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

by Peter Rollins

Our own works and beliefs are here dethroned by the enthronement of God. What is important for Eckhart is not to think correctly, or to work hard, but rather to engage in a type of concrete ego-death by which the divine is invited to enter the place which we have laid down. The hope is that in so doing, love will flow from us.

So then, what if the only way for us to truly contemplate the horror of the cross requires that we banish all thoughts of resurrection from our mind? In other words, what if the only way for us to understand this seminal moment involves placing ourselves in the position of the original disciples, psychologically inhabiting that rarely mentioned Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday?

It has been said that on the day Christ was crucified a group of followers packed their few belongings and set off to find a new home. They were so distraught that they could not bear to stay in the place where Jesus had been executed. So they left, never to return, and after travelling thousands of miles, they set up an isolated village far from civilization. Once settled, they each took an oath to protect the memory of Jesus and live by his teaching. Then one day, after 300 years of solitude, a small band of Christian missionaries reached the isolated settlement and were amazed to find a community of people living the sacrificial way that Christ had taught, yet who possessed no knowledge of his subsequent resurrection and ascension. Without hesitation the missionaries called the entire community together and taught them what had occurred after the crucifixion. That evening there was a great celebration in the camp. Yet, as the night progressed, one of the missionaries noticed that the leader of the community was absent. This bothered the young man and so he set out to look for the community elder, whom he eventually found in a small hut on the fringe of the village, praying and weeping. ‘Why are you in such sorrow?’ asked the missionary in amazement. ‘Today is a day for great celebration!’ ‘A day for great celebration and great sorrow,’ replied the elder, who was all the while crouched on the floor. ‘For over 300 years we have followed the ways taught to us by Christ. We...

Here we are presented with a community who followed Christ not because of a resurrection but because of a seduction. They knew what that cry of abandonment on the cross really meant, for they had lived with it for as long as they could remember. It is in this place of radical uncertainty that we, like this community, can ask ourselves why we are struggling to be faithful to Christ. Here we can ask whether it is because doing so offers us some meaning and security in life or whether our commitment to becoming Christian transcends this.

Holy Saturday ridicules the idea that the feeling of God’s absence is reserved for those who are irreligious, for in reality it is only the religious individual who can really know this absence. This is analogous to the experience of waiting for one whom we love in a café. The later they are, the more we experience their absence. Our beloved is absent to everyone in the room but we are the only one who feels it.

Only one candle remains. It is the Candle of Prophecy, and it is not extinguished; it symbolizes the promises that Christ will not stay dead, but that he will rise. But to those of us furtively stumbling with mincing steps towards the doors of the church, it is not much light to work with. Just as to those who stood on Golgotha, in dense darkness, watching a wailing mother holding her son’s lifeless body, those ancient promises must have seemed very faint indeed. But this candle will burn, in an empty, dark church, for three days.62

So too our religious desire is never satisfied in God but rather deepened there. We cannot grasp God, not because God is absent, but rather because God is always given in excess of our ability to grasp. It is because of this that the revelation of God is not to be thought of as the opposite of concealment but rather has concealment built into its very heart, for each revelation is so luminous that it cannot be reduced to the horizon of our sight. In this way the revelation of God is like a veil which both reveals and conceals the one whom we love.

For often a violent reaction against God signals the presence of God. Rather than thinking that genuine religious experience is always comforting, the sense that there is one who can see into the very depths of our being can cause us to turn and run from God. Such repulsion and fear arises from the actual experience of God, for to feel naked and ashamed before God presupposes some kind of relation with God.

On judgement day a summons went forth to the sea, commanding that she give up her dead, and a voice called out to Hades that the prisoners be released from their chains. Then the angels gathered up all of humanity and brought them to the great white throne of God. All creation stood silently as a great angel opened the books. The first to be judged stood up and approached the text. As the accused looked at the charges, all humanity spoke as one: ‘When we were hungry you gave us nothing to eat. When we were thirsty you gave us nothing to drink. We were strangers and you did not invite us in. We needed clothes and you did not clothe us. We were sick and in prison and you did not look after us.’ Silence descended upon all of creation as the people pronounced their judgement on God.

This a/theistic approach is one that understands how our questioning of God is never really a questioning of God but only a means of questioning our understanding of God.

It allows us to maintain an unflinching belief in God (as one believes in a person one trusts) while maintaining humility when attempting to describe what exactly God is. This is summed up powerfully by Augustine when he wrote, ‘What do I love when I love my God?’ – a phrase that captures a profound passion for God amidst doubt and unknowing.

So many of us begin our faith with an encounter and end with nothing but a doctrine.

Nietzsche commented that getting drunk and getting religion were pretty much the same thing – both activities of the weak, both offering an escape from the difficulties of real life with the illusion of warmth and womb-like protection – prizes that come at a price, the price of clear thinking, genuine experience and worthwhile existence. And here we are: sitting in a pub, talking about God – perhaps not so strange after all. For many of us, we have been guilty of using religion as some people would use alcohol – as a means of escaping reality rather than engaging with it. Yet, by living in this way, we have blood on our hands.

‘The court is indifferent towards your Bible reading and church attendance; it has no concern for worship with words and a pen. Continue to develop your theology, and use it to paint pictures of love. We have no interest in such church-going artists who spend their time creating images of a better world. We exist for those who would lay down that brush, and their life, in a Christlike endeavour to create such a world.’

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.