Radical Theological Unknowing

Radical Theological Unknowing names a structural condition introduced by the Incarnation in which divine concealment is not a failure or limit of human cognition but an intrinsic feature of revelation itself. The theological move here is a reversal of the classical apophatic tradition: rather than positing a hidden God whose revealed face is, at least in principle, knowable and accumulative, Rollins argues that the "radical cut" of the Incarnation ensures that even what is revealed remains withdrawn. Revelation does not illuminate a positive content — it deepens and re-enacts concealment at the very moment of opening. The revealed and the concealed are not two sides of a theological ledger that balance each other out; they are co-extensive. Unknowing, on this account, is not merely an epistemic posture of humility before a greater being; it is woven into the very structure of divine self-disclosure.

This move has an explicitly anti-onto-theological valence: it refuses the architecture in which God functions as a knowable, guarantee-giving presence — a supreme being whose partial hiddenness is a problem to be overcome through deeper revelation, tradition, or doctrine. Instead, the "ineffable mystery" is affirmed "in its very occurrence," meaning the event of revelation does not resolve the unknowing but restages it. Theologically, this is close to kenotic logic (God empties Godself), but Rollins presses further: not even the kenotic gesture yields a recoverable, positive remainder. The result is a theology in which the opening of the divine into the world is structurally analogous to a gap — a void that cannot be sutured by any subsequent theological elaboration.

Within the Rollins source (rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete), Radical Theological Unknowing operates as the positive theological articulation of what structurally parallel Lacanian concepts describe in the registers of subject, desire, and the symbolic order. The cross-referenced concepts provide the theoretical grammar. Like the Real, which "resists symbolisation absolutely" and is "what does not cease not to be written," Radical Theological Unknowing posits a remainder that no act of disclosure can absorb — the divine is not simply pre-symbolic fullness but the structural limit that every theological utterance hits. The relation to Das Ding is equally close: just as das Ding is an "excluded interior" — the void around which representations orbit without ever reaching it — the revealed God in Rollins functions as an intimate extimacy, a presence whose very nearness intensifies withdrawal rather than dissolving it. The Incarnation here performs the role of "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" without making the Thing itself available.

The concept also engages the big Other and Lack. The classical theology Rollins critiques implicitly relies on an intact big Other — a symbolic guarantee-giving structure in which revelation incrementally completes knowledge of God. Radical Theological Unknowing is precisely the claim that the Other is barred, that S(Ⱥ) applies to the divine: there is no Other of the Other, no meta-position from which God's revealed side finally closes into legible, accumulated Knowledge. What Lacan frames logically (Gödel, the non-closeable corpus of the unconscious), Rollins frames christologically: the Incarnation is the theological equivalent of the signifier of the barred Other — not a filling of the gap but its formal inauguration within the divine itself. Radical Theological Unknowing is therefore best read as a theological specification of structural lack, applying the Lacanian insight that "nothing in the real is missing; a lack can only be introduced when there are signs and symbols" to the domain of revelation: it is the Incarnation-as-sign that introduces the irreducible unknowing.

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

This cut of radical unknowing ensures that even what is revealed remains concealed. It ensures that the opening of God into the world remains an ineffable mystery in its very occurrence.

The phrase "even what is revealed remains concealed" is theoretically loaded because it collapses the classical revealed/hidden binary entirely — revelation does not reduce concealment but redoubles it, making unknowing intrinsic rather than residual. The further specification "in its very occurrence" is equally precise: it locates the mystery not beyond the event of disclosure but immanent to it, structurally parallel to the Lacanian Real's definition as what "does not cease not to be written" — a negative that persists inside, not outside, the symbolic act.