“A gold medal is a wonderful thing,” the coach says. “But if you’re not enough without one, you’ll never be enough with one.”

In church, lessons like these are often taught about all sorts of worldly accomplishments: the dream job, the big raise, the right friends. This week at 91����Ƶ, an influential theological writer in the emergent church movement, Peter Rollins, delivered a similar message about God, who, Rollins argued, is too often (and falsely) imagined as an idol capable of providing true wholeness and fulfillment.

Sin – from denying pain of life?

Rollins, originally from Northern Ireland and now living in New York, argued that sin is the result of everyone’s relentless drive to escape the pain of being alive, regardless of whether relief is sought in drink, in friends or in the church. Salvation, then, doesn’t come from attaining closeness to God and relief from pain, but rather by embracing that pain of being alive and letting go of our drive to heal it.

“Religion helps us avoid facing up to our brokenness and troubles … [and] that is devastating,” said Rollins, during his chapel presentation. “We need to have spaces where we can be open about the places where we’re suffering.”

Rollins, whose most recent book is titled The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction, also hosted a “talk back” at the , spoke at the year’s first University Colloquium, visited classes and led an evening conversation hosted by 91����Ƶ’s Freethought Coalition.

At the colloquium, Rollins criticized contemporary religion’s tendency to place itself right beside competing products in a “vending machine” that purports to offer people various paths to fulfill our primal desire for wholeness. What the church should be doing, he said, is taking a sledgehammer to that vending machine and disabusing us of the idea that we’ll ever be whole. (During chapel, Rollins criticized the church for getting people “drunk on sermons” and on God to distract them from the reality that everyone “will die and never be again” and everyone we love “will die a cold death.”)

Community based on love

During his coffeehouse talk, Rollins said he finds hope in building a community in the present – not in some next world or afterlife – where love exists among people who embrace their collective and individual hurts.

Rollins’ ideas have become influential in the emergent church movement, which offers critiques of religious institutions and traditions that cut across denominational and ideological lines. This criticism can be as applicable to seemingly counter-cultural religious institutions like 91����Ƶ as they are to mainstream Christianity.

, professor of , noted that Rollins’ “version of being counter-cultural would be different from the ones we are most used to hearing.”

While Anabaptist traditions may emphasize alternative ways of living and thinking about God, they often still reinforce the notion of longing for wholeness.

“Rollins argues that you instead learn to live with being human, being broken, being, in a sense, unfulfilled. And in the shared humanity of that, you find true fulfillment,” said Early. “The move that needs to happen is not that you abandon being a Mennonite or being an Anabaptist, but that you hold it differently…. It’s something that’s really important for us to wrestle with.”

The value of the “light of inquiry”

Thomas Millary, a junior and co-president of the Freethought Coalition, said he admires Rollins’ call to embrace, rather than trying to escape, the brokenness that everyone experiences in life, and hopes Rollins’ visit will spark wider conversation on campus about finding joy and community in the midst of pain.

“This campus could really benefit from dialogue about faith and [Christianity] from a perspective like Peter’s,” said Millary, who founded the Freethought Coalition to provide a space for honest exploration and discussion of difficult or controversial topics.

When introducing Rollins at the University Colloquium, said that inviting Rollins to present his provocative ideas at 91����Ƶ offered the university the opportunity for self-reflection.

“It’s important that our basic assumptions are not just taken for granted, but that they are held up to the light of inquiry, that they are examined,” Kniss said.

The titles of Peter Rollins’ books offer clues to his stream of thought:

• The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction (2013)

• Insurrection: To Believe is Human; to Doubt, Divine (2011)

• The Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales (2009)

• How (Not) to Speak of God (2006)

• The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief (2008)

In his , Rollins is characterized as “a provocative writer, lecturer, storyteller and public speaker who has gained an international reputation for overturning traditional notions of religion and forming ‘churches’ that preach the Good News that we can’t be satisfied, that life is difficult, and that we don’t know the secret.”

In an interview posted at last April, Peter Rollins said: “Some of my critics say I’m telling them to doubt, but that’s not it. I’m saying you’re already full of doubts. It acts the same way as alcohol abuse – the alcohol makes you feel better about yourself, but then you have this hangover where you realize you’re just covering over some sort of brokenness.

“I’m saying when you’re in church around people who believe the same thing and you’re reading all those books, it feels great, but then, at night over a drink with a friend in a bar, you feel like that there must be a better way. It [i.e., the usual form of church attendance] prevents us from encountering our own brokenness and working through it.”

This interview sparked 50 online comments, with the readers strongly debating each other.

Rollins will be the chapel speaker at 10 a.m. in Lehman Auditorium, followed by a “talk back” at 10:45 a.m. in the student-run coffee house, in University Commons. At 4 p.m. Rollins is speaking at the on “the idolatry of God.” He wraps up the day with a 7:30 p.m. conversation with members of 91����Ƶ’s Free-Thought Coalition in Strite Conference room of the Campus Center. All of these events are free and open to the public.

In his religiondispatches.org interview, Rollins called for people to “create a place where there is no Jew or Gentile, no male or female, atheists or theists, gay or straight.”

He added: “That’s the good news of Christianity for me. It’s not that you can be happy and whole, but rather that life is crap and you don’t know the answers. It’s good news to be freed from the oppression that there’s something that’s going to make it all better. When you’re free from that and begin to work through your brokenness and suffering with a set of rituals, practices and sacraments that help us encounter our humanity, I think we become more loving, more beautiful, more grace-filled people.”

Educated at Queens University in Belfast, Rollins holds degrees in scholastic philosophy (BA Hons), political theory (MA) and post-structural thought (PhD). His 91����Ƶ visit is sponsored by the .