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.   

Commentary on the first Chapter of Peter Rollins' How (Not) to talk to God

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].

Brian McClaren talks

Brian McLaren and Spencer Burke discuss the upcoming event "The Emerging Church" in March 20-21, 2009. In this segment they talk about "The Commons of Emergence". 

The Dangers of Fundamentalism -- John Dominic Crossan

more about "The Dangers of Fundamentalism -- John...", posted with vodpod

A Chat With Peter Rollins, Postmodern Barroom Philosopher

03/17/2008

Editor's note: A Belfast Protestant who talks about God in a bar is the closest we could come to a St. Patrick's Day feature, and we still missed it by a day. [Originally Published by WittenburgDoor, 3/17/08]

Interview by Becky Garrison

Inhabiting a space on the outer rim of church experience, Ikon, a Belfast-based collective, offers anarchic experiments in "transformance art." Challenging the distinction between faith and "no-faith," Ikon employs a unique and provocative cocktail of music, visual imagery, theater, ritual and reflection, immersing participants in an experience of theodrama. Holy or heretical? Faithful or foolish? Boxers or briefs? The questions abound as we sit down to chat with Ikon founder and postmodern philosopher Peter Rollins.

ROLLINS: The desire to get a God’s-eye view of the world is reflected throughout history in theology, mythology and philosophy. In much of the Western intellectual tradition there’s a strong desire to name and capture God in conceptual form. I am trying to explore the ancient idea that God transcends all names. We can’t reduce God to a theological idea without making an idol out of words. Instead of thinking of God as a noun it is perhaps more useful to think of God as a verb. For God is known through action. To say we need to be the place where God speaks means that we need to be the place where God moves through the world. We have to endeavor to be that place where we embody the life of God instead of merely talking about God.

DOOR: Elaborate on this phrase, please: “Such fissures of God as depicted in the Old and New Testaments help to prevent us from forming an idolatrous God, ensuring that none of us can legitimately understand God as God really is.”

ROLLINS: What I’m trying to get at there is that God, as presented in the Bible, escapes our attempts at capturing him in conceptual form. This happens in two major ways. Firstly, we cannot grasp God, not because there is a lack of names, but because there is such a surplus of them. These different ideas and names of God clash at various times—for instance, when God is named a warrior and then a peacemaker, or one who is unchanging and one who rethinks situations. The fact that there are so many ways of naming and describing God is a way of saying that no name or group of names can grasp God.

DOOR: We can sing all the words to Monty Python’s “The Philosopher’s Drinking Song.” Wanna hear us?

ROLLINS: ——

DOOR: Never mind. Do continue.

ROLLINS: Secondly, there are those moments within the Bible when God appears in a way that refuses any name whatsoever. Both of these strategies seem to fight against the desire that many have to place God into words as witnessed in the Kabbalah tradition where there are lots of names for God such as the Monogrammata (the one-letter names of God), the Diagrammata (the two-letter names of God) the Tetragrammaton (the four-letter name of God), the Octagrammaton (an eight-letter name of God) and the Decagrammaton (a ten-letter name of God) as well as the twelve-, fourteen-, twenty-two-, thirty-three-, forty-two- and two-hundred-and-sixteen-letter names of God. All of which pale into insignificance when compared to the massive three-hundred-and-four-thousand-eight-hundred-and-five-letter name.

DOOR: Some would say this name game sounds un-Orthodox.

ROLLINS: Well, that all depends on where you stand and how you define orthodoxy. The word today has taken on a rather unhelpful Enlightenment-influenced definition as “correct belief”—the ability to affirm a certain creedal formation. However, in the more ancient tradition the doxa of orthodoxy does not refer to belief but rather to praise. We see this in the word "doxology" which doesn’t mean belief, but rather worship. So orthodoxy actually means correct praise not correct belief. In that kind of a way, it becomes less about the affirmation of a theological approach—important as theology is—but a way of being like Jesus. We have to rediscover this idea that orthodoxy isn’t belief -oriented but praxis-oriented. In this way the approach I outline isn’t un-orthodox if it helps to bring people back to wonder and praise. Whether it does or not is of course open to question.

DOOR: Our brains hurt.

ROLLINS: ——

DOOR: Okay, what then is the task of orthodoxy?

ROLLINS: The answer to that is simple, and yet infinitely complex, for to be orthodox is to bring praise to God through one’s life. While people these days are asking the question, “Is Christianity true?,” the more fundamental question must be, “What does Christ mean when he uses the word truth?” The reason I am asking that question is that when Jesus talks about the truth, He talk about life. The truth is what brings life. My axiom for today is that Christianity at its core doesn’t explain life but it brings life. We must thus ask whether our beliefs and actions bring life, healing and love to the people in the world.

DOOR: (Sings) All you need is love ...

ROLLINS: To bring love into the world is to know God, for God is love. This is not the knowledge of creeds and theology but the knowledge of a transforming relationship with the source of all love. Truth in Christianity is thus different from the way we understand truth in the world, for the truth of Christianity is life, not description. This is why I talk about heretical orthodoxy, i.e., someone who does not understand God yet who changes the world in love.

DOOR: Some would say this sounds more fishy than faithful. What then does it mean to be a Christian?

ROLLINS: It means entering into a journey of becoming one. It does not mean accepting a world view but rather entering into a healing journey of life. To be a Christian also means that one is committed to exploring this life through the Judeo-Christian tradition, wrestling with it, learning from it and being transformed by it. Being a Christian means learning how to be the opening of life into the world.

DOOR: Why do you call Jesus a subversive prophet who signaled the end to all religious movements?

ROLLINS: One of the interesting things about Christianity is that Christ both founded a religion and yet signaled the end of all religions. Jesus said there will come a time when we worship in spirit and in truth rather than on one mountain or another. The parable of the mustard seed grasps this. It speaks of a seed becoming a tree that will provide a nest of birds. The traditional interpretation is that this tiny movement will become an institution that will house people. But then there is another interpretation which says that the birds of the air are symbols of evil. In this reading, the movement will grow into an institution that will house that which stands opposed to God. What if neither interpretation is true but rather they both are? In Christianity, we need both the priest and the prophet. If religion loses the prophet, it can become prideful and arrogant. If it loses the priest, then you end up with nothing but silence. Christ can thus be seen as founding an irreligious religion, a religion that critiques the idea of religion, a religion without religion. This is one way of understanding deconstruction.

DOOR: So how do you define church in the 21st century?

DOOR: In your first book, How (Not) To Speak of God (Paraclete Press, 2006), you say that we must seek not to speak of God but rather to be that place where God speaks.

PETER ROLLINS: Within my own Christian faith tradition, there has been an attempt to "speak of God," and by this I mean that there has been an attempt to understand the thoughts of God. However, I think that this pursuit is misguided. There is an ancient Jewish parable which illustrates this, in which two rabbis are arguing over a verse in the Torah, an argument that has gone on for over twenty years. In the parable God gets so annoyed by the endless discussion that he comes down and he tells them that he will reveal what it really means. However, right at this moment they respond by saying, "What right do you have to tell us what it means? You gave us the words, now leave us in peace to wrestle with them."

DOOR: Wanna ‘rassle?

ROLLINS: In this parable the rabbis do not want a God’s-eye view because, even if that were possible, that is not the point of faith. Faith seeks to transform reality rather than merely describe it. The parable works from the tradition which states that one must wrestle with the text in every context, rethinking it and learning afresh from it like a piece of art rather than treating it like a textbook to be mastered.

DOOR: Sure you don't wanna ‘rassle?

ROLLINS: That’s a tough one.

DOOR: We stumped the philosopher. You owe us a Guinness.

ROLLINS: ——

DOOR: Sorry bud. Do continue.

ROLLINS: I guess I will say this. In the West I think we will continue to rediscover the wealth of the mystical tradition and negative theology. These are the wells that we should drink from and which may bring new life to the church. I really hope we rediscover the place of parable, of art, of not trying to give people doctrinal answers but rather to evoke questions. In Ikon we are exploring the idea of transformative art, an art form which evokes transformation in the participant.

DOOR: Mmmm, some would say this sounds a bit Bishop-Spong-like...

ROLLINS: My analogy for this is you imagine going into an art museum. If we imagine that the piece of art is the Bible, so many of us have been so obsessed with getting the "correct" interpretation, but the mystical interpretation is how you interact with the painting. You can’t interpret the painting any way you want. There are boundaries, but within those boundaries, there’s real freedom to interpret this work of art. The point is not to get the right interpretation but to explore how there are so many ways of interacting with it.

DOOR: Getting a bit personal here. Describe your faith journey growing up in Belfast.

ROLLINS: My life is an open book that anyone can read, though I don’t know how interesting it is.

DOOR: Well, in the interests of not bringing the interview to a dead stop ...

ROLLINS: I started my faith journey at age of 17 when I was converted through street evangelism.

DOOR: Praise the Lord! Preach it, brother.

ROLLINS: That’s when it all began. I started working for the church and became a church planter and evangelist with the Christian Fellowship Church. Then I started getting interested in philosophy to prove what I already knew but started to be very profoundly challenged by it. When it came to doing a Masters degree, I gave up the youth work and continued to work with the church. I started Ikon when I began my PhD, so I could work out my theories in practice.

DOOR: Moving on to that whole putting-theory-into-practice thingie, how do Ikon’s services put into practice your belief that the truth in Christianity is not described but experiential?

ROLLINS: In a sense I would not even want to say that the truth of Christianity is experiential in so much as the truth of Christianity is life and life is not experienced. Rather life is what allows us to experience. Just as one does not see sight but it is sight that enables one to see. In other words I don’t think we experience the truth of Christianity but the truth of Christianity is hinted at in the renewed way we experience everything else. In this way the truth of faith is not one thing among other things but rather is that which brings us into new relationship with all things. The way we explore this within Ikon is by attempting to create a gathering in which Christianity is not fundamentally about an understanding or experience but rather a way of being and interacting in the world.

DOOR: Why do you have your services in a bar?

ROLLINS: Whenever Ikon started meeting in bar, it was the least important place. I liked this bar and I asked the bartender if I could do it. As time went on, I almost reversed completely. You hear talk about different types of space, intimate space between a couple, personal space, social space, and public space. Church often feels like intimate space between you and God. So we’re exploring doing this in social space where secular and social begin to get blurred. We're tying to inhabit that social space and live out our fractured lives in public. I don’t know many groups who are experimenting with this.

DOOR: Most of the US religious leaders who act out in public tend to get arrested.

DOOR: When we’re having services in a bar, you get people smoking blow, heckling, things like that. It’s really scary. But it also created this wonderful dynamic. Some people who could never go near a church find they can go into this bar and explore their faith. After a year or two of going to Ikon, they could go to a church again. Our most committed regulars are workers at the bar. If we ever have elders at Ikon they’ll be bar staff. Our bartender is in prison at the moment, but he could put the fear of God in anybody that heckled us. At first he never engaged with us, he was suspicious of who we were. One day we brought some Catholic workers in and at that moment his attitude changed. There was a moment when we had a member of Ikon go to light a cigarette. He stopped and offered to light her cigarette. That was a real breakthrough moment when he crossed over and he joined us.

DOOR: Wanna drink? We’re buying.

(Note: portions of this interview appear in,

Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church, Seabury Books, 2007)

Words From Peter Rollins

"God spoke to me, repeating four simple words: 'I do not exist.'"
      — Introduction to Ikon’s service titled “The God Delusion” (Greenbelt 2007)

"What if one of the core elements of a radical Christianity lay in a demand that we betray it, while the ultimate act of affirming God required the forsaking of God? And what if fidelity to the Judeo-Christian scriptures demanded their renunciation?
In short, what if the only way of finding faith involved betraying it with a kiss?
By employing the insights of apophatic theology and deconstructive theory this book seeks to explore the subversive and clandestine nature of a Christianity that dwells within religious institutions while simultaneously undermining them.
'The Fidelity of Betrayal' explores the Promethean nature of a faith which attempts to live up to the name bestowed upon it by the divine: Israel, one who wrestles with God."
      — from "The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief"

"We must avoid confusion between remaining silent and saying nothing. For while the former is passive the latter is active. By saying nothing we endeavour to speak of that which manifests in our world as a no-thing, as an absolute mystery which infuses our world with light and life. To undergo and then speak of that which is not a thing but which transforms our relationship with all things ... this is a sacred and subversive vocation. Here you will find my own fragile, failing attempts to be a mouthpiece for that transformative silence."
      — www.peterrollins.net

On meeting the Subversives During an Emerge-ncy: LeRon Shults Writes About Why The Emergent Church Should Not Have a Doctrinal Statement

Doctrinal Statement(?)
From Tony Jones, National Coordinator, Emergent-U.S.

Yes, we have been inundated with requests for our statement of faith in Emergent, but some of us had an inclination that to formulate something would take us down a road that we don't want to trod. So, imagine our joy when a leading theologian joined our ranks and said that such a statement would be disastrous. That's what happened when we started talking to LeRon Shults, late of Bethel Seminary and now heading off to a university post in Norway. LeRon is the author of many books, all of which you should read, and now the author a piece to guide us regarding statements of faith and doctrine. Read on...

From LeRon Shults:

The coordinators of Emergent have often been asked (usually by their critics) to proffer a doctrinal statement that lays out clearly what they believe. I am merely a participant in the conversation who delights in the ongoing reformation that occurs as we bring the Gospel into engagement with culture in ever new ways. But I have been asked to respond to this ongoing demand for clarity and closure. I believe there are several reasons why Emergent should not have a "statement of faith" to which its members are asked (or required) to subscribe. Such a move would be unnecessary, inappropriate and disastrous.

Why is such a move unnecessary? Jesus did not have a "statement of faith." He called others into faithful relation to God through life in the Spirit. As with the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, he was not concerned primarily with whether individuals gave cognitive assent to abstract propositions but with calling persons into trustworthy community through embodied and concrete acts of faithfulness. The writers of the New Testament were not obsessed with finding a final set of propositions the assent to which marks off true believers. Paul, Luke and John all talked much more about the mission to which we should commit ourselves than they did about the propositions to which we should assent. The very idea of a "statement of faith" is mired in modernist assumptions and driven by modernist anxieties – and this brings us to the next point.

Such a move would be inappropriate. Various communities throughout church history have often developed new creeds and confessions in order to express the Gospel in their cultural context, but the early modern use of linguistic formulations as "statements" that allegedly capture the truth about God with certainty for all cultures and contexts is deeply problematic for at least two reasons. First, such an approach presupposes a (Platonic or Cartesian) representationalist view of language, which has been undermined in late modernity by a variety of disciplines across the social and physical sciences (e.g., sociolinguistics and paleo-biology). Why would Emergent want to force the new wine of the Spirit’s powerful transformation of communities into old modernist wineskins? Second, and more importantly from a theological perspective, this fixation with propositions can easily lead to the attempt to use the finite tool of language on an absolute Presence that transcends and embraces all finite reality. Languages are culturally constructed symbol systems that enable humans to communicate by designating one finite reality in distinction from another. The truly infinite God of Christian faith is beyond all our linguistic grasping, as all the great theologians from Irenaeus to Calvin have insisted, and so the struggle to capture God in our finite propositional structures is nothing short of linguistic idolatry.

Why would it be disastrous? Emergent aims to facilitate a conversation among persons committed to living out faithfully the call to participate in the reconciling mission of the biblical God. Whether it appears in the by-laws of a congregation or in the catalog of an educational institution, a "statement of faith" tends to stop conversation. Such statements can also easily become tools for manipulating or excluding people from the community. Too often they create an environment in which real conversation is avoided out of fear that critical reflection on one or more of the sacred propositions will lead to excommunication from the community. Emergent seeks to provide a milieu in which others are welcomed to join in the pursuit of life "in" the One who is true (1 John 5:20). Giving into the pressure to petrify the conversation in a "statement" would make Emergent easier to control; its critics could dissect it and then place it in a theological museum alongside other dead conceptual specimens the curators find opprobrious. But living, moving things do not belong in museums. Whatever else Emergent may be, it is a movement committed to encouraging the lively pursuit of God and to inviting others into a delightfully terrifying conversation along the way.

This does not mean, as some critics will assume, that Emergent does not care about belief or that there is no role at all for propositions. Any good conversation includes propositions, but they should serve the process of inquiry rather than shut it down. Emergent is dynamic rather than static, which means that its ongoing intentionality is (and may it ever be) shaped less by an anxiety about finalizing state-ments than it is by an eager attention to the dynamism of the Spirit’s disturbing and comforting presence, which is always reforming us by calling us into an ever-intensifying participation in the Son’s welcoming of others into the faithful embrace of God.
Originally posted, May 4, 2006 [http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2009/09/01/reforming-ecclesiology-in-emerging-churches-with-leron-shults-homebrewed-christianity-61/]