Peter Rollins: De-Centering "Belief" as Christianity's Primary Experience

 

 

 

Questioning Theology: Reflections on De-Centering Practices

http://peterrollins.net/2014/02/questioning-theology-reflections-of-de-centering-practices/

 

by Peter Rollins

February 17, 2014

 

A theology that’s genuinely open to questioning eventually hits a point when it must question itself. In other words, a sustained questioning theology thus inevitably leads to the point of questioning theology.

 

This means that the very base from which theological questions are asked itself becomes a question. Apophatic theology (the name given to negative theology) here gives way to a type of auto-deconstructive thinking that uproots and upsets confessional theology without leaving it behind.

 

This is, at any rate, the direction that my own work has taken, from How (Not) to Speak of God through to Idolatry of God and into my forthcoming The Divine Magician.  This approach questions confessional theology from within, opening it up to acknowledging the operative forces of contingency, history and fluidity.

 

More than this, the auto-deconstructive approach to theology is one that opens up a fundamentally different way of understanding faith, an understanding that is rooted in a form of life rather than the affirmation of some particular belief.

 

Dialectically speaking kataphatic thinking (affirmative theology) gives way to apophatic thinking (negative theology) that in turn opens up to forms of radical theology (a theology that negates the negation of apophatic thought). Although, strictly speaking, one could argue that the experience of the apophatic comes first.

 

While this might sound rather abstract and theoretical, the point I want to make is fundamentally a pastoral one. For those of us who want to introduce fluidity to confessional theologies that are too rigid, and open up paths toward a radical faith beyond belief (playing on the ambiguity of that phrase) all we need to do is encourage people to ask questions from within the tradition they already find themselves.

 

In the words of John Caputo, we must help them discover the power of the word ‘perhaps,’ introducing it into the lexicon of their dogmatic assertions. While this can sound simple, the problem is that this requires great courage. As I have argued elsewhere, it’s often easier to die for our beliefs (or kill for them) rather than to question them.

 

What we must do then is walk this path ourselves, build mutual respect and trust with others in our traditions, and carefully curate spaces that encourage this questioning; providing practices that allow the power of the “perhaps” to deepen and widen.

 

In my own work I’ve developed what I call De-centering Practices. These are practices that help people undergo a form of lived deconstruction. One that, I believe, opens the way up to a richer, though not necessarily happier, experience of life (what this might mean is a subject that we can’t go into here).

 

If you’re interested in finding out more about de-centering practices I’d encourage you to watch and discuss the following videos with friends and colleagues. They provide a little information concerning what de-centering practices can look like. There are numerous communities engaging in these practices already and my hope is that you might consider either copying one of those mentioned in the videos, or create one of your own.

 

 

Atheism for Lent

 

 

 

 

Evangelism Project

 

The Force of God

 

 

 

 

Pyrotheology - Salvation for Zombies

 

 

 

 

The Idolatry of God

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Face of Contemporary Christianity Today

Must a Christian Believe in God? (“Godless Christianity?”)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/09/must-a-christian-believe-in-god-godless-christianity/

 

by Roger Olson

September 16, 2013

Comments

 

Over the years I’ve had many encounters with people claiming to be Christians who also say they either do not believe in God or are not sure whether they believe in God. And I’ve read several theologians who claim to be Christian who deny the existence/reality of God (that is, they deny “theistic realism”).

 

Must a person believe in God to be Christian?

 

Well, first, we have to parse the question and terms carefully. What do people like this mean by “God?” What do they mean by “believe in?” What do they mean by “existence” when applied to God?

 

Theologian Paul Tillich famously denied the existence of God. But so did Søren Kierkegaard. So have many existentialist theologians and theologians inclined toward negative theology. But what did they mean?

 

Tillich made much of the brokenness of finite existence; for him “existence” is cut off from “essence.” God transcends the divide between essence and existence. Also, to “exist” is to be an object; God transcends object-ness. God is not an object, a thing.

 

So some philosophers and theologians who deny God’s existence believe in God’s reality; they believe in God.

 

I wrote my entire doctoral dissertation (Rice University, 1984) on Pannenberg’s phrase “God does not yet exist.” One thing is clear; Pannenberg believes in God. (Read my chapters on Moltmann and Pannenberg in my forthcoming book The Journey of Modern Theology to find out what “God does not yet exist” meant in “eschatological theology” and why Moltmann, who clearly believes in God, once declared that “only a Christian can be a good atheist.”)

 

So we can’t take “God does not exist” at face value; we have to ask people who say that what they mean.

 

However, beginning at least in the 1960s, some self-identified Christian theologians began to talk about “Christian atheism” and claimed that they were Christians without believing in God’s reality. That is, they denied theistic realism—any reality of God except as a cipher for some dimension of nature or human spirituality. Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton were the most famous examples. Later Don Cupitt joined them in his own way, putting his own spin on “taking leave of God for God’s sake.” For him, as for many modern ,and postmodern, self-identified Christians, “God” is simply a cipher for “the call forward,” spirituality, self-transcendence.

 

So why did these people, the radical theologians, consider themselves Christians? As William Hamilton insisted, they are Christians because they “stand with Jesus” in the world. That is, their posture toward the world is one inspired by Jesus.

 

More recently one reads self-identified Christian thinkers like John Caputo and his popularizer Peter Rollins (not to say Rollins doesn’t have his own ideas or isn’t inspired by other thinkers than Caputo) and wonders whether they believe in God. I think they are being purposefully ambiguous about it in order to provoke thought about assumptions about “God.” They are bothered (to say the least) by what they consider distortions of God in folk religion and some scholarly religion as well. For them, it is a sin to objectify God. So most talk about God is demeaning to God. But that leaves us with little ability to talk about God. Of course, the mystics such as Meister Eckhart were saying much the same centuries ago. And Kierkegaard wrestled with this in his context of easy-believism in which “God” was often just a cipher for respectable Danish culture.

 

I worry, though, that these ideas are filtering down to non-theologically trained self-identified Christians in confused ways. I am hearing more and more about and from self-identified Christians who go to church, consider themselves Jesus-loving persons, engage in spiritual exercises, and yet say they do not believe in God or are not sure they believe in God. In fact, I would say this is an issue churches and church leaders must face.

 

A few years ago Reformed theologian Michael Horton wrote a book entitled Christless Christianity. I found myself in agreement with much of it. However, perhaps it’s time someone wrote a book entitled Godless Christianity—not to condemn genuinely concerned or confused self-identified Christians who are not sure they believe in God but to explore why some self-identified Christians do not believe in God or are not if they believe in God and then to explain why belief in God, faith in God (not proof of God) is necessary to authentic Christianity.

 

So why do many thoughtful, reflective, even “spiritual,” Jesus-loving people who consider themselves Christians either deny God or struggle with belief in God?

 

I’m sure there are many reasons, but here I’ll touch on a few.

 

First, I suspect many of them grew up thinking of God as a “God of the gaps” and finding out the gaps in knowledge they thought God was necessary to fill can be closed otherwise—for example by science.

 

Second, I suspect many of them grew up thinking of God as a cruel judge and even author of evil and innocent suffering and came to think that this all-determining, judgmental God was not worth believing in.

 

Third, I suspect many of them grew up thinking of God as the only source for moral living, that only believers in God could or would live “good lives,” and then found out agnostics and atheists can also live good, moral lives (often better than many people who believe in God!).

 

Fourth, I suspect many of them grew up thinking their parents were “God-like” and then, under disillusionment about their parents (or pastors), discarded belief in God (the inevitable results of what Feuerbach and Freud called “projection”).

 

Fifth, I suspect many of them found themselves unable to resist temptations, fell into sinful lifestyles, and simply decided believing in God was too much trouble for their consciences. Then they found intellectual arguments in the writings of atheists to support their preference not to believe in God (because believing in God would make them feel constantly guilty as they continued “living in sin”).

 

However, there’s a sixth reason—one more difficult to challenge than the first five. Many young self-identified Christians have simply come to identify “God” with the trivialized deity of much American Christianity who is little more than a cosmic prop for American values. They realize that what one author called “Good old plastic Jesus” is a farce and they want to hold on to Jesus as he really was and is, but they can dispense with God because he has been hopelessly trivialized by popular Christianity in numerous ways. In other words, for them, there simply remains no way to think or speak about God without including, implicitly if not explicitly, all those popular images.

 

I sympathize with these people. But I do not think it is necessary to give up on God just because it seems almost impossible to “rescue” God from cultural theisms. Our task as Christians ought to be to hold on to God (who is, of course, really holding on to us!) and rescue his reputation from the numerous ways in which he is demeaned, used, by “good Christian folks” and their leaders (politicians, television evangelists, popular apologetics writers, movie-makers, many pastors, etc.).

 

So, the proposed book Godless Christianity would have to deal with two issues:

 

(1) why belief in the real God, the God of Jesus Christ, is necessary for authentic Christianity and,

 

(2) why much of what passes as belief in God in America (I won’t speak of other countries but I’m sure America is not unique in this regard) is the cause of thoughtful, reflective, even spiritual people giving up on God.

 

Finally, then, why do I think belief in God (as distinct from proof of God) is a necessary, indispensable part of authentic Christianity? That it is may seem obvious to most people, but my whole point in this post is that they ought to rethink that as many young people today do not see it as obvious. I don’t think it’s really possible to believe in Jesus in any robust sense and dispense with Jesus’s God [(who himself was very God, as part of the Triune Godhead) - res]. God was part and parcel of Jesus’s message. But, of course, we have to learn from him, not from culture, who God is. And, if Jesus was not God, then we have no real reason to consider him unsurpassable. Why hold to him if there could be others, even living today, who are what he was (without God)—just a human prophet and example?

 

 

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Select Comments

 

Austin - Interesting post - very timely too. There is a lot of discussion of Christian Atheism in theological circles because of the enormous popularity of Slavoj Zizek (another major influence on Rollins). I don't know if you noticed, but there was a fascinating guest post at Tony Jones' blog a few days ago on Zizek by someone who basically endorses his position. I thought I would share a link for you in case you hadn't seen it: "Slavoj Žižek and the Illusion of Religion."

 

Reply by Roger - I have read some of Zizek and he reminds me much of Altizer. The two have appeared together and I've watched their presentations and conversation on youtube. [These are] two who think alike [that have] found each other.

 

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Brandon - Thanks for this post! I've noticed in the last year or so how many in the progressive/emergent camp seem to be attempting to resurrect "death of God" theology (pun certainly intended). To me, this seems highly problematic. From what I have heard from John Caputo and Pete Rollins, their Christology seems sketchy, at best. Am I correct in this assessment, or do you think that Caputo and Rollins are still within the bounds of orthodoxy, broadly speaking?

 

Reply from Roger - I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their main concern seems to be to point believers in God away from all idolatries. I sympathize with that while worrying that in their negative theology they may sometimes go too far.

 

Russ - Being around this a bit I think Roger is correct in giving to the new Continentalists the benefit of the doubt. As much as folklore religion has harmed Christianity so too this newer tradition is attempting to "re-right" the Christian faith by exploring it from the "bottom-up."

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Russ - Good insights Roger. At first I wasn't going to read this post (thinking it might be the typical shrift) but was glad that I did. You do a good job at trying to keep abreast of contemporary movements while showing necessary reserve in judgment until more information comes to light (and sometimes that can be a very long time with a movement).

I recently took an online class on Radical Theology by Peter Rollins in which we studied classic Continentalists (Hegel, Heidegger, Bonhoeffer, Tillich) and today's newer figures like Caputo and Zizek. Unfortunately we skipped Derrida. What I wanted to discover was how to speak to today's postmodernism within a Christian context. To do that I needed a different language and mindset to approach it from. Being a conservative Christian with classic upbringings I didn't know if I could bridge the gap enough to do this. Still, I think its possible to create some form of God/Jesus-based Radical Theology that can speak to our postmodern times using a different paradigm than the typical evangelic one.
 
Too, in this class setting I found Peter to be more concrete in his speech and less nebulous. Certainly he's attracted to negative theology as a deconstructionist would be, but I also have discovered in him more of a reconstructionist attitude than he tries to let on. So we'll see. However, it is my responsibility not to be caught-in-translation and to speak of God to today's generation of postmodern skeptical Christians who seem to be quite lost in their own wildernesses of eclectic belief and misguided thoughts about the Christian faith - especially given the several reasons that you think many are dealing with. It makes for a very interesting potpourri to speak to in a positive way of faith stimulation and God-belief centered in Jesus. Thank you again.