Richard Rohr has a large following, if the trends of my clergy friends' reading diets have anything to say about the matter. I've lost count how often I see folks sharing his books and ideas on Facebook. So it really shouldn't come as a surprise that I finally take him up and try to read him on his own terms, without the glosses that I find in those Facebook posts.
Rohr, based on my reading, isn't anything if not transparent. In his new book The Universal Christ, Rohr states rather unambiguously that to say Christ is to say everything. He extols what he calls "perennial tradition" and elsewhere "perennial philosophy". The Christian faith is a gloss, in other words, on a historically esoteric philosophy in all of its various forms. He reads the creation story in Genesis 1 against its grain as an understanding of God as continuous with his creation, and likewise reads John 1 as denying exactly what it says, namely that the universal Logos, from before time, became flesh precisely in Jesus, in whose very person God was made known. He caricatures the creedal tradition as fundamentalist, tightly rationalist, or intent on exclusion.
Which is probably why I see so many clergy my age quoting Rohr favorably in sermons and sharing his books with parishioners.
But let be clear here: Rohr is so far outside the bounds of traditional Christian theology that none of that is too harsh a criticism of him. Rather, it simply takes him seriously. In my less charitable moments reading Rohr's books, I come away thinking he's the newest form of some old heresies -- Arianism, Nestorianism, Gnosticism, Joachism, or religious pluralism -- but those things don't really do justice to what Rohr has written.
Rohr stands in the long-winding theological streams named by "Enlightenment" in modern Europe ("rational religion") and Romanticism in America (his pointing to holism and emotions). Rohr is pretty clear that he stands in the modernism camp of contemporary theology.
So it's really not hard to guess the reason for his appeal. It's light on the doctrines of the faith that aren't easy to believe. It's strong on blessing things from the start, and leaves us free to adopt and adapt whatever religious practices we find personally "meaningful".
Rohr reminds me a lot of the Roman Stoics, with their pantheon of potential gods and moral exhortation without all the pessimism. In other words, Rohr is as positive as positive psychology will let him be, which is something we Americans adore, mixed with some religious mysticism unfettered by any particular tradition.
Now, I'm sure some some trained theologian types will push back a little at this point. Didn't one of his recent books talk about the trinity a lot? And it is the same loving trinitarian God who made the world, sent his Son, and will in the end be "all in all"?
Sure. But I would then assume that there would be more talk about the particular identity of Jesus Christ. After all, you can't have trinitarian theology without christology. The reality of Jesus' life, death and resurrection validates that faith in a loving trinitarian God. And that's where Rohr gets tripped up. He wants to remove the major premise of the faith -- "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again" -- and still have a good dose of Christian "divinity".
That's just it: It doesn't work that way. This is the very thing that makes Rohr so unremarkable.
That's not to say we shouldn't read him. Not for what he says, but for the remarkable way he has drawn such a following in the mainline Church. He's a kind of mirror held up to our communities that helps us to see exactly what we're becoming and what we're losing.
This is what I call modern theology's "Tillich problem". Paul Tillich transposed the Christian theology of God into modernist philosophical terms with his "ground of being". And thus subverted classical Christianity by giving modern people less and less in which to believe. In that way, he simply correlated Christian faith with modern culture. But to students of his own day (the late 50s and into the 60s), Tillich represented something fresh: The chance to breathe new life into old terms. Earlier generations saw Tillich to be a little too lite on Christian faith and a lot less serious theologically. Tillich was a conjurer, and what he conjured was a way of being Christian that took modern worldviews seriously.
But here's the thing: Rohr is no Tillich. Rohr denies classical divinity outright, and in so doing embraces culture in a way that Tillich didn't.
So why his popularity? I suspect those folks fall into several different camps. Some are wounded by the Church and are therefore fairly content to deny anything they've associated with it. Others are simply uncatechized, and don't recognize its undoing because they've never been instructed to recognize it. Many clergy have imbibed -- to the dregs -- the contemporary updates of 19th-century liberal theology during seminary. Many lay readers are serious Christians, but are more the children of modernism than they suppose, as a result of which they do not readily assume a guy like Rohr to be making claims about truth. As a result they read it instead for how it makes them feel or what it impels them to do. Finally, some Church leaders are pragmatic and will accept anything vaguely reminiscent of creedal faith if it holds out some hope of leading to growth, so dire does the Church's position seem, and so out of favor institutions in general. Less could be more, they hope, if offered in passionately mystical tone, especially if it entails no hard doctrinal claims and offers a blanket affirmation of "the All", within which we can accessorize our spiritual approach.
For me, I never really get that much out of Rohr precisely because I was traditioned and trained to get more out of traditional faith. I still have a fairly traditional bent -- no matter what liberals and conservatives want to think about me -- that keeps me flexible enough to embrace all the streams of Christian mysticism, without throwing Jesus out with the dirty baptismal water. I'm positive that Rohr and his kind with retort that my claims of traditional faith are narrow and exclusive than his. And these folks are probably right. I get that Rohr offers something more substantial than the gruel often served up on a Sunday morning at most mainline services.
But I'm not sure a diet that lives on guys like Rohr can survive for long, much less thrive. Christian faith in our world is going to require a lot more of us, not less.
This week, I have been thinking quite a bit about sin. Particularly my own sin. I've been brought back again and again to some words by Bonhoeffer in his little book, Life Together:
Rohr, based on my reading, isn't anything if not transparent. In his new book The Universal Christ, Rohr states rather unambiguously that to say Christ is to say everything. He extols what he calls "perennial tradition" and elsewhere "perennial philosophy". The Christian faith is a gloss, in other words, on a historically esoteric philosophy in all of its various forms. He reads the creation story in Genesis 1 against its grain as an understanding of God as continuous with his creation, and likewise reads John 1 as denying exactly what it says, namely that the universal Logos, from before time, became flesh precisely in Jesus, in whose very person God was made known. He caricatures the creedal tradition as fundamentalist, tightly rationalist, or intent on exclusion.
Which is probably why I see so many clergy my age quoting Rohr favorably in sermons and sharing his books with parishioners.
But let be clear here: Rohr is so far outside the bounds of traditional Christian theology that none of that is too harsh a criticism of him. Rather, it simply takes him seriously. In my less charitable moments reading Rohr's books, I come away thinking he's the newest form of some old heresies -- Arianism, Nestorianism, Gnosticism, Joachism, or religious pluralism -- but those things don't really do justice to what Rohr has written.
Rohr stands in the long-winding theological streams named by "Enlightenment" in modern Europe ("rational religion") and Romanticism in America (his pointing to holism and emotions). Rohr is pretty clear that he stands in the modernism camp of contemporary theology.
So it's really not hard to guess the reason for his appeal. It's light on the doctrines of the faith that aren't easy to believe. It's strong on blessing things from the start, and leaves us free to adopt and adapt whatever religious practices we find personally "meaningful".
Rohr reminds me a lot of the Roman Stoics, with their pantheon of potential gods and moral exhortation without all the pessimism. In other words, Rohr is as positive as positive psychology will let him be, which is something we Americans adore, mixed with some religious mysticism unfettered by any particular tradition.
Now, I'm sure some some trained theologian types will push back a little at this point. Didn't one of his recent books talk about the trinity a lot? And it is the same loving trinitarian God who made the world, sent his Son, and will in the end be "all in all"?
Sure. But I would then assume that there would be more talk about the particular identity of Jesus Christ. After all, you can't have trinitarian theology without christology. The reality of Jesus' life, death and resurrection validates that faith in a loving trinitarian God. And that's where Rohr gets tripped up. He wants to remove the major premise of the faith -- "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again" -- and still have a good dose of Christian "divinity".
That's just it: It doesn't work that way. This is the very thing that makes Rohr so unremarkable.
That's not to say we shouldn't read him. Not for what he says, but for the remarkable way he has drawn such a following in the mainline Church. He's a kind of mirror held up to our communities that helps us to see exactly what we're becoming and what we're losing.
This is what I call modern theology's "Tillich problem". Paul Tillich transposed the Christian theology of God into modernist philosophical terms with his "ground of being". And thus subverted classical Christianity by giving modern people less and less in which to believe. In that way, he simply correlated Christian faith with modern culture. But to students of his own day (the late 50s and into the 60s), Tillich represented something fresh: The chance to breathe new life into old terms. Earlier generations saw Tillich to be a little too lite on Christian faith and a lot less serious theologically. Tillich was a conjurer, and what he conjured was a way of being Christian that took modern worldviews seriously.
But here's the thing: Rohr is no Tillich. Rohr denies classical divinity outright, and in so doing embraces culture in a way that Tillich didn't.
So why his popularity? I suspect those folks fall into several different camps. Some are wounded by the Church and are therefore fairly content to deny anything they've associated with it. Others are simply uncatechized, and don't recognize its undoing because they've never been instructed to recognize it. Many clergy have imbibed -- to the dregs -- the contemporary updates of 19th-century liberal theology during seminary. Many lay readers are serious Christians, but are more the children of modernism than they suppose, as a result of which they do not readily assume a guy like Rohr to be making claims about truth. As a result they read it instead for how it makes them feel or what it impels them to do. Finally, some Church leaders are pragmatic and will accept anything vaguely reminiscent of creedal faith if it holds out some hope of leading to growth, so dire does the Church's position seem, and so out of favor institutions in general. Less could be more, they hope, if offered in passionately mystical tone, especially if it entails no hard doctrinal claims and offers a blanket affirmation of "the All", within which we can accessorize our spiritual approach.
For me, I never really get that much out of Rohr precisely because I was traditioned and trained to get more out of traditional faith. I still have a fairly traditional bent -- no matter what liberals and conservatives want to think about me -- that keeps me flexible enough to embrace all the streams of Christian mysticism, without throwing Jesus out with the dirty baptismal water. I'm positive that Rohr and his kind with retort that my claims of traditional faith are narrow and exclusive than his. And these folks are probably right. I get that Rohr offers something more substantial than the gruel often served up on a Sunday morning at most mainline services.
But I'm not sure a diet that lives on guys like Rohr can survive for long, much less thrive. Christian faith in our world is going to require a lot more of us, not less.
This week, I have been thinking quite a bit about sin. Particularly my own sin. I've been brought back again and again to some words by Bonhoeffer in his little book, Life Together:
If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all. How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own?This is precisely the point at which guys like Rohr fail. Their attraction isn't to something more substantial. In jettisoning the Nicene faith, Rohr comes up short on any doctrine of sin that simply can't be plausible in our time and place. (Much less in my own life.) The pessimism of our time requires a felix culpa -- a happy fault! -- which Jesus has come to remove.