The One time Christian speaks of divine dereliction
It is day three of Greenbelt and, as always, I am having a great time.
There have been a few surreal and interesting experiences, one that I should mention was the way that I am described in the Greenbelt book as a ‘one-time Christian, Charismatic and Evangelist…’. Now I must admit that I gave them the line, but I also went on to say, ‘Pete is now committed to the task of becoming Christian…’. But they left it out! Without that line the description kinda gives the wrong idea. So thought I had better mention it in case any of you were confused.
Last night I gave my main talk, which was called, ‘The birth of Christianity and the Death of Meaning’. In this talk I explored how Christianity has a radical and unique way of understanding the place of doubt, suffering and the sense of divine abandonment. I argued that there are two broad camps in offering a way of interpreting these. The first is the traditional camp (religious Christianity) which affirms that God is there and that doubt, suffering and the sense of losing God are all something that we must endure (God being near us in these trials and tribulations). The other camp (the New Atheists) see these things are signs that God is not there, that Christianity is a fable which we must move beyond in order to grow up.
However, in the talk I was arguing that a properly understood Christology draws us into a third position in which doubt, suffering and the sense of divine abandonment are not something that we experience as part of our relation to God but rather are things that God experiences. The moment of existential atheism is not one in which we are broken free of Christ, nor is it a moment in which we fall short of Christ, rather it is the moment when we partake in the very identity of Christ on the cross. All religions have a place where we can doubt God. In Christianity God doubts God (this brings us into what we can call, after Bonhoeffer, ‘religionless Christianity).
Hence we can begin to approach Bloch’s claim that only an atheist can be a good Christian. When I talk of the ‘atheist God’ I do not mean the weak, anemic atheism of philosophy but the existential atheism of people like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. For these people the loss of God was felt, it was something that made its mark in their existence, it was a defining experience. It was, I argue, a singularly Christian, or Christ, experience.
In this experience God is not near us but rather we partake in the very economy of God. To share in the death of Christ thus involves a radical subtraction, a loss of ultimate Meaning, the experience of life in all its horror and contingency and the sense of being condemned to freedom. This is the founding moment of conversion. In the talk I also argued that this is a deeply Pauline reading.
Today, in a panel I will be exploring how Baptism and Communion are two moments of partaking in this divine dereliction.
August 30th, 2009 at 6:44 am
You wouldn’t happen to have an mp3 of the lecture, would you Pete? Also, have you read much of Zizek’s portions of the Monstrosity of Christ? And the death-of-god stuff from the 60s (Altizer, Van Buren, etc.)? Sounds pretty similar to what you’re doing, so I thought I’d ask. Sorry, if you’ve addressed it before, but I haven’t been following you for too long.
August 30th, 2009 at 7:34 am
I still can’t decide if this is brilliant or if you are a wack-job…
August 30th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Pete, would love to get a copy of the audio from the panel. (Or maybe you could post about it?) I’m particularly curious where baptism fits into this life of faith/doubt/belief/unbelief.
August 30th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Reminds me of the quote from Radical Theology and the Death of God by Hamilton, “We are not talking about the absence of the experience of God, but about the experience of the absence of God.” Pete, philosophically are you still mostly in camp with Caputo, Robbins and Vattimo with weak theology and Marion’s phenomenology as well? It seems that lately you’ve mostly been discussing Freud/Lacan/Zizek and Hegelian death-of-God thought.
August 30th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Hi Peter, I heard you speak (and first heard about you) at Poets, Prophets and Preachers in Grand Rapids. I really appreciated your talks and have since been reading both How (Not) to Speak of God and Orthodox Heretic. I mentioned you to a friend and she says she follows your blog so I thought I would check it out. I’m new to the blogging world and am planning to start one of my own. Thanks for your words and passion.
August 30th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Pete, don’t you have too much of your center staked to a single line of text? And an outside-the-mission bit at that, in my opinion, a thing reported to have been heard by an anonymous ground-pounder on the day of the cross. Too precious, in my opinion. What is more, everyone knows the words simply represent pre-Christian scripture (a fact in which its credential is tarnished a little for me at least).
Now I would suggest that having God quoting the Psalms (with appreciation and approval) is scary enough. But it looks as though the Father did come and get him soon after he uttered the words, thereby performing a typically shattering Godly exegesis (of both Mark 15:34 and Psalm 22).
Anyway, I can’t get meaning out of the God-doubts-God strophe, except the more common version in which God-made-man rejects the providence-racketeering of the man-made gods, (not just heathen but also temple Judaism). If we include mainstream and evangelical Christianity as an equally fit subject of divine doubt, we’re closer to Bonhoeffer (and to the truth, in my opinion). Closer than we get via those great novelists you cited (Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus).
I do think it is high time that more Christians were OK with being called “atheists” by society’s standard-bearers (just as they were so named by the pagans in the first 2 centuries AD).
August 30th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Troy – the mp3 can be downloaded from the Greenbelt shop for £3.00, the link is below. Search by speaker name and you can access all of Pete’s Greenbelt archives.
Pete – did the above, listened from afar. Really appreciated what you had to say. Audio quality disappointing, but that is not your fault.
http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/shop/talks/speakers
August 31st, 2009 at 1:04 am
To play devil’s advocate here, Nietzsche did make a pretty firm break with Christian theology. And I think it is unfair to him to try to suggest that deep down he believed. Certainly he has that famous quote “There was one Christian–and he died on the cross.” But this is really an expression of deep pessimism and contempt; was Jesus ministry so weak and ineffectual that it died with himself on the cross? That means there was no holy spirit guiding the early church. And Nietzsche considered Christianity’s sympathy with the weak and the suffering to be itself a corrosive influence on the West. But what good he set up in opposition to this; glorification of the powerful and the exploitative? Hardly a gospel aesthetic.
Yet I agree there are ways in which Nietzsche’s thinking is not necessarily anti-Christian. Certainly he wrote eloquently on the need for creation and spontaneity in avoidance of decay. Garry Wills calls Jesus “more a higher Nietzsche than a higher Socrates.”
August 31st, 2009 at 8:57 am
Hey Pete- This is Dan from Birmingham Alabama. Thanks for all your hard work and I just wanted to say that as Im fumbling through this fog that is my faith walk…you have been extremely helpful and influential. i do believe you are onto something in this “A/Theistic christian” theology. However I did find it funny that you wanted to clarify your greenbelt book description! The part about you BECOMING christian. That brought a smile to my face…thanks! Its funny to me that you would be concerned about something like that:) The fact that you dont want to be….confusin…. was to me…. confusing! Pete, Ive only met you a few times while you were here in alabama and even I know that this is not the first time someone could accuse you of being confusing! But Im glad you clarified:)
Also… any news on your pub tour? Birmingham? Southeast U.S.? If you can bring it here that would be great. Keep up the good work. Press onward.
September 1st, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Pete, i would love to have you post your thought on baptism and communion as partaking of divine dereliction. very interesting.
But I’m also wondering if sometimes we make too much of dereliction. Certainly Paul emphasizes death/dereliction but also life/resurrection. There is some dialectic at work here between the two that people like Badiou and Zizek (and Moltmann, which is what the post above sounded like). Badiou is too focused on the resurrection offered by the Event, and Zizek is too focused on the death in regard to the Symbolic Order (of meaning as you put it).
But sure the center of gravity, at least for Paul, is on resurrection. While he claims to be a slave (dereliction) it is to the Risen Messiah would is Lord even above Ceasar (see Rom. 1:1-7). And even the Philippians hymn which models an attitude for us to follow begin in ‘kenosis’ but ends in exaltation.
Lastly, what is your model of Christology? You only refer to the results of your Christology (God experiences suffering in Christ), but not its basis.
September 1st, 2009 at 12:15 pm
now to think of it, according to your theology of God as super-essential, beyond being (i don’t have the exact language before me…), it seems that because is not a being among beings, that it would be impossible to predicate suffering or doubt of this non-being.
This is again where Christology comes in…if the divine essense is beyond essense, then however it might have been joined with Christ surely this would still to be assumed into divinity b/c then the divine would be predicated by things that only beings are predicated with (but I thought this is what you were striving against). But if God assumes suffering then he/it is merely one being among other being (no matter how eminent). But again, I thought this is against your paradigm of (not) speaking of God.
September 1st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
[...] PeterRollins.net – The One time Christian speaks of divine dereliction "However, in the talk I was arguing that a properly understood Christology draws us into a third position in which doubt, suffering and the sense of divine abandonment are not something that we experience as part of our relation to God but rather are things that God experiences. The moment of existential atheism is not one in which we are broken free of Christ, nor is it a moment in which we fall short of Christ, rather it is the moment when we partake in the very identity of Christ on the cross. All religions have a place where we can doubt God. In Christianity God doubts God." (tags: religion christianity theology) [...]
March 7th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Hegel Hegel pants on fire!