The Fidelity of Betrayal Quotes

“The sheer amount of ideological conflicts playing out within the text hints at the fact that the writers were writing about a reality that could not be reduced to one description, a reality that was testified to better in the clash of perspectives than in the development of a single, finely honed one. The text was written not to be approached as an academic document detailing facts about the life of faith but rather as an invitation into the life of faith.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“For, if we shift our focus, it is possible to see that these ripples and ruptures within the text, far from counting against the work as something divinely inspired, are exactly what we would expect to find from that which is marked by and born out of the very depths of God.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“...approaching the truth affirmed by Christianity as some
abstract, objective assertion to be tested, simply demonstrates
that the questioner is approaching this query as a problem
to be pondered, dissected, and solved, rather than a mystery
to inhabit and be transformed by.”
― Peter Rollins, The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief

“What we find within the Christian tradition is a beautiful way of remembering, embracing, being nourished by, and living in the light of this miracle despite all the legitimate concerns and doubts we may have concerning it. For Christianity, at its best, offers us a community of people who have likewise been knowingly marked by the miracle and who wish to celebrate it through shared rituals such as prayer, meditation, fasting, liturgy, serving the poor, fighting injustice, and so on.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“A miracle is signaled by the fact that the entire landscape of our being is transformed and transfigured. For when a miracle takes place, everything changes in the life of the individual—not only the present and the future, but also the past. Let us consider one such miracle, the act of forgiveness. When one forgives nothing changes in the world; everything continues as normal as if nothing had happened. Yet, in another sense something of fundamental significance has taken place.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“Christian faith teaches us, if we are sensitive and able to be taught, that the seemingly opposite and opposed realms of radical doubt and absolute certainty are reconciled in a knowing beyond knowledge. There is no doubt for the believer that God dwells with us (as an event), yet there is a deep uncertainty about who, what, or even if God is (as a being).”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“When Pascal wrote of the heart as having reasons that reason does not know, he was referring to a type of knowledge that is foreign to the academic disciplines and different from the type of knowledge we seek in daily life. He was referring to the knowledge of a transformation that could never be placed into words or experience and thus could never be objectified, dissected, and distanced from us.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“We misunderstand the truth of faith if we think that the nature, revelation, and event of God can be torn apart from each other and compartmentalized in isolation from one another.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“The affirmation of an intervention amidst all our doubt and uncertainty concerning its source thus represents the Christian idea that we have been marked by a life-giving event that invites us to passionately respond with our entire being. It is out of this that a deep and sustained questioning arises.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“For Christians it is a happening, an event, that we affirm and respond to, regardless of the ebbs and flows of our abstract theological reflections concerning the source and nature of this happening.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“As a human being I am always haunted by doubt as to questions concerning God. However, I cannot deny that something has transformed my life and that I love the source of that transformation with all of my heart.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“If the truth affirmed by Christianity lay in something that people could intellectually grasp, then the truth of faith would be something that one could hold without ever hearing or following its demand. But Christianity, as a religion without religion, is too elusive to be held in this way. It does not allow for such a divorce between the hearing and the happening, for its saying does not occur in that which is said, but rather in the undergoing of an event. The divine Word, like that spoken of in Genesis, results in life being birthed in the depths of our being.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“In the aftermath of God’s happening the true worshiper attempts to paint the most beautiful pictures imaginable to reflect that happening. It is this heartfelt endeavor to paint the most refined and beautiful conceptual images that speaks of God, not the actual descriptions we create”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“How many of us have treated the gospel as an object that can answer a deep-seated need (for acceptance, happiness, companionship, a clear conscience), and in so doing have approached Christianity in self-interested weakness, hoping that it will be the pill that will cure us, the liquid solution that will provide the ultimate solution. Bonhoeffer wondered whether it is possible to embrace God out of love and lightness of heart, out of a seduction that is caught up in the call of God rather than the need of God.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“When the truth affirmed by Christianity is thought of as constituting a series of factual claims open to being assessed by intellectual experts, Christianity opens itself up to a corrosive form of doubt that threatens to destroy it. Later I shall be exploring the deep importance of doubt in the life of faith. However, this importance can only be understood if we think of the truth affirmed by Christianity in a way that is freed from the realm of objectivity.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“Once the truth affirmed by Christianity is approached as an object to contemplate, it is treated as something that can be tested in the same way as any other propositional claim. This effectively gives the truth affirmed by Christianity over to the academic who has the space, time, and skills to contemplate these claims in depth. Philosophers can ask whether these claims are logically sound, historians can ponder the likelihood of certain scriptural claims, sociologists can ask whether Christian truth claims play a functional role in society, psychologists can explore whether these truth claims are only wish fulfillments, and theologians can contemplate the relationship of these truths to Christian doctrines and creeds.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“The life of faith cannot be treated in the way we approach objects such as computers (which become more understandable the more we dissect and explore them). Persons of faith are not ones who act like rational detached individuals who are coldly assessing the evidence of their faith in the same way that a mathematician considers a formula.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“It is all too common for Christians to attempt to do justice to the scriptural narrative by listening to it, learning from it, and attempting to extract a way of viewing the world from it. But the narrative itself is asking us to approach it in a much more radical way. It is inviting us to wrestle with it, disagree with it, contend with it, and contest it—not as an end in itself, but as a means of approaching its life-transforming truth, a truth that dwells within and yet beyond the words.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“What happens when the depth of the text is thought to be swallowed up in a rational approach like this is an externalization and objectification of faith. Here the words are analyzed, contextualized, and grasped by those who are not necessarily taken up by the depth of the event housed within them. Like someone who analyzes a parable without ever touching upon its transformative power, a purely academic understanding of the text, however brilliant, will always be a (mis)understanding. To believe that the words are the Word reduces the text to what can be named, described, and transcribed. To treat it in this way means that we approach the Word as a thing that stands before us to be examined, poked, prodded, and played with. The Word of God, in this reading, thus refers to something, some thing, some set of things.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“If the Word of God referred to the factual claims within the Bible, then the true experts of the Word would be the academics who understand when these words were written, what the context was in which they were written, and what influences were at work in the composition. In addition to this, the legitimacy of the Word of God would always rest upon the answers one gave to questions such as when the earliest accounts of Jesus’ life were written, whether or not they were recorded by eyewitnesses, whether there was a political agenda at work, whether the information in the text matches up with what we know about historical and geographical data, and so on.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“For the idea of the Word of God as a description of the central Event that dwells within the words and yet is not of them (just as Jesus was in the world but not of it) helps us to understand that however interesting the work of the biblical scholars, the theologians, the fundamentalists, or the intellectual skeptics may be, the true depth of the text is not to be discovered by following their exacting methods.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“The idea of the “Word of God” becomes pale and anemic when reduced to the idea of a factual description of historical events. The words of the Bible, wonderful as they often are, must not be allowed to stand in for God’s majestic Word, as if the words and phrases have been conferred with some sacred status and the phonetic patterns given divine power. Rather, the Word of God can be described as that dark core around which the words of the text find their orbit, the unspeakable Source within the text that cannot be reduced to the words themselves but that breathes life into them.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“In Christ, the absolute Other of God is said to enter into the mundane world and set up a home among us. Here God is neither reduced to the world of objects nor remains in some space utterly beyond the world, but rather ruptures the present with the future, fractures the finite with the infinite, and tears through the temporal with the eternal, inhabiting the now in the guise of the not-yet. Here God’s Otherness is no longer located in some eschatological realm beyond the present order of the world but rather in an eschatological realm that infuses the present world, rupturing it and placing it into question. Here the razor-sharp cut of God’s kingdom does not presuppose a hairline gap between the present world and the world to come, but rather is that which slices through the present world with the world to come, inhabiting our world with a divine realm that is not reducible to our time and space.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“In theological terms, God is neither reduced to human flesh, nor dwells outside the flesh, but rather is in, but not of, it. The mystery of God is not dissipated in Christ but brought near. Is this not the key to understanding the idea of transcendence within Christianity, a term that describes a way of breaking the here/elsewhere dichotomy of near and far through the idea of an immanence so deep and impenetrable that it cannot be approached? The mystery of God now dwells among us rather than standing above us.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“However, within the Bible we find a much more radical view of the eschatological kingdom, not as the absence of something that is to come, but rather as the absence of a kingdom that is already here.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“But for now it is simply worth noting that the multitude of descriptions detailing the nature of God, combined with the various claims that God cannot be contained by any description, presents the reader with the reality that the text affirms God as beyond all our understandings of God. In other words, the God who grasps us is never grasped (in text, thinking, or experience).”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“For the Word, if it exists at all, does not simply dwell in the ink that marks the pages of the Bible and cannot be isolated in a dissection of the story into its constituent parts.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“The point of second naïveté is not to reach a position where one rejects academic debates but rather to provide a space in which readers can place these ongoing debates to one side so that they can attend to the transforming source of the text itself. It is this transforming source that we speak of when we speak of the Word of God.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“While those who advocate biblical inerrancy reject many of the findings of historical criticism, they still attempt to justify their own claims via the rational approach that historical criticism also employs. In doing so the fundamentalist is claiming that the truth of the Bible is tied up with factual claims that can be intellectually defended. As such, those institutions that advocate biblical inerrancy expend a great deal of time and energy attempting to offer explanations that will effectively reconcile any problems that they are presented with in the Bible. Yet it is this very process of rational justification that makes fundamentalism a very modern phenomenon, one that sets it at odds with the more ancient tradition of inerrancy found within the Church.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal

“it would seem almost impossible to argue that the biblical narrative is a calm, clear, and uncontentious text. Rather, the Scriptures reach our ears in an often ominous and scandalous tone. From the opening pages of this ancient text, we are confronted with a shocking series of ambiguous stories and complex conflicts that defy easy categorization and interpretation.”
― Peter Rollins, Fidelity of Betrayal