Quotes from Peter Rollins

By exploring how fidelity to God requires an acknowledgement of the provisional nature of our beliefs, 'A/theism' was designed to offer us a greater appreciation of God's greatness, a renewed openness to learning from other people's understanding of God and a deeper commitment to a faith that is enhanced, rather than enslaved, by a particular Christian tradition.

You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither high church nor low church, Catholic nor Protestant, citizen nor alien, capitalist nor communist, gay nor straight, beautiful nor ugly, East nor West, theist nor atheist, Israel nor Palestine, American nor Iraqi, married nor divorced, uptown nor downtown, terrorist nor freedom fighter, for all are made one in Christ Jesus.

it would seem almost impossible to argue that the biblical narrative is a calm, clear, and uncontentious text. Rather, the Scriptures reach our ears in an often ominous and scandalous tone. From the opening pages of this ancient text, we are confronted with a shocking series of ambiguous stories and complex conflicts that defy easy categorization and interpretation.

Christianity is not brain surgery or rocket science, it is not quantum mechanics or nuclear physics; it is both infinitely easier and more difficult than all of these. The fragile flame of faith is fanned into life so simply: all we need do is sit still for a few moments, embrace the silence that engulfs us, and invite that flame to burn bright within us.

It is in stillness, in the silence, that the word of God is to be heard.

As a human being I am always haunted by doubt as to questions concerning God. However, I cannot deny that something has transformed my life and that I love the source of that transformation with all of my heart.

For Christians it is a happening, an event, that we affirm and respond to, regardless of the ebbs and flows of our abstract theological reflections concerning the source and nature of this happening.

The hint speaks to the heart and will only be heard by those with a sensitive and open ear. This powerless discourse of the hint can be seen at work in Jesus' parables, which can only truly be heard by those 'with ears to hear'.

Wherever the Church suppresses the message of Christ in favour of power, wealth and status, the prophets will always be found condemning this kingdom, claiming that it is forged by human hands in order to legitimize human endeavours. Insofar as Christianity fails to engage in self-critique, not only realizing its own conceptual limitations but also pointing out our own failings, it becomes a discourse about our kingdom and not God's.

The affirmation of an intervention amidst all our doubt and uncertainty concerning its source thus represents the Christian idea that we have been marked by a life-giving event that invites us to passionately respond with our entire being. It is out of this that a deep and sustained questioning arises.

We misunderstand the truth of faith if we think that the nature, revelation, and event of God can be torn apart from each other and compartmentalized in isolation from one another.

When Pascal wrote of the heart as having reasons that reason does not know, he was referring to a type of knowledge that is foreign to the academic disciplines and different from the type of knowledge we seek in daily life. He was referring to the knowledge of a transformation that could never be placed into words or experience and thus could never be objectified, dissected, and distanced from us.

Indeed the unpalatable truth may well be that we are the ones who oppress the type of people that Jesus spoke with—not directly with hatred in our hearts, but indirectly through the clothes we buy, the coffee we drink, the investments we make, and the cars that we drive. By reading these words in an affluent, Western setting we can so easily domesticate the words of Jesus to the extent that they become little more than advice on how to treat a shop assistant or a passerby.

Christian faith teaches us, if we are sensitive and able to be taught, that the seemingly opposite and opposed realms of radical doubt and absolute certainty are reconciled in a knowing beyond knowledge. There is no doubt for the believer that God dwells with us (as an event), yet there is a deep uncertainty about who, what, or even if God is (as a being).

Genuine faith is not some weapon that shields us from the storms of life while pronouncing judgement upon others, but neither is it wholly self-destructive. Rather, it is a weapon that both shields and lacerates the one who wields it, offering comfort to the distressed and distress to the comforted. To advocate this kingdom of love, mercy and truth involves self-sacrifice and self-critique.

that absolute commitment to God involves a deep and sustained wrestling with God.

The point of second naïveté is not to reach a position where one rejects academic debates but rather to provide a space in which readers can place these ongoing debates to one side so that they can attend to the transforming source of the text itself. It is this transforming source that we speak of when we speak of the Word of God.

For the blessing that God bestowed upon Jacob brings us face to face with the fact that God wants a fight.

For the Word, if it exists at all, does not simply dwell in the ink that marks the pages of the Bible and cannot be isolated in a dissection of the story into its constituent parts.

This vision fundamentally challenges what Peter holds to be the command of God and opens up a difficult dilemma: in order to obey the command of God he must disobey the command of God.

But for now it is simply worth noting that the multitude of descriptions detailing the nature of God, combined with the various claims that God cannot be contained by any description, presents the reader with the reality that the text affirms God as beyond all our understandings of God. In other words, the God who grasps us is never grasped (in text, thinking, or experience).

The face of our beloved can thus be described as an icon. Just as with an idol, it is the way we interact with an object, rather than a property in the object itself, that renders it an icon. But in the look of love, objects are exposed as icons. The face of our beloved is not a signpost, for a signpost is not the place where it points; yet neither is the face a pure manifestation of our beloved. Rather, the face is the place where the beloved is both revealed and hidden.

However, within the Bible we find a much more radical view of the eschatological kingdom, not as the absence of something that is to come, but rather as the absence of a kingdom that is already here.

The lover is the one whose heart proclaims, "I had no need of you until I met you, but now I know I always needed you." Or alternatively, "I had no desire for you until I met you, and now I know that I have always desired you.