Peter Rollins's Blog, page 44

McFadden's Saloon, Grand Rapids, MI

In contrast to the usual answers concerning what the Good News might be, Peter will present a radical and initially disturbing definition: you can't be satisfied, life is difficult, and you don't know the secret. Arguing that God has traditionally been thought of as a type of product that will make you whole, remove your suffering and give you the truth, he will contrast that with an approach to faith which invites us to embrace suffering, face up to our unknowing and fully accept the difficulties of existence.

Location McFadden's

Doors open at 6:00 pm and the event starts at 7:00 pm

Bar and Restaurant will be open, so we would encourage you to come down early if you would like food beforehand.

I Have Met The Stranger, And He Is Me

Go in Pieces

My most recent book Insurrection ends with the following beautiful Benediction written by Pádraig Ó Tuama. This track comes from the Insurrection EP created by artist/musician Dubh.

dubh – go in pieces

It’s not the size of the wand that matters, it’s the magic that’s in it: A response to Richard Beck

I have been asked in various quarters to respond to Richard Beck’s critique of Insurrection. Beck raises three primary concerns in his article,

1. That I am rejecting the idea of a personal being “out there”

2. That I claiming the act of undergoing the death of god leads to a life of love

3. That I am demanding the undergoing of an exististentially traumatic event when it is not necessary to get to where I want to go

I shall take each in turn

1.

The idea that I reject the idea of a transcendent-transcendence arises from a basic misunderstanding of my project. This misunderstanding is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that I have not published very much to date and have not systematically and explicitly addressed the theological/philosophical frame I deploy (something that I start to address in my forthcoming book). Having said this I would also say that it is still clearly discernable in my writing (as well as being seen through the influences I draw from) and I have spoken of the underlying frame in various talks, some of which are available on-line.

The point is that my critique of the religious God is no more a rejection of the idea that there is a being “out there” than it is an affirmation of that idea. My critique is not against the content of ones belief, it is fundamentally a critique of the function that belief plays. My primary critique is clearly working with Bonhoeffer’s rejection of the Deus ex Machina or, in more philosophical terms, Pascal’s assault on the god of the philosophers, Lacan’s exposure of the Big Other or Heidegger’s attack upon the onto-theo-logical first cause. In short it is a critique of the Cartesian god we see in so much of the church today (I would argue in the vast majority of the church today in either consciously affirmed or disavowed ways). This means I am not so interested in what you or I believe as in what role that belief is playing in our lives.

Lets take an example. Recently a well-known religionist gave a sermon in which he told people that God hated them. This caused quite a stir as witnessed by how many people jumped onto the internet to correct what they took to be incorrect teaching: “God doesn’t hate you, God loves you.”

The issue here is that, for someone who resonates with the idea that God hates them, the opposite message is unlikely to find a landing place. That message resonates with some people for a reason. The more interesting, astute and pastoral approach is to avoid trying to “correct” the belief and simply ask a person who relates to that message of divine hatred “why?”: in short, to work out why such an idea would hit home, and then work though the reasons with them.

The trick, obviously, is that this cuts both ways. If someone says, “I believe God loves me” we might be more likely not to ask them why they believe this simply because we think it is a more healthy view. But people can consciously believe things we think are healthy for the most unhealthy of reasons (for instance, the conscious belief “God loves me” might act as a means of you avoiding the fact that you are in a abusive marriage and doing something about it).

This means that if someone believes everything I believe I still have to ask “why?” I need to work out how the beliefs function for that person. Do they act as a security blanket preventing them from encountering the world, or do they function as a means of more fully entering into the world they inhabit (for any system, including my own, can act in that way as Katharine Moody insightfully pointed out).

Someone might believe very different things to me (in terms of mental assertions) yet not use them as a crutch (here we are at the level of mere disagreement), and another might totally agree with me on an intellectual level, yet the beliefs operate as a Big Other (something that can be seen if a person cannot engage in genuine critical dialogue, like the preacher I reference above).

As such Beck’s fundamentally non-dialectic claim that we should have “both/and” (God as an object that we love and God found in the act of love) rather than “my” either/or misses the point. I am not arguing for one view of God over another that both operate in the same register, I am arguing for the death of God as the garniture of certainty and satisfaction. My move is properly dialectic in that it starts from the affirmation (God as some-thing) enters the negation (God as no-thing) and unfolds a negation of negation (God as a some-no-thing or, in a Kierkegaardian sense, as radical subject found beyond the realm of thing-hood – in the affirmation of life).

2.

As to Beck’s other claim that I am saying the idea of undergoing the “death of god” (a term signaling the death of God as garniture of certainty and satisfaction) leads to a life of love, I want to say unequivocally that this is incorrect. I am saying that it is the embrace of love that enables us to bear the weight of the death of God. In other words, if we agree with Camus that we must imagine Sisyphus happy the only way we can do that is to imagine Sisyphus in love. My point is that we need Christian community both in order to help us undergo this event and to help us bear the weight of it. This brings us to the role of contemplative practices that Beck thinks I might disregard (even though I spent the first nine years of my project developing a series of them via ikon). Let me say that I am fundamentally for contemplative practices, although he is right to say that I see them a little differently to Bonhoeffer. For me they are primarily 1. a way for us to enter into and undergo the death of god and 2. A means of sensitizing us the work of love. In my last post I offer one small example of what this might look like (in my new book I devote an entire section to this question).

3.

Finally he thinks that I am “just asking” for people to be more loving and so why do we need to go through the event I describe. To be honest I can understand his concern here as I do not feel that I adequately outlined why the death of god is so central in that text (this is the subject of my forthcoming book The Idolatry of God). My point, which will become clear in my new book, is that self-consciousness necessarily leads us into a place where we grasp onto certainty and the desire for wholeness (can’t get into why here but check out this video for a brief overview of the reasons). I argue that the only way to exit this “old creation” and enter into a “new creation” is via a truly apocalyptic event (as opposed to the reactive ideas of apocalypse that we see in Hollywood cinema and fundamentalist books) in which our most basic way of relating to the world is reconfigured (embracing uncertainty and dissatisfaction). Jesus is not then the solution to our universal problem but the problem that problematises the entire problem/solution matrix. By employing the work of people like Lacan I am saying that we can do this only when we tear apart the curtain and expose the Big Other as a fiction (which I argue is described in the Crucifixion).

As to this last objection I am not saying that Beck misread Insurrection, as the points I am making here are in the next book rather than the last one. I hope that the new book clarifies exactly why I see this death of god as so central to Christianity.

—

In closing let me try to summarize what I take to be the most basic problem here, many people think that I am arguing about the type of belief we hold when I am actually concerned with exploring the power that various beliefs hold for us. A fetish object is an object that we know is not magic but treat as if it is. An object that protects us from encountering our own impotence in a direct way even though we may acknowledge it intellectually (for example a picture of someone we love who has died acts as a fetish object if it prevents us from experiencing the horror of their death, something that only happens if the picture is destroyed). So then my project can be summed up in the old saying, “It’s not the size of the wand that matters, it’s the magic that’s in it,” with one caveat: I am saying that the more magic the wand has the more dangerous and destructive it is.

It's not the size of the wand that matters, it's the magic that's in it: A response to Richard Beck

I have been asked in various quarters to respond to Richard Beck's critique of Insurrection. Beck raises three primary concerns in his article,

1. That I am rejecting the idea of a personal being "out there"

2. That I claiming the act of undergoing the death of god leads to a life of love

3. That I am demanding the undergoing of an exististentially traumatic event when it is not necessary to get to where I want to go

I shall take each in turn

1.

The idea that I reject the idea of a transcendent-transcendence arises from a basic misunderstanding of my project. This misunderstanding is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that I have not published very much to date and have not systematically and explicitly addressed the theological/philosophical frame I deploy (something that I start to address in my forthcoming book). Having said this I would also say that it is still clearly discernable in my writing (as well as being seen through the influences I draw from) and I have spoken of the underlying frame in various talks, some of which are available on-line.

The point is that my critique of the religious God is no more a rejection of the idea that there is a being "out there" than it is an affirmation of that idea. My critique is not against the content of ones belief, it is fundamentally a critique of the function that belief plays. My primary critique is clearly working with Bonhoeffer's rejection of the Deus ex Machina or, in more philosophical terms, Pascal's assault on the god of the philosophers, Lacan's exposure of the Big Other or Heidegger's attack upon the onto-theo-logical first cause. In short it is a critique of the Cartesian god we see in so much of the church today (I would argue in the vast majority of the church today in either consciously affirmed or disavowed ways). This means I am not so interested in what you or I believe as in what role that belief is playing in our lives.

Lets take an example. Recently a well-known religionist gave a sermon in which he told people that God hated them. This caused quite a stir as witnessed by how many people jumped onto the internet to correct what they took to be incorrect teaching: "God doesn't hate you, God loves you."

The issue here is that, for someone who resonates with the idea that God hates them, the opposite message is unlikely to find a landing place. That message resonates with some people for a reason. The more interesting, astute and pastoral approach is to avoid trying to "correct" the belief and simply ask a person who relates to that message of divine hatred "why?": in short, to work out why such an idea would hit home, and then work though the reasons with them.

The trick, obviously, is that this cuts both ways. If someone says, "I believe God loves me" we might be more likely not to ask them why they believe this simply because we think it is a more healthy view. But people can consciously believe things we think are healthy for the most unhealthy of reasons (for instance, the conscious belief "God loves me" might act as a means of you avoiding the fact that you are in a abusive marriage and doing something about it).

This means that if someone believes everything I believe I still have to ask "why?" I need to work out how the beliefs function for that person. Do they act as a security blanket preventing them from encountering the world, or do they function as a means of more fully entering into the world they inhabit (for any system, including my own, can act in that way as Katharine Moody insightfully pointed out).

Someone might believe very different things to me (in terms of mental assertions) yet not use them as a crutch (here we are at the level of mere disagreement), and another might totally agree with me on an intellectual level, yet the beliefs operate as a Big Other (something that can be seen if a person cannot engage in genuine critical dialogue, like the preacher I reference above).

As such Beck's fundamentally non-dialectic claim that we should have "both/and" (God as an object that we love and God found in the act of love) rather than "my" either/or misses the point. I am not arguing for one view of God over another that both operate in the same register, I am arguing for the death of God as the garniture of certainty and satisfaction. My move is properly dialectic in that it starts from the affirmation (God as some-thing) enters the negation (God as no-thing) and unfolds a negation of negation (God as a some-no-thing or, in a Kierkegaardian sense, as radical subject found beyond the realm of thing-hood – in the affirmation of life).

2.

As to Beck's other claim that I am saying the idea of undergoing the "death of god" (a term signaling the death of God as garniture of certainty and satisfaction) leads to a life of love, I want to say unequivocally that this is incorrect. I am saying that it is the embrace of love that enables us to bear the weight of the death of God. In other words, if we agree with Camus that we must imagine Sisyphus happy the only way we can do that is to imagine Sisyphus in love. My point is that we need Christian community both in order to help us undergo this event and to help us bear the weight of it. This brings us to the role of contemplative practices that Beck thinks I might disregard (even though I spent the first nine years of my project developing a series of them via ikon). Let me say that I am fundamentally for contemplative practices, although he is right to say that I see them a little differently to Bonhoeffer. For me they are primarily 1. a way for us to enter into and undergo the death of god and 2. A means of sensitizing us the work of love. In my last post I offer one small example of what this might look like (in my new book I devote an entire section to this question).

3.

Finally he disagrees that going through the death of god is necessary to the life of faith. He thinks that I am "just asking" for people to be more loving and so why do we need to go through the event I describe. To be honest I can understand his concern here as I do not feel that I adequately outlined why the death of god is so central in that text (this is the subject of my forthcoming book The Idolatry of God). My point, which will become clear in my new book, is that self-consciousness necessarily leads us into a place where we grasp onto certainty and the desire for wholeness (can't get into why here but check out this video for a brief overview of the reasons). I argue that the only way to exit this "old creation" and enter into a "new creation" is via a truly apocalyptic event (as opposed to the reactive ideas of apocalypse that we see in Hollywood cinema and fundamentalist books) in which our most basic way of relating to the world is reconfigured (embracing uncertainty and dissatisfaction). Jesus is not then the solution to our universal problem but the problem that problematises the entire problem/solution matrix. By employing the work of people like Lacan I am saying that we can do this only when we tear apart the curtain and expose the Big Other as a fiction (which I argue is described in the Crucifixion).

As to this last objection I am not saying that Beck misread Insurrection, as the points I am making here are in the next book rather than the last one. I hope that the new book clarifies exactly why I see this death of god as so central to Christianity (and thus show why, contrary to Beck, I think it is vital).

—

In closing let me try to summarize what I take to be the most basic problem here, many people think that I am arguing about the type of belief one holds when I am actually concerned with the power that belief holds. A fetish object is an object that we know is not magic but treat as if it is. An object that protects us from encountering our own impotence directly even though we may acknowledge it intellectually. So then my project can be summed up in the old saying, "It's not the size of the ward that matters, its the magic thats in it," with one caviate: I am saying that the more magic the wand has the more dangerous and destructive it is.

The Contemporary Church is a Crack house

It's no secret that life is difficult. Yet most of us expend a great deal of time and energy attempting to avoid a direct confrontation with this reality. The problem however is that our attempt to avoid the inherent difficulties of life does not mean that we are free from suffering but rather that we are most oppressed by it.

By filling our lives with any number of activities we avoid that most frightening of things. What I am referring to is not the act of becoming silent, but rather the realisation that silence is all but impossible for us.

When we stop what we are doing and attempt to become still we discover that there are fears and anxieties within us that clutter up our world. Thus we must be careful of the popular wisdom that we must become still in order to work things through. For it would be better to say that the ability to be truly still is a sign that you have done the work.

The truth that we suffer is one that we can avoid most of the time. While it always seeps out in other ways (through frenetic activity, health problems, self-hatred, hatred of others, etc.) we can generally maintain our inner facebook profile (the idealised image we have of ourselves).

However there are times whenever this is difficult and we must work hard to keep the image intact, times whenever we go through a particularly traumatic event.

One of the ways that many of us avoid our inner pain is through the use of drugs. Imagine that you have just lost someone who was very close to you. Let us imagine that the pain of their passing is so intense that you find an escape through drink and other drugs. Initially this proves to be a powerful way of avoiding your suffering, especially when combined with social activity.

Such acts are not in themselves a problem but rather the solution to a problem: the pain. Yet the limitation of this basic solution is exposed the next day when we experience the return of everything we had repressed through the drugs and partying. The pain is not worked through but simply avoided. As a result we are tempted to repeat the cycle.

This is a vicious circle that most of us know is problematic, however it would seem preferable to a direct confrontation with our pain. For that would likely be too much for us to cope with.

However there is a different way to handle such a traumatic event, one that neither seeks to repress the pain, nor confront it directly. This other way involves participation in symbolic activity. For example, you might go to hear a poet who puts into music the suffering of loss; an individual who is able to speak the type of anger/frustration/pain you feel in lyrical form. In such a poet we encounter an individual who has demonstrated profound courage, for in being able to sing her suffering she shows that she is not overwrought by it; that while it is real she has robbed it of its sting.

As we listen to the music we are invited to participate in a form of communion. A call is being issued asking us to touch the dark core of the music so as to encounter our own dark core. Yet the artistic form is such that this encounter with the darkness is bearable.  We encounter our pain and anger in a way that we can cope with and we begin the work of mourning.

Like the professional mourners at funerals we might not cry, but we are paying someone else to cry on our behalf. Not so that we might avoid our suffering, but so that we may be able to access it in a way that is not crushing.

My concern is that most of the actually existing church acts as a type of drug den with the leaders being like the nicest, most sincere, drug dealers. What we pay for are songs, sermons and prayers that help us avoid our suffering. These drugs are very appealing because of the quick fix and powerful high they offer, hence the success of such communities. However they do not help us face up to, speak out and work through our pain.

In contrast we need collectives that are more like the professional mourners who cry for us, the stand-up comedians who talk about the pain of being human or the poets singing about life at local pubs.

In other words, what if the church could be a place where we found a liturgical structure that would not treat God as a product that would make us whole but as the mystery that enables us to live abundantly in the midst of life's difficulties. A place where we are invited to confront the reality of our humanity, not so that we will despair, but so that we will be free of the despair that already lurks within us, the despair that enslaves us, the despair that we refuse to acknowledge.

The following video offers one concrete example of the type of liturgical experience I am writing about (the singer is Pádraig Ó Tuama).

For the lyrics of this song and a more in depth reflection on these themes get Insurrection

Becoming Human (Interview)

Here is an interview I did recently while visiting Whitworth University

Love Beyond Existence

This is a repost of my Valentines message from last year (sorry, currently traveling so can't write something new)…

Love is so humble that it seems impossible to ever really catch anything but the briefest glimpse of her. She is like a tiny field mouse dwelling in the dark. Should we hear her scratching in the corner and shine a light she will, quick as a flash, scurry away so that we catch sight of only the tip of her tail. Indeed love is so bashful that we often forget about her entirely. For love, to change analogies, is like light. When we are sitting with friends we do not think about the light that surrounds us but only of the friends that the light enables us to see. Likewise love illuminates others and so our attention is focused on what she illuminates rather than with the illumination itself.

Love, in a very precise way, enables us to see. For in daily life we perceive others in much the same way as a cow gazes at cars. We walk past thousands of people without really seeing anyone. I was reminded of this recently when a friend of mine told me of something that happened when she took a train from Connecticut to New York. As the conductor, a large and imposing man, approached she realised that she had left her purse at the house. When he got to her seat and asked for her ticket she, with much embarrassment, explained the situation and braced herself for the worst. But the conductor just sat down in the seat opposite and said, "Don't worry about it". Then, for the remainder of the journey they talked. They shared photos of their family, they exchanged jokes and they spoke of the ones who meant most to them. When the conductor finally got up to continue his rounds my friend began to apologise again, but the conductor stopped her mid sentence and smiled, "please don't pay it any thought, you know its just really nice to be seen by someone."

This might initially seem like a strange thing to say as the conductor was being seen by thousands of people every day. But only in instrumental terms, only as the extension of a function he performed. In this brief conversation with my friend he felt that he had actually been seen as a unique individual and that was a gift to him.

This is what love does. It does not make itself visible but rather makes others visible to us. Love does not exist but calls others into existence: for to exist means to stand forth from the background, to be brought into the foreground. Love does not stand forth but brings others forth. When we love our beloved is brought out of the vast, undulating sea of others. Just as the Torah speaks of God calling forth beings from the formless ferment of being so love calls our beloved from the endless ocean of undifferentiated objects.

In this way love is not proud and arrogant. She does not say, "I am sublime, I am beautiful, I am glorious". Love humbly points to another and whispers, "they are sublime, they are beautiful, they are glorious." She does not tell us that they are perfect despite their weakness and frailty, but that they are perfect in the very midst of their weakness and frailty.

Love does not want our hymns of praise or prayers of adoration. She does not want our sacrifices or seek our time. One cannot and should not even try to love love. For love always points away from herself. To honour love is to be in love, to swim in the world illuminated by her.

That which love illuminates means everything to us: a reality that can be exquisitely pleasurable or devastatingly painful. As such we will always experience the one we love as the most sublime existence in the universe. This experience however hides within itself a deep truth, a truth that we would do well to forget as soon as we learn of it (for it works best in darkness). Namely, that the most sublime presence in the universe is not our beloved but the love that exposes them as our beloved. The love that stands beyond existence, raising our beloved to the level of existence.

Union Street Bar, Boston, MA

In contrast to the usual answers concerning what the Good News might be, I will explore a radical and initially disturbing definition: you can't be satisfied, life is difficult, and you don't know the secret.

Arguing that God has traditionally been thought of as a type of product that will make you whole, remove your suffering and give you the truth, I will contrast that with an approach to faith which invites us to embrace suffering, face up to our unknowing and fully accept the difficulties of existence.

Open Bar | Event begins 7pm

If you are going please sign up to the facebook page here

For more information about the bar click here

 

 

 

Nyack College, Nyack, NY

I will be speaking at 3:30pm at the College. Location to be confirmed.

The website can be found here