In a new book, The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith (Howard, Jan.), Peter Rollins (The Idolatry of God), Northern Irish philosopher and proponent of Radical Theology, asks a simple but surprising question: What if one of the best ways of understanding the resurrection of Jesus—the central event of Christianity—is by looking at it as a magician's vanishing act?
In a vanishing act, Rollins says, a magician takes an audience through three stages--the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. In the “pledge,” the audience sees an object presented by the magician; in Christianity, Jesus is presented as the divine object. In the “turn,” the object vanishes; Jesus’ body disappears from the tomb. In the “prestige,” the object reappears. It is not the same object, but another that looks the same. In the same way, Rollins says, in the resurrection story, Jesus reappears in a new form, teaching a new way—that believers are to live out their faith in the material world, rather than looking beyond it to a sacred realm.
Many Christians will find any association of the resurrection story with magic—often equated with the occult—or characterization of Jesus as a magician to be anathema. But Rollins’s inspiration for the vanishing act metaphor came from his study of the 17th-century Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson. “I noticed the connection between magic and the Christian world in [his] writings. He pointed out that when early magicians uttered the incantation ‘hocus-pocus’ as part of the patter of their acts they were parodying the priests who uttered the phrase hoc est corpus ('this is my body') during communion, magically turning bread and wine into the body and blood of the resurrected Christ.”
While traditional Christian churches teach that pain, suffering, and doubt can be avoided by clinging to stories of faith in a sovereign, all-good God, and to the moral and spiritual teachings of the church, Rollins points out in the book that there are no easy answers to the problem of pain, and our days are filled with doubt and uncertainty.
Drawing on philosophers from Nietzsche to Jacques Lacan, he advocates for what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “religionless Christianity.” Says Rollins, "My own project is not to look at Christianity as a set of beliefs, but to look at the type of life that Christianity invites us into." Faith becomes "our loving embrace of the world, and not simply assent to a something 'up there' in a heaven we will one day reach."
Building on that theology, Rollins helped found Ikon, a growing faith group with locations in Belfast and New York City. He says those communities intend to create a space where people can confront their suffering and doubts and learn to live with them. There are two options when faced with pain, one simplistic and one more complex: "We can try to run, which is very often what traditional Christianity has taught, or we can face our own suffering—much like Jesus did—and encourage people to take the idea of a suffering God as an invitation to [experience] life in all its complexity."
