41 Quotes by Peter Rollins

For in the figure of Christ we are confronted with an atomic event that does not destroy the world, but rather obliterates the way in which we exist within the world. In concrete terms, this means that the darkness and dissatisfaction that make their presence felt in our lives are not finally answered by certainty and satisfaction but are rather stripped of their weight and robbed of their sting.

The problem with so much religious communication is that it aims at changing our minds. The result is that we can hear the message of the preacher without necessarily heeding the message; we can listen to the “truth” and agree with it, yet not change in response to it.

For, if we shift our focus, it is possible to see that these ripples and ruptures within the text, far from counting against the work as something divinely inspired, are exactly what we would expect to find from that which is marked by and born out of the very depths of God.

Faith, then, is not a set of beliefs about the world. It is rather found in the loving embrace of the world.

For when we genuinely look at how the other sees us, we are confronted with a distance that exists between the image we have of ourselves and the reality of our actions.

Rather than thinking that genuine religious experience is always comforting, the sense that there is one who can see into the very depths of our being can cause us to turn and run from God. Such repulsion and fear arises from the actual experience of God, for to feel naked and ashamed before God presupposes some kind of relation with God.

Not only this, but churches are ideological in that they create their own constellation of beliefs and practices that tell their congregants how to think and behave. A denomination, for instance, will offer dogmas, doctrines, and rituals that to a greater or lesser extent let everyone know how to interact with the world.

The event testified to within Christianity is evident in a life that has been freed from an idolatrous existence that turns us from the world to an iconic engagement with the world.

As the psychologist Victor Frankl once pointed out, true knowledge is always knowledge plus – that is, knowledge that understands that it is always penetrated by unknowing. The result is that God is not defined as the greatest conceivable being or as that which is greater than conception, but rather, as Anselm argued, God is the one who is conceived as inconceivable.