Listening to Pete Rollins
I spent Saturday at the Journey Warehouse getting to hear from Pete Rollins. In all, it was a fantastic day. Besides getting an entire day to hang out with adults (without the kids) and getting to listen to Pete, I got to hang out with really cool people. It was great to see Laci Scott again and to finally meet Glenn Barbier, and Adam and Brooke Moore. Good times.
But of course the point of the day was to listen and learn from Pete. Which was of course amazing. It was refreshing to be around someone so unapologetically intellectual. At one point I asked him how those who aren’t intellectual or cultural creatives find a voice in his community Ikon and he simply replied that he just makes them that way. That he believes that all people are capable of creativity and thinking, all they need is encouragement. For once it was just stinking nice to not hear excuses or apologies for thinking deeply. And there was a lot of deep thoughts being thrown around yesterday. I’m not going to bother trying to summarize his talk – just highlight a couple of things.
I loved his portrayal of the church as a fetish. He describes our approach to church as like a child to a security blanket – something that protects us from dealing with life as it really is. We use church to escape from reality instead of engaging that reality. So we sing with certainity about justice but don’t actually do it. The church is actually what stands in the way of our transforming the world. Pete insists instead that church needs to become the place where there is no certainty – where we are free to doubt and question and seek. But that as we enter the world we are to live with certainty – to live as if God exists (no matter what we believe) and to live by his call to justice. It is our everyday lives that should be lived radically for transformation. We need to get over church as an impotent force that inhibits life, but make it alive by making it unstable and unsure.
I also was intrigued by his challenging of fellow Belfast native C.S. Lewis (and Chesterton) on the subject of longing for God. As Chesterton suggested that every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God, but Pete asked “what if he is really just looking for sex?” He explored how we often use God as an excuse for our longings. We desire comfort or meaning in life and so find that in church but give it the name God (relating back to the fetish thing). This actually dismisses God and belittles him. The point isn’t that we all have a “God-shaped hole” that causes us to long for God, but that when we long for God he shows up in the form of the God-shaped hole. The idea isn’t “seek and THEN you shall find” but that the seeking is the finding. The need for God is created by the desire for God. The illustration Pete used was that of parents who say their life was incomplete before they had kids. But technically before that point their life wasn’t really incomplete. We can’t go around saying that single people are incomplete because they don’t have kids. But the statement is true in that once the couple had a child, the incompleteness appeared retroactively. Once they have the child, and only then, they can truly say that their life was incomplete before. Once we seek for God we start seeking him. I liked this take on things because it helps get around many of the imperialistic overtones to evangelical discourse. Instead of telling people that we understand their desires better than they themselves, we can start to understand them as they are. It moves us from a position of superiority to that of friend. But at the same time I find it so hard to question ideas that are so ingrained in evangelical thought (especially for a post-wheatie) that they are assumed to be biblical.
Okay I should probably stop rambling and butchering these ideas and just tell you to go hear Pete or read his books. What he’s saying is brillant – it challenges assumptions but also pushes us out to live rightly. This is intellectualism – but real life intellectualism. Thinking deeply about real life and how we live – this is the stuff we all need, even when it shakes us up.
julieclawson(at)gmail(dot)com 
No disrespect to Mr. Rollins, but he couldn’t pack a lunch for either Lewis or Chesterton.
Julie,
Just joining the “conversation” as it were after a few years cloistered in my library and wondering and pondering about my renewed faith in Christ. Rollins is definitely on the reading list now. There’s a great interview of Peter Rollins posted at Emergent Village. I believe it was from “InterCompass”- a Calvin College production.
Anyway, enjoy your posts- added you to my blogroll if that’s okay…
Greg – thanks for the add!
Josh – well, but I’m think how awesome would a Lewis/Rollins debate be? The height of modern philosophy vs postmodern philosophy with both being acutely aware of the worlds they inhabit. Or maybe that’s just me being weird…
Sometimes Peter reminds me of The Sphinx in the movie Mystery Men… “you will not find what you are looking for unless you seek what you are looking for.” or, “You must lash out with every limb, like the octopus who plays the drums.” or “He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.” or “When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.”
Go Peter.
I’m with you in thinking a Lewis-Rollins debate would be great to hear.
Not buying Rollins’ take on desire, though. The need for God is created by the desire for God? So if I’m not conscious of a desire for God, if I am conscious of desire for other things but don’t think the real object of my desire is God, then I don’t need God? I think that WAY over-subjectivizes the concept of “need.” A person may not know that she needs good nutrition, treatment for an as-yet-undiscovered tumor, counseling in her marriage, or any number of other things. But the need is still there and others may realize what she needs before she does. Her discovery of the need when she starts digging deeper into the symptoms of poor health, unexplained pains, marital strife etc. isn’t what creates the need – it was there all along.
Over Rollins, I prefer Rob Bell’s (perhaps more traditional) take on, for example, the interconnectedness of spirituality and sexuality in Sex God: “This is really about that.” Regardless of what the man going into the brothel thinks, he’s *not* “just” after sex in itself. Not to get distracted by the sex thing – of course it’s a lot bigger than that topic alone when we talk about longing and desire.
And we’re not merely talking about an evangelical, or even a modern post-enlightenment concept here, either. From Augustine (”our hearts are restless til they find their rest in thee”) to Pascal (the God shaped abyss) to Chesterton to Lewis with many in between this is a pretty common understanding of desire in the Christian tradition. Many point to Paul’s Mars Hill discourse on the Unknown God as another example illustrating the fact that, “imperialistic overtones” or no, those seeing with the light of Christ may in fact be able to help others make sense of their own desires and show them that the object of those desires might be something other than they had thought. I guess it could possibly be that this historic understanding is just an unfortunate adaptation of neoplatonic thought. But Rollins has the weight of church history (not just 20th century modern evangelicalism) against him on this and a lot of ’splainin’ to do before he’s going to change that understanding for most Christians. Maybe he really is the first Christ following person since about the 1st Century to really understand this but I kinda doubt it.
Julie – it was wonderful to meet you and Mike. Brooke and I look forward to spending more time with you both in the (hopefully) not too distant future.
I think that disagree with a lot of Rollins thought on many levels. While I agree that there is often a disconnect between what happens within the church’s walls and outside of it, I disagree with the idea that this disconnect is wholly the fault of the church as “impotent force that inhibits life.” I think there is a fine line between meaningful critique of the established church and ranting against the church-as-establishment simply because it is “the establishment.”
I find troubling the statement that we are to “make [the church] alive by making it unstable and unsure.” It bothers me for two reasons. First, I am bothered by the fact that no grace is given to the church-as-institution. While there may indeed be many churches that need to do a better job of getting over the idea that they have the corner on doctrine or “right” understanding about God, I honestly resent the implication that the church as a whole does not give its members room to question and doubt.
The second part of that statement which bothers me is the implication that we, humans, are the ones who “make” the church. Perhaps the bigger reason that there is a disconnect between what happens in the church and what happens (or doesn’t happen…or should happen) in the world is precisely because we think that we are the ones who make the church and who fashion it. It seems that Rollins wants to criticize the institutional church for being more focused on “making” the church into what it wants instead of being open to the work of the Spirit…and yet it seems that his solution is to “re-make” the church according to a different set of priorities or ideals.
I might be reading too much into his thought and your words, but ecclesiology is rapidly becoming one of my theological passions, and I tend to get uncomfortable around ideologies that seem to advocate simply scrapping the church for the sake of faith. Thanks for letting me toss my two cents in!
I would respond by saying that whenever we believe that we know how to “make” the church, whether it be according to the values of certainty and detachment from the world or according to the values of questioning and engagement with the world, we yet fall short of what it means to be the Church as body of Christ.
I wonder what the church and its place in the world would look like if we made it a priority to remember that it is the Holy Spirit who gathers the Church together, and that even our presence inside the walls of our particular churches is the work of the Holy Spirit who gathered us there. Perhaps then we wouldn’t feel such a need to establish an us-vs.-them mentality, but rather explore the ways in which the Holy Spirit calls us to let that which happens in worship and inside the walls of our churches propel us outward to be the visible manifestation of the Church in the world.
Hrm. I definitely ended up with a paragraph out-of-order! The “I might be reading too much into his thought and your words” paragraph should be the LAST one….not stuck smack-dab in the middle!
karl – to clarify a bit. Pete’s issue is that we make an object out of God when he should be the subject. God is the mover, the actor not some thing we can find. When we make God an object we do create a fetish or idol out of him – we set him up in our own image and then seek ourselves. But if we give the action back to God and understand that he is making himself known to us first and not us trying to create him then longing starts instead of just ends with God. In many ways it is simply a way of reorienting our thought since God is known already.
Melissa – Pete isn’t at all about attacking and getting rid of the institutional church. He isn’t there to propose a better system, but to get people to really look at what we do with church. I have to agree that church is made. We decide what to sing, how to structure the service, what to talk about, how to view the pastor. All too often we say we uphold certain values but don’t actually reflect those in our actions. His point was to get real and allow those values to live. The issue isn’t the institution, but what we are doing with it. “The church” has no power to change, but how we live and respond to church does. I think he would agree that we do need to live out as the body of Christ. Our lives need to be transformative. But that we should make church into a fake version of that transformative power.
Can’t God be both subject and object? Isn’t that true of the parties in any relationship? I can agree with Rollins about our tendency to create God in our own image, to set up an idol or fetish that we find comforting – just as we can objectify anyone with whom we are in relationship if we forget they are also a subject. But your husband is still the object of your love and desire, even if he’s 3-dimensional and also a subject who acts. I don’t care for an either/or approach and if Rollins is denying the “object” side of the equation wrt God, I don’t want to go there with him any more than I want to create fetishes.
On desire, when it begins and what happens to it after being acted upon by God I like Chesterton’s words to the effect that becoming a Christian helped him to understand why he was always homesick at home. Not that it made him stop being homesick at home – but that being acted upon by God made sense of a longing that he had always (and still) had and showed him where to direct his desire, while (I am sure) kindling desire in new ways.
The comments about creating fetishes and our inability to find God remind me that thankfully it’s not up to us to “find God.” God seems to want to find us and be known by us – and has thus chosen to reveal some of who God is and what God is like to us through the incarnation and scripture. I’m reminded of John Stackhouse’s words:
“Please don’t misunderstand my remarks as defending a naive realism, let alone a dogmatism, that implies that we . . . have figured out God entirely and can accurately delineate the divine nature and history. No, of course we can’t. But we can try to testify to what God has chosen to reveal, and do that with more or less accuracy. That’s what theology properly does, and it’s a good thing to do. Otherwise, we’re left with mere human projections on the universe, as Feuerbach warned, with no knowledge (that can be called knowledge) of God at all.
“So if we have to choose among apprehensions of God as being more or less accurate, then let’s do so as well as we can, realizing that we can never simply and fully comprehend God, but also being grateful that God has given us both the revelation and the capacity to receive revelation such that we can make some statements with high confidence: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” “You shall have no other gods before me,” “Jesus is Lord,” and such like.
“We simply must steer between the Scylla of dogmatism (”We know it all”) and the Charybdis of cynical relativism (”Who knows?)”