This is an off-the-top-of-my-head review of Peter Rollins newest book "Insurrection", which I read this weekend. The book was incredibly good, in that I deeply enjoyed reading it, and it gave me a great deal to ponder and wrestle with. At the end of the day, I value Rollins' ideas about how to existentially live out our faith in Christ on a daily basis. However, I have serious concerns over Rollins' re-visioning and re-definition of key elements of the Christian tradition. As such, Rollins is a sort of "frenemy" who, on one hand is a very helpful friend in elucidating certain aspects of what it means to follow Jesus in our culture. On the other hand, he is an enemy of certain historic Christian affirmations about God and Christ.
As a "frenemy" of Christ, Rollins maintains a place for God, at the cost of flattening God into just a Name for the structure of human psychological experience. As such, his thought is helpful as a bridge to Christ, in the same way that pantheism, panentheism, psychoanalysis and even Marxism can be bridges to Christ, all of which offer various points of commonality and intersection with Christ while also displaying broad areas of discordance. Here are some of the theological moves that Rollins makes in the book:
His key theological code-words are God, Truth, Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. He does not seem to mind if these ideas are given "historic" content as things that happened in space time and which are cognitively affirmed as such. But for Rollins this affirmation is irrelevant, usually distracting, and simply meaningless for the postmodern person. Rather, their true meaning and relevance comes from their identity as descriptions of human experience.
GOD: For Rollins, God is the undeconstructable, unconditional, unselfish Love which elicits our total decision to affirm and support "the other". In this schema, God is not some "Big Other" that can be loved as a person in an "I/Thou" relationship, but rather God is the very act of Loving which allows us to treat other humans as "Thou". God's transcendence is not as an entity outside of our historic existence, but rather is "transcendence-in-immanence" as the ever deepening immanence we find as we explore the un-ending depths of our beloved (whoever that may be). To say it in a way Rollins does not: God is no longer a self-subsistent noun beyond us, but solely an immanent verb which proceeds from us, and binds us together, as an epiphenomenon of our consciousness.
To put it into Jack Caputo's terms (who Rollins draws heavily on): God is that which is undeconstructable and which deconstructs all of our social constructs. Thus God can be seen as the Love which critiques all our personal relationships, or as the Justice which critiques all our social Laws and Institutions. God is therefore a "weak force" which is constantly at work in our conscience, evaluating and interpreting our experience. God is not, and never can be, a "strong force" which exerts coercive power as an entity outside of the human self (because there is no such thing as a personal entity outside of human selves!). Caputo also names this undeconstructable weak force as "The Event". What makes an historic activity or happening into an "Event" is simply the force of human interpretation and evaluation. Before becoming an Event, an historic happening is simply a collision of matter and energy at a specific time. But, in the process of being experienced and interpreted by humans, it is given significance and meaning as an "Event". This meaning-making process, imbued and shot through with undeconstructable Justice and Love, is the weak force of God. God is the process of conflict and evaluation we call "Event".
Although Rollins never mentions his name, I think that Immanuel Kant is sniffing around somewhere at the root of this idea of God as a structure of consciousness. For this God is a sort of absolute demand for absolute Love which operates as a continual weak force in our consciousness of events. This is very close indeed to Kant's concept of the "categorical imperative" which is both absolutely universalizable to all sentient beings, and which treats all sentient beings as ends and never as means (which is a very German, cold, categorical way to express the ethical force of "Love"). I think it would be fair to say that God, for Rollins, is The Categorical Imperative, but not as a cold-blooded mental calculation, rather as a hot-blooded angst-filled passionate embrace of the Other. And following Kant, Rollins is quite allergic to hypothesizing about any metaphysical realities beyond the physical, even to the point of rendering irrelevant certain questions of whether various historical events actually happened. Thus, with Kant, Rollins relegates all of his theologizing to the realm of phenomenal empirical experience, and leaves questions of noumenal realities unasked and unanswered.
Of course, it is easy to see why Rollins (and others) call this "a/theism". It affirms God while also not affirming God. It affirms God without affirming a personal "Big Other" with whom we must deal and to whom we are accountable. Does Rollins' God "judge" us? Yes. But only with the judgment we judge ourselves with, because God is in the end our own judgment. But isn't there something to Rollins' God that is unconditional and undeconstructable? Yes, but only insofar as we allow it to be undeconstructable to us. We can completely, and permanently, ignore the "weak force" of unconditional Love, if we wish. Rollins offers us God without God, in the same way he offers us "religion without religion" (a frequently quoted catch phrase from Derrida).
It is a refinement of 1960's "Death of God" theology using the scaffolding of deconstruction rather than existentialism (and deconstruction, by the way, is a better scaffolding for this view of God). It is not a God of pure immanence or historical process, like the God of Hegel's panentheism or Spinoza's pantheism. Rather, it is God as a re-naming for a universal structure of human consciousness. As such, Rollins' God it is rather akin to a Zen Buddhist rendering of "Nirvana", in which we reach the overcoming and superseding of human experience within the very process of human experience. This supercession is neither a person nor a power nor a place, but a negation of all of these in the very process of a whole hearted affirmation of life. To which the postmodern hipster can shrug and say "Sure, if that's what you mean by God then I can roll with it." This is not God in any realistic sense (in terms of their being real universals or entities outside of empirical experience). But I suppose it is a sort of stepping stone to a realistic affirmation of God for those who are unconvinced.
TRUTH: Once we see how Rollins un/defines God, everything else pretty much falls in line. Following the idea that God is another name for the psychological structure of a hot-blooded categorical imperative, Truth is simply the psychological structure of adapting one's experience to the absolute demands of this categorical imperative. For instance, we come into an encounter with "the other" with a whole series of learned behaviors, values, and assumptions. As "God" exerts the "weak force" of Love upon our consciousness, all of these behaviors, values, and assumptions are over-turned to make room for a deconstructed way of embracing "the Other". Truth is found for Rollins precisely in this process of overturning. Or as Rollins says it "Truth is conflict". Note that Truth is NOT the solution we reach on the other side of conflict (for this is bound to be deconstructed once again as we encounter ever-new "others" to Love). Rather, Truth is the process itself. Truth is conflict itself.
What this means is that Truth is not an entity to discover or uncover. Truth is not a body of facts to construct. Truth is not even the conformity of our inner Reality "in here" to external Reality "out there" (for I doubt Rollins holds that there is an "out there" out there, only our interpretations of "out there"). Truth has nothing objective, absolute or permanent to it. Truth is another name for the psychological process of conflict resolution.
INCARNATION: For Rollins, the Incarnation does not first and foremost refer to an Event in space-time by which a Reality called God enters into human existence as a person named Jesus. This could or could not have happened, and is fairly irrelevant either way. Rather, the records we have of Jesus are a kind of example of what it means to have a human life fully yielded to the psychological process of God. Rollins does not say that we could as easily pick another exemplar to base our discussion of "Incarnation" on, but it is easy to imply this. Yet, Jesus does offer a commonly agreed upon place to step off into the idea of a fully yielded human life, fully open and receptive to the absolute call of this weak force of Love within us all. This is what Incarnation is: The fully yielded life that sacrifices everything for the sake of the God of Love. For Rollins, this is also called the "sacrifice for religion", in which we give up everything FOR God (and remember, God here defined, not as a person, but as a process of Love). This is juxtaposed with the "sacrifice of religion" in which we give up everything INCLUDING God (which we will discuss below). The importance is to note that, once again, a key term in the lexicon of theology (Incarnation) has been all but drained of any particular content, and made into the name of a universal process.
Indeed, in one section of the book, Rollins details the theological idea of kenosis, which is the emptying of Godself to enter into human life as Jesus.
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