Chapter Three proved a less irritating read. There are fewer dismissive comments although they are not altogether absent ("Healthy religion knows that there are many essential things you can only know by a different path than cerebral knowing. Atheists do not know that."). The importance of personal relationships, and especially a personal relationship with God, over against abstractions is developed with reference to a number of lovely Bible verses and to one of my favourite novels - C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces.
Maybe the chapter "people who have faces" is best encapsulated in this excerpt:
I served as a jail chaplain near my home in Albuquerque for fourteen years. One Christmas Day I was talking to an old Hispanic man in his cell. I said to him, "Well, it must be pretty lonely today on Christmas Day to be here." He said something that astounded me. He said, "Father, if you agree to be with him, he always agrees to be with you." Now there's a man who learned everything I'm talking about with all my sophisticated theology."Sophisticated" in this context presumably means that Rohr is using big words like individuation and non-dual consciousness. It does not mean that he now welcomes intellectual rigour, careful analysis, logical coherence or any such matters which, I suppose, easily go with wanting to be in control.
Rohr says he sees the pattern of moving from tribal thinking via individuation to unitive consciousness in the Bible but he makes little attempt to explain how this emerges from the Scriptures rather than being a case of seeing what he wants to see.
Rohr claims that "the biblical tradition, and Jesus in particular, both praise faith even more than love." He may be right but he offers no evidence and I suspect this is just based on his intuition or impression. A quick count in a red letter KJV (done electronically) shows that Jesus refers to "faith" twenty-eight times in the synoptic Gospels but never in John's gospel; he refers to "love" twenty-six times in the synoptic Gospels and twenty-two times in John's gospel. Passages such as Matthew 6:5 and 23:6 need to be deducted from the count for "love" and one would need to analyse the passages more carefully to discern in which faith or love are commended (and maybe without the word being used). I have not done this but I strongly suspect neither has Rohr.
This is not to say that I don't like what Rohr wants to communicate here. "Love is the true goal, but faith is the process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to live without resolution or closure" is a nice way of putting it, maybe except for substituting something more static for the biblical concept of hope as waiting which is a willingness to live without resolution or closure in the firm and certain hope that God - and he alone - will bring closure and resolution.
Experientially I agree with Rohr that "at the beginning, mature adult relationship with God is not yet possible" but his reference to "by the end of the Bible" is vague and unclear, given that he identified Moses as one of those who had a breakthrough to unitive consciousness and Jesus famously invited his disciples to become like little children. For better or worse, it is arguably a feature of growing up for many that their identity is no longer founded on one significant other (parent, lover), even if it is true (as I think it is) that "if a person has a constantly changing reference point, you've got a very insecure person."
I am not convinced that refection on the psychological problems arising from our obsession with celebrities or from "internalization of negative values" are best helped by claiming that this is what the biblical tradition means with the language of "having a demon". (Apparently, the man who named his "unclean spirit" [Mark 5:2] "legion" [Mark 5:9] "for we are many" carried the negative projection of the military in himself - I find it hard to keep a straight face.)
Rohr is right to stress the importance of "encounter, relationship and presence to the face of others" over against "arguments over ideas and concepts" although he comes close to suggesting that the former excludes the latter. He does of course engage in the latter, albeit by way of assertion more than actual argument, when he points out that "Biblical rightness is primarily right relationship!"*
Ironically, to my mind Rohr de-personalises the famous statement by Jesus, "I am the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6 - the second half is, unsurprisingly, not cited) by claiming that this is all about "the sharing of our person instead of any fighting over ideas." On the previous page he tells us that Mother Teresa is said to have encouraged her sisters "not to talk about Jesus, as much as trying to be Jesus!" Now, there is a sense and context in which this is right but I cannot help thinking that the actual person, Jesus, has vanished behind the concept of being present to the other.
*Rohr claims: "Biblical knowing is more akin to face-to-face presence. It is a full-body knowing, a cellular knowing, and thus the word often used for "knowing" is key biblical texts is actually the word for "carnal knowledge" or sexual intimacy." This is of course nonsense. It is the other way round: the usual word for "knowing" is also used occasionally for sexual intimacy. Maybe little harm is done by this howler except that it serves as a reminder that Rohr's assertions are not based on sound biblical scholarship. But it also raises the question what Rohr actually means by "full-body knowing" (and "cellular knowing"), presumably not that we can only truly know those with whom we are sexually intimate. True knowledge is arguably less about physical nudity than the nakedness of one self before another.
