Peter Rollins, Insurrection (2011)

Peter Rollins, Insurrection: To Believe Is Human, To Doubt, Divine  (New York: Howard Books of Simon and Schuster Inc. 2011), 185 pp.  $16 (paper), $19.99 (audio), $9.99 (ebook).

  One Sunday last summer, my congregation sang "Walk in the Light."  It's a lovely old hymn, but I cringed at one line in the first verse: "His love protects me from hurt and from harm."  Here's my problem: we all know that isn't true--at least not literally.  Bad things happen to good people.  So what were we thinking when we sang this hymn? That's the issue Peter Rollins engages in Insurrection: To Believe Is Human, To Doubt, Divine.

I enjoyed Rollins's critique of worship services insisting all too brightly that Life Is Relentlessly Wonderful and God Is In Control Hurrah Hurrah.  He argues that "much of the contemporary Church resembles a drug that prevents us from facing up to the suffering and difficulty that is part of life" (p. 70). Some of the church, certainly.  Most of it?  I'm not sure.  Whatever the statistics on that question might be, his complaint is not true at my church.  Week after week, we grapple honestly with just how tough life can be.  Most of the ten worship services outlined at the end of Rollins's earlier book, How (Not) to Speak of God, would be right at home in our sanctuary.  

I also admired much in the position with which Rollins's argument concludes. He argues that “God is present in the very act of love.  . . . God is loved through the very work of love” (p. 118).  He insists that "the claim 'I believe in God' is nothing but a lie if it is not manifest in our lives, because one only believes in God insofar as one loves" (p. 127).  But he insists that our only relationship to God is indirect, through the love of others: we cannot and do not have "a deep relationship with [God] in the here and now" (p. 115).  That claim points to the core of his basic theological position, and here I confess I have real troubles.

Lots of people do feel that they have a genuine, immediate relationship with God.  Me included.  It's a classic spiritual experience in the Christian tradition.  This sense-of-relationship needs to be distinguished, however, from the immediate experience of God's presence.  That experience can be evanescent--what Wordsworth calls "spots of time." (William James describes many such experiences in his seminal The Varieties of Religious Experience.)  A sense of relationship, however, endures beyond such fleeting glimpses.  But Rollins seems to regard all of this as an illusion we must surrender.  He portrays the desolation of that surrender as central to the arc of mature spiritual development.  It is our participation in the crucifixion, he says.  I simply disagree.

It seems to me that Rollins takes this theological position because he remains trapped in a theology that he realizes doesn't work.  The God he once thought existed does not exist, and he can't imagine an alternative, so the very experience of relationship with God has become suspect.  Desolation and meaninglessness--classically French existentialist despair--become spiritually normative.  

The theology in which Rollins remains mired--despite his best efforts to escape--is sometimes called "modernist."  It derives from John Calvin and Calvin's more radical heirs. This theology portrays God as radically sovereign over creation: what makes God "God" is his absolute power.  As a result, this theology insists that everything that happens reflects the will of God: nothing happens without God's consent.  Unfortunately, that includes tsunami, earthquake, drought, and epidemic.  Black Plague, Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and potentially a mutant HINI influenza.  Really?  The mysterious will of God must also somehow explain mass murder, the raping of three year olds, and starvation as a military tactic: somehow these too must be part of some larger "plan" or subsumed within some "mystery" that as mere mortals we will not understand until the parousia.   As Bible scholar Bart Ehrman explains with devastating thoroughness in God's Problem, the flaws in this theology are both devastating and inescapable.  But for Ehrman, as for Rollins, for God to be "God," God must be all-powerful, and such power translates as absolute control.   Ehrman concludes that "God" is an illusion.  Rollins calls on us to give up God.  

     I would argue that the assumption that God must be all-powerful, in radically causal control of reality, is simply a theological  assumption.  That's all.  This assumption arose when exaggerated theological accounts of God’s sovereignty--exaggerated for political purposes against the theocratic power of the papacy--intersected with the rise of science and technology in the West.  Over time, such thinking came to portray God as the Engineer Almighty, sitting at some celestial keyboard exerting fine-grain control over every last event on earth.  

  But that illusory figure isn't God.  It's an idol.  It's nothing more than a projection of our own control needs.  It's the incarnation of Western delusions of power-and-might available to us through technology and expressed globally in colonial empires and economic systems.  Philosophically speaking, the problem of evil--the tragic suffering of human history--flatly deconstructs the claim that God designed and God controls all of reality.  That's a literalist reading of Genesis.  

  Because Rollins realizes that the Engineer Almighty is an illusion, he  calls on us to “give up God” (p. 156) in favor of a “religionless faith” (p. 132).  That's the "death of God" proclaimed both by Nietzsche and by Time Magazine.  I was puzzled by his recurrence to this position.  Yes, fundamentalists worship the power and might of the Engineer Almighty for whom all things are possible--specifically, keeping them safe "from hurt and from harm."  Worship of power and might and personal well-being is perhaps a quintessentially American heresy.  But I don't understand why he surrenders the words “God” and “religion” to a theological position that at one point he labels "psychotic" (p. 60).  Why not redefine “God” and “religion” in more adequate ways?  

   
     I stopped reading and pondered.  I re-read, and re-read, and re-read again.  What's the payoff, what's the point?  Why does such a bright guy argue  in this way?  The point, I think--and of course this is just a guess--is that unless God is absolutely in control of reality, unless everything that happens is a part of "God's plan," then in his eyes life itself does feel meaningless.   Life is pointless unless it has one particular kind of point: systematic control organized to a particular end.  When that "point" breaks down, one is left with  desolation, futility, and despair.  What then?  Either give up altogether the idea that life can have morally significant meaning, or assert some meaning of one's own.  For Rollins, life reclaims some level of meaning in our efforts to love one another despite the absolute futility of human existence.

  No matter how fervently Rollins tries to hang onto the idea that God somehow exists, I think that his position is barely distinguishable from morally sensitive secular humanism.  I also think it owes far more to Sartre's Being and Nothingness than it does to Jesus of Nazareth.  Rollins brushes Jesus of Nazareth aside: "A community founded in the aftermath of Christ does not stand or fall on the teachings or miracles ascribed to Jesus.  . . . Jesus' teachings were mostly not new or innovative.  He was offering an interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures much like other rabbis' interpretations" (164).  I think that vastly underestimates Jesus' theological originality.  It also ignores scholarship like that of Ched Myers in Binding the Strong Man that Jesus' miracles were symbolic actions demonstrating the contours of the kind of human community to which Jesus called us.  We can't read them in fundamentalist-literalist ways as claims about Jesus' control over cell biology.  
  

  I think that if Rollins had reclaimed the word "God" and the word "religion" for the God of agape and chesed as taught by Jesus, he might have put a more robust foundation under his conclusion that legitimate faith is manifest not in our doctrinal niceties and systematic theological orthodoxy,  and not in what we do on Sunday, but only in how we actually live our daily lives.  To have a here-and-now relationship with the God proclaimed by Jesus is to realize that compassion flows through us.  It doesn't simply originate with us in a Sartrean act of our own heroic or egotistical self-assertion.  Such heroism will never hold up under the gritty pressures of actually working with the homeless, or the sick, or even the ordinary third-grade classroom.  It's hard to feel heroic coping with someone else's vomit--or even a social-media trashing because you stood up for someone being bullied. 

   
Nonetheless, Rollins has many shrewd and provocative things to say about what it means--and what it does not mean--to love others and to confront oppressive systems.  He offers a fine account of how we can pretend to be resisting the structures of oppression while in fact sailing on with our own privileged lives essentially undisturbed.  But with all his talk about "religionless faith" and "giving up God," he is turning his back on thousands of years of spiritual wisdom and spiritual reflection on how it is that some people find the wherewithal to lead compassionate confrontational lives.  If God is not control, if God does not offer control, our best efforts may come to naught.  Our best and most prayerful plans can blow up in our faces.  Under any circumstances, it is unlikely that even our very best efforts will make an iota's difference in the sum total of human suffering across time.  

  And yet: compassion is as potent a reality as any you can imagine.  How do we handle paradoxes like that?  One way, tradition argues, is by realizing that compassion comes through us not from us--exactly the immediate relationship with God that Rollins rejects as illusory, as a narcotic blinding us to the reality of pain.  Once again, I simply disagree.  

     So what was I supposed to be thinking when my own church sang "Walk in the Light" last July?  I flinched and reframed the line.  Let me explain how, drawing on a very useful explanation from Buddhism.  According to the Buddhists, suffering is like two arrows.  The first arrow is the evil that happens to us. We can't do anything about that.  Suffering simply happens.  It has no ultimate metaphysical explanation; it's not part of some larger plan.  It just is.  The second arrow is the complex of guilt, shame, fear, and anger that engulf us amidst our suffering, prompting us to become agents of suffering in the lives of others.  Buddhist spiritual practices are an effort to teach us to stop that second arrow. 
  

  In Christian terms, the vitality of our relationship to God helps to stop that second arrow.  Furthermore, the courage to love others amidst all of their suffering--and to alleviate as much of that suffering as we can--provides a way to protect them from the second arrow as well.  If you stand by me in my troubles, I'm far less likely to be engulfed in incapacitating levels of guilt, shame, fear and anger.  I become more resilient.  You do too: your own tendency to fear and to shame diminishes.  The practice of compassion--costly, hand-on solidarity with the suffering and the oppressed--can give our lives a profound meaning.  Rollins call on us to love in this way, but he insists that life remains meaningless nonetheless.  That's not my experience.  That's not my experience at all.
  

  The practice of compassion helps to protect both those who give and those who receive.  It's not literal protection "from hurt and from harm," not in the sense that diagnoses change or the river stops rising.  God is not a vending machine, after all.  The protection involved is social and psychological.  It is moral and it is spiritual.  Above all, it is human and communal and deeply rooted in the teachings of Jesus.

  Let me say it again: the God of compassion and the god of causal control are two different deities.  For a God of compassion, in a faith tradition centered on compassionate solidarity with the suffering and the marginalized, pain is never the last word.  Suffering is never the last word, nor is nihilism, despair, or futility.

  The final word, like the first word, is love.