Faith of Christ vs. Faith in Christ

The concept "Faith of Christ vs. Faith in Christ" names a constitutive internal tension at the heart of Christian existence as Rollins theorizes it. The faith of Christ designates the pre-dogmatic, living source — the original, kerygmatic encounter with the divine that precedes and exceeds any doctrinal formulation. The faith in Christ, by contrast, designates the confessional, propositional affirmation — the creedal, institutionalized declaration that Christ is Lord, Savior, Son of God, etc. These are not two stages that could be resolved into each other or harmonized; they stand in irreducible tension, and Rollins argues this tension is not a defect or scandal to be overcome but the very structural condition of Christian life.

This formulation performs a move recognizable within a Lacanian-Hegelian frame: the particular site of contradiction — the narrow gap between living faith and doctrinal faith — is not a limitation on access to the transcendent but its very condition of possibility. The "constrictive" particularity of Christianity (its insistence on a named, historical person — Christ — rather than a generic spiritual principle) is what makes the universal available, not what blocks it. Just as contradiction in the Hegelian tradition is the motor rather than the obstacle of dialectical advance, so too this internal split is not something to resolve but something to inhabit. The Christian does not choose one side of the tension; operating amidst the tension is itself the form of genuine fidelity.

This concept appears in rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete and is central to Rollins's broader project of rethinking Christian community beyond doctrinal conformity. It cross-references several canonical concepts whose logic it quietly deploys. The tension it names is structurally homologous to Contradiction as theorized elsewhere in the corpus: rather than a mistake to correct, the internal opposition between the faith of and faith in Christ is the generative engine of Christian existence — analogous to Hegel's claim that dialectical advance moves toward, not away from, absolute contradiction. The concept also resonates with Particularism: the specific, named particularity of Christ (as opposed to a generic "divine principle") is presented not as a parochial limitation but as the privileged opening onto the universal — precisely the move the corpus associates with the dialectical value of the particular over abstract universality.

The cross-reference to Das Ding and Sublimation suggests a deeper structural layer: the faith of Christ functions like das Ding — the unreachable, pre-symbolic source that cannot be fully captured in any representation, around which doctrinal formulation (faith in Christ) eternally circles without arriving. Doctrinal confession would then be a form of sublimation in the Lacanian sense — raising the historically contingent figure of Christ to the dignity of the Thing — while the living faith of Christ remains the void that animates that operation. The cross-reference to Desire reinforces this: the Christian's desire is constitutively split between the lost source (faith of) and its articulated substitute (faith in), and it is precisely this gap that keeps desire — and faith — alive. Ir-Religious Drive and Universality further situate the concept within Rollins's constructive theological argument: the drive dimension of religion exceeds any particular creedal content, and it is the universal that emerges through, not despite, the narrow particular site of this tension.

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond BeliefPeter Rollins · 2008 (page unknown)

the Christian operates amidst the tension created between the faith of Christ and confessing a faith in Christ.

The phrase "operates amidst the tension" is theoretically loaded because it refuses both synthesis and choice: the Christian subject is not positioned as resolving the contradiction between "faith of" and "faith in" but as constitutively inhabiting it, making the tension itself the site of subjectivity. The genitive distinction — of Christ versus in Christ — condenses the entire difference between a living, pre-dogmatic source and a propositional confessional object, encoding in grammar what would otherwise require pages of theological argument.