4 The Triggers of Deconstruction
Deconstruction in a traditional church can be the moral thing to do. If a refusal to examine the church’s teaching in light of Scripture is frowned upon, and if there is pressure to just conform and fit in, then we are not building the Church of Christ.
And when it comes to deconstructing Christian faith, everybody must examine themselves to determine whether they love God with all their heart and mind, energy, time, and money or whether they really want to live for other things (read: idols), like family, happiness, wealth, business, career, or status. If they find being-a-Christian oppressive or burdensome, they should earnestly seek to know who God really is or confess their unbelief and break with the church. God hates a church filled with hypocrites; it is a dishonor for His Name and over time such a church will collapse and self-destruct.
Be intellectually and morally honest! I prefer to have friends, who are pantheist or atheist, and who are honest about their convictions than those, who insist they are Christians of the progressive type. But, if you still have honest, real questions, pray to God for a serious Christian who can coach or mentor you during this time so that when you make a final decision, it will be a well-informed one.
Listening to various people online, who talk about (their) reasons to break with the Christian faith, it seems that there are a few basic patterns. Trevin Wax discerns two categories of doubts and struggles.
The first relates to the truth claims, which includes doubts about God’s creation, Jesus’ miracles, and his death and resurrection. Related to that can be doubts about the reliability of the Bible as God’s Word. The emphasis here lies on intellectual obstacles. Indeed, many consider Christian teaching as irrational and absurd.
The second focuses on the goodness or fairness of biblical teaching. Especially, in light of critical theories, Christian teaching is commonly viewed as a major obstacle to social progress and human flourishing.
Often, it has been said that pride (in various forms) is the greatest obstacle to revival. Ecclesiastical pride stands in the way of church revival and personal pride stands in the way of sanctification or transformation by God’s Spirit.
• Often, deconstruction involves a personal frustration of being controlled by their church community. In traditional cultures, there may be little room for personal opinion, expression, and lifestyle. The only way to be accepted, and especially to be respected, is to toe the line of expected behavior. If these restrictions are too fierce and control is too strict, it will be tempting to rebel for many, who insist on personal processing and evaluation of doctrine and life.
On the one hand, this can be an insistence of total personal freedom that then becomes incompatible with the sacrificial love, required for community living. On the other hand, for the church to flourish, it must encourage personal struggles in order to facilitate strong, personally appropriated faith. It also prevents traditionalism, where leaders and parents can no longer adequately explain or defend the rationale for their rules for doctrine and life.
• Others deconstruct on the basis of personal experiences or feelings. In a proseperity-gospel-church, people can finally come to feel utterly disappointed through dashed hopes: if strong faith must result in material blessings, and this does not happen, there must come a time that people just give up. Similarly, if faith is especially linked with feelings, and one comes to the valley of the shadow of death, the lost joy can easily make people lose ‘their faith’.
In this context, we should consider Jesus’ parable of the sower and the soils.1 Although we are called to spread the good seed everywhere, we are warned that many places will never bear fruit. In the case of our examples, however, we also must recognize that churches with poor preaching must share the blame for raising false hopes and missing the purpose of the Christian life.
• For those who wrestle with ‘truth claims’, they often have adopted a ‘scientific mindset’ that presumes there is no God who created and controls the laws of nature and that the only way to acquire knowledge comes through scientific inquiry and not through ‘listening’ to God’s revelation. This mindset cannot accept the existence of miracles that seem to go against or beyond the observed laws of nature. Yet, although the resurrection of Christ is rejected as impossible, the evolution of life from non-life, moral-rational humans from animals, and living cells from a primordial soup are considered plausible, even though they are just as impossible in view of the observed laws of nature.
While they take for granted the incredibly minute likelihood that complex life could form on earth, they like to stress the apparent inconsistencies or paradoxes in the Bible. Consider the biblical teachings that God is absolutely in control and free and that human beings have the freedom and responsibility in moral choices, they may conclude that the two are mutually exclusive and therefore false. Yet, in their pride they insist that God must be so small and simple that our minds can comprehend the fulness of his glory.
• In the current situation in the west, the greatest obstacle to the Christian faith may no longer be intellectual problems but moral concerns. Old Testament stoning, slavery and genocide, Jesus’ teachings about judgment and hell, and at the end an apocalyptic barrage of terrible judgments all look quite primitive to the postmodern, ethnocentric mind. A dear Chinese friend, who always seemed open to the Gospel, over the years deconstructed to a form of western Buddhism. If the God of the Bible condemns people to hell, and Chinese parents may have ended up there, she could not believe in such a god. Since there is no absolute truth and truth is constructed by every beholder, why not construct or follow a religion that claims there is no hell or punishment for evil. Ironically, New Age and Hinduism teach that departed souls, in realizing their evil lives, desire to be reincarnated as seriously handicapped people to get a better chance to pay off for earlier ‘sins’.2 This sounds like a different, yet very real, concept of ‘hell’, not at the end of this life, but when the soul is forced to start over and try again, in more miserable circumstances than before.
At the root of it all, most people reject their Father-God, who created them in His image. And then, not unlike the ancient Greeks, they create their own gods, in their own image. And as they do so, in their audacity, they think they are actually more righteous, merciful, and loving than their Heavenly Father, whom they have refused to seek. Study the Old Testament prophets with an open mind, and imagine Yahweh’s reply to such an attitude!
Sean McDowell, during an interview with Alisa Childers,3 shares how at one time he had a fairly long chat with a small group of Christian teens. They all seemed positive, Christian young people, and then Sean asked them, “Why are you a Christian?” The answers he got ranged from ‘I feel at home among Christians’, ‘My parents raised me Christian’, ‘My friends are Christian’, and ‘It makes me feel good.’ Sean felt strongly that teenagers with such rationale might easily turn to deconstruction, when they would end up in a different peer-group or cultural community. If they wanted to feel good and ‘at home’ in their new environment, they would have to. During the interview, it was concluded that strong or mature Christians must have come to a strong, personal conviction of their sinfulness and need for a Savior, and must have wrestled with competing truth claims that led them to the conclusion that the Bible is reliable, that the Gospel is indeed the truth.
1. Matthew 13.
2. Ruth Montgomery: Herald of the New Age. 1986. p. 156.
Also, Ravi Zacharias: Jesus among other gods. 2000. p.83.
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