Secondary literature 2006

How (Not) to Speak of God

Peter Rollins

by Peter Rollins (2006)

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Synopsis

Peter Rollins' How (Not) to Speak of God (2006) mounts a two-part argument: first, that authentic Christian faith requires an irreducibly "a/theological" posture in which every naming of God is simultaneously a de-naming — a structural movement that mirrors apophatic theology, the critique of ideology, and the biblical condemnation of idolatry all at once; and second, that this theoretical position must be embodied in liturgical practice rather than remaining academic abstraction. Rollins contends that both conservative evangelicalism (which naïvely claims privileged conceptual access to God) and liberal Christianity (which reduces faith to immanent ethics after absorbing the critique of ideology) are mirror-image failures, each committing a form of intellectual idolatry. Against both, he advances the concept of "Hyper-presence" (God as hypernonymous — saturating and short-circuiting understanding rather than merely exceeding it) and a correlate notion of "a/theism," by which the Christian simultaneously affirms and negates every concept of God out of profound faith rather than agnostic indifference. The book redefines orthodoxy as "believing in the right way" rather than holding correct propositions, and orthopraxis as "practising in the right way," anchoring both in a "prejudice of love" that displaces foundationalist ethics. The second half of the book presents ten liturgical services from Rollins' Belfast-based community Ikon, each designed to enact — rather than merely illustrate — the apophatic, deconstructive and transformative theology developed in Part 1, refusing to export these as universal templates but offering them as locally produced, organic instances of theory made flesh.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes this book within a Lacanian-adjacent corpus is its unusual double movement: it uses the conceptual architecture associated with continental theory — ideology critique, the structure of desire, Das Ding as the ungraspable Real, the logic of lack, fetishistic disavowal in religion — not to deconstruct theology from the outside but to regenerate it from within. Rollins does not cite Lacan explicitly at length, yet the extraction data reveals that the book's most recurrent theoretical concerns (Lack, Ideology, Das Ding, Desire, Sublimation, Jouissance, Fetishistic Disavowal, the Real) are precisely the Lacanian categories that Žižek and others deploy in critiques of religion. What Rollins contributes is an application of this structural logic to ecclesial practice and liturgical form — arguing that the void (the God-shaped hole understood as aftermath rather than lack to be filled) is not a problem faith solves but the very medium through which transformative desire operates. This makes the book a rare instance of a practitioner-theologian appropriating, without fully naming, a Lacanian logic of constitutive lack and applying it to worship design.

A second distinctive contribution lies in the book's insistence that apophatic theology and the postmodern critique of ideology are not enemies but structural homologues: both attack the pretension of any system to adequately represent the Real. By mapping Feuerbach-Nietzsche-Marx-Freud's genealogical critique onto the biblical prohibition of idolatry, Rollins finds a theological warrant for what might otherwise appear as a secular dissolution of religious content. The result is a text that can be read both as emerging-church practical theology and as a contribution to the broader Lacanian-theological conversation (exemplified by Žižek, Caputo, and Marion), while remaining committed to concrete community formation in a post-conflict Northern Irish context — a ground-level specificity almost entirely absent from the more purely theoretical interlocutors in this corpus.

Main themes

Conceptual idolatry and the critique of ideology as structural homologues
Hyper-presence: God as hypernonymous excess that short-circuits both understanding and experience
A/theism: the simultaneous affirmation and negation of every concept of God as authentic faith
Revelation as constitutive concealment: the un/known God
Desire as the medium of transformation rather than a preliminary stage before arrival
The God-shaped hole as aftermath rather than unfilled lack
Orthopraxis over orthodoxy: truth as soteriological event and transformative encounter
Powerless discourse versus apologetic power discourse
The prejudice of love as the only legitimate hermeneutic
Liturgical practice as the embodiment and testing-ground of apophatic theology

Chapter outline

Introduction: The Secret
Part 1: Heretical Orthodoxy — Framing Introduction
Chapter 1: God Rid Me of God
Chapter 2: The Aftermath of Theology
Chapter 3: A/Theology as Icon
Chapter 4: Inhabiting the God-Shaped Hole
Chapter 5: The Third Mile
Part 2 Introduction: Towards Orthopraxis — Bringing Theory to Church
Service 1: 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?'
Service 2: Prodigal
Service 3: Sins of the Father
Service 4: A/theism
Service 5: Advent
Service 6: Judas
Service 7: Prosperity
Service 8: Heresy
Service 9: Corpus Christi
Service 10: Queer

Chapter summaries

Introduction: The Secret

Rollins opens by staging the tension between Wittgenstein's injunction to silence ('What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence') and the evangelical imperative that God is the one subject about whom we must never stop speaking. Rather than resolving this tension dialectically, he credits the Christian mystical tradition — particularly Meister Eckhart — with a third way: the unspeakable is precisely what compels speech, generating not a poverty but an excess of words. The introduction frames the entire book as an attempt to articulate an 'a/theological' approach born from this tension, one that Rollins presents not as innovation but as recovery. Notable examples: Meister Eckhart; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Part 1: Heretical Orthodoxy — Framing Introduction

The Part 1 preface introduces the two dead ends Rollins is navigating: conservative Christianity's naïve claim to ideologically uncontaminated access to God, and liberal Christianity's capitulation to the critique of ideology by abandoning meaningful God-talk altogether. Both, Rollins argues, share the assumption that the critique of ideology is incompatible with genuine faith. The emerging church conversation, in his reading, uniquely possesses the conceptual tools to move beyond this impasse because it has rediscovered the biblical and mystical tradition's own internal resistance to conceptual idolatry. The key structural move is the equation of idolatry (eidos + object) with ideology (eidos + logos): both claim to render the essence of the Real representationally transparent.

Chapter 1: God Rid Me of God

This chapter develops the central diagnosis: the modern Church unwittingly absorbed Enlightenment epistemology even while opposing secularization, producing a theology that treats revelation as the opposite of concealment and God as an object of rational knowledge. Rollins traces how Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud exposed the ideological character of any supposedly neutral understanding of God or world — a move Rollins calls the 'critique of ideology' — and argues that neither a retreat to pre-critical naïveté nor a liberal abandonment of God-talk is adequate.

The chapter's distinctive move is to show that the Bible itself enacts structural resistance to conceptual idolatry through its irreducible plurality of divine descriptions — warrior God and peacemaker, territorial deity and universal sovereign — contradictions the biblical editors did not iron out precisely because, as Eckhart claimed, 'the unnameable is omni-nameable.' This plurality bars any single ideological reading from colonizing the text. The chapter closes with the famous Eckhartian pivot: 'God rid me of God' — a prayer that acknowledges the irreducible gap between any concept of God and the divine reality it attempts to name, and which encapsulates the entire theological programme of the book. Notable examples: Meister Eckhart; Feuerbach; Nietzsche; Marx; Freud; Duck-rabbit diagram (Wittgenstein/Gestalt)

Chapter 2: The Aftermath of Theology

Rollins advances the argument that theology is not a human discourse about God but the site where God speaks into human discourse — a reversal by which theology is understood as being mastered by rather than mastering the divine. The key distinction is between treating God as an object of knowledge (the concentration-camp guard who possesses comprehensive data about the prisoner) and encountering God as the absolute Subject before whom we become the object (the love that knows but cannot be reduced to data). This Hebraically-inflected epistemology — truth as transformative encounter rather than propositional correspondence — will underpin the later chapter on 'truth as soteriological event.'

The chapter introduces 'Hyper-presence' as the concept that resolves the false dichotomy of transcendence versus immanence: God is not distant but so immanently saturating that understanding is short-circuited, like being blinded by the sun. The related concept of 'hypernymity' (too much information rather than too little) is distinguished from anonymity (too little information). God is thus the 'un/known' God — not unknown through absence but un/known through excess. The chapter also advances the 'a/theistic' structure of Christian faith: because all beliefs fall short of the divine, authentic faith must simultaneously affirm and negate its own conceptual content, producing a productive oscillation rather than agnostic suspension. Rollins draws on Tillich's 'God beyond God,' Marion's crossed-out word 'God,' and Eckhart's 'forsaking God for the sake of God' as precedents. Notable examples: Paul Tillich; Jean-Luc Marion; Meister Eckhart; Gregory of Nyssa; Augustine; Pseudo-Dionysius; Anselm, Proslogion

Chapter 3: A/Theology as Icon

This chapter works out the practical epistemological consequences of the a/theological approach. Rollins introduces the distinction between idol and icon: an idol claims to make the essence of God manifest and graspable; an icon opens onto that which exceeds representation while remaining the site where God touches humanity. The distinction is not ontological but relational — it is the way one engages with an object, not a property in the object, that makes it idol or icon. This is illustrated through Sam Mendes' American Beauty, where Ricky Fitts films Jane's eyes rather than her body — seeking transcendence within flesh rather than reducing it to object.

The chapter develops the notion of 'dis-course' — a language that perpetually sends us off-course from God, acknowledging itself as always falling short — as the only honest mode of religious speech. Critically, Rollins argues that doubt is not the enemy of faith but its condition: only in the space of undecidability can a truly free, non-self-interested commitment be made. This is articulated through the concept of 'Holy Saturday' — the 24-hour space between crucifixion and resurrection — as the paradigmatic site of authentic decision. Against apologetics (which Rollins calls 'power discourse,' operating at the level of command and compelling belief regardless of desire), he proposes a 'powerless discourse' modelled on Paul's refusal of 'wise and persuasive words' (1 Cor. 2.1-5): a mode of communication that opens thought rather than closing it, addresses desire rather than overriding it, and creates space for the Christ-event rather than demonstrating it. Notable examples: Sam Mendes, American Beauty; Anselm, Proslogion; Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being; Gregory Palamas

Chapter 4: Inhabiting the God-Shaped Hole

Chapter 4 performs a decisive inversion of the traditional Pascalian 'God-shaped hole.' Rather than a void in the human that precedes and awaits filling by God, Rollins argues that the God-shaped hole is constituted in the aftermath of God — it is the trace left by God's passing, not a pre-existing lack. This structural reversal means that the hole is not resolved by religious fulfillment but is precisely what compels ongoing seeking. Religious desire is not a preliminary stage before arrival at God; it is itself the medium of transformation. Rollins draws on Heidegger's account of death as an analogy: the ungraspable can have profound present effects without ever being directly experienced.

The chapter stages this against Camus' character Meursault (The Outsider) as a figure of 'quiescent anti-theism' — not atheism in the traditional sense but an indifference that dissolves the religious question itself as meaningless. Rollins does not refute Meursault but uses him to show the structural difference between a desire constituted by its object (the religious) and a desire indifferent to its object (the anti-theistic). The extended fable of the princess who throws her treasure back into the sea in order to return to the beggar who gave it enacts the thesis: what is sought is not the treasure but the seeking itself, not arrival but the transformative motion of desire. This chapter has the most concentrated resonance with Lacanian accounts of desire as structured around a constitutive lack. Notable examples: Albert Camus, The Outsider; Blaise Pascal, Pensées; Martin Heidegger; Princess and the beggar (fable)

Chapter 5: The Third Mile

The final theoretical chapter distinguishes three registers of truth: metaphysical Truth (the Real/God, ungraspable), empirical truth (descriptions of reality), and a specifically Judeo-Christian register — truth as soteriological event, a transformative encounter with the Real that short-circuits the subjective/objective debate. This third register, derived from the Hebrew rather than Greek understanding of 'knowing,' redefines knowledge as relational liberation: Truth is not described but enacted in the transformation of the subject.

From this foundation Rollins develops the 'prejudice of love' as the only legitimate hermeneutical stance: no reading of scripture is neutral, and the Bible itself demands that we read it not from some imaginary objective height but as ones 'born of God and thus born of love.' The interpretive framework is neither pure exegesis (extracting meaning) nor pure eisegesis (reading meaning in) but the sustained tension between them, governed by love as the constitutive prejudice. Rollins distinguishes the 'transfinite' (the unbounded but not infinite set of legitimate interpretations) from the 'infinite' to resist relativism: a painting of two people embracing cannot legitimately be read as an image of war. The chapter climaxes in a reinterpretation of orthodoxy: reading its Greek roots from right to left (as Hebrew), ortho-doxa becomes not 'right belief' but 'believing in the right way' — a shift from what one believes to how one believes, dissolving the binary opposition between orthodoxy and heresy and aligning orthodoxy with orthopraxis as two facets of a loving engagement with world and text. Notable examples: The 'third mile' teaching (Matthew 5.41); Meister Eckhart; Derrida on the gift; Buddhist parable (disciple and the Buddha)

Part 2 Introduction: Towards Orthopraxis — Bringing Theory to Church

The Part 2 preface performs a theoretical-to-practical pivot, arguing that the emerging church's apophatic and deconstructive theology must be embodied in liturgical praxis rather than remaining abstract. Rollins explicitly warns that those who shun academic insights are not thereby free from theory but most enslaved by it; yet the movement must translate dialogue into community formation. He introduces ten services drawn from Ikon, his Belfast-based gathering, stressing that these cannot and should not be universalized or exported as a package: they are locally produced, organic, and reflect the specific skills and needs of a particular community. The descriptions are partial — they omit the full use of poetry, music, and discussion — but provide a map rather than a template. Notable examples: Ikon community (Belfast)

Service 1: 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?'

This service enacts the 'Holy Saturday' theology developed in Chapter 3 by staging the crucifixion in deliberate isolation from the resurrection, using Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb projected at body height in a bar, spilling over onto surrounding surfaces. The theoretical background argues that the resurrection, when too quickly appended to the cross, functions as a 'safe, cathartic horror' that neutralizes the radical decision demanded by the cross. If The Passion of the Christ had ended with a closed tomb, it would have forced viewers to confront whether their faith is genuine gift or economic exchange.

The service description — set in a Belfast bar, candles and incense, a DJ looping the Aramaic cry of dereliction, a young woman repeatedly painting 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' in black paint — demonstrates how the theoretical problem of faith-as-gift-versus-economy is dramatized liturgically. The service makes the 'testing-ground' of the closed tomb experiential rather than propositional, enacting the argument that authentic faith persists in the darkness of divine absence. Notable examples: Holbein, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb; Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ; Ikon community service

Service 2: Prodigal

Building on the first service's exploration of Holy Saturday, 'Prodigal' deepens the treatment of divine absence by distinguishing three modes of revelation: anonymous (insufficient information), adequate (sufficient for understanding), and hypernymous (super-abundant, overwhelming understanding). Rollins argues that God's revelation belongs to the third category — God's 'absence' in experience is itself the effect of an excess of presence, not a deficit. The service uses the prodigal son narrative to explore how the experience of divine void is a sustained dimension of faithful life, not a rare extremity. Notable examples: Parable of the Prodigal Son

Service 3: Sins of the Father

This service explores the tradition in Judeo-Christian scripture of confronting God with a 'clenched fist' — Moses, Job, the Psalms, Holocaust testimony — arguing that violent protest against God is not a sign of faithlessness but can signal the actual presence of God, since such repulsion and fear presuppose a relation. The service uses inverted quotations from Matthew 25 ('When I was hungry you gave me nothing to eat...') looped into the music, reversing the judgment scene to accuse God of the very failures attributed to humans, staging a liturgical confrontation between creation and creator. Notable examples: Book of Job; Holocaust testimony (Yosl Rakover); Matthew 25 (inverted)

Service 4: A/theism

This service enacts the a/theistic position developed in Chapter 2: Christianity as simultaneously theist and atheist, affirming a concept of God while immediately de-nominating it. The background text argues that both theist and atheist must have some concept of God (the one they affirm, the one they reject), and that authentic Christianity involves a perpetual process of naming and de-naming that prevents any conceptual construct from occupying the throne of God. The service employs a Žižekian figure — the Tamagotchi as a projection of the owner's own desires rather than an independent existence — to illustrate how the God one thinks one fully understands is necessarily a projected idol. Genuine faith persists against the God one has constructed. Notable examples: Slavoj Žižek (Tamagotchi figure); Lord's Prayer ('hallowed be thy name')

Service 5: Advent

The Advent service uses Mary's pregnancy as a structural analogy for the Christian's relationship to the incoming of God: just as Mary was overcome by the Spirit, nurtured God in her womb, and gave birth to a transforming Word, so the believer is called to empty herself of existing idols, become a dwelling place, and let God flow outward in transformative words and deeds. The service — set in a Christmas-decorated bar with ultrasound imagery, ash, and sackcloth — enacts Eckhart's theme of ego-death as the condition of divine indwelling, linking the Advent narrative to the broader orthopraxis of 'believing in the right way.' Notable examples: Mary's pregnancy (Luke 1); Meister Eckhart; Isaiah 40.3

Service 6: Judas

Shifting from reflection on God to relations with others, this service asks participants to identify with Judas rather than the beloved disciples — a difficult act of self-critique aimed at exposing the way religious communities use faith to legitimate self-interest and political power. The theoretical background invokes the prophetic tradition as one that is always directed inwardly at the community of faith rather than outwardly at opponents, and Luther's formulation that the Word of God arrives as adversarius noster (our adversary). The service confronts the perennial temptation to convert 'God is on our side' into 'we are on God's side,' using the Judas figure to destabilize triumphalism. Notable examples: Judas narrative; Martin Luther (adversarius noster); John 1.8; Romans 7.18-19

Service 7: Prosperity

This service is designed as a parody of self-centered Christianity — prosperity theology, faith-as-crutch, evangelism founded on fear of hell rather than love of Christ — that begins subtly and becomes increasingly overt, so that participants initially countersign the content before recognizing what they have endorsed. The theoretical background deploys the logic of fetishistic disavowal: inauthentic religion functions as a fetishistic substitute that uses symbolic performance (Bible-reading, church attendance, 'correct' doctrine) in place of genuine ethical engagement with the neighbour. Authentic faith, by contrast, is demonstrated not through correct doctrine but through transformative action oriented toward the other. Notable examples: Prosperity theology (parody); Ikon community service

Service 8: Heresy

Building on the Anselmian principle that God must be conceived of as that which is greater than conception, this service explores how before God 'we are all heretics' — a recognition that, rather than being something to mourn, is presented as deeply liberating. Participants sign their names on a makeshift cross and encounter mirrors labelled 'heretic,' enacting a communal act of repentance for the times when dogmatic certainty has silenced doubt and generated violence. The service formalizes the book's central claim that fundamentalism is best understood not as a content but as a way of holding beliefs — with totalizing self-certainty — and that acknowledging one's heresy is the condition of authentic faith. Notable examples: Anselm, Proslogion; Marx, Nietzsche, Freud (critique of conceptual idols); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics

Service 9: Corpus Christi

This service enacts the claim that truth is a soteriological event found in the encounter with the neighbour's body rather than in abstract doctrine: 'one can know God by finding God in the other' (1 John 4.16; Matthew 25.40). Using Sufi poetry (the lover turned away because 'there is not enough room for two'), Holocaust testimony (Hasidic tales), and Buddhist parable, the service stages the dissolution of the self-enclosed 'I' as the condition of genuine encounter with God in the flesh of the other. This is the most explicitly Lacanian-resonant service in the collection, dramatizing the logic that the subject must be decentred — the 'I' must yield — for the encounter with the Real (God in the neighbour) to occur. Notable examples: Sufi poetry (lover at the door); Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust; 1 John 4.16; Matthew 25.40

Service 10: Queer

The concluding service addresses sexual orientation not as a divisive doctrinal question but as a site for examining how we hold our disagreements — specifically, resisting the twin temptations of consumption (compelling the other to become like us) and repulsion (scapegoating the other). Rollins presents Ikon as a 'doughnut community' — no doctrinal centre, constituted entirely by its relational exterior — in which both conservative and liberal views on sexuality are represented and in which the challenge is not to resolve the disagreement but to change the manner of holding it. The service thus performs the book's deepest thesis: that orthodoxy as 'believing in the right way' is about the quality of relational engagement, not the correctness of propositional content. Notable examples: Ikon community structure (doughnut model); Discussion of sexual orientation

Main interlocutors

Meister Eckhart, Sermons
Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology
Anselm, Proslogion
Augustine, Confessions
Gregory of Nyssa
Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Karl Marx, German Ideology
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Albert Camus, The Outsider
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Slavoj Žižek
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII

Position in the corpus

Rollins' book occupies a distinctive niche in the Lacanian-theological corpus as a practitioner text that operationalizes — without fully theorizing — the Lacanian categories that Žižek deploys in works such as The Fragile Absolute and The Puppet and the Dwarf and that Caputo mobilizes in The Weakness of God. It shares with those works a structural commitment to constitutive lack, the impossibility of directly accessing the Real, and the critique of ideological certainty in religion, but it differs sharply in its destination: where Žižek uses these categories to diagnose Christianity's political unconscious from outside, Rollins uses them to reform Christian practice from within. Readers coming to Rollins after Žižek's theological writings will immediately recognize the structural homologies — the a/theistic logic, the fetishistic disavowal in prosperity theology, the Real as the hypernymous God — but will find them translated into liturgical design and community formation rather than cultural-political critique. Rollins should be read alongside Marion's God Without Being (which he cites) and Caputo's The Weakness of God for the apophatic phenomenological trajectory, and alongside Žižek and Milbank's The Monstrosity of Christ for the polemical a/theological stakes.\n\nWithin the secondary Lacanian corpus, How (Not) to Speak of God functions best as a bridge text between the theoretical and the pastoral. It is most productively read after a grounding in Lacan's Seminar VII (the ethics of the Real, Das Ding) and Žižek's theological applications, since Rollins' unacknowledged structural debts to these frameworks become visible against that background. It should be read before more advanced constructive theology in the emerging-church mode (e.g. Rollins' later The Orthodox Heretic and Insurrection) because it provides the clearest exposition of the foundational a/theological architecture. Its primary audience is readers interested in how Lacanian structural categories can be transposed into ecclesial and liturgical practice without losing their critical edge.