Peter Rollins: Nothing Remains the Same

When Jesus spoke of being “born again” he was not referring to some proposition that could be considered through logic, religious sermons, Bible reading, or through some kind of reflection on religious experience; rather he was speaking of an event that opens up a whole new world of experience. Religious experience, in its fundamental form, is not then an experience at all but rather a counter-experience, one that transforms our mode of being in the world rather than being reduced to some strange feeling. With the incoming of this truth nothing necessarily changes in the physical world, no new object enters our horizon. But in its aftermath the person is never the same again, for everything has changed. This luminous life can never be captured, contained, or pulled apart; it is lived. This event in which nothing changes is an event so radical that nothing remains the same.

~ Peter Rollins, in The Fidelity of Betrayal