Pyrotheology

"Here God is not approached as an object we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself." -Peter Rollins 'The Idolatry of God'

In my context, people who believed in God disagreed about Him enough to worship in separate buildings on Sundays. In Belfast between the 1960's & 1998, Protestants & Catholics disagreed about Him enough to kill one another. Peter Rollins was born into that world. He saw people who claimed (essentially) the same God kill each other in His name. Rollins also saw atheists live more loving lives than God-believers. Somewhere in all these experiences, Rollins began to name an intuition that sacred & secular, theism & atheism are more blurry than we give them credit for. His calls his work Pyrotheology, the process of unraveling our need for certainty & satisfaction while at the same time embracing life's complexity & ambiguity. The question of life after death, a question Rollins believes leads to violence & division, is put on hold in favor of exploring life before death. In this essay, I want to explain why Peter Rollins is worth reading & why Orthodox Christianity is still worth embracing.

The Need for Certainty

A recurring theme in Pyrotheology is the rich role of doubt. For Rollins, doubt is your response when your experience doesn't match your beliefs. Doubt is not something to be discouraged, but rather something to be encouraged. The reason we need doubt is because we idolize certainty. The fuel for our lust of certainty comes from the experience of lack. Lack is (something like) experiencing a distance between you and something you desire as if getting that thing you desire would make you satisfied. For human beings, what greater satisfaction exists than the satisfaction of certainty? But Rollins rightly diagnoses that we cannot achieve the certainty we desire. Even if we don't desire certainty, we try to fill that Lack with idols (wealth, relationships, a car, career, etc.). Embracing doubt is a curb against idolatry according to Rollins. Faith, then, is found in loving the world unconditionally now rather than waiting to be proven right later.

Though Rollins is right that we wrongly desire certainty, ought to be more accepting of doubt & that we chase idols, Orthodoxy has a different answer for why we chase idols & the proper role of Faith. First, we do chase idols, and we chase them because we desire something. But the root behind idolatry is love, or rather, loving poorly. I ought not love & desire food as if it was God, but I ought to love food as food, my neighbor as my neighbor, myself as myself. It is not wrong to desire certainty (God has certainty, and we were made to reflect Him), but it is a foolish attempt to grasp certainty as our own. And second, doubt is the proper response when your experiences come in conflict with your beliefs. Peter was correct to remember that people don't walk on water when he walked to Jesus in Matthew 14. But then again, doubt was never a knowledge problem for Peter. It only became a problem when his doubt took his eyes off Jesus. His faith took those first steps, and then Christ, by grace, kept Peter afloat then picked him up when he sank. Peter experienced something which conflicted with his beliefs. He encountered Jesus & His grace. The role of Faith in the Christian story has been faith seeking understanding, rather than understanding seeking faith (thank you Augustine & Anselm). Faith is to trust Jesus & God's grace more than your own experience & understanding.

Nothing Changes, But Everything Does

Rollins's most recent book The Divine Magician explores "the disappearance of Religion & the discovery of Faith." Essentially, a magic trick follows three steps: the Pledge, the Turn, & the Prestige. An object is presented, the object vanishes, then it re-appears again to the bewilderment of the audience. The heart of the magic trick is that the object presented is most often not the same object that re-appears. Rollins applies the same idea to the Christian story, specifically, in the Eucharist (Communion). The world was presented religion when Jesus came along, but then Jesus's death ushered in something new to re-appear in its place: faith, the faith which embraces the world rather than religious certainty. Bread and wine is presented, it disappears when it is eaten, and what is presented after is a new way of living in the world by faith, faith which lives in the reality of doubt & ambiguity. Nothing changes in the world, but everything is different to the person who begins to live this life of faith. It's a traumatic shift in perspective rather than the old religious pattern of certainty. Nothing changes, but everything does. Christ is 'resurrected' in each person committed to this life of radical faith.

But those familiar with the Christian Story know that this is not the Eucharist, this is not the Resurrection. Yes I was not an eye-witness of the resurrected Jesus, but I believe by faith on the account of the Apostles. This is the faith the Church has held since Christ's death & resurrection. Orthodoxy holds that Jesus died & rose again, appeared to the Apostles among others, & the work of the Church is to bear witness to the reality of the Good News that the cross is God's victory over our sin & the ushering in of our redemption. The image which was marred with Adam was made right by Christ in our place. The Eucharist is not merely a shift in perspective, it is an active participation in the reality of the Gospel. It is an image of our hope that, just as we participate & reflect Christ's life, suffering & death, we may one day, by grace, participate in His resurrection too.

Grace > Empathy

For Rollins, Pyrotheology is a lifestyle of continually burning down the objects which promise to satisfy our needs and embracing the freedom from satisfaction, from God & from Idols. He believes that, instead of the violence which comes from certainty, communities of faith will embrace complexity & ambiguity together as they learn from each other in peace. However, it seems to me that the only fuel for this kind of community which Rollins envisions is empathy.

If Rollins is right, then we all suffer from the misleading of our desires. We chase certainty among other idols to the point where we commit acts of violence & hate against our neighbors & the world we live in. People are not fundamentally broken, merely misguided. We can begin to fix ourselves & the world by embracing faith which doubts certainty & celebrates ambiguity. We can empathize with one another through our mutual experience of doubt & ambiguity, and perhaps that empathy might form the fabric of true community.

Rollins is a master storyteller. The Orthodox Heretic is a collection of parables he wrote to flip our commonly-held beliefs about God & the world on their head. He is remarkably insightful & clever. Yet, there is one distinct absence in ALL his works that, above all, misses the beauty & richness of Christian Orthodoxy: grace. If the end goal is true community among people, this will not happen without grace. I will only give reasons for you to mistrust me & break community with me in the end. If I am called to love you unconditionally, I will constantly fail & you will constantly fail. No matter how much certainty I am willing to give up or ambiguity I am willing to live with, I will undoubtedly love you poorly. This is because I am broken. I will hurt you, not out of misdirection, but out of hate. I am a loving being who loves poorly. I need grace in my community to allow me to still participate in community, but more importantly, I need to begin to love truly. This, this is what makes Orthodoxy proclaim the good news.

The Orthodox Christian story is emphatic that, if Jesus is the standard, we all fall short. I will fail to love you & fail to love God again & again. But Christ's life, death, & resurrection is the victory over this brokenness, which He extends to us purely out of His loving grace in order to establish true community & redeem the fallen image we bear. This Story claims something truly radical. It claims that when I hurt you, I am the worse for doing so. I have committed a wrong against you that needs righting. We have committed wrongs against God that need righting. This is a task I cannot manage, nor can I expect for you to extend to me what I cannot give myself. Empathy will not cut it, only grace which covers my wrongs & changes my heart can do that. This is the Story we tell.

Peter Rollins & his Pyrotheology does indeed blur the lines between Atheism & Theism, Sacred & Secular. But, the Story the Church has told since Christ brings both faith & clarity, a clarity grounded in faith and a faith grounded in God's grace. My fear with Pyrotheology is that what replaces what is burned is simply another law (embrace ambiguity, doubt, unconditionally love others). Orthodoxy faithfully declares these words:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, creator of all things visible & invisible. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father. Through Him all things were made. For us and for our salvation, He came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit & the Virgin Mary and was made man. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, & was buried. On the third day He rose again in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living & the dead, and His kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord & Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father & the Son, who with the Father & the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church, we acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins, we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen. -The Nicene Creed

*I understand that, in trying to capture much of Rollins's thought in less than 2,000 words, I am inevitably making a caricature of his work, which I really do not intend to do. I simply want to articulate the work of someone I admire as best as I can, and offer the ways in which we approach Faith from different traditions. My project is to understand my faith in light of correctly understanding Rollins's work, yet I am sure his work is above & beyond me in many respects. The difference is I still hold that Orthodoxy is a richer story I also have yet to fully discover.