“Because I’m held together with duct tape” is not the correct answer.
If you are not familiar with the term, deconstruction refers to the process of dismantling or analyzing something–originally a written text–to discover its meaning. More recently, it has come to mean the process of analyzing one’s belief systems. It is quite popular in some of the more “progressive” evangelical circles as those running from a more structured evangelicalism attempt to dismantle their beliefs to find something meaningful. I’m sure some people will take issue with my definition, and that’s to be expected, as the term has seemed to take on a life of its own.
As with so many things, many mainstream evangelicals find deconstruction a frightening concept, as they see it as threatening to the foundation of people’s faith. And, I think there is some validity to this concern, even though I am not an evangelical and have no attachment to many of the structures (boxes) that are being challenged.
Throwing the baby…
One of the possible outcomes of deconstructing one’s faith is that as belief systems are dismantled and discarded, things that were once objects of faith disappear, and the Christian faith itself disappears. Even pastors have walked away from the faith. As the saying goes, the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. While there may be other factors involved, I do think that a reckless job of deconstruction can be a dangerous thing.
One of my problems with deconstruction is the word itself: it seems to be a waste of a prefix. If you want the opposite of “construction,” there already is a word for that–destruction. It’s more to the point, and it reveals the inherent dangers. There’s a process in forensic science called “destructive testing” where something is taken apart in order to see what caused it to fail. This is the process many refer to as deconstruction. Again, I don’t like the term and don’t use it so not to be confused with some of the more extreme practitioners.
I Don’t Deconstruct
There are some who would say that what I’ve done in my own life, as evidenced in my book Unboxing God–An Unevangelical Guide to Christianity, is a form of deconstruction. Whatever. However, I didn’t start by tearing down the structures to find out what was left.
First, I had recognized that the foundation of my faith was not in systems and structures and doctrines, but in the person of Jesus as testified to in the Bible. Note that I didn’t say that my faith was in the Bible itself, but in the person of Jesus. That’s an important point. Remember, Jesus chastised some Jewish scholars for putting faith in the Scriptures, when the Scriptures were pointing to Jesus (John 5:39). Those who are conditioned to view the Bible as inerrant can have a very hard time some of the realities of Biblical scholarship; to them the Bible has become somewhat of an object of worship. Any of these boxes, as I call them, can become objects of worship and hindrances to real faith.
From that starting point of Jesus, I could look at historically how both Jews and the early Christians viewed the Scriptures, and what they thought about a number of things. Already suspecting there were issues with much of Augustine’s theology and subsequent western thinking, I was able to look at these issues more objectively from a position of faith. This became a strengthening, faith-building exercise rather than the other way around.
Unboxing and Reorienting
I had the advantage of not having been raised in an evangelical setting. Although I lived in that world for many years, it never really took, and I remain unevangelical. For those steeped in evangelicalism, there will likely be some additional hurdles that I didn’t have to face. I hope that the concept of unboxing will be helpful in that regard, as it’s not necessarily destructive. You’re just opening the evangelical box up and seeing the God that’s inside. What you do with the box after that is up to you.
A lot of evangelicalism puts an emphasis on having faith in evangelicalism itself, especially doctrines like infallibility of scripture and taking the Bible literally. There are other issues, but I won’t belabor the point. Attacking one or more of these issues can cause a major faith crisis, because often folks have a hard time telling the baby from the bath water.
I think it’s important, rather than simply deconstructing your faith, to first reorient your faith where it always should have been. Once that is firmly in place, the other issues become less important and should you decide to amend or discard a doctrine or two, it won’t be quite as catastrophic, and may in fact be faith building.
