In the conservative evangelical Christian world, there is a mistrust of “deconstructionism.” There is a fear that we might totally dismantle the Christian faith and end up as atheists. Or, if we remove the curtain, we might discover the all powerful Oz is just a little man pushing buttons and pulling levers. I get it. Their fear is real and somewhat justified. Maybe that’s a strange thing for an evangelically-minded progressive Christian to say? But we have to remember that the modern scientific method that so many of my siblings in Christ like to tear down was born out of religious curiosity. The further people of faith stepped into the world of scientific discovery, it seems they moved further into explaining away the possibility of God’s existence. But that seems to be changing recently.
Over the past 20 or 30 years we have begun to see a shift in the scientific field. Where once “religion” was publicly touted in the scientific community as mere superstition—and theology and science were viewed as polar opposites or even in competition with one another—more theologians and scientists are coming together to see the two as valid explorations but responding to different questions. Many are even seeing opportunities for the two fields to speak to one another and even enrich one another’s inquiries.
Theologically and scientifically speaking, “deconstruction” is not about “destruction,” though that is a part of the process. Rather, it’s about carefully pulling back the layers to more deeply understand, in hopes of reconstructing something more faithful and honest. Consider the world of buildings or electronics. Yes, in the process of deconstructing, some technology will be declared obsolete and tossed in favor of more efficient and more stable technology. Diodes or vacuum tubes are now things for collectors of old technology. Today is all about circuits and memory chips. How can more information be stored in increasingly smaller technology? When we apply this to theology, sometimes our deconstruction can result in the throwing away of some bits that are no longer helpful or valid because we understand the universe differently (and hopefully better) than when those theologies were developed.
The Protestant Reformation did away with much of the tyrannical power that was concentrated into a single pope. Further, the movement re-affirmed the long forgotten gift of reason given to each individual who ultimately has to decide for themself. It also reminded the church of God’s free and abundant grace in the face of temptations and sin. The invention of the printing press in many ways made the Protestant Reformation subsequently important Roman Catholic Church’s Counter Reformation happen, by giving people the information they needed to make their own decisions, to “freely” love God, not because someone told them to “or else.” And, we are better for it on both sides of that aisle.
Faith deconstruction has been part of the long Judeo-Christian heritage going back thousands of years before Jesus. The Jewish faith was formed, shaped, and reshaped over and over again. Each generation altered, trashed, or reconstructed different parts of the previous generations’ understandings of God and themselves to fit an ever renewing reality. And with each theological or scientific innovation, another layer was added to the multi-layered complexity of our faith. That’s not a good or bad thing! It’s just a thing to be recognized.
However, all this multi-layered complexity means that we need to be able to cut into that complexity and try to understand each layer like a geologist cuts into the earth and studies the layers of sediment to form a story of what happened in that place over time. Christianity was not born ex-nihilo. In fact, it started being shaped well before Jesus. Understanding that evolution, especially within the first two centuries of the Common Era in the context of the centuries prior, can go a long way toward helping us mature in our faith beyond our fifth grade Sunday School class.
I think my sabbatical time was one of those seasons when I was given the space to process how I’ve grown in the decades since my fifth grade Sunday School class. Each season—from elementary school into junior high, from junior high into the young adulthood of high school and college, from there into my twenties, getting married, having kids, through seminary grad school, serving the church for nearly three decades, then my doctoral work—has shaped me, stretched and challenged me, and made me into something different on the other side.
Through all those seasons, one idea that has been creeping around in the back of mind, but which I have had difficulty articulating, is that Christian faith is not monolithic, even within the same tradition. We (the Church in the west) have done a really poor job educating our communities on the complexities, intricacies, and nuances of what is very much a polylithic (meaning many theologies, not many gods which would be “polytheistic”) faith that has been adapted to thousands of different contexts and cultures. We might see a lot of similarities between Martin Luther’s theology and John Calvin’s, but they were worlds apart in both their cultural and geographical contexts, which resulted in being world’s apart in their experience and understanding of the Divine Presence. Then, John Knox, a student of Calvin’s, took all that and shaped it into something yet different again in his reformation of the Church of Scotland, which resulted in what we know today as Presbyterianism.
Just as language is always changing (just ask the people who are still working on the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language nearly 150 years after it was started), so is our understanding of our world, of the universe, and of God. And that will never change (I hope). Further, as we increasingly come into contact with other non-Christian religions (that’s a very Christo-centric way of saying that), or even other flavors of Christian expression (Lutheran, Pentecostal, Charismatic, Mormon, or something else entirely), we might actually begin to see strong similarities in how we approach our faith and understanding of the one we call “God.” So much so, that our differences start to become something to celebrate rather than fear.
I did a vlog a couple of years ago about the supposed “War on Christmas.” It’s kind of a funny look at how that all got started. But the purpose of it is to remind us that the Christmas we know today is not the Christmas of the first century because Christmas did not even exist for a couple of hundred years after Jesus. I find comfort in the fact that there really is no “one way is the right way” when seeking to follow in the Way of Jesus.
This is what I love about the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Reformed Tradition. We are never “settled” or satisfied with what is. “Reformed and always being reformed according to the Word/Will of God,” as the saying goes. And that is what I carried with me into that sabbatical, along with the names of all the leaders of my congregation, along with a directory of my church family, and my camera (of course). Thanks be to God for diversity and newness and ever-changingness.
very good Eric