Adult Education Seminar
Considering
Peter Rollins’
How (Not) to Speak of God
(Paraclete Press, 2006)
Directed by
Sunday, October 5, 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 4
Inhabiting the God Shaped Hole
On the whole, even with several major passages of peculiar opacity, this is a brilliant chapter one that indicates the importance of Rollins in the development of the emergent community.
In what must be one of the oddest affirmations of faith, Rollins asserts that Christianity is not true and that is one of the main reasons he embraces it. “For in Jesus I see not merely an individual who acted as a catalyst for a new religious movement, but also a subversive prophet who signaled the end of all religious movements. To be part of the Christian religion is to simultaneously hold that religion lightly” [44].
In what follows we discover Rollins is a thorough going Derridian. That is to say he is greatly influenced by the work of Jacques Derrida (15 July 1930 – 8 October 2004) a French philosopher who is known as the founder of deconstruction. Derrida’s work had an enormous impact on literary theory and continental philosophy. Most of this chapter is in fact a Derridian analysis of Christian belief.
I like very much his Derridian reflection on the relationship between law and justice. “The law can be described, as its best, as an attempt to set out justice. For example, we may say that, for justice to be done, those who destroy private property ought to be punished. However, as soon as we try to write down what justice is in this way, we find that this written law can embody injustice. Hence we find people who have destroyed private property (such as military equipment about to be used to bomb cities) in the name of justice. Each time the law is presented with situation which it cannot cope with, it attempts to adapt to the new situation, and it is thus edited or added to. In this way the law is never complete but is always open to change in light of new situations. This means that the law, as a system that attempts to embody justice, always falls short of justice” [45].
Rollins makes a second Derridian reflection on the absence of the one we love to explain this concept. “If we are waiting for someone we love in a bar, then their absence is something that is actually present to us—unlike all the other people in the bar, the absence of the one we are waiting for is felt by us.” In a similar way, Rollins writes, “our desire to put justice into words is inspired by the power of that which we love but which is not present. Yet the law can never make justice present.”
Moving forward with this reflective method, Rollins then considers the Christian religion. “Our religious tradition testifies to God and is inspired by God, yet our religious traditions do not make God present” [46]. To illuminate this he uses an interesting simile: our religion is like the clearing in a forest after a great fire. Without the clearing we would not know of the event, but the clearing does not hold that event.
What follows this simile is somewhat confusing because it is so compressed. Rollins writes: this image “gives the impression that the poverty of religion comes from the actual absence of God.” Yet, Rollins claims, Christianity is not about the absence of God it is rather about the impossibility of grasping the overwhelming presence of God. He describes the Christian as being one who is caught between two “incomings.” While in the current moment we are awash in the Spirit of God, we look back in the remembrance of our beloved and at the same time we look forward in longing.
Then we have one of those unfortunate opacities, I was talking about. Rollins writes while “Christianity is a religion [that] binds us to the sacred enacted by fidelity to a system of belief . . . at its origin [it] also signals a cutting loose from such systems [through] an understanding of God as . . . Wholly Other. This double act of binding to God and loosing from God . . . is one of [Christianity’s] great strengths . . . . The Christian religion thus testifies to a relation with God that exists without relation, to religion as both im/possible and un/necessary.”
Rollins likes this convention of using the slash between a prefixes and its core word. What he intends by this must be clear to some audience somewhere, it is lost on me, however. It seems to be an unfortunate compression where the slash is supposed to take on great meaning, whatever that might be.
What is the ordinary reader to assume he means by describing Christianity as both impossible and unnecessary [with or without slashes]? We should not dwell in opacity, perhaps and let it go as the necessary ancillary of brilliance. It is nonetheless most certainly bad writing, brilliance or no brilliance.
Desire for transformation and transformative desire
Perhaps to make up for this opacity, Rollins hastens to say, “While God is impossible to grasp, this does not mean that God has no impact in our lives, for in religion we are transformed by our desire for God” [47].
His discussion of death is one I had not heard previously. This transformation, he writes, is the opposite of how death affects us. “Death is never experienced, for death is a term that refers to the end of all experience. . . . death has not been experienced by anyone who is currently reading this book. We cannot imagine what it would be like to have no consciousness for . . . death is . . . utterly foreign to us and impossible to imagine.”
This is an excellent example he goes on to say of what it means to live in the aftermath of something. When we have narrowly avoided death we live in the aftermath of that event and begin to take life more seriously, holding it more precious. We repair broken relationships, we “learn to smell the roses,” as the saying goes. After this good example Rollins explains “something we cannot grasp like death can have a powerful influence over us.” Then he takes an oblique connection and writes similarly “the desire for spiritual transformation . . . is itself the means of spiritual transformation.”
The story of the Princess that follows provides an example of this process. Even so, I like his analogy of the sunken ship. “Because God . . . can never be made utterly present, desire is never satisfied in God. . . . This is analogous to the idea of a ship sunken in the depths of the ocean: while the ship contains the water and the water contains the ship, the ship only contains a fraction of the water while the water contains the whole of the ship. Our saturation by God does not merely fill us but also testifies to an ocean we cannot contain” [49].
Rollins connects this analogy to our desire for the beloved. “Instead of our desire being satisfied in the one we love, our desire is both maintained and satisfied by and in our longing. In love we desire our beloved, indeed the presence of our beloved is that which sparks the desire. This is because the presence of the one we love testifies to the fact that what we know of them is only a fragment of what is still to be discovered.”
Then Rollins asserts “we see here that seeking God is not some provisional activity which precedes the goal of finding, but is itself evidence of having already found” [50].
I think many of us will be surprised when we read Rollins assert “much desire that appears to seek after God is nothing of the sort. For instance, to seek God for eternal life is to seek eternal life, while to seek God for a meaningful existence is to seek a meaningful existence. A true seeking after God results from an experience of God [in] which one falls in love with for no reason other than finding God irresistibly lovable. In this way lovers of God are the ones who are most passionately in search of God.”
The God-shaped hole
I love the idea of this section and was interested to learn the origin of the expression comes from Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 -- August 19, 1662) a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He explains that “Traditionally the God-shaped hole has referred to a type of void in every human which remains unfilled until filled by God” [50-51]. Then after a romp across Albert Camus’ novel, The Outsider, Rollins writes “In many ways this character [Meursault] can be taken to represent a contemporary response to religion, one which rejects the religious ‘answer’ as irrelevant precisely because the question is believed to be irrelevant” [51-52].
Nourished by our hunger
Rollins affirms the importance of this concept of the God-shaped hole when he writes “we can say that far from having a God-shaped vaccum in our heart which remains until filled by God, the a/theology of the emerging communities allows us to turn this idea around, pointing out that far from being something that exists until being filled, the God-shaped hole can be understood as precisely that which is left in the aftermath of God.” But at the end of this interesting discussion Rollins leaps into wound imagery which he seems to think is connected with what has proceeded.
“Faith,” he writes, “in this rendering, can thus be described as a wound that heals.” Here we have another one of those chestnuts Rollins drops in our laps without developing it. It this a wound that in and of itself heals the person who has received the wound? Is the God-shaped hole a wound caused in the aftermath of God? And if it is then is it faith that heals it? I am not sure I like the wound imagery at all as it suggests something injurious about the experience of God. Again Rollins seems to compress his thinking beyond where we may not easily follow.
Being evangelized
I think I like what I think I hear in this section, though it is one of the more opaque examples of Rollins’ writing. Rollins begins, “By existing in the void of the hyperpresence, we discover a renewed openness to genuine conversation with others. This dialogue replaces the standard monologue of those who would wish to either clone the other, making them into a reflection of themselves, or [to] exclude the other, making them into a scapegoat who embodies all our fears and insecurities” [53]. Earlier he put this better I think when he said that we understand that when we are speaking of God we are never speaking of God but only speaking about our understanding of God. So long as we know we are talking about our understanding of God and not of religious dogma somehow held up as unassailable truth we can clear a space where we can begin to share our understandings and learn from each other.
Rollins writes insightfully about this new kind of communication “the difference is that those involved in the emerging conversation can engage in an genuine dialogue in which they are prepared to rethink in relation to what the other says (instead of inauthentic dialogue in which one pretends to be open to the insights of the other, but in reality is not prepared to place one’s own thinking into question).” After such enlightened writing, Rollins then inexplicably writes, “for one is committed to the idea that if we genuinely seek truth from above, we will not be given a lie, for God does not give scorpions to one who seeks bread.”
About this process of evangelism Rollins writes: “I find time and time again that the idea of learning from the community that they visit enriched rather than destroyed their experience. For in this type of mission we are all transformed and have less pressure upon us to provide all the answers. In Christian mission the goal is not that some people ‘out there’ are brought closer to God by our work, but rather that we are all brought closer to God by our work. Such an insight may actually help expand the numbers of people who want to be involved with mission organizations rather than diminishing them for there are many who have been put off by the apparent superiority they are often required to assume in such environments” [54].
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