Insurrection, by Peter Rollins

Barbara Brown Taylor’s blurb gives a pretty good overview of Peter Rollins’ new book, Insurrection *. She says:

“While others labor to save the Church as they know it, Peter Rollins takes an ax to the roots of the tree. His strokes are so clean and true that his motive soon becomes clear: this man trusts the way of death and resurrection so much that he has become fearless of religion.”

Part One: Crucifixion

Undergirded with an understanding of the crucifixion as a pivotal experience where “God doubts God” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), Rollins moves into what is not merely a critique of the church, but a call to “rethink what it means to be the Church.” Or, in the words he quotes from Buenaventura Durruti: “The only church that illuminates is a burning one.”

Rollins and his ax take on the god that is a psychological crutch, the danger of coerced belief and the church’s tendency to use a deus ex machina - a God that can be “wheeled in to protect us…or to give a supernatural explanation for what we cannot understand.” From here, he moves methodically towards his understanding of what Bonhoeffer was hinting at with his concept of “religionless Christianity.”

Rollins claims that as we follow Christ, we follow him into crucifixion and forsakenness:

“It is easy for us to take the experience of God’s absence as a rejection of God’s presence and either celebrate it or bemoan it, depending upon one’s position. But a properly Christological reflection should lead us to see the felt experience of God’s absence as the fundamental way of entering into the presence of God. For if being a Christian involves participating in the Crucifixion, then it means undergoing this earth-shattering loss.” (24)

“In contrast to those who would see the experience of this loss as something to be endured and others who would claim that such feelings expose Christianity as false, we find the staggering message of the Cross: radical doubt, suffering, and the sense of divine forsakenness are central aspects of Christ’s experience and thus a central part of what it means to participate in Christ’s death.” (28)

At this point, Rollins explores the phenomenon in which a person can claim to believe something (and actually thinks that they do believe it) but continue to live in ways that show that they actually believe something quite different. The structures and leaders within churches can act as “believe on our behalf” — insulating us from the full impact of doubting and experiencing God’s absence:

“The worship songs affirm certainty so that we are free to celebrate uncertainty; the sermons relay absolute conviction so that we can freely confess our doubt; and our prayers never question the God of religion so that we can express our cynicism. The structure acts as a security blanket that enables us to speak of the Crucifixion without ever undergoing its true liberating horror,” (48)

allowing us to “have a dark night of the soul while keeping all the lights on.” (52)

Part Two: Resurrection

Rollins begins the next section with an exploration of the gap between perception and reality with respect to who we think we are (or who we want others to think we are) and who we really are. “All the energy that is exerted in attempting to close the gap between what we think and how we act fails to acknowledge that our practices do not fall short of our beliefs, but are the concrete, material expression of them.” (103)

Here he begins to articulate his view of resurrection:

“Resurrection is not some form of ascension in which we are miraculously transported out of our immediate problems or ripped away from our humanity in all of its frailty. Just as the resurrected Christ is said to have borne the scars of the Crucifixion, so our Resurrection life will continue to bear the marks of the death we had to undergo. This new mode of living is not one in which the anxiety of death, meaninglessness, and guilt are taken away; it is one in which they are robbed of their weight and sting.” (111)

He attempts to reposition God from an external, otherworldly object that we love to an ungraspable essence which we discover in our midst as we embrace and love the broken world around us — “we learn that God is present in the very act of love itself.” In the context of resurrection, Rollins describes “a way of living in love, a love that embraces existence, not because it is perfect, but because it is beautiful in the midst of its very imperfection” and in which sadness is confronted and accepted as a precursor to its dissipation. This resurrection living compels the Christian to work for genuine transformation in the world, “living an alternative reality in the midst of the present one” and being aware that token gestures can “end up supporting the system they supposedly oppose.”

On a personal level, this book resonated in many places as I read from the perspective of one who has undergone an “earth-shattering loss” that changed my perspective on everything. This isn’t to say I’m comfortable with everything in the book, but I think it is important, I hope many people read it, and I look forward to discussing it with friends.

Related resources:

Spoiler alert: some of these resources are contained in Insurrection in on form or another:

• Peter Rollins: “I deny the Resurrection”
• Pádraig ô Tuama: Maranatha
• The Rapture, a parable by Peter Rollins, illustrated in the style of Jack Chick. (I helped him design it a few years back).
• Review of the Orthodox Heretic
• A collection of older Peter Rollins video

*Insurrection, by Peter Rollins is due out next week. I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher with the hope that I would write a short review of it.

What would Jesus hack?

Cybertheology: Just how much does Christian doctrine have in common with the open-source software movement?

“THE kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,” Jesus said of little children. But computer hackers might give the kids some competition, according to Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest. In an article published earlier this year in La Civiltà Cattolica, a fortnightly magazine backed by the Vatican, entitled “Hacker ethics and Christian vision”, he did not merely praise hackers, but held up their approach to life as in some ways divine. Mr Spadaro argued that hacking is a form of participation in God’s work of creation. (He uses the word hacking in its traditional, noble sense within computing circles, to refer to building or tinkering with code, rather than breaking into websites. Such nefarious activities are instead known as “malicious hacking” or “cracking”.)

Mr Spadaro says he became interested in the subject when he noticed that hackers and students of hacker culture used “the language of theological value” when writing about creativity and coding, so he decided to examine the idea more deeply. The hacker ethic forged on America’s west coast in the 1970s and 1980s was playful, open to sharing, and ready to challenge models of proprietary control, competition and even private property… [more]

PAPA Festival highlights Christianity, anarchism and community spirit

The moon is bright orange, hanging in the warm evening sky like an enormous gumdrop. Underneath it is a “village” of Christian festival-goers, housed in 100 colorful tents on a gently sloping Pennsylvania field about an hour north of Baltimore. Some of the villagers are roasting marshmallows. Others are pressed, mosh-pit style, against a makeshift stage, where an indie folk band named Theillalogicalspoon, which bills itself as “theologians and anarchists,” seems to be singing about everything but Jesus. One number ends: “If I had my way, I’d tear the whole thing down.”

So goes the PAPA (People Against Poverty and Apathy) Festival, “a convergence of communities and movements” run by young organizers mostly connected with Circle of Hope, a Brethren church in Philadelphia … [Read more]

With all this talk about a rapture that is supposed to be occurring tomorrow, I would be remiss not to mention the Chick-style tract that Peter Rollins envisioned (and which I helped produce) a year or two ago. So, here it is: The Rapture, by Peter Rollins.

Though the aftermath of the beating caused Zwerg much emotional pain, the attack also led to one of his most profound religious experiences. He felt something during the mob attack that he still struggles to describe.

After he stepped off the bus, Zwerg says, the crowd grabbed him.

In “Parting the Waters,” Taylor Branch wrote that the mob had swelled to 3,000 people and described what happened to Zwerg: “One of the men grabbed Zwerg’s suitcase and smashed him in the face with it. Others slugged him to the ground, and when he was dazed beyond resistance, one man pinned Zwerg’s head between his knees so that the others could take turns hitting him.’”

Yet in the midst of that savagery, Zwerg says he had the most beautiful experience in his life. “I bowed my head,” he says. “I asked God to give me the strength to remain nonviolent and to forgive the people for what they might do. It was very brief, but in that instant, I felt an overwhelming presence. I don’t know how else to describe it. A peace came over me. I knew that no matter what happened to me, it was going to be OK. Whether I lived or whether I died, I felt this incredible calm.”