Last week, I posted an essay entitled,
Should
We Give Up God For Lent? The piece was a critique of what I saw
as some serious problems with the message of scholar, speaker and
community-founder
Peter
Rollins. I took issue particularly with his campaign,
Atheism
for Lent, which provocatively asks Christians to
give up God
for Lent. I was especially
concerned with Rollins' apparent assumption that belief in God is
primarily a matter of intellectual assent.
Because
I am grounded in the highly experiential Quaker tradition, and also
due to my own personal experience of transformation through a direct
encounter with the living presence of the Holy Spirit, it felt
important to lift up another perspective: That while belief in God
can be idolatrous when borne out of fear or an unexamined desire for
existential security, belief can also emerge from
a
profound encounter with Christ within.
I
write as someone who has lived through the process of deep
existential doubt, a felt sense of abandonment by God. Ultimately, it
was through fully engaging with my doubt that the Holy Spirit freed
me from the false conceptions of God that held me in shackles. Far
from being the form of idolatrous escapism that Rollins describes,
this encounter is a profoundly humbling experience, one that strips
away layers of pretension, self-centeredness and delusion. It is
precisely when we are faced with the reality of who God is, when we
stand in the light and beauty of the Spirit's presence, that we are
empowered to strip away the false images we have created to control
God and impose order and certainty upon our world.
I was
glad that Rollins was able to make time to
respond
to my concerns in a blog post of his own. Unfortunately,
as
some very perceptive observers have noted, we seem to be talking
past one another. Rollins spent much of his post analyzing me from
the perspective of a Liberal vs. Radical dichotomy, concluding that I
am a Liberal. In effect, he positioned me as being outside the realm
of the kind of analysis that he wants to do. He also seemed to assume
that I am uninterested in theory and analysis. Instead, I gather that
he views me (and, more importantly, those with an experience and
worldview similar to mine) as a reflexive
doer,
a do-gooder who acts immediately and without sufficient consideration
for the structural consequences and context of my actions.
I
understand this aspect of Rollins' critique, but I disagree. His
evaluation of my stance is unnecessarily reductionist, and I question
his decision to create two camps and assign me to one and himself to
another. (Given Rollins' deep awareness and appreciation of
Girard's
scapegoat mechanism, I am surprised by this move.) As an
alternative to this us-versus-them dichotomy, I would like to suggest
that both Peter Rollins and I are holding up an important aspect of
the faith/doubt journey that we are called to walk in together as
friends of Jesus.
In
many quarters of my own tradition (
Quakers),
there is a problematic reluctance to engage with deep theory. At
times, this can result in exactly the kind of behavior that Rollins
describes - knee-jerk reaction to circumstances, action for its own
sake without thoughtful regard to context and consequences. I am
grateful for this critique from Rollins, and I hope that Quakers will
take it to heart (and mind!).
Yet,
my observation is that Rollins' own perspective is also presently
unbalanced. Our lived human experience is important, too. I find
Peter Rollins' dismissal of personal and communal experience of God's
presence and action to be deeply problematic. This represents an
amputation of the heart, which is just as devastating as the
intellectual lobotomy that he warns against.
I
argue that the answer to an unreflective faith is not to cease
action, but rather to
engage in action that is informed by
reflection. The proper response
to a religious life that is overly dependent on individual experience
is not to deny experience, but rather to
hold that
experience in dynamic conversation with theory.
If we are to live out the full gospel, a balanced and complete
gospel, we must wed faith and action, experience and analysis.
Besides
this basic message of dynamic tension and balance, I would also like
to briefly speak to the final portion of Peter Rollins' response, in
which he addresses my own experience of and relationship with God.
Rollins concludes that I "admit that I need God in order to gain
meaning and work for justice." He identifies me as someone
"whose belief in God... is not something they can question
without the sense of destruction that would result." In effect,
if I understand his overall critique properly, he concludes that I
worship an idolatrous God of my own making, and that I have not yet
been through the process of purgation required to release what he
calls the God-object,
the human-created image of God that one clings to in order to escape
reality.
While
I understand how Rollins could come to this conclusion, he is
mistaken. Though it is easy to read my words as expressing a terror
at the loss of God, what I am actually communicating is an awareness
of a deep ontological reality that is, in my experience (and that of
my community),
inescapable. I could no more give up God for Lent than I could give
up gravity. I say this because, for me, at this point in my
faith/doubt journey, the God whom I worship is not a
thing
out there. On the contrary, my
(and
my
community's) experience is that of a
thou in here.
This
living and visceral experience of the Holy Spirit comes unbidden, is
uncontrollable and calls us into unpredictable lives of relationship
with Jesus. Rather than a fetish object
out there,
this
mysteriously personal
Ground of
Being draws us into lives of deeper trust, greater humility and
community with others who also live in relationship with God. With
this understanding, I do experience my own
faith
collective as a community where, as Rollins puts it, "people
encounter this depth-dimension precisely by breaking the sense that
there is some thing that is needed like air (for reducing faith to
the affirmation of a thing renders the sacred into an object to be
placed alongside other objects)."
In our
experience as a
community,
we recognize that there are so many idols competing for our
allegiance. It is by seeking after the deepest reality, the amazing
divine Spirit that breathes in us and grounds our entire life
together, that we are liberated from bondage to the many
things
that demand our loyalty and draw us into destructive patterns. In
this, I perceive that Peter Rollins and I share a common mission,
even if we still disagree on the best way to get there.
Lest
there be any doubt, I would like to state clearly that I value the
work that Peter Rollins is engaged in. I think that unmasking
idolatrous conceptions of God is a crucial task that we must
undertake as followers of the ultimate revealer, Jesus. Insofar as
Rollins provides an analysis that allows us to strip off the false
vestments of human-constructed deities, I stand in solidarity with
him.
I am
grateful that Peter Rollins has been willing to engage in this
conversation with me. I think that being able to publicly discuss
these questions of faith/doubt and life is crucial, and I am glad to
have Rollins as a conversation partner as we seek to build up the
Body of Christ. Moving forward, I hope that we can find ways to hold
the tension between faith and action, experience and theory. What are
ways that we find the synthesis between faith and doubt, reflection
and action, rigorous analysis and reckless love?
-
PS: I have felt so blessed by the
passionate conversation that has arisen around last
Thursday's post, and I want to extend my thanks to all the
bloggers and commenters who have engaged with these questions. I have
gained a lot of insight from all of the bold, scholarly, imaginative
and curious people who have added their own critique, asked questions
and pointed out where they saw Rollins, me or both of us missing the
point. Here are some links to some of the key sites where this
conversation took place:
