Tag Archives: Mystical Side Of Christianity

Book Reviews

“The Roots of Christian Mysticism” by Olivier Clement

Christianity has changed a lot since its early days with “distortions and caricatures…constantly being hawked about.”[1] Clement’s book is an effort to remind people of the mystic roots of Christianity.[2] To that end, the book includes large portions of text written by the early Church Father with Clement’s own words being used to connect the passages along with some brief commentary on the material.[3] Topics addressed within the book include, but are not limited to the mystery of God, the church, the Eucharist, passions transfigured, prayer, contemplation, and love. The primary theme throughout the book is that our lives, hopes, dreams, and prayers should be centered around Jesus of Nazareth. It is a “spirituality of resurrection”[4] that starts today and goes beyond death.

[1] Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary (Hyde Park, New York: New City Press of the Focolare, 2017), 9.

[2] Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 9.

[3] Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 11.

[4] Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 307.

Book Reviews

Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey Into God, The Tree of Life, and The Life of St. Francis

Born in a small town in central Italy, Saint Bonaventure entered the Franciscan Order in 1243 C.E. at twenty-six years of age while studying at the University of Paris.[1] Fourteen years later he was elected as the Minister General of the Order, a position he would retain until his death on July 15, 1274 C.E.[2] Throughout his career, Bonaventure was a prolific writer whose writings covered multiple genres including sermons, administrative writings, scholastic treatises, spiritual works, and lecture series.[3] The volume currently under review contains three of Bonaventure’s spiritual writings (The Soul’s Journey Into God, The Tree of Life, and The Life of St. Francis), which, when taken together, “offer a comprehensive picture of Bonaventure’s Franciscan spirituality.”[4]

            Bonaventure’s mystical masterpiece The Soul’s Journey Into God is the first work offered in the volume. Drawing off St. Francis’ vision of a winged Seraph, Bonaventure develops six stages of illumination (one stage per wing of the Seraph) through which “the soul can pass over to peace through ecstatic elevation of Christian wisdom.”[5] Written in seven chapters, the work serves a summa of mystical theology in that it brings together all the “major strands of Christian spirituality”[6] during the Middle Ages.

            The second work included in this volume is The Tree of Life, which is a “meditation on the life of Christ, based on the Gospel accounts of his birth, public ministry, passion, death, resurrection and glorification.”[7] The work is split into three parts focused on the mystery of Jesus’ origin, his passion, and his glorification. Within each of these parts, Bonaventure uses the image of a tree bearing twelve fruits (four fruits per part) that provide the reader with a view of the “varied states, excellence, powers, and works”[8] of Christ’s love. Taken together, these fruits will nourish the soul of the one who “meditates on them and diligently considers each one.”[9]

            The last work of Bonaventure included in this volume is his biography of St. Francis entitled The Life of St. Francis. This work was written at the “unanimous urging of the General Chapter”[10] of the Franciscan Order at their meeting in Narbonne in 1260 C.E.[11] A few years after it was completed, the General Chapter of Paris in 1266 C.E. declared it the official biography of St. Francis, cementing its position within the Order and expanding its readership.[12]  The work itself was written along a “thematic order”[13] with events placed within fifteen chapters that loosely follows Francis’ life. Within the thematic order of the book, one can detect a broad selection of nine chapters in the middle that follows the three stages of the spiritual life: purgation, illumination, and perfection.[14] While this order may conflict with the modern view of a biography, it fits within the norms of the Bonaventure day.

            Though each of the three works in this volume were interesting in their own way, I must admit that it was Bonaventure’s The Tree of Life that warmed my soul the most. I loved Bonaventure’s simple yet powerful way of waking the reader through the life of Jesus of Nazareth. As I read through the meditations, I found myself being drawn afresh into the story of Jesus. Of all the writings within this book, it is this work that I see myself coming back to time and time again. It really is a “bundle of myrrh,”[15] as Bonaventure called it, that I can hold close to my heart.

[1] Bonaventure, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey Into God, The Tree of Life, and The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York City: Paulist Press, 1978), 5.

[2] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 7-8.

[3] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 9.

[4] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, xx.

[5] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 54.

[6] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 20.

[7] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, xix.

[8] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 121.

[9] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 122.

[10] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 182.

[11] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 37.

[12] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 40.

[13] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 183.

[14] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 43-44.

[15] Bonaventure, Bonaventure, 119.

Theology Thoughts

Experiential Spirituality: Peter Rollins (Part 7 of 7)

rollins book 2The post-modern pastor and theologian Peter Rollins (1973-Present) is the eleventh and final travel guide along this journey. Growing up in Northern Ireland during the post-Christendom shift of the late-20th century, Rollins embraced the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart and others [2012, xiv]. This led Rollins to promote having a sense of doubt, unknowing and uncertainty within the Christian walk as intellectual theology will never fully capture the Living God. Faith, to Rollins, is “analogous to the experience of an infant feeling the embrace and tender kiss of its mother” [2012, 1].

This does not mean that Rollins is against theology; rather he sees theology as “reflecting upon” the God who “grasps us” [2012, 1]. This embracement of the mystical experience of God all comes down to love. God is personally in love with humanity just as his followers are to be passionately in love with him and their fellow humans. This is a love that “cannot be worked up but is gained only as we give up” and let ourselves become a “dwelling place in which God can reside and from which God can flow” [2015, 75].

Rollins and Williams are fitting ends to this journey along the experiential spirituality path of the last five-hundred years. Both of them are helping the 21st century church retain and explore the value of experiencing the Living God within an intimate ongoing relationship. As St. Ignatius, St. Teresa, Blaise Pascal, Brother Lawrence, St. Thérèse, Martin Luther, John Calvin, George Herbert, and William Seymour taught before them, God is a living God who seeks a personal on-going relationship with his people. Rather than been content to believe a doctrine, however orthodox that doctrine is, or with having a  one-time born-again experience, the people of God are to follow the advice of St. James, the half-brother of Jesus of Nazareth, and “draw near to God” as he “will draw near to [them]” [Ja 4:8].

 

Bibliography

Rollins, Peter. 2012. How (Not) to Speak of God. Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press

Theology Thoughts

Experiential Spirituality: William Seymour and Don Williams (Part 6 of 7)

William J. Seymour
William J. Seymour

The focus on experiential spirituality dramatically increased within Protestantism at the beginning of the 20th century with the start of Pentecostalism through William J. Seymour.  The son of former slaves freed at the end of the Civil War within the United States of America, Seymour (1870-1922) passionately pursued God at an early age and “found his identity in Jesus Christ” [Liardon 1996, 141] in such a way that he oozed the Spirit of God. John G. Lake, an early Pentecostal leader, said that Seymour had “more of God in his life than any man I had ever met up to that time” [Liardon 1996, 154].

This passion for experiencing the Living God captured the hearts of thousands of people as Seymour lead the Azusa Street Revival (1906-1915). Early Pentecostal historian Frank J. Ewart, who was also an eyewitness to the revival in its later years, later wrote that Seymour’s ministry was “not built on a new system of doctrine, but on an eminent scriptural experience” [1975, 69]. The inmate ongoing relationship promoted by St. Thérèse and other mystics within the Roman Catholic Church had finally found a home within Protestantism.

The tenth travel guide along our experiential spirituality journey is Don Williams (1937-Present). Williams was a Presbyterian pastor who had a personal encounter with the Living God through the ministry of John Wimber, the leader of the Vineyard Movement, which challenged his Calvinist education that had taught him “not to expect any powerful work of the Holy Spirit after conversion” [Williams 2011, 5].

Building upon this experience, Williams went on to influence the direction of Christian worship and church practice towards experiential spirituality through his writings and leadership within the Vineyard Movement [Geraty 2014]. His message of “intimate communion” with Jesus [Williams 2004, 116] would help blend together the spiritual experience of the Pentecostal world started by William Seymour with the personal transformation Christianity of John Calvin to create a new paradigm Protestantism that has come to shape 21st century Christianity [Luhrmann 2012, xx].

To be continued….

 

Bibliography

Ewart, Frank J. 1975. The Phenomenon of Pentecost. Hazelwood, Missouri: Word Aflame Press.

Geraty, Luke. 2014. Don Williams: Shaping the Theology, Praxis, and Culture of Worship in the Vineyard and Beyond. Master’s essay, University of Birmingham.

Liardon, Roberts. 1996. God’s Generals: Why They Succeeded and Why Some Failed. Tulsa, Oklahoma: Albury Publishing.

Luhrmann, Tanya M. 2012. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Williams, Don. 2011. Signs, Wonders, and the Kingdom of God: A Biblical Guide for the Reluctant Skeptic. Woodinville, Washington: Sunrise Reprints.

…………… 2004. 12 Steps with Jesus. How Filling the Spiritual Emptiness in Your Life Can Help You Break Free from Addiction. Ventura, California: Regal.

Theology Thoughts

Experiential Spirituality: John Calvin and George Herbert (Part 5 of 7)

calvin picJohn Calvin (1509-1564) was another Reformer who laid the foundation for people to experience the Living God in all areas of their lives. In the first chapter of his famous Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (a booklet containing a central part of his longer Institutes of the Christian Religion), Calvin expands on the danger of an external, purely rational faith. Rather than be content with an intellectual faith, Calvin encourages the followers of Jesus to allow God to transform every part of their lives:

“The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart…our religion will be unprofitable if it does not change our heart, pervade our manners, and transform us into new creatures.” [2008, 20-21]

In writing these words, Calvin was trying to get beyond the tendency of humanity to profess one thing with their mouth and another with their lives. However in doing so, Calvin also laid the foundation for a personal encounter with Jesus that goes beyond anything he would have anticipated.

The foundation laid by both Luther and Calvin for an experiential spirituality came together about a hundred years later within Anglicanism, which retained some of its Roman Catholic roots [Olson 1999,429-449]. The person most readily associated with this experiential mysticism is George Herbert, our eighth travel guide. Born into an aristocratic English family, Herbert (1593-1633) was an Anglican priest and poet who greatly influenced the soul of Anglicanism. His sense of connection and passion with Jesus is so powerful that a reader of his poems cannot but know that Herbert was “truly touched and amazed with the Majesty of God” as he encouraged all parsons and priests to be [1981, 60].

To be continued….

 

Bibliography

Calvin, John. 2008. Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life. Ed. Henry J. Van Andel. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books.

Herbert, George. 1981. George Herbert: The Country Parson, The Temple. Ed. John N. Wall, Jr. New York: Paulist Press.

Theology Thoughts

Experiential Spirituality: Martin Luther (Part 4 of 7)

LutherAn acute reader might notice that all of the travel guides until now have been members of the Roman Catholic Church. The reason for this is that the Roman Catholic Church had a head start on Protestantism when it came to seeking a personal experiential relationship with the Living God. This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t anyone promoting such a relationship; rather it means that the Protestant church had its hands full trying to survive rather than encouraging the mystics among them.  The reformers also tended to downplay the personal spiritual aspect of God as the Roman Catholic Church was using claims of “miracles and revelations as proof of their legitimacy” [Ruthven 2013, 10]. However if one were to look back through the writings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, the two giants of the Protestant Reformation, one can see the foundation for an experiential spirituality that would come to light later on in history.

While Martin Luther (1483-1546), the sixth travel guide, didn’t embrace an experiential spirituality like his Roman Catholic contemporaries (St. Ignatius and St. Teresa), he did fight against a purely intellectual faith. Rather he recognized that “reason itself needs miraculous healing and renewal by the grace of God and the Holy Spirit in order to believe in God rightly” [Olson 1999, 354]. Once an individual’s mind, heart, spirit and soul were transformed by God’s grace, the person became a priest of the Almighty. This priesthood of all believers is a radical statement that opened up the throne room of God to the common people of the land. No longer were they cut off from a personal experience with the Living God, having to rely on the ordained priest of the Roman Catholic Church. They could boldly enter “into the presence of God in the spirit of faith…and cry ‘Abba, Father!’” [Olson 1999, 392].

In addition, Luther was also a pastor who deeply cared for people and wanted them to experience the love and grace of the Living God. This part of Luther comes out best in the various letters he wrote to friends and love ones. For example, when his mother was sick Luther encouraged her to cling to Jesus knowing that we do not have to “fear him but approach him with all assurance and call him our dear Savior, our sweet Comforter, the true Bishop of our souls” [2003, 35]. At another time, Luther wrote to a friend imprisoned for his faith telling him that he was not suffering alone, but that Jesus was there in prison with him. Neither Jesus nor Luther would “desert” him; rather he was to be of “good courage” and Jesus would “strengthen [his] heart” [2003, 198]. In all these pastoral letters, there is an assumption that each person could experience the presence of Jesus in their lives. This was a faith that went beyond simply knowing about the Scripture into the realm of experiencing the touch of God in one’s personal life.

To be continued….

 

Bibliography

Luther, Martin. 2003. Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel. Trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert. Vancouver, British Columbia: Regent College Publishing.

Olson, Roger E. 1999. The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press.

Ruthven, Jon Mark. 2013. What’s Wrong with Protestant Theology? Traditional Religion vs. Biblical Emphasis. Tulsa, Oklahoma: Word & Spirit Press.

Theology Thoughts

Experiential Spirituality: Brother Lawrence and St. Thérèse (Part 3 of 7)

Brother LawrenceThe fourth travel guide is a contemporary of Pascal who lived in a Carmelite monastery in Paris. Brother Lawrence (c. 1614-1691) was an obscure monk who worked in the kitchen with no fanfare or fame. After his death, one of his friends would compile a short book full of conversations and letters from Brother Lawrence. This book provides travelers with a widow into the mystical life of Brother Lawrence where menial chores became an avenue to experience the Living God. Every day was filled with the “Divine Companionship” of the Living God [2003, 70]. This “Presence of God” was to him “an applying of our spirit to God, or a realization of God as present, which is borne home to us either by the imagination or by the understanding”  [2003, 77]. While the manner may have been different than what Apostle John experienced, the Living God “took shape before” [1 Jn 1:2, The Message] Brother Lawrence in everyday life.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) is another travel guide along the experiential spirituality path that had an increasingly personal relationship with the Living God. Starting from a very young age, St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus met and spoke with the Living Creator as an intimate and personal friend. In remembering her first communion at age 11, St. Thérèse writes the following:

“Oh! How sweet was the first kiss of Jesus on my soul!…It was a kiss of love. I felt myself loved, and I also said, ‘I love You, I give myself to You forever.’ There were no demands, no struggles, no sacrifices. For a long time Jesus and poor little Thérèse had been looking at each other and understanding each other…That day it was no longer a look, but a fusion” [2006, 77-78, emphasis in the original].

This intimacy with Jesus continued throughout her life. Jesus was her first and only friend whom alone she loved and pursued [2006, 221.] No one and nothing else mattered to St. Thérèse, just Jesus. It is because of this single minded focus on experiencing God that she became saint with the Roman Catholic Church a mere twenty-eight years after her death.

To be continued….

Bibliography

Brother Lawrence. 2003. The Practice of the Presence of God with Spiritual Maxims. Grand Rapids: Spire Books.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux. 2006. The Story of a Soul. Trans. and ed. Robert J. Edmonson. Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press.

Theology Thoughts

Experiential Spirituality: St. Ignatius, St. Teresa and Blaise Pascal (Part 2 of 7)

The first travel guide along this journey is St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491- 1556) who founded the Society of Jesus or Jesuits, a religious order within the Roman Catholic Church. Writing in the early part of the 16th century, St. Ignatius’ booklet Spiritual Exercises recorded various prayer and meditation practices that he found helpful in experiencing the Living God. These practices placed a “great emphasis on discerning God’s presence in the everyday activities of ordinary life” [Jones 2015]. Similar to St. Paul who saw the Lord as filling “everything in every way” [Ep 1:23, NIV], St. Ignatius refused to embrace the sacred/secular divided that permeated Christian thought then and now.

Saint Teresa of Ávila by Peter Paul Rubens
Saint Teresa of Ávila by Peter Paul Rubens

St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) is the second travel guide drawing travelers into an experiential spirituality of the Living Creator. A proponent of the contemplative life, her book The Interior Castle is an allegory of a soul on a journey through seven mansions within itself to find the Lord. When the soul enters into the seventh and last spiritual mansion, St. Teresa writes about how the Living God will come and dwell within the soul of the pilgrim.

“Oh, God help me! What a difference there is between hearing and believing these words and being led in this way to realize how true they are! Each day this soul wonders more, for she feels that they have never left her, and perceives quite clearly, in the way I have described, that They are in the interior of her heart – in the most interior place of all and in its greatest depths. So although, not being a learned person, she cannot say how this is, she feels within herself this Divine companionship” [2008, 129]

There can be no greater expression of experiential spirituality than to feel the everlasting companionship of the Living Creator.

Living about a hundred years later, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is the third travel guide along the experiential spirituality journey. Known primarily for his advances in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, Pascal may seem like an odd travel guided into the mystical realm of a personal experience with the Living God. However rather than being a hindrance, it was Pascal’s philosophical mind that led him to the understanding that God was seeking a personal relationship with him. “If we submit everything to reason,” Pascal says, “Our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element” [1958, 78]. Building upon this understanding, he declares that “it is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason” [1958, 78].

To be continued….

 

Bibliography

Jones, Lorna. 2015. A Brief Introduction to Ignatian Spirituality. Ignatian Spiritual Formation III class handout, St. Stephen’s University, St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, October 5.

Pascal, Blaise. 1958. Pascal’s Pensees. Trans. T.S. Eliot. New York: E.P. Dutton.

St. Teresa of Avila. 2008. Interior Castle. Trans. E. Allison Peers. Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications.

 

Theology Thoughts

Experiential Spirituality: An Introduction to Eleven Travel Guides within the Past Five Hundred Years (Part 1 of 7)

IMG_0890The danger of all religions is that the participants will cease to pursue a personal spirituality and rather choose to become content to blindly follow the traditions and rules established by their authority figures. While this decision is encouraged and promoted by some religions, it is antithetical to the Christianity promoted by the early followers of Jesus. Building upon the legacy of Abraham, Moses, and the Jewish Prophets of old, Jesus “quite deliberately remodeled first-century Jewish expectations around himself” [Wright 2011, 117] with an emphasis on relationship with the Living Creator. No longer were the people of God to be called “servants,” rather they would be “friends” of the Creator King [Jn 15:15, NIV].

Writing near the end of his life, the Apostle John pens a letter to the second and third generations of Jesus followers reminding them of their status change.

 “From the very first day, we were there, taking it all in—we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we’re telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us.

“We saw it, we heard it, and now we’re telling you so you can experience it along with us, this experience of communion with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ. Our motive for writing is simply this: We want you to enjoy this, too. Your joy will double our joy!” [1 Jn 1:1-4, The Message]

Through the incarnation, the Creator King revealed his desire to walk among his people in a very personal way that goes beyond anything ever known in the ancient world.  No longer was the Creator of Heaven and Earth a distant deity removed from the daily lives of his people. Rather he is a deity who is actively seeking an intimate ongoing personal relationship with each individual, adopting us as sons and daughters [Ga 3:26-4:7] and placing his Spirit into our hearts as a “deposit guaranteeing our inheritance” [Ep 1:14, NIV].

While Christianity has for the most part emphasized the need for personal salvation, the “experiential awareness of God’s presence that we see reflected in the New Testament has certainly not always characterized Christian life since” [Thiessen 2015, 1]. However there have always been those within the Christian community who have promoted such an experiential spirituality. This paper will seek draw out examples of experiential spirituality being promoted within Christianity over the past five hundred years (16th to 21st century). The goal of reviewing these examples is to remind readers of the value of experiential spirituality while introducing them to eleven travel guides who have walked the path before them.

To be continued….

 

Bibliography

 

Thiessen, Walter. 2015. Inner Healing Prayer. Module notes, St. Stephen’s University, St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada.

Wright, N.T. 2011. Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, And Why He Matters. New York: HaperOne.

 

Book Reviews

“How (Not) to Speak of God” by Peter Rollins

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rollins book 2Peter Rollins is a postmodern pastor, theologian and philosopher born and raised in Northern Ireland. In 2006, he published his first book, “How (Not) to Speak of God,” as an attempt to bring the mystical approach of viewing God into the wider Christian community of the Western Church. The core of this endeavor can be found in the following statement articulating the tension between mystical humanism and religious fundamentalism:

“That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking” (page xiv).

Drawing heavily on postmodern philosophy and the tradition of medieval mystical thought (especially that of Meister Eckhart), the book itself was directed to those engaged or interested in the “the emerging conversation” (page xvi). Accordingly, Rollins spends the first part of the book providing a theological framework for this view of God before shifting into a more practical outworking of the material. While Rollins’ application of his theoretical framework is interesting, this review is going to focus solely on the theological first part of the book.

In the first chapter, Rollins introduces two very important concepts. The first is that each of us unconsciously projects our view of the world on to the Scriptures, affecting the way in which we see and understand God. Once we know this, then we are able to understand the second major concept, that of mystery and concealment. It is this later concept that serves to drive the book forward as Rollins explores how God can both be concealed and revealed at the same time: “revelation embraces concealment at one and the same time as it embraces manifestation and that our various interpretations of revelation will always be provisional, fragile, and fragmentary” (page 18).

Chapter two builds upon this foundation by “exploring how such thinking critiques the idea of theology as that which speaks of God in favor of the idea of theology is the place where God speaks” (page xv). The core of this exploration is the concept that while we must continue to speak of God, we must also recognize that our words will always fails at truly defining or describing God. This “a/theology”, as Rollins calls it, is an “uncollapsible tension between affirming our religious ideas while also placing them into question” (page 28).

The next chapter continues to developed the a/theology concept with a focus on virtual of doubt. Rather than trying to know everything completely, a/theology focuses on the Holy Saturday experience between the shock of the cross and the glory of Resurrection Sunday. Namely that the decision to follow Jesus on Holy Saturday, when the future is unknown, is the true decision while the same decision on Resurrection Sunday, when the future is certain, is a false decision. This embracement of doubt causes one to realize that “God is not revealed via our words but rather via the life of the transformed individual” (page 44).

Peter Rollins in 2015
Peter Rollins in 2015

The theme of doubt and mystery continues to build in chapter four with Rollins exploring how the “rediscovery of mystery, doubt, complexity and ambiguity in faith helps us come to a more appropriate understand of religious desire” (page xv). For Rollins, it is the “seeking” after God that is important rather than the “finding” Him as other traditions have done (page 53). This core thought behind this can be understood in the following statement:

“A true seeking after God results from an experience of God which one falls in love with for no reason other than finding God irresistibly lovable. In this way the lovers of God are the ones who are the most passionately in search of God” (page 53).

All of this mystery, doubt and complexity on whether one can fully talk about or understand God leads to question how we can understand which reading of the Bible is “good and which reading is not” (page 64). Rollins tackles this question in the fifth and final chapter of part one during which he “draws out the centrality of love in Christian thinking” (page xv). Rather than having an infinite number of ways in which one could interpret the Scriptures, love provides the boundaries that keep the interpretations in check. This prejudice of love is draw from Rollins view that it was the “central interpretive tool that Jesus employed when interpreting the scriptures” (page 65).

In reflecting on part one of Rollins book, I found myself really enjoying and agreeing with chapters one through four. The mystical concepts of the unknowable yet knowable God is something I have embraced over the years, primarily through the reading of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity. In this tradition, they have something called apophatic theology which attempts to describe God by what He is not just like cataphatic theology seeks to describe Him by what He is. The back-and-forth nature of the Eastern Orthodox’s apophatic and cataphatic approaches to theology creates a sense of mystery which fits beautifully with Rollins a/theology viewpoint.

My main disagreement with Rollins is over the centrality of love in chapter five. Rather than seeing love as the central interpretive tool used by Jesus, I see Jesus embarking on the mission of God as seen through the lens of Kingdom Theology. God is the Creator King who created humanity in His image as a signpost to all of creation declaring His rule and reign. After breathing life into humanity, the Creator King beckons them to join Him in His mission to establish His kingdom throughout the earth. Jesus, in entering into a specific culture at a certain time and geographical location, joined His Father on this mission while destroying the works of the evil one and challenging the different contemporary interpretations of the kingdom. We, as followers of Jesus, are to embrace the mystery of the inaugurated eschatological kingdom established by Jesus and allow that mystery to guide us in how we view God and the Scriptures.