What if one of the core elements of a radical Christianity lay in a demand that we betray it, while the ultimate act of affirming God required the forsaking of God? And what if fidelity to the Judeo-Christian scriptures demanded their renunciation? In short, what if the only way of finding faith involved betraying it with a kiss?

Peter Rollins

Categorized in : Christian Kissing What If

The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.

Peter Rollins

religious god reality

What if the church should be less concerned with creating saints than creating a world where we do not need saints? A world where people like Mother Teresa and MLK would have nothing to do.

Peter Rollins

creating mother people

The church is a place where we make our prejudice sacred.

Peter Rollins

sacred prejudice church

Whatever you believe, be open to being wrong

Peter Rollins

being-wrong believe

Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.

Peter Rollins

acts-of-love objects mystery

Faith, then, is not a set of beliefs about the world. It is rather found in the loving embrace of the world. Because the actual existing church has reduced the Crucifixion and Resurrection to religious affirmations held by a certain tribe, rather than expressions of a type of life, the event they testify to has been almost completely eclipsed.

Peter Rollins

church expression religious

There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.

Peter Rollins

dream night memories

I deny the resurrection every time I turn my back on the poor or become a cog in a system of injustice

Peter Rollins

cogs resurrection injustice

Christianity can be described as a theological materialism: It is that which transforms our material existence. If our faith does not throw us into the arms of the world, if it does not lead to our experience of responsibility, love, celebration, and our commitment to transformation, then, whatever we call it, we have nothing but an empty shell.

Peter Rollins

responsibility doe commitment

That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.

Peter Rollins

one-thing speak

To believe is human to doubt is divine.

Peter Rollins

divine doubt believe

If you cannot speak your brokenness, your brokenness will speak for you.

Peter Rollins

brokenness speak ifs

Truly embracing the fragility and tensions of life...brings with it the possibility of true joy.

Peter Rollins

fragility true-joy possibility

In contrast we let go of existence, meaning, and the sublime as categories to describe the object “God.” Instead these become ways in which we engage with the world. Yet, as we affirm the world in love, we indirectly sense that in letting go of God we have, in fact, found ourselves at the very threshold of God.

Peter Rollins

sublime letting-go world

A faith that can only exist in the light of victory and certainty is one which really affirms the self while pretending to affirm Christ, for it only follows Jesus in the belief that Jesus has conquered death. Yet a faith that can look at the horror of the cross and still say ‘yes’ is one that says ‘no’ to the self in saying ‘yes’ to Christ.

Peter Rollins

light self jesus

Your job is to take notes, my job is to make that impossible.

Peter Rollins

notes impossible jobs