The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief

As I finish chapter 7 of Dr. Rollins' book, "The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief" (Paraclete Press, 2008), I am left a bit reticent about the overall proposal at this point, since I have several questions that I cannot seem to reconcile. First, I want to say that I think Rollins is onto something when he asserts that Christians have, at times, been a bit overly-ambitious to speak about God's essence and his supposed future actions in concrete terms. At the same time, I wonder if Rollins' view represents a polarization that goes too far in the opposite direction. One very important thing that Rollins does, as I have mentioned previously, is that he does seek to come to grips with the Biblical text itself, and to develop his perspective from that vantage point. This is one thing that I have not seen done nearly as well by anyone else involved in the Emergent Movement.

At the same time, the problem, it seems, is that while Rollins does want to move beyond a critical, academic reading of the text (the second naivete), he does so by first presupposing that their are grave inconsistencies in the text; the inconsistencies are the ruptures that testify to God to the extent that they also show how the finite cannot capture the infinite with the bounds of a text. Now, I am not about to make an apologetic presentation for the consistency of the Biblical text, but I would say that as much as we do want to move beyond a critical reading of the Biblical documents, it is virtually impossible to do so without first stopping briefly to consider their nature; and it is that consideration that inevitably undergirds our reading in one way or another. This is the point where I think Rollins may have run into a problem.

Before I elaborate, let me first reaffirm and underscore Rollins' suggestion that our theological constructs are almost certainly, at times, an overstatement of what can truly be said about God's essence and future actions. Allow me to offer a rather lengthy quote by John Webster as an acknowledgement, but also as a way forward beyond Rollins' suggested metaphysical inaacessibility:

"In this sense, postmodernism is quite correct to reject what Taylor calls, 'the realized eschatology of the system'; authientically Christian eschatology needs to be distinguished from what we might call futurism, that is, the elaboration of a satisfyingly coherent narrative scheme on the basis of which we may come to possess and control the outcome of human history, assigning roles and predicting outcomes in what is no more than a kind of eschatological technology. Postmodernists rightly deplore the false homogenization and singularization of history which this entails. But the protection against this predictive abuse of eschatology is not to abandon teleology, but to specify its character with the right kind of Christian precision. Two things above all are of critical significance here.

First, the fundamental content of Christian eschatology is the personal identity of the one who was and is and is to come, and only by derivation is it teleological. Its core is not the elaboration of a scheme of historical purposes, but the coming of Jesus Christ. His being, his presence and activity, now known in a hidden and yet real way in the activity of the Holy Spirit but to be manifest in the last day, is the content of Christian eschatological belief, and only on the basis of that coming as the transfiguring event of human history may we speak of history's telos.........Eschatology is the forward expansion of the name of Jesus; it is the confessor that he will be, that he will come; only as such is it a confession of the future of humanity and its history. The object, therefore, of Christian eschatological speech is the perfect, that is, complete, and utterly self-sufficient, reality indicated by the name of Jesus."

From this vantage point, we are left with a much more modest proposal about Christian belief about God and his actions; but it also still leaves us with the critical question about the text unanswered, which is needed in order to move beyond a critical reading as Rollins proposes. While Rollins may want to deny, perhaps rightly, the Bible's ability to substantiate a comprehensive theological structure for Christian belief about God's essence and future actions, the question is whether he would want to take it so far as to deny the Bible as a mediator of reliable knowledge of God's revelation of himself, which is Jesus Christ. To the extent that the Bible does in fact reliably attest to Jesus Christ as the manifest presence of God, it also seems reasonable to assert that it is possible make both ontological inference about God (to some degree), and consequently, to assert that he is not totally metaphysically inaccessible.

Now, while the divergent, historically contingent nature of this variety of texts that make up the Bible may make a conprehensive super-structure a bit ambitious, it seems equally ambitious to assert that the Bible does not allow for one to make any ontological assertions about God; let us not forget, Jesus represents God's ontological presence or manifestation in this world. This cannot be denied as a concrete fact unless one takes a posture on the critical academic debates that is opposed to any substantial coherence in the Bible; and, in the case of the Emergent Movement, I have yet to see one person (and this is not offered in a spirit of arrogance) who argues sufficiently with regard to historical-critical issues, so as to defend the point that the Bible is primarily a document characterized by error. This, in my opinion, is the major obstacle in the postmodern church for developing a credible position with regard to the Biblical documents.