Hey everyone, this is my first blog reflecting on Peter Rollins’ Atheism for Lent series. It’s not quite what I was expecting – at least not the first week – and maybe it’ll be surprising to you too. Here’s sort of a summary of what the first week was about. Enjoy, and leave comments for discussion either here, or on the facebook post. Cheers. – Jonathan
Peter Rollins opens with an article from a distinguished Christian Philosopher, Merold Westphal, in which he talks about Karl Barth’s critique of what he calls “the criminal arrogance of religion” in which people become so preoccupied with religious needs that “they surround themselves with comfortable illusions of about their knowledge of God and particularly with their union with Him.” I think this sort of sums up and serves as the catalyst for the first week of AFL (Atheism for Lent).
This is what I got out of the first week. Rollins is setting up a journey NOT to give up GOD, but to give up a standard idea of God, which I can totally get behind.
Rollins frames it like this: There’s an object that we desire that is either lost or out of reach, or even unattainable. And there’s an obstacle that stands in the way of the object we want. He uses the stories of Oedipus Rex and The Garden of Eden. Are you familiar with Oedipus Rex? If not, in short, it’s a story about a son who falls in love with his own mother and kills his father so he can sleep with his mother. But when he does he finally realises that what he wanted, and what he achieved, didn’t actually bring him happiness. It wasn’t a blessing, but a curse.
The same goes for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The object is the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It’s already enticing because it’s off limits, but what’s more is that Eve, in the story, wanted to be like God; knowing the difference between good and evil. The serpent even told her just that, “‘You will not surely die,’ the serpent said to the woman… ‘when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ When the woman saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it (Gen 3:4-6).”
Eve, tricked though as she was, desired to be like God. She wanted to know the difference between good and evil. The knowledge of God was the object she couldn’t attain. The obstacle was the tree and the fruit of the tree. But instead of receiving what she thought would be a glorious blessing – knowing good and evil – she received a curse. It wasn’t a blessing at all. It wasn’t what she expected or hoped for at all? It was a straight up curse!
Rollins says this, “What they find is that the meaning of life isn’t found in the object, but it’s found in revolving around it.”
So Consider this: By avoiding the tree as God initially decreed, and living life revolving around it, did they already have all the meaning of life they needed? Didn’t they already have all the truth they needed in their context?
I think the message here for us to consider is this: God is something that, because we can’t fully comprehend, we make ways to do so. We create ideas of God as an object; something attainable.
– maybe you agree. maybe you don’t –
Of course we want to be with God, we’re built by his hands, we breathe his breath of life, and we search for him because we are incomplete without him. Some people describe us as being made with a God shaped hole to fill. However, that object is out of reach. There’s an obstacle in the way.
What Rollins suggests is that removing the obstacle to find the out of reach object, we’re more likely to only find disappointment, or even a curse. And I think that’s because the object we’re trying to take hold of isn’t truly what God is. Instead it’s more of a standardised idea of who God is, and by removing the obstacle we find out what we were hoping to find isn’t truly God at all.
In fact, I agree with his notion that by revolving around the unknown, or the ‘gap’ as he calls it, “is something we need to enjoy, not get rid of.”
Us trying to fill that gap means we create something that will fill it. But God isn’t something we create. God created us! Instead, there’s a mystery that we live with. We can either let that mystery bug us to the point where we feel incomplete, thus we are driven to find completeness, OR we learn that joy, and beauty are found in being incomplete.
Hmm…I’m going to leave it here and let that sit with you for a while. I have more thoughts to share around the complete/incomplete argument he makes, which I think will spur good conversation, but have a good think over the idea of the object and the obstacle analogy. Does that hold up for you? Why or why not? What makes sense and questions does it raise.