Reading Richard Rohr 6

Reading Richard Rohr’s Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (London: SPCK, 2016; originally published in 2008, based talks given in 1998) and reviewing my response. (Preface, Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three).

Chapter Four, "the boxing ring", again pits law and grace against each other. Rohr stresses that it is necessary to have the match and that it is crucial that grace wins - as it does. The challenge is big because morality is "a common counterfeit for religion" and "the idolatry of law" seems an ever present temptation.

Rohr expresses amazement about how "the three classic divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures (Law, Prophets, Wisdom) also parallel the normal development of spiritual consciousness and even human growth" as follows:

Law	Prophets	Wisdom
order	criticism	integration
thesis	antithesis	synthesis

"Now if you think that is rebellious talk, it probably means you have not studied much of the second section of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Prophets or the birth of criticism."

Now, I don't think it "rebellious talk" - I think it is ridiculous. It is no surprise that Walter Brueggemann whose Theology of the Old Testament worked with the categories of testimony and counter-testimony would be sympathetic to the picture of development of spiritual consciousness presented in this book but I still find it odd that he would endorse Things Hidden (even if his endorsement makes no reference to Rohr's credibility as a reader of Scripture): "Things Hidden is an invitation of gospel proportion to move on into the life God intends, a life of joy and obedience." Maybe it is but this chapter is driving me to the edge of what I can bear as a biblical scholar.

Where do biblical prophets challenge "the idolatry of law" or an over-emphasis on morality? Where do we get a picture of the people of God being caught up or stuck in the "container" (Law/Torah)? It is noteworthy that Rohr does not discuss a single passage. It is also noteworthy that Rohr's list of wisdom books fails to mention Proverbs which for many might be the first book that comes to mind. Presumably it does not fit easily into the category of "non-dualistic thinking."

What about the New Testament? If you were looking for a snappy summary of Paul's letters to the Romans and the Galatians, Rohr offers this line from the Dalai Lama: "You must learn the meaning of the law very well, so you will know how to disobey it properly." I am not convinced this sits easily with, say, Rom 2:17-27 where Paul elaborates on the problem with relying on the law.

Rohr is on more secure grounds when he says that Paul teaches us that "laws can only give us information, and even helpful information, but they cannot gives us transformation." Maybe it is because I grew up in a Lutheran church but this comes across to me as a common place rather than as the much neglected insight Rohr claims it to be. Rohr's Paul is very Lutheran: "Give them the law until it frustrates them to hell!"

Rohr's experience is that "instead of tackling that frustration and moving people toward union with God, what we have by and large done is trivialize the law into small issues that we could obey by willpower, determination and a certain kind of reasonableness, still trying to find salvation through the law." I can detect a faint echo of this in my context but most ideas of "being good" which I come across seem to have only the most tenuous relationship to biblical law or church teaching. 

I am left wondering whether it is worth persisting with the book. Rohr offer kernels of theological as well as psychological truths, e.g. in the observation that "our unconverted and natural egocentricity ("sin") uses religion for the purposes of gaining self-respect." But none of these are new to me and when it comes to the Bible he is untrustworthy, a charlatan who pretends to insight which he does not have and, whether deliberately or not, seems to shield himself against criticism by casting aspersions on anyone who might ask for hard facts, proper analysis or logical coherence as if scholarly exegesis is "law" to the "grace" of eisegesis flowing from "inner experience".

Reading Richard Rohr 5

Reading Richard Rohr’s Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (London: SPCK, 2016; originally published in 2008, based talks given in 1998) and reviewing my response. (Preface, Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two).

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.

Reading Richard Rohr 4

Reading Richard Rohr’s Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (London: SPCK, 2016; originally published in 2008, based talks given in 1998) and reviewing my response. (Preface, Introduction, Chapter One).

Chapter two is about “getting the ‘who’ right” which is to appreciate that we are created in the image of God. Rohr interprets this as “humanity’s objective unity with God” which he contrasts with a view of humanity as totally depraved. Rohr seems to be saying that, in a sense, we are already in union with God; many just lack the inner experience of this and therefore, in another sense, are disconnected.

On the one hand, Rohr claims that “the great illusion that we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness.” On the other hand, he writes of “disconnected people” and “the state of believed or chosen autonomy” and sin as “a state of living outside of union.”

I think I know what he is trying to say (God’s arms are wide open; it’s our resistance to receiving the gift that is the problem) but I do not find his way of putting things attractive.

I remember distinctly one occasion when I heard someone use the language of “total depravity” in a way which made me recoil but nevertheless I do not warm to Rohr’s opposition to such language. I think I know why theologians have coined it and what they meant by it. I doubt that Rohr does, or that he can imagine any sense in which this phrase may be considered truthful. Am I a theological snob who does not want to be associated even in his own mind with theological illiteracy? I don’t think so and yet I feel embarrassed at what seem to me cheap shots here and elsewhere.

Rohr claims that “most people have never noticed that on the first and second days it does not say that it was good!” He’s probably right. With his usual self-confidence he asserts: “The Bible does not say that [the separation of darkness from light and the separation of the heavens above from the earth below] is good–because it isn’t.” As seems typical for Rohr’s writings, there is no need to explore options or weigh up arguments. Rohr presumably now apprehends the truth intuitively as anything that aligns with his vision. A moment’s thought could have shown that there may be a problem with the view that “separation” (interpreted as dualism) is not said to be good because it is not good – see the separation of land and sea which appears to be good in Genesis 1:10 and the summary statement in Genesis 1:31 which surely looks back to all six days. Rohr probably did not bother to look at a Genesis commentary but if he happened to chance upon one that does not (at least implicitly) explain why “good” does not feature at the end of the first two days, he should get a different one.

I am afraid, to me this failure to engage with other voices just looks like arrogance, given the importance of the claim. “The rest of the work of the Bible will be about putting those seeming opposites of darkness and light, heavens and earth, flesh and spirit back together in one place. They have really never been separate, but remember, ‘sin’ thinks so.”

In the same vein, Rohr believes that “the ark is an image of the People of God on the waves of times, carrying the contradictions, the opposites, the tensions and the paradoxes of humanity.”

In line with this Rohr then defines forgiveness as “mutual deference” in which one accepts reality by forgiving “reality for being what it is.” Thus you experience “God’s unmerited goodness, the deeper goodness of the one you have forgiven and...your own gratuitous goodness too.”

The section on “the garden of knowledge” is revealing. Rohr reckons that the major heresy of the Western church is “demanding to know and insisting that I do know!” While I can vaguely see what he means, Rohr’s penchant for exaggeration and blanket condemnation rather puts me off exploring this further.

A sentence at the bottom of page 38 reinforces a suspicion that grew in me as I read the first chapter, namely that most of Rohr’s judgemental statements are directed (also, primarily?) against his own (former) self: “I came out of the seminary in 1970 thinking that my job was to have an answer for every question.”

By contrast, I think it is possible to be both analytical and humble (Thomas Aquinas?), to seek answers without believing that we can ever have all the answers (let alone believe that God won’t love us until we do – see previous chapter), to appreciate the gift of positive knowledge as well as to value the gift of unknowing (Hildegard of Bingen?).

As three “bookmarks” for union Rohr introduces “water, the first invitation to an inner life of union...blood, which symbolizes the difficult price of union...bread, the ongoing feeding of that union.” It is probably difficult to get the symbolism of bread wrong. Blood is more complex (see my entry in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, 2000); Rohr seems to think nearly exclusively of sacrifice. Water is ambivalent, flood and river being two very different motifs; Rohr seems unaware of this. Maybe I can receive some valuable un-knowing from reading subsequent chapters, maybe not.

Again, the final pages offer material that I can affirm (nearly) without irritation. The one thing we most need to know in relation to who we are is that we are “in Christ” -- although I suspect that Rohr believes that every human being is in Christ which would then be equivalent to being made in the image of God. I think it is possible to speak of an objective change from not being in Christ to being in Christ without (a) claiming a change from God hating to God loving us, or (b) reducing the change to an inner experience. 

Reading Richard Rohr 3

Reading Richard Rohr’s Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (London: SPCK, 2016; originally published in 2008, based talks given in 1998) and reviewing my response. (Preface, Introduction)

Chapter 1 makes the point that “information is not necessarily transformation” and contrasts ready-made answers with the exciting process of “participatory knowing” that connects the dots.

On one side is “the overwhelmingly shame-and guilt-based church and culture we have today in the West” with churchgoers that are “overwhelmingly passive or even passive-aggressive” and religion that is “merely ritualistic, moralistic, doctrinaire and largely unhappy.”

On the other side are those who have “inner experience of how God works in [their lives]” and who will “substitute the text” in places where it goes backward (in the direction of vengeance, divine pettiness, law over grace, form over substance) “for the real inner spirit” evident in places where the text moves forward (towards mercy, forgiveness, inclusion, nonviolence and trust).

I bristle at the same things that rubbed me up the wrong way in Rohr’s Falling Upward. It is not that there is no truth to the statements he makes about the vast majority of people who are a foil to the spiritually enlightened. But by and large it is a caricature that I do not recognise. There are “religious” who feel the need to impress God and to win his love by their good works or faithful exercise of religious duties, but I do not find this a plausible characterisation of the majority of people inside the church, let alone outside.

Rohr believes that to begin with almost everybody assumes “that if you get the right answers, God will like you.” Is this true? I am not conscious of ever having been even so much as tempted by that idea.  

Do “religious” people prefer abstractions over the actual, as Rohr suggests? Are they disappointed that so much of the Bible is about ordinary folk rather than pious saints? Even if this might be true in some contexts, I do not believe it to be universally so.

For all his urging against dualistic thinking in favour of ambiguity and mystery, Rohr comes across to me as rather black and white. Even if there is a journey we all have to make (from building containers in the first half of life to letting go of them in the second, if I remember Falling Upwards correctly), I do not find Rohr’s sweeping generalisations helpful. They do not sufficiently ring true to me and thus many of his swipes at “religious” people simply baffle me. 

I also wonder whether Rohr is going to offer an integrative vision or another variety of dualism, pitting vengeance and law over against grace and love.

In addition, the motif of the journey seems to operate at the level of human history as well. With his comment on guilt- and shame-based culture being “at the heart of most of the European Reformations–on both sides,” Rohr does seem to suggest not only that he has a deeper experience of God’s love than the majority of religious people today but also a better grasp of grace than Martin Luther, John Calvin or Francis de Sales. I would not be surprised to discover in subsequent chapters that Rohr believes with Trevor Dennis that we can know the gospel better than the apostles and the Gospel writers in a way that allows us to correct them.

I conclude this post with a positive responses to two statements:

“Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as ‘whenever you are not in control.’”

The definition of suffering in the second sentence strikes me as worth pondering and I appreciate the use of the first person plural in the first sentence which guards against the “them” and “us” so frequent elsewhere in the chapter.

“All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”

The statement in italics voices a common place but it is nonetheless worth saying and underlining. The statements about “all healthy religion” and “great religion” confirm that, having beaten the drum for the scandal of particularity, Rohr is not averse to generalisation. I wonder how much mileage there is in those statements. Can these categories be sensibly defined? Was Stoicism a religion? Was medieval Catholicism a “healthy religion”? Is Buddhism a “great religion” or far too diverse a phenomenon for the question even to make sense?

Reading Richard Rohr 2

Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (London: SPCK, 2016; originally published in 2008 by St Anthony Messenger Press, Cincinnati, Ohio) is based on a set of talks given in 1998 on “The Great Themes of Scripture”.

The title (“things hidden”) is from Psalm 78:2, quoted in Matthew 13:35. The subtitle seems to relate to the other verse (partially) used to preface the book, 1 John 2:21.

“It is not because you do not know the truth that I write to you, but rather because you know it already.”

The introduction (“connecting the dots”) speaks of “thin-slicing” the (biblical) texts which refers to sifting, throwing off all that is irrelevant, focusing on “what really matters”. Once these prime ideas of Scripture are uncovered, others might re-cognise them as truth that had lodged in their own hearts but not yet risen to consciousness.

“My assumption throughout this book is that the biblical text also mirrors the nature of human consciousness itself. It includes within itself passages that develop the prime ideas and passages that fight and resist those very advances. You might even call it faith and unfaith ­– both are locked into the text.”

Faith is associated with “the Unfamiliar” – breakthroughs we may call “revelations” within the Bible, to be sifted from the familiar (small mind) terrain of unfaith.

“It might first feel scary, new or even exciting, but if you stay with the unfolding texts, you will have the courage to know them also as your own deepest hopes or intuitions. Such is the dance between outer authority and inner authority, the Great Tradition and inner experience.”

Rohr stresses the need for both, the external contribution of Sacred Scripture (“It takes all of the Bible to get beyond the punitiveness and pettiness that we project onto God and that we harbour within ourselves.”) and inner awareness (“We have far too long insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey and maturing consciousness.”)

My initial response: I sympathise with the observation that we have paid too little attention to “prayer, inner journey and maturing consciousness” and that this harms our reading of Scripture and ourselves. The idea of “sifting” between the wheat and chaff of Scripture, however, sounds very much like old-fashioned liberal Protestantism. I find the Christian tradition which hoped and even expected to glean goodies from every little crook and nanny of Sacred Scripture far more exciting.

Reading Richard Rohr 1

Ian Paul comments that Richard Rohr is “something of a ‘Marmite’ theologian—people either adore or loathe him” and cites Edward Dowler’s Church Times review of Richard Rohr’s Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe (London: SPCK, 2019):

“Many will warm to him who think that theological language and concepts grown stale and fusty will benefit from being thrown up in the air so that we can be excited by seeing where they land. And they often do land in interesting places, thus yielding a wealth of striking aphorisms and insights.

Others, however, who value plodding virtues such as accuracy and attention to what the scriptures and teachers of the tradition have actually said, will find difficulty with the sweeping generalisations, questionable assertions, and Aunt Sallys that Rohr frequently sets up, so as then to be able, triumphantly, to knock them down.”

In a review of the same book George Sumner, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, claims that  “to say that Rohr is outside the bounds of the mainstream Christian theological tradition is not a harsh attack on him. Rather it is to simply take him seriously.”

I have friends who like Rohr’s writings and commended them to me. I read much of Falling Upward: A Spirituality For The Two Halves Of Life (London: SPCK, 2012) but I did not get on with the implied author who came across to me as pompous and patronising. All this makes me hesitant to spend time with another Richard Rohr book. But for various reasons I think it might be useful for me tor reflect on my response to Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (London: SPCK, 2016).

Not interested in writing a critical, detached review, I want to explore possibilities for learning (recognition, retrieval) as well as note where and maybe why Rohr rubs me up the wrong way.