Pyrotheology, Post-Evangelicalism and the Logic of the ‘One’

Abstract

This article highlights a particular thread in Peter Rollins’s work that affirms a different quality of life is possible, shows how it constructively connects to the Evangelical/Post-Evangelical communities represented by the Emerging Church, and raises a feminist challenge to it, arguing that a more explicit critique of the aspects of ‘religion’ that create and preserve rigid and stifling forms of church is needed. Rollins centres the enactment of what he calls the magic trick (the transition from ‘religion’ to ‘faith’) around a singular subversive leader, even while calling for his or her disappearance. A postcolonial feminist perspective would charge that it is, rather, in the process of collectively navigating the radical participation of all within the body, when the habit of elevating a particular individual’s role or participation above all others is eliminated, that the magic trick is actually enacted, religion’s patriarchal logic undone, and true faith discovered.