Deconstruction and Retention

Deconstruction is complicated because it is a transition from a comfortable acceptance of one way of seeing things to another. One knows not where the journey will take one, only that one must make the journey. Thus, some mourning is involved: we who deconstruct have lost something that was a huge part of our lives: often not merely a theology and a hermeneutic lens but also a community. In a sense, we lose our Bibles: we lose our ability to confidently interpret the Bible.

Reading deconstructively allows us to see some of how the faith cultures which raised us prepared us to deconstruct. This will look different for different people because some of us learned more or less and different things from those cultures. Some may have learned almost nothing good but "God is love," and even that may have been learned in a twisted fashion.

I learned several things from people I no longer trust. In fact, in many cases, I don't trust those people because of what I learned from them. For instance, "the indicatives precede the imperatives," which is a slogan which John Piper uses, is part of the logic undergirding my rejection of complementarian theology, which theology Piper accepts. It is also a point Tim Keller has made: that the law is promulgated after Salvation (from Egypt--but then also from sin).

Those who uphold bad theology yet still teach the Bible sow the seeds of our deconstruction. They have no standing to complain if they cannot (and often do not even try to) answer out logical objections.

This does not mean we should be especially charitable towards them. They still teach false theology--some worse than others--and so we should still be clear about where we disagree with their theologies and argue our cases. We can still drop their writings and their teaching products without needing a systematic argument about why we can ditch them. But it can be helpful for us to trace the truths we learned in the dark and how they brought us into the (or greater) light, just as Augustine documented his journey to Christianity through partial truths and tantalizing falsehoods.

If this is a significant element of deconstruction as practiced now, and not merely an element in how I have deconstructed, then all those objecting to deconstructing Christians as people who had a bad run-in with bad Christians are simply missing a massive part of the picture. If this is right, then there is an argument we are making which they are, apparently, happy to ignore. It is possible that the argument is not being made explicitly, and that might be an excuse for the objectors. Still, the objection stands: your theology is incoherent; your actual practice does not match what you claim is central in your theology, and often even your taught practice fails to fit neatly with what you claim is central to your theology.

Part of why it can be hard to leave these communities is that we find it hard to understand why they won't follow the line of thought we have run into and found so compelling. We see them claiming that the Gospel is good news and should motivate our actions, that Scripture is God's inerrant word, and then we wonder why they can't see the implications.