How (Not) to Speak of God Quotes

“Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us … that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain).”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“There is an old anecdote in which a mystic, an evangelical pastor and a fundamentalist preacher die on the same day and awake to find themselves by the pearly gates. Upon reaching the gates they are promptly greeted by Peter, who informs them that before entering heaven they must be interviewed by Jesus concerning the state of their doctrine. The first to be called forward is the mystic, who is quietly ushered into a room. Five hours later the mystic reappears with a smile, saying, ‘I thought I had got it all wrong.’ Then Peter signals to the evangelical pastor, who stands up and enters the room. After a full day has passed the pastor reappears with a frown and says to himself, ‘How could I have been so foolish!’ Finally Peter asks the fundamentalist to follow him. The fundamentalist picks up his well-worn Bible and walks into the room. A few days pass with no sign of the preacher, then finally the door swings open and Jesus himself appears, exclaiming, ‘How could I have got it all so wrong!”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“Instead of religious discourse being a type of drink designed to satisfy our thirst for answers, Jesus made his teaching salty, evoking thirst. Instead of offering a scientific explanation that would convince, or publicizing the miracles so as to compel his listeners, Jesus engaged in a poetic discourse that spoke to the heart of those who would listen. In a world where people believe they are not hungry, we must not offer food but rather an aroma that helps them desire the food that we cannot provide. We are a people who are born from a response to hints of the divine. Not only this, but we must embrace the idea that we are also called to be hints of the divine.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“In the Bible we read that while Christ hung on the cross a dark cloud engulfed him. What was this dark cloud? Did it signal the victory of nihilism or was it the dark dwelling place of God?”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“The parable is given to us, but at the same time its full wealth of meaning will never be fully mined. It is not reducible to some clear, singular, scientific formula but rather gives rise to a multitude of commentaries. In opposition to this, many Christian communities view the stories and parables of the Bible as raw material to be translated into a single, understandable meaning rather than experienced as infinitely rich treasures that can speak to us in a plurality of ways.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“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.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“If one loses one’s life only because one believes that this is the way to find it, then one gives up nothing; to truly lose one’s life, one must lay down that life without regard to whether or not one finds it. Only a genuine faith can embrace doubt, for such a faith does not act because of a self-interested reason (such as fear of hell or desire for heaven) but acts simply because it must. A real follower of Jesus would commit to him before the crucifixion, between the crucifixion and the resurrection, and after the resurrection.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“If we imagine that our words are like arrows, then we can say that those arrows always fall short of the heavenly realm to which we aim them. In short, an emerging discourse acknowledges that speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“As the psychologist Victor Frankl once pointed out, true knowledge is always knowledge plus – that is, knowledge that understands that it is always penetrated by unknowing. The result is that God is not defined as the greatest conceivable being or as that which is greater than conception, but rather, as Anselm argued, God is the one who is conceived as inconceivable.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“Thus orthodoxy is no longer (mis)understood as the opposite of heresy but rather is understood as a term that signals a way of being in the world rather than a means of believing things about the world. As we shall see, this approach opens up a Christian thinking that profoundly challenges some of the most basic ideas found in the contemporary Church. It is an approach which emphasizes the priority of love: not as something which stands opposed to knowledge of God, or even as simply more important than knowledge of God, but, more radically still, as knowledge of God. To love is to know God precisely because God is love. The emerging community, at its best, can teach us again that love must be the first word on our lips and also the last, and that we must seek to incarnate that sacred word in the world. I recently heard a well-known speaker say that if faith does not cost us something, then it is nothing. Only much later could I respond: if faith does not cost us everything, it is nothing. Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us … that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“Speaking of God in Northern Ireland has too often fomented distrust and prejudice, not peace and reconciliation; speaking of God has too often been part of the problem, not of the solution”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“Genuine faith is not some weapon that shields us from the storms of life while pronouncing judgement upon others, but neither is it wholly self-destructive. Rather, it is a weapon that both shields and lacerates the one who wields it, offering comfort to the distressed and distress to the comforted. To advocate this kingdom of love, mercy and truth involves self-sacrifice and self-critique.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“Wherever the Church suppresses the message of Christ in favour of power, wealth and status, the prophets will always be found condemning this kingdom, claiming that it is forged by human hands in order to legitimize human endeavours. Insofar as Christianity fails to engage in self-critique, not only realizing its own conceptual limitations but also pointing out our own failings, it becomes a discourse about our kingdom and not God’s.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“It is in stillness, in the silence, that the word of God is to be heard.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“By exploring how fidelity to God requires an acknowledgement of the provisional nature of our beliefs, ‘A/theism’ was designed to offer us a greater appreciation of God’s greatness, a renewed openness to learning from other people’s understanding of God and a deeper commitment to a faith that is enhanced, rather than enslaved, by a particular Christian tradition.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“God of Israel,’ he said, ‘I have fled to this place so that I may serve you in peace, to follow your commandments and glorify your name. You, however, are doing everything to make me cease believing in you. But if you think that you will succeed with these trials in deflecting me from the true path, then I cry to you, my God and the God of my parents, that none of it will help you. You may insult me, you may chastise me, you may take from me the dearest and the best that I have in the world, you may torture me to death – I will always believe in you. I will love you always and forever – even despite you. ‘Here, then, are my last words to you, my angry God: None of this will avail you in the least! You have done everything to make me lose my faith in you, to make me cease to believe in you. But I die exactly as I have lived, an unshakeable believer in you.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“Tenebrae is Latin for ‘darkness’, so it is a service of darkness. Tenebrae services are held on the night of Good Friday, and its purpose is to recreate the emotional aspects of the passion story. Specifically, Tenebrae is a Christian service with no benefits of Christ’s resurrection. There is no sermon, no prayer in Jesus’ name, no offering as there is no Christian work, and no benediction. There are no announcements, and there is no coffee hour. There is no chat before or after the service. It recreates the betrayal, abandonment and agony of the events of Christ’s death, and it is left unfinished, because the service isn’t over until Easter Day, making it technically the longest service of the Christian calendar.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“Holy Saturday is the name that is given to that 24-hour period nestled between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, between crucifixion and resurrection. It is a day that speaks of the absence of God and is as much a part of the Christian experience as the day before and the day after. It is the moment when we experience the depth of Christ’s cry on the cross, the moment when we feel abandoned by God and utterly alone in the world. This day is never as far from us as we would wish, for there are times when we all are unsettled by the feeling that we have been abandoned and that everything we believe may be nothing more than empty words and hopeless dreams. This is the horror of the cross, not the blood and suffering of an innocent, but the removal of God. 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. Who among us does not find ourselves dwelling, from time to time, or perhaps at all times, in the space of Holy Saturday? Yet this day is rarely spoken of and the experience is often seen as one to be avoided or merely tolerated rather than embraced.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“As Meister Eckhart once said: When one can do the works of virtue without preparing, by willing to do them, and bring to completion some great and righteous matter without giving it a thought – when the deed of virtue seems to happen by itself, simply because one loved goodness and for no other reason, then one is perfectly virtuous and not before.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“The love that arises from God is a love that loves anonymously, a love that acts without such self-centred reflections, that gives without thought. Our lives should be full of acts of love of this kind, and yet, by definition, they will be invisible to us.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“The love that Christ spoke of is born of God, and when we see it at work, we know that the person has been born of God. If the works being carried out are for other reasons (such as the desire for salvation), then it is not love that we are witnessing. This love is not the narcissistic love that we see all around us and within us; this love is more radical that we can ever imagine.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“For most Christians, the question, ‘Would you die for your beliefs?’ is the most radical one that can be asked – to which the faithful will answer with a defiant ‘Yes.’ But Amen asks a more radical question, namely, ‘Would you kill your beliefs?’ In other words, would you be prepared to give up your religious tradition in order to affirm that tradition? Can you give up the very thing you would die to protect, not because of something even more powerful, but rather because of another’s suffering?”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“The Truth in Christianity is not described but experienced. This is not then the affirmation of some objective description concerning Truth but rather describes a relation with the Truth. In other words, Truth is God and having knowledge of the Truth is evidenced, not in a doctrinal system, but in allowing that Truth to be incarnated in one’s”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“In short, the emerging community must endeavour to be a question rather than an answer and an aroma rather than food. It must seek to offer an approach that enables the people of God to become the parable, aroma and salt of God in the world, helping to form a space where God can give of God. For too long the Church has been seen as an oasis in the desert – offering water to those who are thirsty. In contrast, the emerging community appears more as a desert in the oasis of life, offering silence, space and desolation amidst the sickly nourishment of Western capitalism. It is in this desert, as we wander together as nomads, that God is to be found. For it is here that we are nourished by our hunger.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“For those within the emerging conversation this a/theology is not a way of understanding God and neither is it simply the result of filtering God through our minds in order for God to be provisionally understood. Rather, our a/theology should be thought of as a dark glass which protects God from being spoken, which responds to and returns to the love of God, and which encourages others to seek God for themselves. God is not revealed via our words but rather via the life of the transformed individual.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“The desire to say nothing, to create sacred space, opens up the most beautiful type of language available – the language of parables, prose and poetry. This is why the mystics would write so extensively about how nothing can be written and would preach beautiful sermons about the futility of words. Without such well-honed words we may begin to think that we have something to say instead of viewing our life as the space out of which God speaks.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“So in a sense, when it comes to God, we have nothing to say to others and we must not be ashamed of saying it. Our approach must be a powerless one which employs words as a way of saying that we have been left utterly breathless by a beauty that surpasses all words. This does not mean that we remain silent – far from it. The desire to get beyond language forces us to stretch language to its very limits. As Samuel Beckett once commented, we use words in order to tear through them and glimpse at what lies beneath.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“As Marion writes, ‘The silence suitable to God requires knowing how to remain silent, not out of agnosticism (the polite surname of impossible atheism) or out of humiliation, but simply out of respect.’50 Or as Gregory Palamas writes, ‘[The] super-essential nature of God is not a subject for speech or thought or even contemplation, for it is far removed from all that exists … [it is] incomprehensible and ineffable to all for ever.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church

“The silence that is part of all God-talk is not the silence of banality, indifference or ignorance but one that stands in awe of God. This does not necessitate an absolute ‘silencing’, whereby we give up speaking of God, but rather involves a recognition that our language concerning the divine remains silent in its speech.”
― Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church