Book Review: How Not To Speak of God

This is the most frustrating book of theology I have ever read. I say that partly because it goes directly against the ringing endorsement from emergent statesman Brian MacLaren, and partly because in identifying it as such I know many will accuse me of not 'getting it', and of misreading it. Peter Rollins slim and controversial volume - half post-modern reimagining of the Christian faith, half liturgical examples of said thesis - had been on my radar for several years, but it was not until quite recently that I managed to get around to reading it. My review, after this not-exactly-positive opener, reflects my feelings about it, and what it means for 'church' generally.

First some background. The "Emerging Church" is a disparate thing, and no-one can really work out what it is. I recently reviewed "Reforming or Conforming", which by and large I agreed with, apart from its section on Tom Wright. The Emerging (emergent) church is not, in my mind, a particularly helpful or useful movement. Rollins book basically proves that. Rollins is himself a big fan of the movement, and he is seen by many as one of its foremost practitioners and thinkers. 

This is not a review of the book from an academic perspective, because I'm simply not qualified to speak about postmodern thought. I do, however, have a broadly working laymans understanding of it, and so it is from this that I try to engage with Rollins work. My main issue with what is said here is the simple fact that it doesn't make much sense in the normal world! For all the cleverness of philosophy (And indeed the very valid point that Rollins makes about the limitations of our language in describing God) and postmodernist thought, I did come away from some chapters feeling as though I'd just read nothing. That said, I do gladly affirm (ish) what Rollins says about scripture in his opening chapter; "the Bible itself is a dynamic text full of poetry, prose, history, law and myth all clashing together in a cacophany". I agree with his classification - but the more I study and grapple with the Bible the more I find it comes to a great unity. I'm not alone in this - as Jim Packer's "Concise Theology" implicitly reveals. 

The second chapter of "How (Not) To Speak of God" is at once enlightening and infuriating. The chapter is basically made up of paradoxes; "Christianity as a/theistic", "The un/known God", which are infuriating simply because they recognise that a tension is at the heart of the Christian message, and the imperfect discipline we call theology, but at the same time appear to abandon any hope of concrete or certain knowledge about him. In isolation, I would thoroughly agree with Rollins' statement that "we do not grasp God, faith is born amidst the feeling that God grasps us", but in the context of this work this means less something about the overwhelming love of our Redeeming Creating King, and more something about a general fuzziness regarding who or what that God is.

The rest of the theoretical part of the book continues in much the same vein as the opening and important chapters. Occasionally - and thankfully, as I swung between mental weeping and metaphorical forehead-slapping - there were gems of observational theology, but much of the time there was nothing new here. I could not shake the sense, whilst reading this book, that I wasn't gaining or losing anything by reading it. For a voracious and avid reader, this was frustrating.

The second half of this book is perhaps more controversial than the first. It is however less infuriating, because it gives form and explanation to the ideas of the first half. Part 2, "Towards Orthopraxis: Bringing Theory to Church" is exactly what it says on the tin, and specifically ten 'liturgies' or 'services' from the group known as Ikon that Rollins is involved in leading. Much has been said on these elsewhere, but suffice to say that the ten services have Christian elements but are arguably not essentially Christian. This is probably and perhaps deliberate - but you may have gathered by this point that this is exactly what you might expect from this section of the book.

I came away from Rollins book slightly dissappointed. Whilst it was at times stimulating, and had the occasional bit of beauty, it was also infuriating, worrying, and overly deliberately controversial. I don't really think the Emergent/Emerging Church movement is that theologically deep, and I'm concerned that if this is one of its key texts, that it is moving way from Christianity. Its worth reading for those interested in the topics it touches on, but for real theology, go elsewhere. A book that forms something of a response would be "Reforming or Conforming", which I reviewed a while ago, and would be a more useful way of thinking about this particularly stream of 'church'.