the REAL christians

Peter Rollins, in his continual quest to view the world as if in a photo negative, has told us some things in a recent post at his blog.

First, he thinks that God suffers from a crisis of self-confidence.

However, in the talk I was arguing that a properly understood Christology draws us into a third position in which doubt, suffering and the sense of divine abandonment are not something that we experience as part of our relation to God but rather are things that God experiences. The moment of existential atheism is not one in which we are broken free of Christ, nor is it a moment in which we fall short of Christ, rather it is the moment when we partake in the very identity of Christ on the cross. All religions have a place where we can doubt God. In Christianity God doubts God (this brings us into what we can call, after Bonhoeffer, ‘religionless Christianity).

And what does that mean? Why, it means this...

Hence we can begin to approach Bloch’s claim that only an atheist can be a good Christian

Yep, you who believe, you who have faith, who have put your faith in Christ, who have come to know God and love Him, you take a back seat to those who are actively against Him.

When I talk of the ‘atheist God’ I do not mean the weak, anemic atheism of philosophy but the existential atheism of people like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. For these people the loss of God was felt, it was something that made its mark in their existence, it was a defining experience. It was, I argue, a singularly Christian, or Christ, experience.

So, instead of embracing Christ, embrace the superman. Instead of living in hope, live in existential angst and hopelessness, wallowing in self-pity and meaninglessness. Heck, if you write some bad poetry or make some cheap art that means nothing, you may become one of Rollin's Christians.