A - Theism

A/theism, as coined by Peter Rollins in peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006, names a structural posture within Christian faith that refuses the simple binary of belief and unbelief. It designates the simultaneous affirmation and negation of every conceptual formulation of God — not as a midpoint of doubt or a dialectical synthesis, but as the very movement constitutive of authentic religious discourse. Drawing on the apophatic tradition (Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm), Rollins argues that because the divine exceeds all representation — what he terms "Hyper-presence" — every name, claim, or concept attached to God is necessarily provisional, insufficient, and in need of active unsaying. A/theism is therefore a structural logic of naming and de-naming, affirmation and negation held in irreducible tension as the condition of faith rather than its failure.

This structure maps directly onto the Lacanian logic of lack: the divine occupies the position of das Ding — the impossible, excluded interior around which all signifying chains orbit without ever capturing it. Just as no signifier can adequately represent the Real, no theological proposition can saturate the divine. The a/theistic gesture is thus the faithful subject's acknowledgment that every god-concept functions as a substitute formation — an object raised toward the dignity of the Thing — while the Thing itself (God as Hyper-presence) withdraws from all positive determination. Rather than disavowing this insufficiency (as fetishistic theology might, maintaining the fiction that its propositions are adequate), a/theism institutionalizes the gap as its operating principle.

In peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006, a/theism serves as the central theoretical move that organizes the book's entire theological program. It is positioned as the authentic form of Christian speech about God — a speech that must always be doubled by its own negation. Among the cross-referenced canonical concepts, it stands in closest relation to das Ding and lack: the Hyper-presence that makes a/theism necessary is structurally homologous to the Thing that no signifier can reach, meaning that God-discourse is constitutively incomplete in the same way that desire is constitutively unfulfilled. A/theism can also be read as the theological inversion of fetishistic disavowal: where disavowal maintains a fiction despite knowing its inadequacy, a/theism actively refuses the fiction and foregrounds the inadequacy as its operative principle — "I know my claims are insufficient, and therefore I simultaneously affirm and negate them." Against ideology (which functions by papering over constitutive lack with fantasmatic supplements), a/theism proposes a discourse that refuses supplementation and keeps the void open.

The concept also brushes against the Sublime and Negation as cross-referenced concepts: the apophatic tradition it draws on is precisely a theology of the sublime — the divine as that which overwhelms representation — while the structural movement of negation mirrors Hegelian determinate negation, though Rollins resists synthesis in favor of permanent productive tension. A/theism is thus neither an extension of orthodox theological positions nor a capitulation to secular critique; it is a specification of what rigorous theological speech looks like once the Lacanian-style lesson of the constitutive limit of the signifier is taken seriously within a faith tradition.

How (Not) to Speak of GodPeter Rollins · 2006 (page unknown)

This a/theism is not some agnostic middle point hovering hesitantly between theism and atheism but, rather, actively embraces both out of a profound faith.

The phrase "actively embraces both" is theoretically decisive: it refuses the resolution of contradiction into a neutral third term, insisting instead that the tension between theism and atheism is not a deficiency to be overcome but the productive engine of faith itself — a formulation that aligns with Lacan's logic of the constitutive gap, where lack is not a problem awaiting a solution but the very structure that keeps desire (and here, faith) alive.