How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

by Peter Rollins

For example, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud helped to show that any supposedly objective, scientific conception of God can easily be explained as a reflection of our cultural context, education, tradition and unconscious, while theologians such as Barth argued that to make a conceptual image of God is nothing more than forming a conceptual idol made from the materials of the human imagination. In fact we can find such thinking in the Bible itself, for in various passages we find references to God as an unnameable name (YHWH) and as an inaccessible presence that is always mediated (for no one can look upon the unmediated presence of God and live). Here God is understood to be greater than the conceptual construct ‘God’; hence some people’s reference to the God beyond God. ‘God’, rather than being a straightforward concept, is thus a term that stands in the place of the one whom we love but cannot grasp.