Secondary literature 2009

The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales

Peter Rollins

by Rollins, Peter (2009)

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Synopsis

Peter Rollins' The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales (2009) advances a sustained argument that genuine religious truth cannot be communicated through propositional discourse but only through the performative "dis-course" of the parable — a form of (mis)communication that destabilizes the subject rather than informing them. Organized in three parts ("Beyond Belief," "G-O-D-I-S-N-O-W-H-E-R-E," and "Transfigurations"), the book presents thirty-three original parables, each accompanied by a theological-philosophical commentary that unpacks the parable's subversive logic. The central wager is that authentic faith is not a cognitive assent to doctrinal propositions but an incarnated praxis: the Word of God exists only when performed, the Resurrection is affirmed only when lived, and love transcends rather than fulfills the law. Deploying concepts drawn from Lacanian theory (fetishistic disavowal, the big Other, jouissance, the Act), from Freud's death-drive logic, and from Hegel's dialectic of negation, Rollins argues that religious belief-as-ideology functions as a "safety valve" that reproduces the social order it claims to resist, and that only an encounter with genuine lack — the stripping away of all ideological guarantees — can constitute authentic faith. The book further argues that true forgiveness, genuine hospitality, and real ethical action are all "impossible" in the sense of exceeding any economy of exchange or law: they are unconditional gifts that retroactively create the conditions of their own justification. The culminating parable, "The Heretic," enacts the book's master-thesis — that humble, self-aware distortion of the image of God ("orthodox heresy") is preferable to the dogmatic claim of having the truth ("the heresy of orthodoxy").

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes The Orthodox Heretic within the Lacanian-adjacent theological corpus is its formal choice to make the parable itself the primary theoretical instrument rather than a mere illustration of arguments mounted elsewhere. While thinkers like Žižek use film, jokes, and cultural examples as dialectical leverage for Lacanian argument, Rollins makes the parabolic form philosophically load-bearing: the gap between the parable and its commentary enacts, rather than merely describes, the split between knowing and doing, between the said and the saying, between intellectual assent and embodied transformation. This homology between the book's form and its content — the parable as structural instance of fetishistic disavowal, where one "knows very well" the theological point but is transformed only if one "acts as if" it were true — is a distinctive theoretical contribution that no other work in the corpus executes in quite this way.

The book also occupies a unique position as a rigorously Lacanian intervention into popular and emergent Christian theology, translating concepts such as the big Other, jouissance, the Act, the Real, and fetishistic disavowal into a vernacular register without sacrificing their structural precision. Where Žižek's The Fragile Absolute and The Puppet and the Dwarf apply Lacanian-Hegelian thought to Christianity at a high level of abstraction, Rollins makes the same moves accessible through narrative, grounding them in rewritten Gospel parables and parabolic fictions. The result is a text that can serve both as a theological primer and as a worked example of how Lacanian ethics (particularly the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and the logic of the Act) cash out in concrete practice: unconditional forgiveness before repentance, hospitality extended to the "demon," the ethical act as its own self-justifying reward.

A third distinctive contribution is the book's articulation of what might be called a "theology of constitutive lack." By arguing — through multiple parables and commentaries — that the encounter with God produces greater opacity rather than clarity (the mystic tradition of docta ignorantia), that faith is born in the space of Holy Saturday rather than Easter triumph, and that every conceptual description of God is rejected in advance by the encounter with the Real of God, Rollins develops a negative theology that is not merely apophatic in the classical sense but is structurally Lacanian: the Real escapes every symbolic capture, and the "orthodox heretic" who admits this is more faithful to the logic of the encounter than the orthodox believer who claims propositional mastery.

Main themes

The parable as performative dis-course that transforms rather than informs
Fetishistic disavowal: knowing-without-acting as the structure of ideology and belief
The big Other and the law as generators of the transgression they prohibit
Unconditional gift-logic versus the economy of exchange (forgiveness, hospitality, love)
The Act as self-justifying ethical event that retroactively creates its own conditions
Incarnational praxis: the Word of God as performed act rather than propositional text
Constitutive lack and the theology of divine absence (Holy Saturday, God-forsakenness)
Orthodox heresy versus the heresy of orthodoxy: humble distortion versus dogmatic claim
Religion-as-ideology as 'safety valve' that reproduces the social order it claims to resist
Faithful betrayal: genuine fidelity to a teacher requires transgression of the teacher's letter

Chapter outline

Introduction: Dis-Courses — The Sacred Art of (Mis)Communication — p.ix-xii
Part One: Beyond Belief (Parables 1–11) — p.1-64
Part Two: G-O-D-I-S-N-O-W-H-E-R-E (Parables 12–22) — p.65-124
Part Three: Transfigurations (Parables 23–33) — p.125-186

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Dis-Courses — The Sacred Art of (Mis)Communication (p.ix-xii)

The Introduction establishes the book's theoretical and formal program. Rollins opens with the dilemma of speaking the unspeakable and immediately identifies the parable as the appropriate form for this impossible task. The key move is the coinage of 'dis-course' — a form of (mis)communication that sends the hearer 'spinning off course and onto a new course' — as opposed to detached logical discourse, which aims to change minds without transforming subjects. The parable, Rollins insists, refuses to be captured by a single interpretation; it demands perpetual return, wrestling, and puzzlement, and its work is done not at the level of cognition but at the level of embodied transformation.

This introductory argument is implicitly Lacanian in structure, though the vocabulary is kept accessible: the split between knowing and doing that the parable exploits is precisely the structure of fetishistic disavowal — 'I know very well, but all the same I act as if I do not.' The Introduction thus announces the book's formal self-consciousness: each subsequent parable followed by commentary is itself an enactment of this split. By providing commentaries, Rollins risks domesticating the parables; by making the commentaries explicitly reflexive and incomplete, he preserves the dis-course structure. The Introduction also gestures toward the audience critique that runs throughout: Western, affluent religious culture is 'awash with a vast sea of writing and talks designed to make the truth of faith clear, concise, and palatable,' and the book positions itself as structural opposition to this desire for comfort and closure.

Key concepts: Fetishistic Disavowal, Signification, Desire, The Act, Ideology, Sublimation

Part One: Beyond Belief (Parables 1–11) (p.1-64)

The first part groups eleven parables and commentaries under the rubric 'Beyond Belief,' collectively arguing that authentic faith cannot be identified with ideological self-image, propositional assent, or an ethical rule-system, but must be incarnated in sacrificial action. The opening parable, 'No Conviction,' uses the thought-experiment of a world where Christlike living is literally illegal to expose how the inner/outer distinction in faith — the idea that private beliefs are more essential than public actions — is itself ideological. The commentary explicitly rejects this split: authentic belief is legible only through embodied, subversive action, and the fictional 'alternative universe' functions as a Lacanian mirror that reveals the reader's actual ideological universe.

'Jesus and the Five Thousand (A First-World Translation)' performs a shock maneuver: it rewrites the feeding of the multitude so that Christ distributes food only among his twelve disciples, inverting the familiar miracle into an act of hoarding. The theological logic is that the body of Christ in the world today is the community of believers, so the question 'does this reflect how Christ is presented to the world by Western Christians?' becomes inescapable. 'Translating the Word' (adapted from a Buddhist parable) makes the incarnational argument most directly: the Word of God cannot be an object separate from the subject who hears it; it is formed only when performed, lived only when incarnated. Sophia's repeated sacrifice of her accumulated funds for immediate need enacts the Word in a way that any printed translation could not.

'Turning the Other Cheek' and 'Salvation for a Demon' together develop the theme of impossible love that exceeds ethical calculation. The commentary on the former argues that Jesus' commands of non-retaliation were addressed to the oppressed, not the powerful, placing the affluent Western reader in the position of oppressor overhearing a message directed at those she exploits. The latter presents unconditional hospitality — opened even to the demonic — as an impossible but necessary ideal that transforms both host and guest. 'The Pearl of Great Price,' inspired by Kierkegaard, articulates a paradox of renunciation: only by giving up the desire for the reward do we discover the wealth indirectly, so that in the logic of faith 'it is only in renouncing our desire for wealth that we discover it.' This is a precise structural homologue of the Lacanian account of desire as constituted by its own withdrawal from direct satisfaction.

The latter parables of Part One — 'Great Misfortune,' 'The Third Mile,' 'The Invisible Prophet,' 'The Payoff,' and 'Finding Faith' — develop complementary arguments. 'The Third Mile' argues that love operates as a structural excess beyond the law, always doing more than is required, thereby fulfilling the law by dwelling beyond it. 'The Payoff' stages a collision between two incommensurable worlds: the prince who deploys power and image-management (the ego-ideal) against the priest who embraces transparency and powerlessness, using Pauline self-deprecation ('I am the worst of sinners') as the authentic prophetic mode. 'Finding Faith' deploys the Bonhoeffer thesis via The Matrix to argue that institutional religion functions as a 'safety valve' — a state-sanctioned site of transgression that allows the oppressive system to run smoothly — and that authentic faith requires full worldly immersion rather than the consolation of a religious sphere set apart from the secular.

Key concepts: Fetishistic Disavowal, Ideology, The big Other, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Jouissance, Desire Notable examples: No Conviction (parable); Jesus and the Five Thousand (parable); Translating the Word (Buddhist parable adaptation); The Pearl of Great Price (parable); The Matrix Trilogy; Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Part Two: G-O-D-I-S-N-O-W-H-E-R-E (Parables 12–22) (p.65-124)

The title of Part Two — a string of letters that can be read either as 'God is nowhere' or 'God is now here' — announces its governing paradox: divine presence and absence become structurally indistinguishable, and authentic faith must inhabit this undecidability rather than resolve it. 'Being the Resurrection' opens the section by arguing that the Resurrection is not primarily a propositional belief but an incarnated, lived praxis. The parable imagines a community that has lived entirely according to Christ's teachings without any awareness of the literal Resurrection, and argues that they have thereby 'affirmed the reality of the Resurrection in a more radical way than many of those who confess such a belief.' The commentary explicitly links this to Holy Saturday — the liminal space of unresolved loss — as the authentic site of faithful existence. Orthodox doctrinal belief can itself become a barrier to this affirmation when it functions as a 'divine insurance policy' detached from action.

'The Prodigal Father' and 'Awaiting the Messiah' both rework canonical Gospel stories to explore divine withdrawal and the retroactive structure of desire. The former, composed in a Quaker meeting, rewrites the prodigal son from the perspective of those who wait for a God who does not return, meditating on divine absence-as-abandonment (Christ's cry of dereliction) rather than absence-as-transcendence. The latter, inspired by Blanchot's Writing of the Disaster, stages the paradox that desire for the beloved is born at, not before, the moment of presence: 'I had no desire for you until I met you, and now I know that I have always desired you.' This retroactive structure — where the 'always already' is a post-hoc construction — is one of the book's most explicitly Lacanian moments, echoing the logic of tuché and après-coup.

'The Orthodox Heretic' (ch. 17), the title story, is the section's pivot. A community shelters a refugee, protects him against religious authorities, and is subsequently condemned for harboring a heretic. The commentary reframes the opposition: the community's act of embodied love for the stranger constitutes genuine theological fidelity regardless of the stranger's doctrinal status, because 'the ethical demand of God is immanent to worldly acts of love and solidarity with the suffering — not transcendent authority.' The parable thus enacts the book's master-thesis: the heresy of orthodoxy (claiming doctrinal correctness while failing to love) versus orthodox heresy (admitting one's darkness while living in the way of Christ). 'The Mission of Judas' (ch. 18) performs a complementary inversion: Judas is recast as the most courageous disciple, one who betrayed Christ in full foreknowledge of what that betrayal would produce, raising the question of whether apparent acts of betrayal can be acts of deepest fidelity.

The remaining parables of Part Two — 'The Agnostic Who Became an Atheist,' 'God Joins the Army,' 'Betrayal,' and 'The Believer' — extend this logic in different directions. 'The Agnostic' argues that the encounter with God produces a universal, non-regional atheism: because God utterly transcends all concepts, 'only an atheism that proclaims no concept of God can do justice to the reality of God.' 'God Joins the Army' develops the theology of divine power-as-weakness: God always sides with the marginalized, even at the cost of God's own defeat, an idea illustrated by Jacob's wrestling (Genesis 32) and the Canaanite woman's argument with Jesus (Matthew 15). 'The Believer,' one of the most explicitly Lacanian parables, presents Leon who recites a prayer he does not believe in because the priest told him it works regardless of belief — a perfect instance of the big Other's efficacy operating through ritual practice independently of conscious disavowal, and of jouissance persisting beneath acknowledged lack of conviction.

Key concepts: The big Other, Jouissance, Tuché, Real, Fetishistic Disavowal, The Act, Ethics of Psychoanalysis Notable examples: Being the Resurrection (parable); The Prodigal Father (parable); Awaiting the Messiah (parable, inspired by Blanchot); The Orthodox Heretic (parable); The Mission of Judas (parable); The Believer / Leon (parable); Jacob wrestling with God (Genesis 32)

Part Three: Transfigurations (Parables 23–33) (p.125-186)

Part Three, 'Transfigurations,' gathers eleven parables around the logic of transformation — specifically, how genuine change in the subject is effected not by the law, by propositional argument, or by conditional exchange, but by unconditional love, impossible forgiveness, and the retroactive gift. 'Blindness' (ch. 23) opens with the mystical tradition of docta ignorantia: drawing on Pseudo-Dionysius and the example of Aquinas abandoning the Summa Theologica after his mystical experience ('All my works seem like straw after what I have seen'), Rollins argues that proximity to the source of faith produces greater opacity rather than clarity. The word 'mystic' itself, derived from muo (the closing of eyes or lips), captures the idea of closing one's eyes in order to see — a knowing unknowing. The accompanying parable enacts this through a figure who becomes increasingly blind as she approaches the divine light, while others who stay at a safe distance retain their ordinary sight.

'The Father's Approval' (ch. 24) and 'Overthrowing the Emperor' (ch. 25) together develop the Pauline/Lacanian argument that the law constitutively generates the transgression it prohibits. The commentary on the former deploys Paul's 'the power of sin is the law' (1 Corinthians 15:56) to show that prohibition intensifies temptation, and that only unconditional love — offered prior to repentance, not contingent upon it — can dissolve the dialectical trap. 'Overthrowing the Emperor' extends this into political theology: divine power operates as weakness entering the world from below (the Incarnation as infant rather than warrior), and it is precisely this powerlessness that constitutes a revolutionary force capable of overthrowing worldly authority. The commentary explicitly argues against the 'chain of being' hierarchy in favor of a God encountered in the lowest and most marginal.

'The Unrepentant Son' (ch. 26) is Rollins' most direct engagement with deconstructive gift-logic. Taking his cue from Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, Rollins argues that what ordinarily passes as forgiveness is a strategic, conditional, economic transaction — forgiveness that follows repentance. Jesus' radical move is to offer forgiveness unconditionally, prior to repentance, as an impossible gift exceeding the economy of exchange. The parable sticks close to the original prodigal son, but the commentary stresses the paradox: it is only when the message 'you don't have to change, I love you just the way you are' is genuinely taken to heart that real change becomes possible. Repentance is thus not the condition for forgiveness but its freely given response. 'The Empty Exchange' (ch. 28) complements this with the logic of reconciliation: here, paradoxically, it is the rejection of the apology — not its acceptance — that restores genuine friendship, because the rejection demonstrates that the offended party understands the full weight of the circumstances.

The final parables — 'The Last Supper,' 'The Book of Love,' 'A Miracle Without Miracle,' 'The Reward of a Good Life,' and 'The Heretic' — bring the book to its ethical and theological summation. 'The Last Supper' (ch. 29) is written in the second person, implicating the reader directly as Judas; the gaze of Christ becomes an unbearable encounter with foreknowledge, implicating everyone in the betrayal and staging the Lacanian structure of the gaze as that which reveals the subject's own desire and guilt. 'A Miracle Without Miracle' (ch. 31) argues that the true miracle of faith is not a physical event in the external world but a subjective transformation that changes everything without requiring any objective change: 'while nothing in the world needs to change, nothing in the world remains the same.' The closing 'The Heretic' (ch. 33) stages the book's culminating thesis: the heretic's refusal to repent exposes the universal guilt of his accusers, and his final words — demanding an innocent executioner — dissolve the scapegoat mechanism. The commentary returns to the book's master-distinction: 'orthodox heresy' (humble admission that one's descriptions of God are distorted) is preferable to 'the heresy of orthodoxy' (the dogmatic claim to have the truth), and it is this stance of knowing, loving inadequacy that constitutes genuine fidelity to the encounter with the Real.

Key concepts: Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Act, Das Ding, Sublimation, Jouissance, Lost Object, Gaze, Universality, Sublation Notable examples: Blindness (parable); The Unrepentant Son / Prodigal Son reworking; The Empty Exchange (parable); The Last Supper (parable, second-person); A Miracle Without Miracle (parable); The Heretic (parable); Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica; Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

Main interlocutors

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being
John Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?
Jacques Derrida, Given Time
Søren Kierkegaard
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
Paul (1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy, Colossians)
Buddhist parable tradition

Position in the corpus

Within the broader Lacanian-theological corpus, The Orthodox Heretic occupies a position adjacent to Žižek's The Fragile Absolute (2000) and The Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), which similarly deploy Lacan and Hegel to recover a subversive, materialist kernel within Christianity. Where Žižek argues from a rigorously Hegelian-Lacanian theoretical platform and uses Christianity as a case study, Rollins reverses the priority: Christianity (specifically the parabolic tradition) is the primary register, and Lacanian-Hegelian concepts are the interpretive machinery brought to bear on it. This makes Rollins more accessible to theological audiences and less to strictly psychoanalytic ones. Readers who approach the corpus from the Žižek side should read The Puppet and the Dwarf before or alongside The Orthodox Heretic; readers coming from theology will find Rollins a more gradual entry point into the conceptual apparatus before tackling Žižek's denser formulations. Rollins' own How (Not) to Speak of God and The Fidelity of Betrayal (both cited in the back matter) develop the same project at greater theoretical length, and The Orthodox Heretic can be understood as the practicum to those works' theory.\n\nIn terms of the Lacanian corpus proper, the book's most significant debts are to Seminar VII (the Ethics of Psychoanalysis), particularly the analysis of das Ding, sublimation, and the logic of the Act as self-justifying; to the Freudian Beyond the Pleasure Principle via its reworking in Lacan's account of the death drive and jouissance; and to Žižek's elaboration of fetishistic disavowal and ideological interpellation. The book does not engage directly with Lacan's own texts in any systematic way, making it a secondary-tier source that translates and applies Lacanian concepts rather than developing them. It should be read as a companion to Žižek's theological writings and to the literature on the ethics of psychoanalysis, and is especially valuable for understanding how the logic of the unconditional Act, the gift beyond exchange, and the encounter with the Real are operationalized in a concrete, narrative-theological register.