has made reconciliation difficult in the contemporary church is well taken. Where he takes this is central and important. “The emerging church,” Rollins writes, “is thus able to leave aside the need for clarity and open up the way for us to accept the fact that what is important is that we are embraced by the beloved rather than finding agreement concerning how we ought to understand this beloved.”
We should all be singing hosanna and hallelujah when we hear Rollins write: “If we fail to recognize that the term God always falls short of that towards which the word is supposed to point, we will end up bowing down before our own conceptual creations forged from the raw materials of our self image rather than bowing before the one who stands over and above that creation” [18-19].
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