Last week, I was in Belfast for Pete Rollins’ Idolatry of God retreat, named after his fifth book, The Idolatry of God: Breaking our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction. The four-day event was designed to enable participants to explore Pete’s work in the city where his theology and practice took shape.

I was asked to give a presentation positioning Pete’s project of ‘pyrotheology’ within a broader cultural, political and religious frame. I’ll briefly outline some of the points I made in my presentation in another post, but in my first few reflections on the event I want to write up some of the ways I introduced myself, my work, and my presence at this retreat to the group before beginning my talk.

I’m from a Church of England background, with the church I was part of as a child and teenager being fairly high Anglican. This is quite different from not only most of the other participants in the Belfast retreat but from Pete himself as well as many other public figures within emerging Christianity, who tend to come from broadly evangelical religious backgrounds.

As with many liberal churches, my church community wasn’t particularly comfortable with changes in form. I remember being frustrated as a young person that we had to fight so hard to get things like alternative worship services once a month.

Image credit: Dave Walker.

Theologically, it felt like we were very comfortable with Jesus’ humanity, with the message of the social gospel, with a historical critical approach to the Bible, and with what might ultimately be called a Christian humanism. But not at all comfortable with experiences of God – or at least a certain kind of expression of experiences of God.

I feel like my church background is primarily intellectual rather than experiential. And a background like this comes with its own very particular baggage when approaching Pete’s work.

One of the illustrations from my “Giving up God for Lent” article in the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of Third Way Magazine. I’m not sure about the metaphor of walking out into the snowstorm of atheism versus returning to The Light of theism. But they definitely are very pretty.

I recently got the new edition (Jan/Feb 2013) of Third Way Magazine, which includes my “Giving up God for Lent” article. I’m pretty pleased with it.

Here’s a video from Peter Rollins around ideas presented in Chapter 4 of his latest book, Insurrection, “I Don’t Have to Believe; My Pastor Does That For Me”.

I reflected on this chapter in my review of Insurrection for The Other Journal’s “Church and Pomo” blog, “Becoming Church Mice: From Refusing to Lead to Refusing to be Led”.

I wondered whether Pete’s “fans” often let him disbelieve on their behalf, focusing on the next book, the next blog post, the next vimeo video, the next speaking engagement on pyro-theology rather than setting fires themselves. 

In his response to my review, Pete recognised the dangers of “I don’t need to doubt; Pete does that for me”.

And this video similarly reflects on the ways in which we disavow doubt, like saying, “I never question God. I only question my understanding of God”.

From the Introduction (download PDF for free here) to Political Theology’s special issue (13/2) on speculative philosophies and religious practices, which contains my article, “Retrospective Speculative Philosophy: Looking for Traces of Zizek’s Communist Collective in Emerging Christian Praxis”:

Katharine Moody… [studies] the work of Zizek and his atheistic speculative philosophy as it might relate to emerging religious practice as represented in the practice of Peter Rollins in particular. Zizek talks about a “God who dies” and the surviving Christian community of believers driven by the Holy Spirit as what remains following Christ’s death. He does, however, tend to suggest that it is only outside the boundaries of institutional religion and churches that this residual revolutionary praxis is to be encountered.

Moody questions this and suggests that Rollins’s emerging transformative and creative movements, as found in Ikon (an emerging church project in Belfast, Northern Ireland), offer an example of an heretical and apocalyptic practice which exists, albeit uncomfortably, both within and beyond institutional boundaries. This is a religious collective, but one that exhibits a “faith beyond religion” and is close to Caputo’s deconstructive theology. Perhaps the crucial characteristic of this movement is that beliefs are held lightly, whilst it is the embodied practices of emerging and often doubt-driven collective worship and activity that are the central aspects of what is now developing.

Whether or not this bears much resemblance to Zizek’s new communist collective is a question that Moody suggests requires further research.

If someone would just give me some MONEY!!!

There are both more radical and more traditional elements within Pete Rollins’ work.

The latter can be placed squarely within the tradition of negative or apophatic theology, according to which ‘we ought to affirm our view of God while at the same time realizing that that view is inadequate’. The result is both a theism and an atheism, an “a/theism” that is ‘not some agnostic middle point hovering hesitantly between theism and atheism but, rather, actively embraces both out of a profound faith’ (Rollins, How [Not] to Speak of God, p.25).

For Rollins, this is

a deeply religious and faith-filled form of cynical discourse, one which captures how faith operates in an oscillation between understanding and unknowing. This unknowing is to be utterly distinguished from an intellectual lazy ignorance, for it is a type of unknowing which arises not from imprecision but rather from deep reflection and sustained meditation (p.26).

This is one of the videos from which I took quotations to introduce the material I wrote for “Atheism for Lent” on Pete Rollins: “Christianity is a fascinating religion because, whereas lots of religions have a place for doubt, in Christianity God doubts God” (“Doubt”).

As we approach the festival of Easter, we aim to experience something of what Jesus felt on the Cross. In his cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God confesses the absence of God.

…let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

G.K. Chesterton

During Lent, we will expose ourselves to some of the great atheist critics of religion, in order to purge ourselves of a faith in which God is used as a crutch to cope with the uncertainties and hardships of life.

In the process, we hope to discover a richer faith in which our experiences of the absence of the presence of God are recognised and remembered.