What Is Deconstruction?
It's not uncommon to have questions about your faith. The Bible can be a radical book for first-time readers. But a growing movement is developing in our churches and even in the mainstream, called deconstruction. What is it, and can it be done healthily?
What is deconstruction?
On a base level, the idea of deconstruction is when we root down into revisiting long-held beliefs and rethinking them. It is also asking the question: What do I believe?
Whether you grew up in the church or found faith later, this process can be a wider part of our restoration. The goal of tearing our preconceived beliefs down is so that they can be built back up better.
American priest Richard Rohr breaks down deconstruction into three different stages: construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. If we assume construction is our coming to faith and reconstruction establishes our faith, where does deconstruction fit in? The end goal should always be to have a more holistic understanding of our beliefs to reconstruct around.
Why is Deconstruction Gaining Momentum?
This idea of deconstruction is taking off in churches and even gaining momentum in the mainstream. So why is it gaining so much traction? Part of it has to do with people looking at the (global) Church and thinking they don't believe what it says anymore. For many, they have seen Christians fail to live as they believe for too long.
However, I believe the primary reason is that the Church has wavered in its commitments to being the body of Christ. People are looking for a genuine God-ordained community of faith. They no longer want to participate in socialized, cultural Christianity. There's an entire generation saying that's not going to work anymore. These people are pushing the Church to return to the roots of what Scripture calls it to be.
Another takeaway from the deconstruction movement is the argument of: Do you believe what Jesus said? My guess is this has to do with our more expansive cultural moment of an inherited distrust of all institutions and traditions. It's not necessarily that the church is doing anything wrong, but the current cultural moment says there's widespread suspicion of all forms of power and authority.
“Every generation loses the Gospel, and every generation is charged with its recovery.”
What this tells us though, is that people are looking for the Gospel. They are looking for good news and something to answer the brokenness of the world. This is an incredible opportunity for young Christians to have revival and discover God’s Word. It's an opportunity to begin doing church again through faith and discipleship in Jesus. That's an exciting thing.
Before we break down how we should deconstruct our faith, I'm going to change some verbiage. I'm not fond of the word deconstruction. Names and words matter; Deconstruction implies neglect and deterioration. If this is part of a broader reconstruction process where we dig into a better understanding and answering of our questions and faith, then what we're doing is excavating. This process goes down through the dirt and the mire to find something authentic, pure, ancient, and noble.
What Does Healthy Excavation Look Like?
If you've reached a point in your faith where you've begun to experience doubt and are unsure if you believe what you've perhaps grown up believing, how do you revisit your beliefs? There are right ways and wrong ways to do this.
The wrong way is to leave all spiritual connections. This can include:
Disengage from worship
Leave Christian community
Abandon Christian brotherhood
Disregard preaching and teaching
Refusal to take sacraments, or other things God has given as a means of grace
If you're trying to wrestle with what's true, put yourself in places where God's grace manifests. We have to be careful to sift through our motivations and guard our hearts in this process. This can't be a Trojan Horse for us to backslide from disciplines of faith to do what we want.
If you look at Scripture, it gives us some great models of both good and bad excavation.
An Example of Bad Excavation:
If we look at the Fall of Man, God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, or they will certainly die. In Genesis 3, the serpent comes along and says, "Did God really say you can't eat from that tree?" The serpent is beginning that process of deconstruction. He's calling into question what God has proclaimed.
This is how Eve responds, "We may eat from the trees in the garden. But God did say you must not eat from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die." She's already mincing God's words.
The serpent, which both represents Satan and the pagan wisdom of the time, latches on to this misremembering of God's Word. The serpent says, "You will certainly not die, for God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
This deconstruction of what God said becomes an inroad to pride in doing what one wants. This desire to eat without restriction represents the wrong way to do excavation.
An Example of Good Excavation
During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeatedly says, "You have heard that it was said long ago...” His first reference is, “You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment."
What He's saying is these are traditions referenced in Scripture. However, man has taken them to a whole new level. What Jesus came to do was to show us the Spirit of the Law. "But I tell you that anyone angry with a brother or a sister will be subject to judgment."
Jesus is cutting through the people's traditions and showing them again what God's original intent was. "You have heard it said, 'You shall not commit adultery…'" He's excavating through these topics and revealing the truth. "'…But I tell you, that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.'"
Jesus is calling us back to a better understanding of God's word's original spirit and intent. This is a healthy excavation of our beliefs and understanding of Scripture.
How do we excavate?
1. Accept That You Won't Understand Everything
We have to address on the front end that not everything in our faith will be fully worked out and understood this side of man. Nevertheless, the mystery of faith is real. So, yes, part of our excavation lays the foundation of who you are and what you believe, but it also goes back to understanding what God originally called and commissioned the Church to be.
2. Use Caution in the Voices You Accept
In this process of excavation, be careful of the voices that you are listening to. Are you narrowly focused on who you're gaining understanding from? Are you only hearing from modern theologians, or are you looking backward at the excellent authors and speakers from centuries ago? If you're staying in one realm, that's only one sliver of the broader Communion of Saints that God has poured into over time.
“Whenever I read one new book, I tried to read three old books.”
Lewis' ratio was 3:1 because, in those older books, he could see glimpses of the truth that we in our modern age cannot see. We tend to live in chronological snobbery, that just because we are 21st century, postmodern, enlightened Christians, everyone who came before us was wrong.
The excavation process requires a lot of humility and being open to listening to voices that are diverse in culture, race, and ideology, but also, in time.
3. Find Someone Who Speaks Honestly
It feels good when people tell us what we want to hear, but we need confidants who are willing to have tough conversations. Some people may be walking through this process because the church has hurt them. That's an unfortunate reality because the Church is full of broken people. If that's you, I encourage you to sort through that emotion and find someone with a strong faith to begin having these conversations. Don't let this person be someone you solely trust, but let it be someone mature in their faith. Find someone who loves you and will meet you where you are. There is no room for judgment for asking these questions.
4. Remember Christ's Love For You
“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6-8)
God proves His love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. It's not a question, nor a condition; It's what happened.
Christ did not die so you would be a part of one church that you've been a part of your whole life, in that town that you grew up in; that's not His angle. His angle is that you're a part of the Big C Church that was defined and ordained by Him through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Taking a step back doesn't mean you ultimately have to leave that church. Maybe it means you need to ask questions in your own heart of what you believe in first. Is Jesus real to you? Just because it is real to someone else doesn't mean it's real to you. It must be real to you.
5. Don't Lose Hope
If you've been digging and are fed up with church, the hypocrites, and have been burned, don't give up.
Repeatedly in the New Testament, we see people coming to Jesus to ask that He would heal their unbelief. We have to remember that the little c church, the establishment of the church, is filled with broken people who do things that are not good. These people are acting out of brokenness, not a representation of Christ. We have to be people that seek to say, "What does it mean not to be a follower of Jesus? What does it look like to bring our realness and our wrongness to Jesus?"
When we ask questions, we have to be the pupil to realize that the source of all of it needs to be seeking and finding the truth. So we want to be people and seekers of truth.
6. Invite Christ into the Process
Decide at the outset of your excavation that you're going to be a follower of Christ, even if you don't think there is Christ at times. Then, pray that God will help you with your unbelief, and He will because Jesus was the hero who did that for us.
If you've been told, "you just don't have enough faith," when you ask these questions, bring them to Jesus. Bring your uncertainty, concerns, fears, and anger to Jesus first, then seek out another counselor for your excavation. Ultimately, He is our Father, and He loves us. Therefore, it is well within His power to deal with any question that we have.
If a question you may be wrestling with is bothering you and stirring in you deep enough to be concerned by it, then it's real enough to be heard by God. So don't be embarrassed for bringing questions to God. He wants to hear them, because He Loves you and wants to see you fully through reconstruction.
TL;DR
Deconstruction is the idea of revisiting long-held beliefs and rethinking them. It is also asking the question: What do I believe?
There are wrong approaches to deconstruction: Disengage from worship, leave Christian community, disregard preaching and refusal to partake in sacraments.
During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls us back to a better understanding of God’s original spirit and intent.
How can we deconstruct our faith?
Accept that you won’t understand everything.
Use caution in the voices you accept.
Find someone who speaks honestly.
Remember Christ’s love for you.
Don’t lose hope.
Invite Jesus into the process.
Related Articles
How to Understand the Old Testament by Grant Caldwell
How to Read Difficult Scripture by Brad Bogue
The Problem of Evil by William Merriman
About Christ Church Memphis
Christ Church Memphis is church in East Memphis, Tennessee. For more than 65 years, Christ Church has served the Memphis community. Every weekend, there are multiple worship opportunities including traditional, contemporary and blended services.
