Next-Wave Ezine > church & culture

How (Not) to Speak of God
By Scott Berkhimer

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How (Not) to Speak of God has been generating its share of buzz in emerging church circles, and for good reason - Pete Rollins's work is one of the first to take the trajectory of chastened rationality that is a common thread among such folk and do something constructive with it. In other words, to the critics who have said that the emerging church offers nothing of substance, Rollins offers a heaping helping.

I have to say, this was one of the more challenging books I've read in a while. It's not - contra the cover blurb by McLaren - the sort of thing that I'd hand out to the average person looking to get a sense of what the emerging church is all about. It's heavy on philosophy and is so abstract that it makes a lot of what I read look like a how-to manual. That's not necessarily a criticism - Rollins is obviously a first-rate thinker who knows his stuff. But he makes the reader work for it.

In honesty, I didn't really like the book initially. I found it frustrating and, at times, it seemed that he was contradicting himself. But this is a book that benefits from a slow, thoughtful read, and at times a second reading as well. And, the more I mull on it, the more I think he's on to something. Rollins talks about all revelation as both a revealing and a concealing - I really wanted to argue with this, but, at the end of the day...I think he's right. This approach forms something of the backbone of the book; it's a thoughtful appropriation of postmodern philosophy laced with a heavy dose of irony, along with a chunk of liturgies from his community that demonstrate how his theological approach plays out in a practical setting.

Rollins discusses a shift from a Greek understanding of orthodoxy as "right belief" to a Hebraic understanding of orthodoxy as "believing in the right way": "Thus orthodoxy is no longer (mis)understood as the opposite of heresy but rather is understood as a term that signals a way of being in the world rather than a means of believing things about the world." Here's what I think he's saying, and the more I think about it, the more I'm forced to concede his point: we make a pretense of saying things like all theology is provisional and all interpretation is subject to critique and whatnot. But Rollins comes right out and incorporates that stance into the very heart of his project. He's basically conceding at the very beginning that everything that he says, indeed everything that we all say, about God is at least a little bit of crap. We can never come to the point where our theology grasps all that is God. In fact, much of the Christian tradition has long held that to do so is to create an idol. We try to grasp God, indeed we must try to grasp God, so as to understand the One who has grasped us. What marks out orthodoxy, in Rollins's terms, is not so much the content of that grasping but rather the way in which it is held. Love, openness, humility - these, I think, would characterize orthodoxy in Rollins's terms.

But I don't think he's saying that what we believe doesn't matter. I don't think that's in any way his point. Rather, I think this is an understanding that orthodoxy is a journey towards truth. It begins with an understanding that we don't have it right, and it sets off towards the truth, recognizing that we will never completely arrive this side of eternity. The theology that doesn't recognize it's own provisional and incomplete character - this theology is no longer a grasping towards God, but is rather the fashioning of an idol.

He goes on to unpack this perspective in more detail, focusing next on a discussion of the nature of revelation as concealment: "Hence revelation ought not be thought of either as that which makes God known or as that which leaves God unknown, but rather as the overpowering light that renders God known as unknown...Revelation can thus be described as bringing to light the secret of God in such a way that it remains secret."

Here, again, I'm forced to say that I didn't initially like his proposal. But as before, the more I think on it, the more I think that he's got it right. What is striking in the OT, and Rollins pulls numerous examples from that material, is that God's revelation never exhausts his being. The ones to whom the revelation is given seem to walk away from the encounter with less understanding than before - or, perhaps put better, with God having demolished the understanding that they thought they had. The revelation of God overwhelms and befuddles, leaving the one to whom it is given without rational categories but with awe and worship and no small amount of fear instead. And, interestingly enough, faith is the result of such encounters, in spite of (because of?) the reordering and disassembling of those rational categories.

And, of course, the NT is little different. For the Christian, the NT revelation of Jesus as the second person of the Trinity is the penultimate revelation of Godself. But no Christian that is intellectually honest would claim that the incarnation has exhausted all mystery of who God is - if anything, it has deepened the mystery by revealing another aspect of God's being that is beyond our ability to comprehend.

In light of this, I think it wonderfully fitting that Rollins concludes his book with a selection of liturgies from his community's gatherings. After all, at the end of the day, isn't that what is most compelling about chastened rationality? We are free to admit that God is larger than our comprehension, and thus worthy of wonder and worship.

Scott Berkhimer blogs @ theopraxis and lives in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, PA, home of the Liberty Bell, the cheesesteak, and the Eagles. He is the husband of Joy and the father of two fantastic boys, Jason and Christian. By day he analyzes statistics for a large investment firm, by night he is a student in the LEAD MDiv program at Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, PA, and occasionally...he sleeps.

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