Peter Rollins. How (Not) to Speak of God.
Brewster MA: Paraclete Press, 2006.
xvii + 152 pp. $19.99 (paper).
In How
(Not) to Speak of God, Peter Rollins assembles a potent brew from an array
of essentially familiar claims. Taken in isolation, these claims are
fairly tame. But stirred together? That’s another matter. Some will find his brew intoxicating. Some
will find it explosive.
I’m in the first group: l think this is
brilliant work. I’ve read his argument
four or five times in the last six years: at seventy-nine pages, that’s easy to
do. Each time it speaks anew to my own
spiritual journey.
The argument does bog down at
times. In particular, I object to
wordplay in the manner typical of Continental philosophy. Coinages like “hypernymity” or “a/theology”
can be awkward if not actively misleading--or, at times, philosophically
sloppy. I worry that the excellent work
he has done may be undermined by the temptation to be deliberately provocative.
Nonetheless, his deepest roots are in
Celtic spirituality, not Continental philosophy--in the conviction that God
abides with us, before us and behind us, a love that short-circuits everything
we would otherwise take for granted. He
pushes that fact hard--and it opens out a fine perspective on the experience of
faith in our times. Rollins begins
with a simple and familiar claim: none of us see God face to face. In the experience of God, we encounter that
which we recognize as beyond our comprehension.
Our cognitive abilities are swamped; our vision is over-exposed like the
sensors in a camera aimed straight at the sun.
As a result, when I say anything about God, all I’m talking about is my
own experience of God.
When we forget that fact, Rollins
argues, we fall into a philosophical variety of idolatry: we turn our
experience of God into an ideology whom we worship like some golden calf.
The stakes rise by a notch or two when
Rollins points out that these same limitations apply to scripture. The Bible
also speaks only of the human experience of God. That’s why the Bible speaks in so many
voices, in voices that are at times radically contradictory. The truth of the religious tradition we
inherit, he explains, is like a compass pointing us always in the direction of
radical love. But to use this compass
successfully, we must also know the terrain of our own lives. If we turn scripture into a rule book or into
a rigid and absolutist ethical system, we are turning it into an idol--an idol
who will lead us astray.
From this analysis Rollins draws two
main conclusions. The first is this:
doubt is inseparable from faith, not a challenge to it. Doubt is not a condition to be overcome in
the journey of faith. Doubt is evidence
that we have encountered that which is beyond our comprehension.
