Peter Rollins Quotes

#1. Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.

Peter Rollins

#2. The excessive pleasure we imagine receiving from what we want most of all is fleeting at best.

Peter Rollins

#3. Truly embracing the fragility and tensions of life ... brings with it the possibility of true joy.

Peter Rollins

#4. The point then is to help break the false distinction between the idea that there are those who are whole and those who have a lack. For the true distinction is between those who hide their lack under the fiction of wholeness and those who are able to embrace it.

Peter Rollins

#5. The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.

Peter Rollins

#6. This book is about a salvation that takes place within our unknowing and dissatisfaction,

Peter Rollins

#7. Our real beliefs are generally not to be found at the level of ego.

Peter Rollins

#8. A true Christian militant attacks systems of oppression and fights for a better world even though that new world might negatively affect their own position of power.

Peter Rollins

#9. If you cannot speak your brokenness, your brokenness will speak for you.

Peter Rollins

#10. Your job is to take notes, my job is to make that impossible.

Peter Rollins

#11. To believe is human to doubt is divine.

Peter Rollins

#12. I deny the resurrection every time I turn my back on the poor or become a cog in a system of injustice

Peter Rollins

#13. The problem with so much religious communication is that it aims at changing our minds. The result is that we can hear the message of the preacher without necessarily heeding the message; we can listen to the "truth" and agree with it, yet not change in response to it.

Peter Rollins

#14. Our religious beliefs have not provided us what they seemed to promise.

Peter Rollins

#15. The evidence of "forgiveness of sin" is not found in a profession of belief, but in a life freed from self-destructive pursuits, scapegoating, and violence.

Peter Rollins

#16. What if the church should be less concerned with creating saints than creating a world where we do not need saints? A world where people like Mother Teresa and MLK would have nothing to do.

Peter Rollins

#17. What we see taking place in the church today is the reduction of God to an idol.

Peter Rollins

#18. That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.

Peter Rollins

#19. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain).

Peter Rollins

#20. This is not about the mere extension of life along a horizontal plane, but about the deepening of life along a vertical plane. Mere longevity cannot render life meaningful any more than brevity has the power to make it meaningless.

Peter Rollins

#21. Whatever you believe, be open to being wrong

Peter Rollins

#22. The church is a place where we make our prejudice sacred.

Peter Rollins

#23. In other words, the claim I believe in God is nothing but a lie if it is not manifest in our lives, because one only believes in God insofar as one loves.

Peter Rollins

#24. Love is the crazy, mad, and perhaps ridiculous gesture of saying yes to life, of seeing it as worthy of our embrace and even worthy of our total sacrifice.

Peter Rollins