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Editorial:
Nurturing spirituality From
the[acting] director: New Shoes Wholeness,
Holiness & Wholegrain Spirituality Comment:
Racehorses and Turtles A
Spirituality of Communion: The Benedictine Monks, Rostrevor Interview
with John Dickinson & Paul Symonds: The Shape of Spirituality Prayer
24-7 In
quest of living theology: A conversation piece on theological education
and Christian formation A
Spirituality of Welcome Bible
Study: Christian Spirituality Review:
How (Not) to Speak of God Review:
Spirituality and Transformation Difficult
Conversations |
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THERE IS A CONTRADICTION at the heart of Peter Rollins’ debut book, How (Not) to Speak of God. As he acknowledges in his introduction, maintaining fidelity to the title would have required leaving its pages blank. But Rollins fills his pages by seeking to explain how embracing contradictions could be the key to revitalising Western Christianity. His ideas would not be widely held in conventional Christian circles, and the embrace of contradiction that flows through the book might be regarded with suspicion or hostility, especially within evangelicalism. However, for those with ears to hear, Rollins has some provocative and practical words to say. Rollins is a native of Belfast and a teenage convert to charismatic Christianity. He discovered philosophy at Queen’s University, where he wrote his doctorate on the influence of post-modern thought upon Christianity. His thought is loosely situated within what has been called the “emerging church” or “post-evangelical” movements. The foreword is written by the leading figure of the emerging church movement in the US, Brian McLaren. The emerging church has become increasingly visible in recent decades. It has links with the “house church” movements of the 1980s and some within the movement no longer attend institutional churches. Participants disagree about how to define themselves, but it has two generally recognisable features: it critiques evangelical/fundamentalist Protestantism; and it critiques modernist ways of understanding faith. Some emerging churches are marked by worship with a technological bent, such as light shows and video projectors, but that is a style that Rollins and McLaren reject. Rollins divides the book into two parts. The first part, “Heretical Orthodoxy: from right belief to believing in the right way,” is theoretical. The chapter subtitles are delightfully curious: “God rid me of God,” “The aftermath of theology,” “A/theology as icon,” “Inhabiting the God-shaped hole” and “The third mile.” The second part, “Toward Orthopraxis: bringing theory to the Church,” is an account of how Rollins and the Belfastbased group “Ikon” are, as he puts it, “exploring the relationship between mysticism and postmodern thought in a liturgical context.” In this part, Rollins describes ten Ikon services, which were held in the Menagerie Bar on University Avenue. In both sections, there is much that may disturb or unsettle, particularly people from evangelical traditions who are accustomed to defining their faith in terms of believing the right doctrines: the atonement, the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and so on. But Rollins argues that the “right doctrines” way of understanding faith is not inherently Christian, but rather derives from a modernist way of looking at the world which sought to define reality in terms of objective truths. For him, modernist thought denied ambiguities, doubts and contradictions, dividing the world into false binaries. When applied to Christianity, modernism created the impression that our finite minds could understand an infinite God, based on our “rational” interpretations of scripture and the world around us. This critique echoes that of many post-modern philosophers. However, Rollins’ emphasis on “re-introducing ideas” from earlier periods of Christian history establishes the emerging church critique as more than just a parroting of other post-modern ideas. Drawing on Hebraic thought and the insights of medieval mystics such as Meister Eckhart, he argues that what we believe is not of primary importance – but how we believe is. This means that: “the Judeo-Christian view of truth is concerned with having a relationship with the Real (God) that results in us transforming reality. The emphasis is thus not on description but on transformation.” A Christian, accordingly, should believe in the right way: loving unselfconsciously and without pretension. When this happens, contradictions make sense. Seeking and finding become one and the same; as does simultaneously saving your life and losing it. This has practical implications for many areas of Christian life, such as engaging in ecumenical dialogue, evangelism and the way we handle biblical texts. Ecumenism becomes a way of discovering how different Christian traditions deal with the mystery of God in concrete ways. Evangelism becomes two-way dialogue in which the “missionaries” are converted by those to whom they go. The Bible is not read like a history text or newspaper, but as a collection of narratives that can speak to different people in different ways. In the second part of the book Rollins shows how some of these ideas can be enacted liturgically or ritualistically. These descriptions of the Ikon services are often striking and lyrical, providing a welcome contrast to the abstract tone of the first part. Indeed, at times Rollins’ argument is obscured by abstraction, including sentences such as: “This is not to say that those involved in the emerging conversation choose the idea of journeying over and above the idea of destination; or even a type of journeying that moves toward a destination, rather, there is a sense in which such binary thinking is rejected in favour of the view that faith embraces journey as a type of destination.” Such prose can be difficult and some readers may be intimidated by subheadings like “truth as a soteriological event” and “the double hermeneutic.” Even so, Rollins shows us how thinking about Christianity in old ways can provide new insights. He won’t convince everybody. But he just might get us speaking about God. HOW (NOT)
TO SPEAK OF GOD |
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