Last week, Peter Rollins made an impromptu stop at Vanderbilt Divinity School that I was fortunate enough to attend. It wasn’t a scheduled speaking engagement or a part of his Lessons in Evandalism tour, just a talk given to a small group over lunch. I am familiar with Rollins’ work only from reading Blake’s and Kevin’s posts about him, but these left me intrigued. His talk was given in light of responses he’d received to his book How (Not) to Speak of God, which I have not read, so I think my hearing of his talk may have been lacking some important background information. Regardless, here is my take on his talk.
Rollins’ talk centered on the dissonance between our meta-narrative and our mega-narrative. I’m not familiar with the latter term, which he took from Westphal, but I understood it to be along the lines of the narrative of our lived history. It’s the “big story.” To illustrate, he drew a simple table:
| Meta |
Mega |
| Believe |
Doubt |
| Doubt |
Believe |
He said the center row is where he sees most of Christianity–ascribing belief to the meta-narrative, but professing doubt at the level of lived experience. Our lives profess belief in the free market, the military, our 401k, policital parties, etc. He advocated a move toward the third row–doubt at the meta level and belief at the mega level. He pointed to the experiences of Mother Theresa and Bonhoeffer. I’m not terribly familiar with Bonhoeffer’s life other than the hagiography, but after Mother Theresa’s long life of service for the Gospel, some of her writings came out confessing that she had not sensed the presence of God for many years. It is this kind of doubt-belief paradigm toward which we ought to move. He briefly described the belief-belief paradigm as a sort of fundamentalism and doubt-doubt as some kind of liberalism (he used a specific adjective here, but it escapes me).
He also discussed Ikon, the community he founded. He said that it was a community of theists and a/non-theists, the latter of whom, if asked, might respond that they did not believe in God, but they were at Ikon because, of course, God had spoken to them. The question, he said, is not whether God exists, but what God is saying.
A few other snippets and one liners (paraphrased):
- Batman fighting subjective violence by night placates Bruce Wayne’s conscience and allows him to perpetuate objective violence by day. Similarly, the church placates and allows us to continue participating in systems of violence.
- God is not anonymous, but hypernonymous.
- The Incarnation is not the revealing of God, but the mystery among us.
- Revelation is not new information, but bedazzlement, transformation, and concealment.
- Ikon offers the Omega Course–like the Alpha Course, but its opposite.
I found the talk to be intriguing, and I will certainly check out How (Not) to Speak of God and The Orthodox Heretic. My main question (which I should have asked, but didn’t) was why there was seemingly a necessary dissonance between the meta- and mega-narratives. Perhaps delving into Rollins’ work would answer that question, and I think Blake’s above-linked post gets at this question as well.
What are your thoughts? Do you have any experience with Rollins? Do you find him compelling? Heretical? Other? I’ll be interested to see where a conversation might lead.
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