Can I recommend the works of French academic Rene Girard on desire and its implications for Christian thought.

'I saw Satan Fall like Lightning' is probably the place to start.

Is Truth found by analytical thought? There's another one to throw into the mix!

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?)"

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.

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.

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.

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…

Anyway, enjoy your posts- added you to my blogroll if that's okay…