How (Not) to Speak of God

I’m encouraging everyone I know to read Peter Rollins’ How (Not) to Speak of God. It has stimulated my thinking more than any book I’ve read in the last year or two. It’s fairly short, but it’s dense. The payoff is worth the time spent.

It informed some of what I said at the Zoe Conference last week. I think I’m going to blog through each chapter of the book in order to give you a taste of the content. Here is a passage from the introduction to Part 1 that gives a pretty good idea of where Rollins is going:

Instead of following the Greek-influenced idea of orthodoxy as right belief, these chapters show that the emerging community is helping us to rediscover the more Hebraic and mystical notion of the orthodox Christian as one who believes in the right way–that is believing in a loving, sacrificial and Christlike manner. The reversal from ‘right belief’ to ‘believing in the right way’ is in no way a move to some binary opposite of the first (for the opposite of right belief is simply wrong belief); rather, it is a way transcending the binary altogether. 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.

The first time I remember reading of such a distinction was in McLaren’s Finding Faith and it rocked my world then and it still does. Probably because I come from a Christian tradition that emphasized right belief about “salvation issues” in such a stark way.

One of the questions I asked last week was: Will we be known as disciples of Jesus because we have the right answers on all the big questions or because we emanate the love of Christ in all things?

I still believe the answers we give to the big questions are important, but how we answer those questions is equally important. When people resist our message, I wonder if what they’re resisting is the content of the message or the way in which its delivered?

Rollins continues:

Orthodoxy as right belief will cost us little; indeed, it will allow us to sit back with our Pharisaic doctrines, guarding the ‘truth’ with the purity of our interpretations. But orthodoxy, as believing in the right way, as bringing love to the world around us and within us. . .that will cost us everything. For to live by that sword, as we all know, is to die by it.

Peter Rollins, How (Not) To Speak of God, Emerging Theology, Emerging Church