I'm part way through
Peter Rollins' book
How (Not) To Speak Of God (thanks again to Huw). The book is an exciting and fresh discussion of how Christianity can speak into and about our postmodern condition.
Brian McLaren seems right to rave about the book in his Foreword as "one of the first and most hopeful expressions to date of Christian theology being done in a postmodern context."
Several of Rollins' arguments are synergous with ideas expressed by Nicholas Mosley and Walter Brueggemann and the theological conversation that Rollins is engaging in can only be enhanced by the ideas that Mosley and Brueggemann bring to the discussion.
Rollins writes of the way in which our approach to speaking of God:
"must be a powerless one which employs words as a way of saying that we have been left utterly breathless by a beauty that surpasses all words. This does not mean that we remain silent - far from it. The desire to get beyond language forces us to stretch language to its very limits. As Samuel Beckett once commented, we use words in order to tear through them and glimpse at what lies beneath. The desire to say nothing, to create sacred space, opens up the most beautiful type of language available - the language of parables, prose and poetry."
Similarly, Mosley writes about the need to "hear for ourselves what might be going on just behind our words, off-stage" and to:
"evolve a language which will try to deal not just with facts, with units of data, together with the patterns, connections, that such data, together with the minds that observe them, make - in particular a language that can deal at the same time both with the data and with the language that is traditionally used to describe them. By this, apparent contradictions might be held. This language would be elusive, allusive; not didactic. Some such language has been that of poetry, of art; also of love ..."
Rollins goes on to argue that the emerging conversation:
"is demonstrating an ability to stand up and engage in a powerless, space-creating dis-course that opens up thinking and offers hints rather than orders. In short, the emerging community must endeavour to be a question rather than an answer and an aroma rather than food. It must seek to offer an approach that enables the people of God to become the parable, aroma and salt of God in the world, helping to form a space where God can give of God."
Similarly, Brueggemann has argued that "the task of the Christian minister is not to construct a full alternative world but to fund - provide the pieces, materials and resources - out of which a new world can be imagined." Our responsibility, he says, "is not a grand scheme or a coherent system, but the voicing of lots of little pieces out of which people can put life together in frsh configurations":
"Over time, these pieces are stitched together into a sensible collage, stitched together, all of us in concert, but each of us idiosyncratically, stitched together in a new whole - all things new."
One of the Ikon services described in Rollins' book speaks about our experience as Christians being the experience of Holy Saturday; "that 24 hour period nestled between Good Friday and Easter Saturday, between crucifixion and resurrection." A reflection from this service by Ikon says that Holy Saturday "speaks of the absence of God and is as much a part of the Christian experience as the day before and the day after." It asks: "Who among us does not find ourselves dwelling, from time to time, or perhaps at all times, in the space of Holy Saturday?"
Brueggemann also writes of this perception of Holy Thursday citing George Steiner as writing:
“There is one particular day in Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor scripture make report. It is a Saturday. And it has become the longest of days. We know of that Good Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. That is to say he knows of the injustice, of the interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending … We know also about Sunday. To the Christian, that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that have conquered death. If we are non-Christians or non-believers, we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms … The lineaments of the Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less deconstructible). But ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation of rebirth on the other.”
In my In Between collaboration with Alan Stewart, from our time together at NTMTC, we used the three days of Easter as a paradigm for our own experience as Christians arguing that, in our Christian journey we experience: rebirth (an Easter Sunday experience); suffering (a Good Friday experience); and tension, from the now and the not yet of the Kingdom (an Easter Saturday experience). We structured our material non-chronologically because we wanted to leave people in the tension of the now and not yet which is where we thought we spend most of our time as Christians and illustrated this with the quote from Steiner.
Several of the meditations that we wrote for this collection also express ideas that have synergy with those developed by Rollins in How (Not) To Speak Of God:
in between
Between the action and its consequence
Between knowledge and its understanding
Between the invitation and the party
Between the longest day and the last day
The stone not rolled away
The tomb still guarded
The friends still scattered
The promise known
but not understood
The body still still
The still time
The still waiting time
The time between times
The last times
In between
Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste
and the dream of liberation and rebirth, ours is the long days journey of the Saturday.
are/are not
We hear you
and
do not.
We are with you
and
are not.
Through whom,
with whom
and in whom,
we are – what?
We are one
with what
we are
not.
No voice is audible,
yet we hear.
No hand touches ours,
yet we feel.
No eye has seen the glory,
yet we kneel.
What you are,
who you are
is and
is not
clear.
Knowing
and
not knowing.
In
and out
of touch.
Out of mind
yet
mindful.
Out of sight
yet
insight.
We are
in relation
to much
that is excess -
beyond
comprehension
and expectation –
being
night
and light.
These are among the In Between meditations that I will be reading at the opening night reception for Visual Dialogue on Friday 5th October.
Rollins' book comes out of and develops an emerging conversation about ways to speak of, with, and to hear from, God. Mosley, Brueggemann and In Between are part of that conversation of which there is much more still to be said. Some further thoughts on the significance of Mosley, Brueggemann and others can be found by clicking here.
A final thought is that Jim White is the bard of this emerging conversation. To see what I mean, check out the lyrics to Static On The Radio and 10 Miles To Go On A 9 Mile Road or try this video.
