The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief

I just finished chapter 5 of Peter Rollins forthcoming book, "The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief" (Paraclete Press, 2008), and I have one bit of advice for the potential reader as I continue; you better have "guts" when you decide to pick up this book because it challenges the very foundations of Western conceptions of Christianity. Rollins continues to offer powerful argumentation for his position, and unless you possess a sort of beligerent confidence in what you think you know, you can help but grant that many of his points have substance, even if you do not end up argeeing with the breadth of his proposal.

Chapter 5 is primarily aimed at expanding on, and adding specificity to his critiques of the church described in chapter 4. We saw in chapter 4 that Rollins sought to highlight the idea that because of the way man's inquiry into the nature of truth has developed, at least in the western world, we have come to domesticate the notion of God. In other words, our method inquiry has led us to be inappropriately ambitious and confident about our ability to describe God's ultimate reality. We have reduced God to ways in which we describe his supposed essence. We have reduced God to what can be described as a set of facts, appropriate for examination and contemplation.

In chapter 5, Dr. Rollins shows a number of parallels that this type of thinking has in common with the approach used in the empirical sciences, while also making a number of provocative statements in the wake of the implications. Consider the following comments:

"As soon as Christianity is thought of as something that makes claims to a set of facts that exist in the world, then it becomes subject to a whole range of critiques. This does not in any way imply that we must reject specific claims in the Bible, any more than it implies that we must embrace them; this is another question entirely, one that can be approached in relation to the best evidence that we have. It merely points out that if we take such claims as the “truth” of faith then we predicate that truth upon claims that will always be open to question. Of course within the Bible there are various claims to historical events; the point is that these claims, like all claims, are open to question, and so, if the truth of faith rests upon them, then it is also open to question.

Thus the truth affirmed by Christianity ends up being treated like any other set of factual claims, claims that are provisional and open to being proven wrong. Even if one believes that the various claims within the Bible are wholly accurate, it is always possible that a new discovery in archaeology, history, or biblical scholarship will overturn the current body of evidence. Apologetics, in its attempt to defend the factual claims of the Bible through the use of reason, thus implicitly affirms the very philosophical outlook that undermines its own project, placing the truth of Christianity in the realm of rational reflection and thus into the realm of reasonable doubt and provisionality."

From this vantage point, Rollins sets out to substatiate his claim that this approach to the Christian faith only undermines it by employing a number of strands of argumentation; first, Rollins explains that this type of rationalistic approach places the substance of Chrsitian faith in the hands of the academic. He also claims that this type of of supposedly objective inquiry places distance between the inquirer and Christianity's moral substance. In other words, this mode of inquiry allows one to examine the claims of the Christian faith at a distance, without being subject to moral claims it makes on our lives.

Ultimately, Rollins uses, quite brilliantly, the writings of Nietzsche, in order to show the deeply rooted affinity that a rationsalistic, apologetic, and at times, morally disconnected breed of Christianity has with its supposed antithesis; atheism. Rollins begins by quoting the parable in which Nietzsche coined the famous phrase 'god is dead', and then offers some very insightful commentary (I have to warn you that this is a relatively long quote, but its very important):

"For Nietzsche the idea of God had become inextricably linked with claims to do with the idea that there is an overall meaning and purpose in the universe, i.e., with factual claims. Indeed, he judged this approach to be so embedded in the culture of his time that anyone who believed that the world had some overarching meaning accessible to the human mind, was actually affirming this God even if they denied it .... (NB: Descarte's God)

This helps to explain why the people who the madman is speaking to in the parable are actually described as not believing in God. For while they had given up on church, prayer, and even the word “God” they implicitly affirmed and were comforted by the idea of overall cosmic meaning, a view rooted in the affirmation of Descartes’ God. For Nietzsche God was dead, not because some entity “out there” had ceased to exist, but rather because the idea of God had become synonymous with Descartes’ God, and Descartes’ God had no positive transformative power. In many ways Nietzsche was pointing out that both the religious believers of his day and those who called themselves atheists were methodological theists and practical atheists. In other words, for Nietzsche God is nothing more than an idea that comforts the individual with the belief that the world has some overall meaning. God was directly affirmed by the believer and indirectly evoked by the so-called enlightened scientists of his day, but this belief had no real effect upon either of them. Such an intellectual belief did not evoke a radically transformed life of loving enemies, giving away worldly goods, and standing up against injustice. Belief in God was now just a type of crutch, an ideological system divorced from life. For Nietzsche God had gradually become nothing more than a guarantee of meaning, and this meaning seemed to serve no other purpose than the rather selfish one of making us feel secure in the universe.

If the traditional religious philosophers asked that we remain faithful to our objective understanding of God, Nietzsche asked that we betray such understandings because they offer us nothing but an ideological drug that enables us to live without embracing existence. Hence, Nietzsche equated drugs and religion, for both provide ways for the individual to avoid facing up to life in all its beauty and horror.

Nietzsche looked to a time when people would be able to live without such ideological crutches—a time when they could embrace life without this Cartesian God. This would not, however, signal the reign of some kind of traditional atheism, for if God had become synonymous with the affirmation of ultimate meaning, then Nietzsche was saying that the atheism of his day was still too interested in playing the same game, affirming a meaningful universe without God. Atheism had to embrace its own message and overcome itself, recognizing that there was no privileged position to judge what the world was all about either scientifically or religiously. Nietzsche was thus attempting to show how Cartesian theology lay deeply embedded within the thinking of modern Western philosophers and scientists, even though they often claimed to have nothing to do with theology. The time that he looked toward was one when people would simply accept the world as it is and create meaning from the raw materials of our everyday activities."

Overall, I must simply say that I found this chapter to be the most cogently argued, and provocative thus far. I don't think I am in a position to offer criticism, nor do I want to at this point; rather, I simply wish to see the direction in which Rollins will take an alternate proposal.

At the same time, I must admit that I do not yet understand how denying that we can know anything about God's overarching meaning for this world is healthy for the Christian faith. I understand Rollins' point that total certainty about the outcome of things can breed complacency, but it seems, in some sense, that our reading of the Bible, for example, causes us to wrestle with what God's overall purposes with respect to man might be. Perhaps I am just the perfect illustration of his point, but it seems that to garner some degree of meaning with respect to God and faith is what renders our faith intelligible.

I look forward to Dr. Rollins' corrections to my understanding.

Very intersting....