How (Not) to Speak of God: The Third Mile

In Chapter 5 of How (Not) to Speak of God, Rollins simultaneously deals with the objections to the concept of a/theology while pointing out how such an approach actually allows us to move forward, rather than backward in our spiritual journey.

This chapter is packed full of ideas. I thought about splitting them into several posts. But in the end, I decided it was better to do it at once, so that the interrelationship between Rollins’ ideas would be clearer.

Rollins begins by pointing out that Christians think of “truth” in a way that is entirely different than the way the modern (and ancient Greek) world view truth. For the modern and ancient Greek worlds, “truth” has to do with what is Real: “the underlying substance of the universe, the nature of logic and so forth.”

But for the Christian, truth is much different.  Truth is an experience that we have when we encounter God. Thus, Truth is something with which we come face-to-face, rather than with some “correct” verbal description of the way things are.

So how do we know we have had an authentic experience of God/Truth. Here, Rollins borrows form the Epistle of John:

Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, becuase God is love…No-one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made ocmplete in us…God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.

Can you hear echos of the themes from Rollins’ prior chapters in this? You can’t “see” God – you can’t capture him in words or pictures. Instead, you experience God, and in that experience of God, you learn to take on His nature. The ultimate test of authenticity for our faith, then, is not whether we understand things “correctly” but whether our lives reflect this encounter with Truth.

To paraphrase: Truth grabs us, shakes us, saves us, transforms us. It is neither ink on a page, nor words in a mouth, nor (per se) thoughts in our minds.

So what should we say, then, about ethical systems? They are useful, to be sure, but they can never become an excuse to avoid the difficult struggle of moral reasoning. Every system, every biblical text, every theological work, must be read with extreme prejudice – he argues – a prejudice of love. Indeed, he says, people can interpret a text or a situation in more than one way, so long as both are doing so with a prejudice of love.

Rollins invites us to think of it this way: Jesus told his followers to “go the second mile” when they were required to carry Roman soliders’ packs. Does this mean, then that the “second mile” is all that is required? Is a third mile required? Can we put together a rigid, ethical system that says the limit of our service to others is simply a little further out than it was before? Of course not, argues Rollins, becuase Jesus wasn’t creating an ethical rule. Instead, he was modeling a system by which ethical obligations are interpreted through the lens of a prejudice of love.

And it is at this point that – in my view – Rollins quite effectively rebuts the critics of a mystical, a/theological approach to Christianity. To those who his approach allows anyone willy-nilly to make anything they want out of the biblical text, he points out that the fact that there may be multiple interpretations of a text (“transfinite” readings), infinite readings are not possible, because any reading that does not come from a prejudice of love is not True.

Is Rollins, then, arguing for works-based salvation – asserting that the only way to be saved is to love? Not really, he points out, because “as soon as love works in order to receive something, it is not love.” We can only truly love, he points out, when we lose our awareness that we are even doing it, “[f]or a love that is born of God is a love that gives with the same reflex as that which causes a bird to sing or the heart to beat.” We cannot simply force this radical, Christ-like love.

Our challenge, then, is to learn to let go of ourselves. We must undergo an ego-death, and in that death the divine has a place in which it can enter in and lay itself down. Our hope is that, in so doing, love will flow through us.

Up next: a few concluding reflections.

Previous Posts:
1. Introduction
2. The meaning of heretical orthodoxy
3. Chapter 1: God Rid me of God
4. Chapter 2: The Aftermath of Theology
5. Chapter 3: A/theology as Icon
6. Chapter 4: Inhabiting the God-Shaped Hole