peter rollins demands what he already has

It's amazing, really, the kinds of things people can whine and complain about. I've heard of instances where a child can be in a room filled with toys, and for reasons only speculated on begin to cry. Perhaps it's because the one kind of toy they wanted wasn't among the riches they had before them, maybe it's because there were so many option that they simply couldn't figure where to begin, but just like those kids, some people will cry about the wealth of things about them.

Peter Rollins does that here.

Please Give Me Freedom From The Pursuit of Happiness

Something that I am exploring at the moment in my writing is the way that the pursuit of that thing which we believe will satisfy our soul is deeply destructive. It is a common belief that society will function best when its population is able to pursue what they desire. A pursuit that is constrained in only minimal ways (protecting others, making sure that contracts are honored etc.). The idea is that a happy society is one in which we have the ability, hypothetically at least, to gain the fame, money, relationship, creative venture, lover etc. that we seek. If these dreams are not even unlikely but practically impossible to achieve then, whether we realize it or not, we effectively live in a type of oppressive, totalitarian society that will lead to nothing but a discontented, depressed and angry population.

So, considering how Rollins likes to rip things inside out--turning traitors into heroes, making defiance and disobedience the marks of true love for God, and the hope for Heaven into a selfish desire--we can imagine where he's going with this.

What we see here is the way that the freedom to pursue our highest ambitions is not experienced as a freedom from some oppressive system but is itself often felt to be deeply oppressive. This is something that Mother Teresa noted when she visited the US. During her time she noted a poverty and oppression that hid in the material wealth and political freedom enjoyed here. For such political freedom often leads to a society with greater material wealth and better opportunities for the population. Things that are to be valued highly. However unless we also have the freedom from the pursuit of our highest ambition this political freedom, far from offering us an escape from oppression, can be experienced as one of the most psychologically powerful forms of oppression.

Oh, so, the right to pursue happiness is actually a type of oppression and totalitarianism. Gotcha.

Coming up, how the right to life actually makes death a good thing, and the right liberty is actually slavery. How freedom of speech actually curtails speech, how the freedom to assemble peaceably actually means we can't assemble at all, and how the right to bear arms means we are all defenseless.

Hey, it's Peter Rollins' world, you're just not ripped open enough.

What if we had sites in our life where we could be free from the pursuit of our highest ambition?

This is amazing illogic because, quite simply, he just mangles the whole concept of the right to pursue happiness. He bring down to such things as money and fame, and that's about it. But the right to pursue happiness is not a guarantee one will find happiness, or for that matter that one will get money or become famoues or achieve the things one wants, and it certainly doesn't mean one will find happiness in money or fame or goals.

And the right to pursue happiness also means that one does not have to pursue money or fame or achievement.

That is the freedom Rollins already has--he doesn't have to pursue riches, fame, achievement, if he darned well doesn't want to. He's the one who's been putting himself forwards, speaking before groups, writing books, and basically trying to make a name for himself and get his ideas out there.

If Peter Rollins wants to stop pursuing these "highest ambitions", I'm all for him doing that. He can not write any more books, he can not go on any more speaking tours, he can not preach any more sermons in churches or bars where he spreads his unbiblical teachings, and I'd be pleased as can be if he were to do so.

So, Mr. Rollins, quit whining, and if you're not going to repent of thinking you're smarter than God, than at least fade away. We'll all be happier if you did so.

One more thing.

This is one of my visions for the reconfigured church – a community that is not a place where we go to pursue some highest pleasure (heaven, ecstatic experience, an escape from our everyday life) but rather the place where we lay all that down and learn how to smile deeply about the here and now.

What an absolute waste of church service that would be. Church is not about us, Mr. Rollins, and it's not about living in the here and now. It's about God. It's about Christ, who died as a sacrifice for our sins, even yours Mr. Rollins, even mine, so that through repentence and faith in Him we can have forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Church isn't about the here and now, except insofar as "today is the day of salvation, now is the accepted time".

find the heroes

So, over a Emergent Village, a person has posted a particularly whiny blog entry.

An early post I wrote raised concerns. I provocatively titled it: My Evolution Towards Theistic Evolution.* When a couple friends read this, I was accused of being an atheist. Someone then forwarded that article to my senior pastor at the time, attempting to get me fired from my youth pastor position. Luckily, my leader had an open mind on this particular issue. Yet, this incident drove me into theological hiding, with a determination to prevent this from happening again.

So, here we have the tone of the entry--this person has beliefs that are contrary to the church or churches he is working for, working for even as a youth pastor, and fear that discovery of his real beliefs will result in his losing his job. Would I be wrong in think that, in his role as youth pastor, he may have been trying to get those youths to share his beliefs? Were the people of the church not right to be concerned about what this person as youth pastor was teaching their kids?

Eventually, he leaves that church and goes somewhere else, still trying to keep his blog and online activities separate from his ministry, to a degree.

Then, it happened. I received the following comment on the Groans From Within contact page:

Wow, you actually believe this stuff? Well, it [the blog] is titled correctly, however, you might consider this groan to be the gas pains from deep within your own bowels. I hope the church isn’t paying for your time to produce such…wow.

After checking the name, email, and IP address, I knew exactly who left the comment. The following week, this person sent a five-page email to the pastoral staff and church board about why his family was no longer attending the church. And guess what, half-a-page was devoted to my “liberal” blog with the final sentence quoting a passage about false teachers being in danger of destruction. My guess is that they found my site through a Google search, in hopes to find dirt on leaders in the church. That week, I made the painful decision to set the blog to private and announced that I would be fasting from blogging indefinitely. This was a spiritually rewarding time, but in all honesty, the blog shutdown was mostly driven by an impulse to hide

But this doesn't end his 'trials and tribblations'.

After a few months of fasting, I reinvented my site and moved to a new domain. This time I determined to keep church and social media separate. Google search engines couldn’t find my new site, The Pangea Blog, and I chose to only use my first name. These steps certainly would hide my identity enough so that I wouldn’t get outed. But no such luck. Someone on my email update list was a spy and sent word to all the people who were angry at the church I worked at. Tensions rose among the more conservative crowd, but luckily at the close of the fiscal year, my “church planter residency” came to an end. The timing of this prevented greater dissension in the church. My attempts to hide didn’t work. Instead, hiding held back a part of who God designed me to be.

So, this guy, a covert emergent, is working in churches, pretending to be one thing while being something else, and when he's outed, he blames those who found out about him and his real beliefs, and who contact the churches he works for and takes money from to minister for them.

Read the entire post. This whiny emergent wants to paint himself as a hero and martyr, and be praised for being so brave about coming out of his theological closet. But this man is no hero.

On one level, the heroes of this story are the people who found out about him, and notified the churches he worked for on his double life. They are the people whom this whiny emergent blames for his hard times, calling them "spies" and attributing to them what he considers bad motives. I am grateful for people who still try to keep the wolves from entering, especially under the guise of 'youth pastors'. These emergents always seem to try to target the young, the ignorant, the unlearned, the vulnerable.

On another level, the hero of this story is Christ, the Good Shepherd still protecting His sheep. I'm glad this emergent charlatan is out of his theological closet, so that any church worth its salt will know to avoid him.