My deconstruction journey began in my freshman year of college. My zoology professor delivered a series of lectures on evolution. I was mesmerized. Maybe I was asleep when this was taught in high school. That’s possible. The earth was billions of years old. Seriously? Animals, including the human species, developed over a span of millions of years? What?
I stopped by my pastor’s study and asked him about it. His response: “You can’t trust science.”
Seminary was a process of daily deconstruction. My professors challenged everything I was sure of — from the Bible to women and Queers and on and on. My hometown Elders had warned me: “Don’t let them change you.” Well, they did.
Dr John Piet stood on a chair and held a Bible above his head and the lecture table. He then dropped it. The noise and the act itself startled me. Then he said: “Vis, is this how the Bible was given to us?”
I have been disordering/reordering, to use Richard Rohr’s language, ever since.
For me, deconstruction is like repentance. It’s not a one-time movement. Repentance is a lifestyle. We move through life realizing that we are going to bring hurt into the lives of others. And when we do, we recognize the offense, and we make things right. We do this throughout every single day of our lives. It’s a lifestyle.
Or we do something stupid, something destructive to ourselves and others, and so we stop, and we change our behavior. And this too is an ongoing aspect of living. We don’t stay stuck in our addictions, our dysfunction and our destructive ways. We change because we can. That’s the good news.
“Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand” (John and Jesus). Things don’t have to be the way they are. We can change. There is fluidity in a healthy life.
For me, deconstruction is exactly like that. It’s a lifestyle. Deconstruction is critical thinking. It’s a way to walk through life with curiosity, courage and trust that God is loving and gracious, and not thin-skinned and capricious.
I find that many church leaders want to define deconstruction in terms of doubt. “You doubt the truths we embrace,” is how I often hear it said. I don’t look at it that way. I simply don’t believe everything that others embrace as absolute truth. I may doubt what I believe, but as regards the absolutes, I simply don’t accept them all as true.
I don’t believe that God created the world in six 24-hour days and then rested on the seventh. The Noah and the ark narrative is a great story, but it’s just that, a story. God did not destroy all living things because he was displeased with what he had created. God is not a hothead lacking both restraint and creativity.
The Book of Joshua implies that God ordered a genocide. I don’t believe God ever sanctions a genocide. Not then, and not now either.
And David as “a man after God’s own heart?” I don’t think so.
I’m wrestling with what I believe about a virgin giving birth. I want to believe that, as I love Mary, and the story of Gabriel’s visit is gold! However, I believe that the narrative came late into the Jesus story and is more Greek than Hebrew.
I believe similarly about the cross of Jesus. I do not believe that God needed a human/blood sacrifice to be in relationship with us. That too is foreign to the Hebrew mind and to mine as well. All Hebrew writings denounce human sacrifice as an abomination, as the one action that separated them from the nations around them. What changed?
I believe that Jesus was a gift from God meant as a living word showing us the best way to live our lives. Humankind rejected the gift because it was too hard to unpackage, and asked too much of us. We killed the one who was sent. God raised him, gifted us with a second chance through the presence of the Holy Spirit. What will we do differently, knowing what we know about what others have done since? This is the one question that I wrestle with every day.
The people who scare me the most are those who are certain they know what is true and what is not. That’s not me. I’m constantly rethinking, recalibrating, and reconciling my beliefs with my experiences and learnings. It’s a lifestyle.
In her book Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions, Rachel Held Evans wrote:
It seems that a whole lot of people, both Christians and non-Christians, are under the impression that you can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat, you can’t be a Christian and believe in evolution, you can’t be a Christian and be gay, you can’t be a Christian and have questions about the Bible, you can’t be a Christian and be tolerant of other religions, you can’t be a Christian and be a feminist, you can’t be a Christian and drink or smoke, you can’t be a Christian and read the New York Times, you can’t be a Christian and support gay rights, you can’t be a Christian and get depressed, you can’t be a Christian and doubt. In fact, I am convinced that what drives most people away from Christianity is not the cost of discipleship but rather the cost of false fundamentals.
She goes on – “False fundamentals make it impossible for faith to adapt to change. The longer the list of requirements and contingencies and prerequisites, the more vulnerable faith becomes to shifting environments and the more likely it is to fade slowly into extinction.”
People like me, deconstructors, are pushing the edges of what exactly are the “false fundamentals.” More importantly, what are the “fundamentals” that are true? We’re never going to agree on those. Do we have to be 100% aligned to be in community?
If so, then people like me have no place to be, not authentically at least.
What is it I want? I can only speak for myself as a retired pastor. I’m not the enemy. I have no desire to “empty your pews,” as I’ve been accused of wanting. I want churches to thrive. And my hope is that people who are where I am can find a place to be in the church.
You can start to reach out to me by reaching out to me. Now I’m not talking personally here, but as one of millions. You want to know what people like me are thinking, why we are walking away from something that we have loved for our entire lives. Buy one of us a cup of coffee or a draft of beer and ask us. Don’t assume you know us!
And yes, we should do the same.
Here’s Rachel again:
Love. It’s that simple and that profound. It’s that easy and that hard. . .Taking the yoke of Jesus is not about signing a doctrinal statement or making an intellectual commitment to a set of propositions. It isn’t about being right or getting our facts straight. It is about loving God and loving other people. The yoke is hard because the teachings of Jesus are radical: enemy love, unconditional forgiveness, extreme generosity. The yoke is easy because it is accessible to all—the studied and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the religious and the nonreligious. Whether we like it or not, love is available to all people everywhere to be interpreted differently, applied differently, screwed up differently, and manifested differently. Love is bigger than faith, and it’s bigger than works, for it inhabits and transcends both…
26 Responses
Deconstruction is good and i portant, and yes, a kind of intellectual conversion and repentence, the dying away of the old knowledge and the coming to life of the new, if I may adjust Heidelberg 88. But what’s troubling is where does it stop? For example, virgin births actually do happen in nature, but resurrections don’t. So why not deconstruct the resurrection of Our Lord? Must everyone of us personally recapitulate the Enlightenment? For me the Apostles and Nicene Creeds, in the greater wisdom of the Church, offer firm ground to construct the house on.
But Daniel, what if “the greater wisdom of the Church” is still being revealed?
I think it is.
But the Creeds are important and essential precisely because they are not lists of ideas. The Apostles Creeds is a list of events, God’s doings, what happened, happens, will happen. Conceived, born, suffered, crucified, buried, descended, rose, ascended, sits, shall come. Even the last part is all actions of the Holy Spirit, who makes the church holy and catholic, who makes a communion of saints, who forgives sins, who resurrects bodies, who makes life eternal.
The Roman Catholic Church certainly has a doctrine of the greater wisdom of the Church still being revealed, and yet is steadfast anchored in the Creeds (plus other stuff we are not).
Thank you both for this point and counterpoint conversation. I think there are many ideas we have been taught that are like childhood Sunday School concepts but I am not ready to throw out the creeds. While it is good to look at and challenge those childish explanations of biblical history and the characters the Bible presents, I believe there are deeper theological positions that need to be held to firmly.
Daniel,
I think I need to remind myself that the creeds and the things you love (as I do) are part of the construction of our faith. Without it, we have no means to judge that which is essential/eternal and that which is for a time. To me, deconstruction is the act of walking with Christ until everything in my life and faith is refined, but not as an end in itself, for it is soul crushing if we do not take the next step of reconstruction. Some of the original foundation we were given by our church community is kept. I do not believe in a literal 6 day creation, nor that the Lord stopped the sun in the sky so that Joshua could defeat his enemies, but I do believe in a bodily resurrection. I cannot tell you how this makes logical sense, but it seems to me that the former has been shifted through the deconstruction process and set aside, while the latter remains as part of my reconstructed faith, but I must admit that I hold most of that reconstructed faith more loosely than I did before, not so much because I don’t hold to it, but because I feel like God holding me is more essential and eternal than me holding to the right things.
Alas, I can feel all the “issues” and “problems” with what I’m admitting to in this response, but I cling to grace and love some sort of hope born out of faith in the mess of it.
Thanks Daniel and Marlin
” … virgin births actually do happen in nature, but resurrections don’t.”
Actually Daniel, consider Nature’s ‘lowly’ Tardigrade (aka Water Bear) which can reproduce asexually (Virgin Birth?), survives the temperatures and vacuum of space, and can be re-animated years, even decades, after being in a state essentially indistinguishable from death (Tun state, Resurrection?). Taking our theological cues from Nature can be tricky.
First, asexual reproduction is not Virgin Birth. The Blessed Virgin Mary was female. The famous example of female-only reproduction is whip-tail lizards. Second, I’m sure them tardigrades are tough little buggers, and apparently it’s hard do know when they’re dead, from what you say, but I would bet that when you do kill one, so that it’s dead dead, you can’t bring it back to life. Resuscitation is not resurrection. And there is no record of bringing a dead mammal, or reptile, back to life.
“But what’s troubling is where does it [deconstruction] stop?”
Daniel, it doesn’t stop. That ship has sailed, at least in the Reformed Church in America.
When the people of our generation pass away (those in their 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s) who still remember and are influenced by catechism instruction and a Reformed Christian worldview, the younger folks will inevitably be exclusively committed to a progressive mindset. Creeds will contain too much “certainty” to be of any value for them. Also, I’ve noticed that Reformed progressives are much more focused on calling out Christian conservatives than they are calling out fellow progressives who go to far in their deconstruction.
Angela Bick (Editor, *Christian Courier*–Canadian publication) and Peter Schuurman (Executive Director, Global Scholars Canada) have recently published *Blessed Are the Undone,*–New Leaf–a witness to a selection of interviewees’ stories of deconstruction and where they are in the process of re-construction. One issue that many recognized that most of the earlier authorities and sources for rigid, literalist, doctrinaire faith were from the USA. Canada wouldn’t really fit well as an extra state, not just in historical cultural roots, but in expression of faith as well.
True
Thanks for this, Marlin. A conservative Pentecostal man in my Christian Feminism class wrote in his journal this semester that he wasn’t sure I was a Christian because I raised questions like these in class. Meanwhile, other students were grateful to hear a different perspective on Christianity that didn’t automatically support sexism and homophobia and a tyrant God.
I have been struggling again after hearing a guest pastor’s Mother’s Day sermon yesterday full of certainty, the need to hold to [an undefined] truth–to know it, practice it, and guard it. “If we don’t, the next generation will not be part of the faith at all,” he said.
And I thought “That rigid certainty is the very reason for the rampant deconstruction of faith–to the point of leaving the church.” I heard in that message no awareness of deconstruction already happening. I was sad–and then upset. I am still wrestling. I found comfort in your article. Thank you.
Appreciate this article! Curiosity and questioning are hallmarks of being human. It’s not sinful to wonder!! Deconstruction only makes sense if one sees faith and life as some kind of certain construct …. Easier just to hold faith and life with open hands and heart throughout life, preferably in an affirming community!
Last week I looked for Bible verses about building or not building the kingdom (in response to Daniel Meeter’s article). Today I looked for verses about deconstructing. Here are some that might apply. The Lord deconstructed Dagon by knocking his statue down into pieces (1 Samuel 5:2-5) There’s a general call to deconstruct the altars and idols of others (Exodus 34:13; Deuteronomy 12:3), but what about our own?. To the Edomites who wanted to rebuild their homeland, the Lord said, “They may build, but I will tear it down (Malachi 1:4), a kind of permanent deconstruction. The rich man foolishly said he would deconstruct his barns and build bigger ones (Luke 12:18). Under one way of interpreting his words, Jesus challenged the Pharisees to tear down the Temple and he would rebuild it in three days, but he was talking about his body (John 2:19). In 1 Corinthians 3:10-15, Paul says we are all building on the foundation of Christ, but on judgment day God will send a deconstructing fire to test the work of what was done. I see some value in deconstructing, but I find wisdom in a paraphrase of Psalm 127:1 — unless the Lord deconstructs the house, those who deconstruct it labor in vain.”
And I forgot one to write more that was one of the first ones that came to my mind: Jesus came to deconstruct the dividing wall of hostility between Jew and non-Jews so he could construct a new humanity (Ephesians 2:14-16).
Thanks, Marlin. I appreciate, AND NEED, this.
I appreciate this very much. I never have been one with the atonement theory. I have always believed God’s greatest sacrifice was taking on incarnate form so as to walk with us and teach us, bringing the Good News in person to us. Jesus knew as he fought against oppression and taught us how to live with him, as he would do, that this would not end well for him. Yet he persevered. The true one Model, in the Trinity, so that I can now live my life leaning into “What would Jesus do?”
My mom always said that we come through our childhood and young adulthood with a suitcase full of tenets, rules, doctrines, beliefs, etc., and that it’s our job to open the case and pick out the good, look it over, maybe fold it a bit different, and put it back into the suitcase. What was left needed to be dumped. When I asked her how we would know what’s good and bad, she said, “You will know by the fruit it bears.” I’ve kept this in mind all of my life.
I harbor many of the thoughts and beliefs you outline here. I no longer struggle with them or call them ‘doubts’. I believe in the Triune God and he / she is real in my life. I believe the Bible and Creation together show us God and God’s grace to us. A Keqush Rabbi friend of mine once explained that the Jewish religion is one of seeking and searching. He said he would know certainty when he went to meet his Lord. That man s how I now view religion. My diary is firm but my religion is constantly seeking God and God’s way for my life.
I enjoyed your article. I just had to get that out of the way because my main reason to respond to you is to ask you the question, Did you attend Northwestern College, Orange City, IA? It just so happens that I attended between 1965 and 1969. When I was a freshwoman, I had the Dutch name of Tuinstra but I got married to an Irishman before I graduated. I kept my last name even after I divorced him. I sure hope I will be able to vote! If there is a problem, you better believe I will fight it. Because I was intrigued by your name and your article, I did a small amount of research about you. I loved the little video I found of you in a hot tube saying “I am none.” Very interesting comment as well as setting. But I was so drawn to it because for years I have had the worst time calling myself a Christian giving what that term connotes in these times. I believe in Jesus and all that goes with that belief but I just cannot identify with so much of what Christian means in our time and culture.
Yes, I was at NWC this same years.
I am reminded of Gene and Finny in *A Separate Peace.” As the two are talking about belief and prayer, one of them resorts on Pascal’s Wager (sorry, can’t recall exactly): “I pray in case there’s a God after all.”
I join you and many others here acknowledging the need to question, learn, grow, and change as I follow Christ today. I will admit that I don’t fully understand the term, deconstruction, as it regards to my faith. I need to read Peter Schuurman and Amanda Bick’s book soon. But when I think of how God has led me in my faith journey, I give thanks for my reformed roots. I would like to think of it more like a plant than a pile of bricks. If my grandson builds a big tower out of blocks, he always gives it a good kick when he’s done and they go flying all over the room. That is not how I want to view my faith journey. But when I look at a rose bush, I see that the roots hold it firm and promise new life even when it gets pruned back. I like to think about my faith journey like that bush – I need plenty of pruning to stay healthy and allow for new growth and beauty. But I also rely on the roots to hold me fast and secure. If that’s deconstruction, I’m okay with it.
Marlin (Tony),
I began my deconstructing journey when I joined the United Methodist Church in 1975. At the First United Methodist in Ames,, Iowa for the past 20 years I have been leading a Sunday morning discussion group. We are known as the “Faith and Reason” people. Everything is open for discussion. A number of retired clergy have joined over those years. Christian Nationalism seems to a hot topic recently. Challenging times for sure. But keep coming back to the wisdom of that Jewish carpenter who was all about building relationships and advocating that “love” stuff.
Dale, my son Aaron is the pastor of ReNew Community in Ames, an RCA congregation. Deanna and I drive up from Grimes most every Sunday to worship with this great group of “faith and reason” folk. Perhaps we should touch base sometime.
Thank you, Marlin. This is a good word.