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In this mind-bending exploration of traditional Christianity, firebrand Peter Rollins turns the tables on conventional wisdom, offering a fresh perspective focused on a life filled with love.
Peter Rollins knows one magic trick—now, make sure you watch closely. It has three parts: the Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige. In Divine Magician, each part comes into play as he explores a radical view of interacting with the world in love.
Rollins argues that the Christian event, reenacted in the Eucharist, is indeed a type of magic trick, one that is echoed in the great vanishing acts performed by magicians throughout the ages. In this trick, a divine object is presented to us (the Pledge), disappears (the Turn), and then returns (the Prestige). But just as the returned object in a classic vanishing act is not really the same object—but another that looks the same—so this book argues that the return of God is not simply the return of what was initially presented, but rather a radical way of interacting with the world. In an effort to unearth the power of Christianity, Rollins uses this framework to explain the mystery of faith that has been lost on the church. In the same vein as Rob Bell’s bestseller Love Wins, this book pushes the boundaries of theology, presenting a stirring vision at the forefront of re-imagined modern Christianity.
As a dynamic speaker as he is in writing, Rollins examines traditional religious notions from a revolutionary and refreshingly original perspective. At the heart of his message is a life lived through profound love. Just perhaps, says Rollins, the radical message found in Christianity might be one that the church can show allegiance to.
- Sales Rank: #42137 in Books
- Brand: Simon & Schuster
- Published on: 2015-01-20
- Released on: 2015-01-20
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x .50" w x 5.50" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Review
This book is unsettling, as intended, but anyone who wrestles with big theological questions in a post-secular world will find Rollins’ work as exhilarating as it is disquieting. (Publishers Weekly,)
About the Author
Peter Rollins is a widely sought after writer, lecturer, storyteller, and public speaker. He is the founder of Ikon, a Belfast, Northern Ireland, faith group that has gained an international reputation for blending live music, visual imagery, soundscapes, theater, ritual, and reflection. He currently resides in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Divine Magician CHAPTER 1
Conjuring Something from Nothing
The word Christianity has largely come to refer to a particular way of viewing the world. It involves a set of beliefs and practices that can be compared and contrasted with other worldviews. Both its advocates and its critics see Christianity as making certain claims about the existence of God, the nature of the universe, and the ultimate meaning of life.
Countless books attempt to work out how the beliefs of Christianity should sit in relation to theories put forth by sociologists, psychologists, and natural scientists. A mammoth amount of time and energy is spent on the question of whether Christianity offers a perspective that complements contemporary theories of the world, conflicts with them, or deals with a different set of issues entirely.
But despite which view one picks, the shared understanding is that Christianity offers a concrete way of understanding the world and our place within it. It is one of the few things that both religious apologists and their adversaries actually agree on—both accept that Christianity makes certain knowledge claims and both accept that these claims attempt to reflect the nature of reality in some way. The only difference is that religious apologists attempt to prove them true, while their adversaries strive to expose them as false.
Whether we accept or reject Christianity, we all seem to know broadly what we mean when we use the term: a worldview that makes certain knowledge claims. Christianity is thus a term that is used to describe a tribal identity; a grouping within society bound together by shared beliefs, traditions, and history.
Of course, within this shared horizon there are legion conflicts regarding what exactly constitutes a Christian belief. Depending on whether one is Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant (and whether of the conservative or liberal leaning), one will get different answers about which beliefs and practices are debatable and which are nonnegotiable. Some people might only hold a few beliefs as essential, while others might list volumes of things—from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous—that they think we need to affirm in order to warrant the title. All of these different factions, though, agree that Christianity makes at least some claims. Any debates, then, that revolve around what beliefs or practices might be correctly “Christian” continue to operate within the same horizon of meaning.
This belief-oriented understanding of faith causes certain problems for those who find the beliefs unconvincing, who have legitimate doubts, or who suffer from mental health issues that make the forming of such beliefs too difficult. Regarding this last issue, some religious leaders might claim that there is a divine get-out-of-jail-free card for such circumstances, but this very view hints at the idea that belief might not be of central importance.
It suggests that Christianity might concern something deeper than intellectual belief.
Or rather, that something might be happening within Christianity that doesn’t rest on the affirmation of some church doctrine. Christianity has indeed become another system. It’s been reduced to a way of viewing the world and marking out a particular social grouping. However, while Christianity as a system might be of interest to social scientists on one side and systematic theologians on the other, the aim of this book is to chart a different path.
I wish to argue that this founding event—which I will explore as we go along—is not concerned with a set of beliefs concerning the world, but rather calls us to enter into a different way of existing within the world. The good news of Christianity—that is to say the life-giving event harbored within the tradition—is not an invitation to join an exclusive party. Indeed, as I hope to show, this good news involves discovering that those parties aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and that there is a way of celebrating life that is more authentic, enriching, and healing than anything we might find through membership to some special club. A way that is not limited to a conservative or liberal, optimistic or pessimistic, theistic or atheistic worldview, but rather one that can operate happily in and through them all.
In order to provide a dim sense of what this event is—or different way of being in the world—I have opted for comparing the good news of Christianity to a magic trick. This is not an arbitrary decision, though there are no doubt other approaches that can be taken. For this reading provides a clear and precise way of understanding how the event of Christianity is not an intellectual position we take with regard to the world, but a way of immersing ourselves in the world.
I hope to show that by approaching it through the lens of a great vanishing act, the ubiquitous idea of Christianity as a confessional system of belief, i.e., as involving the affirmation of various doctrines, actually obscures the liberating call that gave birth to this system, a call that encroaches on all religious and secular encampments.
The Creation of the Sacred-Object
In order to understand what this event harbored in Christianity might be, we must begin by outlining a particular type of suffering that we are all prone to. We all face numerous difficulties in life, difficulties that require medical, political, and economic solutions. However, there is one difficulty that would seem to require a different response, one that is expressed and addressed in, among other things, the biblical narrative.
This difficulty can broadly be described as the experience of a lack in our lives—a lack we believe can be filled by a particular thing or set of circumstances. For the remainder of this book we shall use the term sacred-object to describe whatever it is we think will fill this lack, whether that be money, health, a relationship, or religious practice. Before looking more deeply into the problem faced by this sense of lack, we must spend a little time looking at what makes up this sacred-object, or rather why we would think that some mundane thing would have this magical quality. We can begin by taking a look at the genesis of human beings as described in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The Story of Adam and Eve
In the book of Genesis, we read how Adam and Eve lived in a type of primordial paradise where everything was freely available—everything, that is, except for the fruit of a particular tree: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die’ ” (Genesis 2:15–17).
Here, we are immediately confronted with a series of puzzles. For instance, what could possibly make the fruit of this tree so special, and how could it possess the power to bestow moral knowledge? Some readers might be tempted to close the book at this point and dismiss it as mere prescientific nonsense.
However the story is not as esoteric and bizarre as it might initially appear.
In response to the question What makes this fruit so special? the answer might be deceptively simple. In my previous book, The Idolatry of God, I explored how prohibition can work in relation to a parent and child: if a child is denied a toy, the denial generates an excessive desire in the child for the prohibited object.
The no of the parent doesn’t extinguish the desire of the child, but acts as a mechanism that redoubles the intensity of the original desire. It thus serves to evoke the very thing that it’s attempting to quash, transforming an otherwise mundane toy into an object of singular value and importance. What we see in the story of Adam and Eve is the same structure, a prohibition that generates an excessive attachment.
The fruit takes on a special and excessive value because Adam and Eve experience the fruit as barred. Of course objects that are withdrawn in this way don’t change in any physical way. But they’re off-limits and therefore transformed into a type of sacred-object.
In the example of the prohibited toy, the no bestows upon the toy a sacred property that is not an inherent part of the toy, causing the child to find herself deeply attached to it. What was previously only of passing interest now becomes infused with a seductive power. The prohibition can make a mundane object appear sacred, i.e., as something that has the power to satisfy us and render our existence meaningful.
In Robert Duvall’s film The Apostle, we see a fascinating example of this mechanism at work. In one scene, a racist construction worker drives a large construction vehicle up to a small church with the intention of knocking it down. The pastor of the church, Sonny (played by Robert Duvall), comes out of the church and places a Bible in the direct path of the vehicle. Being raised in the Deep South, the construction worker shows a certain respect for the leather-bound book and gets out to remove it. But Sonny tells him solemnly and with great authority not to touch the book. When he gets closer Sonny asks his parishioners to repeat the words, “No one moves that book.”
This prohibition begins to affect the construction worker as he bends down to cast it aside, and at the last minute he finds himself kneeling before the Bible and crying. The prohibition was subjectively inscribed into the construction worker and thus had the effect of transforming the book into a type of magical object before which he crumbled.
Stealing a Masterpiece That Never Existed
Adam and Eve were not forbidden to eat something that would satisfy them, but were faced with a prohibition that made them think that the fruit would satisfy them.
In order to understand this, consider the following story.
There was once an artistically talented teenager who felt unrequited love for a girl in his art class.
It so happened that his beloved’s artwork was particularly bad, so bad, in fact, that it was often quietly mocked. One day the boy overheard two classmates laughing about how bad her artwork was. But just then she entered the room, and they quickly changed the subject. After a couple of minutes, the two classmates started playing a cruel game where they praised her for her artistic abilities.
She protested, but the classmates kept insisting that she had real talent and should think about exhibiting something in the end-of-year art show.
A week later she pulled the lovelorn boy to one side and asked for some advice about a painting.
He jumped at the chance to talk with her, and while the work was terrible, he praised it profusely. To his horror, the praise he lavished on it convinced her to enter the painting in the school art exhibition.
Because of his love, he didn’t want her to be humiliated, so the day before the show he went into the room holding all the submissions and stole her painting along with a couple of others.
Once the theft was discovered, the art teacher quickly worked out who was guilty and pulled the boy out of class. Before suspending him, the teacher asked why he’d stolen the paintings.
“That’s easy,” replied the boy. “I wanted to win the prize and so stole the best work.”
News quickly spread around the school that the girl had created a masterpiece that might have won the prize if allowed to compete.
In this illustrative story, we can see how stealing the bad painting created the illusion that it was a great painting. The removal of a pedestrian thing generated the idea that it was extraordinary.
The subtraction of the painting from the competition effectively added an excessive value to it in the minds of the students, making it into an imagined masterpiece.
The imagined reality was:
• There was a masterpiece.
• It was stolen.
• It could have won a prize.
However the actual reality was:
• A terrible painting was stolen.
• This led to the idea that it was a masterpiece.
• This led to the fantasy that it could have won a prize.
In the beginning the girl may well have thought that she had created a good painting, but the subsequent theft caused her and her classmates to imagine that she had actually created a truly great work. The theft introduced the sense that something wonderful had existed.
With this belief, a new and obstinate sense of dissatisfaction enters the story. The idea that something truly wonderful was taken away initiates a sense of dissatisfaction in the girl. The problem, however, is that the object that promises to get rid of the dissatisfaction doesn’t actually exist and so can never be possessed. Hers is not, then, the basic type of dissatisfaction that comes from wanting some mundane thing, but rather an insidious dissatisfaction that comes from wanting a seemingly sublime object that can’t actually be grasped.
Both the painting and the fruit exist in a mundane, everyday sense, but the masterpiece is a fiction just as the idea of a superfruit that would make us gods is a fiction. The seeming inaccessibility of these sacred-objects is what gives them a special halo. But the halo is a lie; the sacred-object is inaccessible and impossible, not simply because access to it is blocked, but more fundamentally because it doesn’t exist. The blockage is not what blocks access to the sacred-object, but rather what helps to create the fiction that it actually exists.
Virtual Reality
This idea of an object holding an excessive value only in its prohibition or loss forms within us a pleasurable pain (something that is called jouissance in philosophy).
It’s this very logic that we bear witness to in the story of Adam and Eve. Instead of Adam and Eve first being dissatisfied with the Garden of Eden and imagining that they will be satisfied through transgressing the prohibition (and gaining the fruit), we see that the prohibition is the very thing that creates their sense of dissatisfaction in the first place. When a mundane piece of fruit is experienced as prohibited, it takes on a special value and turns into a sacred-object for the ones who are barred from it. The prohibition thus creates a sense of dissatisfaction. Not an everyday type of dissatisfaction, but a deep sense of gap in the heart of our being that marks every part of our lives.
This ancient story of Adam and Eve, then, offers us a mythical description of how sacred-objects are formed and how their very formation creates within us a sense of painful longing. We (falsely) believe that the sacred-object can offer us wholeness and lasting pleasure; but in actuality, it is responsible for birthing our sense of dissatisfaction. The sacred-object does not exist, yet it cannot be said to simply not exist, since our desire for it influences our behavior and drives us to certain actions.
In this way, it is neither actual nor completely fictional.
It is virtual.
In philosophical terms, the virtual is a type of reality that cannot be adequately grasped in the terms existence or nonexistence. Rather, virtual objects insist. For example, fascism doesn’t exist in the sense that it would be found in a universe where all people were removed. Yet it still makes its presence felt in society in very real ways.
Whether or not someone is actually a racist, racism can still affect how one behaves. For instance, it might influence where one buys a house, takes a job, or sends one’s children to school. Racist ideology can still regulate people’s everyday activities, even if they aren’t directly aware of it. In this way, a virtual reality doesn’t have to be consciously embraced to be effective.
Grammar also operates as a type of virtual reality in that it regulates how we put words together, yet it doesn’t exist in our conscious minds (unless we are studying it). Grammar was there before we arrived on the scene and will be there when we leave. It is something that comes from us and that we are immersed in, yet it is not reducible to us.
This is why one can say that virtual realities insist—for they exert force upon us whether we know it or not.
The sacred-object is thus a virtual reality in that it does not actually exist, but makes an impact on us. The sacred-object, as a virtual object, appears actual to us in, and only in, the act of taking it seriously. A virtual reality only begins to dissolve when people stop acting as if it is real.
The creation of the sacred-object can be described in the following diagram. Here we see how the barrier between Adam and Eve and the tree creates an excessive drive by making the fruit of the tree into something excessively desired. While Adam and Eve can try to content themselves with substitute objects, they remain enchanted by the illusion of what lies out of reach.
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden1
I Want What You Want
How we decide which objects are sacred is deeply connected to the desires and interests of the people around us. We find ourselves wanting the things that the people we desire want. If we fall in love with someone, for instance, we find ourselves with desires for a whole range of new things, desires that reflect the interests of the one we are with. If our partner is interested in film, travel, or the piano, we’ll often find ourselves taking on these interests for ourselves. In this way we tend to mimic the other’s desires and come to experience those desires as our own. This process simply reflects how we constructed desire at an early age within the home.
This means that the things we want, while deeply personal, actually arise and shift in relation to our interactions with others. We can compare this process with something we witness in the 1987 romantic comedy The Princess Bride. In one famous scene, a criminal genius called Vizzini (played by Wallace Shawn) gets into a game of wits with the mysterious hero, the Man in Black.
Vizzini fancies himself one of the smartest men in the world and is thus confident when challenged by the hero to a game of wits. The game proposed by the Man in Black is a simple but deadly one in which he places one glass of wine in front of Vizzini and one in front of himself. The Man in Black goes on to explain that Vizzini must choose which glass to drink from and which he wants the Man in Black to consume. However, before the game begins, the Man in Black takes the drinks and hides them from sight for a moment before returning them to the table. He then tells Vizzini that he has added a small amount of iocaine powder, a deadly poison, into the game, one that is both odorless and tasteless.
In response, Vizzini arrogantly states, “All I have to do is divine it from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you . . . But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.”
What ensues is a dizzying monologue as Vizzini works out what he envisions as inspired logic to determine which glass has the poison in it.
Vizzini finally makes his choice, they both drink, and he quickly falls dead.
The scene itself gains its comic effect by enacting an infinite loop in which the criminal gets caught up in a game of “you think that I think that you think . . .” The decision as to which glass to drink is directly connected to what Vizzini thinks is going on in his adversary’s mind (the final twist being that the hero actually poisoned both glasses, having previously built up immunity to the poison).
Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan drew out how our own thinking is connected to what we perceive the other is thinking in an analogy concerning animal tracks. To understand the analogy we can imagine a hunter who is faced with interpreting the meaning of some animal tracks. The initial challenge faced by the hunter is to uncover these tracks and use them as a means of discovering where the animal might be.
However, we can easily imagine a species that masks its true tracks when feeling threatened and makes false ones, so that a less experienced hunter might be misled by the marks on the forest floor. In contrast, the more seasoned tracker will know that the visible tracks are misleading and instead attempt to uncover the true ones.
Yet Lacan notes that there is at least one species we know of that is able to leave true tracks that are intended to be read as false ones: humans.
If I am the one being tracked, I need to judge whether or not the predator is inexperienced. If she is, I might simply run, attempting to gain as much distance as possible from my pursuer, knowing that she likely won’t be able to track me. If, however, I know she is more experienced, I might try to cover over my tracks and leave false ones to throw her off the scent. However, I can also take into consideration what she might think of my experience. Does she think that I’m well versed in survival techniques? If so, then I might decide to leave real tracks hoping that she assumes them to be false and wastes time looking for nonexistent, camouflaged ones.
My reflections could get caught up in a type of infinite loop and must be disrupted by a decisive action if I am to move at all. In the terms of philosopher Jacques Derrida, this would constitute a real decision, for it is a choice that happens when the right move is not obvious. If the right move were obvious, it wouldn’t really be a decision at all, because there would only be one true option available.
If I choose to leave true tracks with the hope that my hunter interprets them as false, I am doing the equivalent of telling the truth precisely in order to lie.
Just as our actions are related to other people, so too are our desires. So when asking why a piece of fruit would occupy the space of the sacred-object for Adam and Eve, we can approach an answer by saying that it comes about because each interprets the other as wanting the fruit. The fruit itself isn’t a sacred-object because of some inherent property, but rather because of the prohibition combined with an interpretation of what the other desires.
The Adam and Eve story can thus be read as a reflection of our own situation: we are caught in the gravitational pull of things that we excessively want—things that are forbidden to us in various ways (by parents, by society, by etiquette, by inability, etc.) and things we think (correctly or incorrectly) others want as well.
The story of Adam and Eve is our story; what it describes is not some outdated origin myth, but rather something that mirrors our contemporary situation caught up, as it is, in wanting to find something that removes our lack.
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Life sucks…and then you love…but we aren’t going to talk about that much. Let’s talk about how everyone else has it wrong.
By Kelly L Wilbur
If it had been written to its potential, this book should have been titled: “Life sucks…and then you love.” Instead, a more accurate title would be: “Life sucks…and then you love…but we aren’t going to talk about that much. Let’s talk about how everyone else has it wrong.”
I have never read any of Rollins’ books before and I read this book upon the suggestion of a friend. This book is short and a fairly easy read. Rollins keeps things interesting with various analogies, stories and pop culture references. Most of the time, these vehicles do well to explain his ideas. Other times, Rollins pushes an analogy too far and it does more harm than good (I’m primarily referring to the main analogy of the entire book: the magic trick). Fairly rarely, Rollins does start to speak unintelligibly with a sage-like mystical phraseology. But thankfully this is relegated to just a few pages. Overall, be ready to have all of your core assumptions questioned. Rollins doesn’t shy away from challenging the establishment.
Rollins opens with the introduction of an analogy that sets the theme for the rest of the book: the magic trick. This magic trick concept is composed of three parts: the pledge, the turn and the prestige. This analogy is used to represent man’s existential search for meaning, the ultimate futility of the search and how we can remodel that futility into something truly meaningful. Rollins explores these representations in varying degrees of width and depth using various other stories and analogies from history and pop culture.
In Section 1’s “The Pledge” (covering chapters 1 and 2), Rollins is on firm empirical psychodynamic ground in discussing man’s “lack” which we often assume can be filled by some imagined object. Rollins claims this object does not exist and labels it as the “sacred-object.” That title feels like a loaded term to me (perhaps on purpose) and so I’ll hereafter refer to it as the “false-goal.” Throughout the book, Rollins maintains that this false-goal is an illusion that is created and persists for various reasons. In chapter 1 Rollins uses the story of Adam and Eve to describe how a prohibition can be the genesis of the false-goal. For Adam and Eve, the benefit of eating the forbidden fruit is an illusion whose draw is increased by a command not to eat it. A version of peer pressure is also shown to create and maintain the false-goal. Rollins also describes how we use various distractions to provide contentment in the face of such prohibitions and desires.
Chapter 2 starts to expand upon the futility of chasing a false-goal. Rollins maintains that as long as a false-goal is perceived as real, all paths to it will lead to disillusionment. In a return to a Biblical analogy, Rollins equates “the fall” as man’s relationship to the false-goal and the inevitable disillusionment that comes from its pursuit. At this point, Rollins begins to bring the concept of Biblical law into his analogy, demonstrating that Law exists as a prohibition that creates a desire for a false-goal. Rollins returns to this beautifully in Section 2. The remainder of chapter 2 discusses three other topics including: 1.) life’s meaningfulness is not necessarily congruent with its length, 2.) the psychological phenomenon of defensively sabotaging our search for the false-goal because we subconsciously recognize its futility and 3.) the psychodynamic paranoid character structure of radical groups which is represented by turning a hatred of the self into an outward hatred of others.
Section 2’s “The Turn” (covering chapters 3 and 4) is the strength of the book. Rollins continues in chapter 3 with his discussion of the relationship between prohibition and the false-goal by comparing the Garden of Eden with the Jewish Temple. This discussion leads into an absolutely elegant reconceptualization of God through a discussion of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:12 about seeing through a glass darkly. First, Rollins gives what I feel is a fair characterization of both conservative and liberal Christian core theologies and he ultimately challenges them both. Rollins maintains that both theologies sustain the search for a goal that is on the other side of Paul’s “dark glass” in different ways. However, Rollins proposes that nothing truly exists on the other side of the glass. Indeed, the dark glass is merely an existential prohibition that artificially generates the idea of something on the other side…the false-goal. The very end of chapter 3 provides an unfortunate lull in which the book appears to get bogged down in what I call “Yoda-speak”…an almost unintelligible metaphysical muddy puddle in which there is no clear link to concepts that lie outside of whatever is going on in Rollins’ mind. The closing sections entitled “The Gap Within God,” “Removing the Curtain” and “Crucifixion as Rupture” start to feel like a sermon from the Rollins Random Word Generator. They don’t clearly convey a message that the reader can link to any other established ideas either within the book or the reader’s personal experience. Perhaps there are some important gems here, but Rollins should have provided some more concrete analogies to help the reader connect with them.
In Chapter 4, Rollins finally hits his stride and starts to put the pieces together. Forgiveness of sin and salvation are described as the release of the individual from the draw of the false-goal. The reader is warned not to think in terms of the replacement of the false-goal but to focus on the embrace of its absence. Rollins then talks about love being the alternative to pursing the false-goal. This is a powerful and crucial message, but it is unfortunately convoluted by Rollins’ insistence on his magic trick analogy. Rollins demands that we embrace the emptiness left behind in the destruction of our false-goals. He then awkwardly introduces “love” without calling it a replacement. Rollins should ditch the entire magic trick analogy and simply say that love is the true “sacred object” and we simply misperceive it as various false goals. Either that or admit that love IS the replacement of the “sacred object”/false-goal. Either solution would work but Rollins misses both.
With those weaknesses aside, the book hits its absolute peak on pages 83-85 where it beautifully ties together how “…the Law and that which the Law attempts to protect us from is actually one and the same thing…the Law creates the illusion of the sacred-object, and that illusion creates a sense of lack.” Rollins then graphically shows that forgiveness of sin and our salvation are found in destroying this entire system which frees us from this false pursuit. The elegant and beautiful work found in these few pages is well worth the price of the entire book.
Section 3’s “The Prestige” (covering chapters 5 and 6) comes up fairly flat. This is unfortunate because I feel like a much stronger conclusion is waiting to be written. Rollins completely fails at conveying what love truly is. I would personally maintain that while society is caught up in all sorts of hedonistic interpretations of the word “love,” the true definition is rarely described or seen in action: love is a choice to completely selflessly will the greatest good of another. This is my comprehensive description which reveals why Christ would command us to love even our enemies (which would expose any hedonistic impurity in our motives to be selfless lovers…you receive nothing back from loving your enemies). Sadly, Rollins falls into the trap of talking about love using Yoda-speak and other vague language. Rollins attempts to rectify this with Paul’s poetic description of love in 1 Corinthians 13. This excerpt from Paul is absolutely beautiful and emotionally moving but completely uninformative in any practical way. The concept of love should truly be the centerpiece of this book…the TRUE sacred-object…the REAL goal. The crucial position of love in Rollins’ arguments requires a dedicated approach that is completely missing here. High points of chapter 5 include the tie-in that God is love and a surprisingly good reimagining of the Eucharist utilizing the magic trick analogy.
Most of the rest of the book is dedicated to saying why other people are getting it wrong. This is a huge disappointment as the remaining 83 pages could have been more valuable by saying how other people could get it right. Chapter 6 reveals one of Rollins’ very few clear contradictions. While constantly criticizing the very existence of ideology, Rollins states “…there is no real existence outside of ideological constructions.” It is also at this time that Rollins more transparently reveals his true style (which I immensely respect) when he subsequently says, “there is a way of briefly being shocked out of one’s ideology in a way that means one reenters it in a critical way, becoming more aware of what was previously just assumed.” Other chapter 6 highlights include good examinations of hope and faith as things that exist with our participation, not just our passive observation.
The Interlude’s “The Trickster Christ” is a fascinating comparison between a counterintuitive reimagining of the prodigal son and the relationship between Jesus and God. Here the prodigal son is seen as a failure for returning to a wealthy system of comfort instead of fundamentally challenging and changing his family’s relationship with poverty. Jesus is seen as the antithesis of this…remaining with the suffering of the cross instead of using his power to return to safety. Rollins describes this as the “self-saving of the father.” This is a short section that deserves much more elaboration and could likely lead to a whole book’s worth of ideas.
Section 4’s “Behind the Scenes” (containing chapters 7-9) returns to the railing against most organized religion. Once again, there isn’t much to learn here that isn’t obvious and these pages should have been dedicated to an expansive discussion of love and what we can do right. Chapter 7 contains a fairly convoluted and unnecessary argument about unbelief supporting belief. Chapter 8 finally concludes the anti-religion discussion with the statement, “the church reveals that it has no mystical power to grant us what will make us whole and that what we have, instead, is each other.” I don’t necessarily disagree with this statement. However, I didn’t need ten pages of rehashed criticism to come to this conclusion.
Chapter 9 closes the book by stating “a subversive leader…breaks apart the strangle hold of dogmatic beliefs and destabilizes rigid community markers, but [is] also one that makes the leader’s ongoing presence ultimately superfluous.” That statement deserves praise for its courage. It takes balls for a leader like Rollins to state that he must be prepared to “enact [his] own disappearance.” The other highlight of Chapter 9 is its focus on how our personal psychology underpins our beliefs. I learned this lesson years ago after reading Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” where the background and childhood experiences of philosophers throughout history were described. It was fairly easy to make correlations between each set of philosophical beliefs and the psychological profile that likely led to them. Of course, this is a lesson that we as readers and Rollins as a writer should apply to this book as well.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith Rollins takes aim at the "sacred object" which always lies just beyond
By Steve Hackman
In grad school I took a class once called The Politics of Ideas. On the first day the professor warned us that each class period he would take us all into the metaphorical abyss where we would be un-moored from everything we thought we knew and understood to be real, "but don't worry," he added, "before the bell rings I will pull you out again into the sunlight and stable ground."
Peter Rollins offers no such assurances!
In his new book The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith Rollins takes aim at the "sacred object" which always lies just beyond our reach yet draws us like moths to the flame with it's promises of wholeness and completeness. Whether that "sacred object" is Forbidden Fruit, The Holy of Holies, or even God himself, The Divine Magician will call into question your motivations for pursuit and assumptions of what you will eventually find when you finally peek behind the curtain.
Using the 3 essential parts of a magician's trick, the Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige, Rollins argues that this "trick" is actually a convention that continually echoes in the lives of all people.
We feel incomplete!
We lack wholeness!
We are depressed!
Then there is always something that promises to take away that pain whether it be a new relationship, a new job, a large pizza with everything, or even God. This "sacred object" is presented to us like the Pledge of a magician who waves the large silver coin to his audience. In life of course two things can happen in our pursuit of this object promising wholeness.
* we fail to obtain the "sacred object" and live with the misery of feeling an ongoing "lack" in our lives
or
* we obtain the object (job, lover, faithful church attendance) and discover it actually didn't complete us as promised.
"The ancient story of Adam & Eve then offers a mythical description of how sacred objects are formed and how their very formation creates within us a sense of painful longing. We (falsely) believe that the sacred-object can offer us wholeness and lasting pleasure; but in actuality, it is responsible for birthing our dissatisfaction."---The Divine Magician- pg 22
This disappearance of the "sacred object" is the Turn whereby the magician makes the silver coin, not unlike our hopes and dreams, vanish into thin air.
Peter Rollins tells the story of the Roman General Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus who in 63 BC stepped behind the temple curtain in Jerusalem only to discover "the sanctuary was empty and the Holy of Holies untenanted".
There was nothing there...
What had been just been beyond the reach of the people of Israel and placed behind a curtain of prohibition was revealed to be nothing at all.
It's this disappearance (the Turn) of the "object" that can destabilize a person into depression or force them to ultimately create a false system (religious or otherwise) that keeps the illusion of the object in place and the subsequent depression at bay. Hence the reason, for example, fundamentalists react in the way they often do:
"Fundamentalist communities are not threatened by the liberal claim that they believe to much, for this plays into the very fantasy that sustains them. The threatening move in such communities lies in the other direction; in exposing how they don't believe enough. Why? Because it is only as they fully accept their beliefs without unbelief that they are faced with the powerlessness and even horror of those beliefs. It is only then that beliefs themselves might crumble into dust."------The Divine Magician - Pg 153
Rollins suggests the goal of the the Pledge and the Turn however are not to leave us in this empty state, but to prepare us for the Prestige; the reappearance of the object. But the reappearance of said object, not unlike the resurrected Christ, comes in a form we often don't immediately recognize. And the traits of this "re-apparated object" differ from the earlier "object of desire". Rather than give an illusionary wholeness, this "Prestige" frees us from the ongoing need to seek wholeness at all.
"Christianity should not be thought of as the means of bridging a gap. This event is nothing less than the smashing of the whole chasm / bridge idea that Gnostic spiritualities buy into. The liberation that this narrative expresses does not offer us the fullness we seek, but rather frees us from the need to seek fullness." ----The Divine Magician - Pg 85
In the end, Rollins conclusion is that working through this three part system by engaging in practices that cause disruption to the illusions we create provide an opportunity for us to live a life worth living. The tell tale sign of this worth while life is not the affirmations we cling to but the evidence in how we interact with our environment:
"The evidence of 'forgiveness of sin' is not found in profession of belief, but in a life freed from self destructive pursuits, scapegoating, and violence."
The Divine Magician - pg 83
The Divine Magician is possibly Peter Rollins most accessible book. He mixes theology and philosophy effortlessly and utilizes his natural gift of storytelling in a way that makes his work attainable to readers across a spectrum of educational or religious backgrounds.
I've suggested before Peter Rollin's writing is far from the "happy clappy" certainty of most Christian literature and a new reader may feel uncomfortable at the honest probing of sacred assumptions he is prone to do, but I've come to the realization that if I'm not getting Peter Rollins in my spiritual diet, I am not eating a balanced meal.
Take my advice and read The Divine Magician now
32 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Religion is a trick. Rollins doesn't deliver the treat.
By Paul Mastin
Sometimes a book just leaves my scratching my head, wondering "What was the point of all that?" That's how I felt about Peter Rollins's The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith. Not only was I left wondering what exactly Rollins was trying to accomplish, I was wondering where this guy has been to church? Is he really drawing on his own experiences or on some stereotypical picture of church?
I'm no perfect Christian, and certainly no perfect church member, and I've never been to a perfect church, as if there is such a thing. When people like Rollins start talking about what's wrong with "the church" or with "religion," it always seems like they get into straw man arguments that don't hold up in reality. Rollins talks about the "snake oil claims of religious movements." He talks about "pious professionals" in whose hands "'God' is presented as nothing less than an object that promises satisfaction and certainty." Those professionals "hand out placebos," offer a "security blanket," and their followers rely on belief as "an emotional crutch."
To Rollins, Christianity has become "an ideological system." Churches "create their own constellation of beliefs and practices that tell their congregants how to think and behave." His whole point is that faith in institutions and leaders is bound to disappoint, that fulfillment can't be found in ritual and dogma. So this is news? All my life, I have heard affirmations like the simple phrase, "Christianity is not about religion, it's relationship." In the evangelical world in which I live, it's common knowledge that joy and wholeness and salvation are not found in a building, a pastor, a set of doctrines, or a ritual, but in a personal encounter with Jesus himself. The reality is that oftentimes a building, a pastor, a set of doctrines, or a ritual can be instrumental in fostering such an encounter. But Rollins wants to get rid of all of that, or at least diminish the role they play.
I don't know Rollins. I don't know anything about him except what you can read on the book jacket or the Amazon profile. So I don't want to pass judgment on him as a person. All I can judge is this one book. (And by one I mean one; I don't intend to read any more of his books.) His writing is pretentious. His style is that of someone fascinated with his own thoughts and caught up in his self-perceived cleverness of his own ideas. It's the equivalent of someone who drinks only rare, organic, free trade coffee, or hard-to-find regional craft beers, and looks down on anyone who drinks grocery store coffee or national brand beers.
There, I got that off my chest. It sounds rude, I know, but my reaction reflects the visceral offense I took to his arguments. I love the church because I know it offers, in a very human, imperfect, distracting way, a means by which we can come to know Jesus in community. We have screwed it up in every denomination and every generation, but the church universal is the body of Christ, and local congregations make up that body. Rollins rejects the church in pretty much any form you see from day to day.
For all the promise of the disappearance of religion and the discovery of faith, Rollins's book was a huge disappointment. Perhaps he unintentionally pulled a magic trick of his own. He pulls back the curtain, tears the veil, and reveals not a revelation of a fresh approach to living as a follower of Jesus, but an empty confession of someone who's disconnected and discontented.
Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!
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