Here We Go Again
You can reliably assume that there will be a movement in the church every 5-10 years that sets out to reimagine the Christian faith. The current iteration of this is calling itself “exvangelicals” that are “deconstructing”. But, if you don’t recall, we’ve been over this before. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane. About a decade ago, a movement emerged in the evangelical world, which quickly came to be known as “the emergent church.” Remember Rob Bell and those Nooma videos which were basically “not-quite” spoken word accompanied by “not-quite” stock footage.
Before that, in the late 90s and early 00s, there was the whole Seeker-Sensitive movement. The movement there was perhaps less obviously “liberal” in its trajectory, but underlying the whole project was the slicing and dicing of Scripture to suit the consumerism of the 90s. Further back we had the controversy over inerrancy in the late 70s. We could keep going further back and rewatch––like late-night Sitcom reruns––the same boring attempt to reimagine the Christian faith. These “reimaginings” always lack a principle ingredient, however: imagination. They think they’re doing something brave and new, but it’s all the same lame attempt at redefining the Christian faith to suite current sensibilities. The sensibilities change, but the attempt is the same: change God’s Word to conform to modern fads.
When Tacky is Trendy
The current Exvangelical/Deconstruction movement is just apostatizing under a new name. The thing is, at least the old heretics had some courage. The recent wave of people “deconstructing” their faith lack even the courage to think originally. They’ve simply done a “copy & paste” from other more original (albeit wrongheaded) thinkers (e.g. Heiddeger, Derrida, and further back Nietzsche, and even Descartes).
Deconstruction, a philosophic tradition which treats hermeneutics as a sort of jungle gym of possibility, has always been tacky. It wants to retain the right for itself to define terms, but it doesn’t want its opponents to be able to retain the old definitions. The deconstructionist tries to get people to see how silly it is to think that the definition of a word should be left unchanged, while simultaneously asserting that the new definition they’ve introduced should be adopted without questioning. This whole philosophic tradition is what has brought about HR departments making employees sign agreements to affirm their co-worker’s preferred pronouns. Trans-women are women, but we must not ask what it means to be a woman. Words are meaningless, the deconstructionist claims, until the Deconstructers decide that a word has a meaning which you must approve of, or else lose your job.
Deconstruction wants to paint the living room mustard yellow and put in burgundy carpet. Then, when you question the aesthetic of such choices, you are told that you need to learn to see the world the way they do. Color has no distinction other than what we assign to it. So what you mean by mustard yellow and burgundy, they mean pastel blue and light grey. “So you see,” they explain, “you must not foist your reading of the color wheel on others.” Thus, the tacky meaninglessness of Deconstruction becomes trendy. Everyone starts painting their living room mustard yellow, while un-ironically thinking they’ve each been courageous and brave because they each reserve the right to assign their own meaning to the color wheel.
Identity and Idols
This whole project, aided and abetted by living in an age of unrivaled material blessing, has afforded modern Deconstructionists the luxury of personalizing their identity. It is abundantly clear that what Deconstruction allows you to do is to try to personalize your identity like you would the home-screen on your smart-phone. Because “male” & “female” are not rigid with meaning, you can think of them as a gender, or discard them entirely (as we see with those adopting the term “non-binary” to describe themselves). Within evangelical circles, this line of thinking has allowed folks to decry “spiritual abuse” and call for accountability in the church, but then in the very next breath (to use one of the more vivid recent examples) demand that the government forcibly vaccinate your kids. All of this stems from the fact that we are identity insecure.
We have failed to hear what God the Father says about us, and we’ve sought to create from nothing what we want to say about us. So comes myriad of gender-identities in the broader culture, and this glut of evangelical “deconstructions” and “deconversions”. It all wants to find solid ground by asserting that what we say about ourselves is decretal, but what God says of the world and about us is softer than a forgotten tub of ice-cream in the trunk in mid-June.
The thing to notice about these exvangelical deconstructions is that they all angle to sit at the cool-kids table. They all want to rub shoulders with the celebrities and power-brokers of the moment. They think that by disassociating with the historic, Christian faith, they can find acceptance in the movements which have arisen from Marx, Freud, Darwin, Bernie, and Greta. If you watch carefully, one of the first things which someone who has “deconstructed” will pay homage to is to the sexual madness of our day, followed closely in most cases with an embrace of an economic understanding that comes right out of the pages of Das Kapital. Their identity issues have spurred them to seek refuge in the cult of the modern Idols. But, as I said recently elsewhere, the gods of our day are papier-mâché gods; they’re lame and boring, and all who worship them become like them.
If you deconstruct your evangelical faith––along with it’s repressive gender roles and “unfair” economic values––the first thing you do is sleep around with someone you’re not married to (if you haven’t already) and parrot the Marxists. In abandoning the decretal Word of God, you are now at the mercy of what all the gods want from you. The false gods are all capricious, and this explains why modern man is in a mad dash to carve out a “unique” identity for himself. The gender-queer anime stan who shaved half her hair off, dyed the other half blue, and runs her OnlyFans from her boyfriend’s trailer is just one instance of this; but the formerly Christian musicians, the Big Eva types, and their ilk who have recently deconstructed are just another instance of this identity insecurity.
Getting a Seat at the Cool-Kid’s Table
Much of this stems from a desire to get a seat at the cool-kids’ table. Those deconstructing never do so in order to come out in support of banning abortion at every stage of pregnancy. Instead, we see that they want to put daylight between themselves and the red-states. Heaven forbid people think they supported Trump. They do not want to be lumped in with those fundamentalists who got married at 21, stay married for 50+ years, had 6 kids and are now enjoying their 20 grandkids with one on the way. Ew…gross. They do not want to be associated with a hermeneutic that comes to Scripture with the understanding that there is one meaning there which God intended; if they embraced that approach to Scripture (i.e. a historical/grammatical reading), that would mean they’d have to read the U.S. Constitution and other such earthly documents…you know…like their birth certificate, in much the same way.
C.S. Lewis was insightful as usual when he noted that for many liberal theologians, their questioning of the orthodox teaching of Scripture usually didn’t come with loss of reputation and wealth. Rather, the net result was greater prestige, book-deals, and invitations to sit on the board of powerful organizations. He describes this in an episode from The Great Divorce:
‘Honest opinions fearlessly followed–they are not sins.’
‘I know we used to talk that way. I did it too until the end of my life when I became what you call narrow. It all turns on what are honest opinions.’
‘Mine certainly were. They were not only honest but heroic. I asserted them fearlessly. When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk.’
‘What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came–popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?’
The Great Divorce, Pg. 36
As it was then, so it is now. Deconstructing is a tacky way of rolling up to the cool-kids’ table and trying to get a seat. The initiation ceremony to get to sit at the cool-kids’ table involves gaining the world, but losing your soul.
The Solid Ground
So, we must insist, the Word of God is not just text. It is life. Who God is isn’t a matter for us to deconstruct, it is for us to receive by His own gracious revelation in the mouth of the Law, Prophets, and Apostles, and ultimately in the face of Jesus Christ. Questions about the Scripture and its meaning are not sinful on their own. But there’s a difference between questioning to get an answer and questioning as a pretense to justify sleeping around. This is just another way of saying you’ll know them by their fruit (Mt. 7:16).
Deconstruction thinks that dissecting the creature will make the creature more alive. But taking something apart does not guarantee understanding it better. A trail of mangled corpses makes it hard to believe that the Deconstructionists are sincerely interested in understand the thing better. This is because Deconstruction is, at its root, a rebellion against God and His Word. We must never forget that God made Adam a speaking creature (Gen. 1:26-27). Words were native to man. Naming was Adam’s first job (Gen. 2:19-20). Describing and defining was the first talent displayed by our first father. Poetry came easy to Adam on his first date (Gen. 2:23). Words are a gift to us, to be received, not taken apart.
Of course, to answer an anticipated objection, words are more like giant sequoias than steel girders; put another way, words have rigid meaning, but there’s an organic aspect of growth and development in words (for example, cleave meaning both to unite & to separate). This is the delightful study of philology and etymology. This isn’t the same thing as what the Deconstructionist wants to do, by peeling back all the words and meanings, thinking this will help us all arrive anywhere at all. Deconstruction thinks it can find deeper meaning by shooting meaning in the face at point blank.
Trying to deconstruct all the old doctrines through a process of watering down the clear meaning of the words used to describe and define the old doctrines is a sure-fire way to introduce false doctrines. These false doctrines, just like we see in the New Testament (Cf. Rev. 2:15, 1 Jn. 1:6), are always a pretense to introduce sexual immorality, a hatred of the created order (specifically the body), and an undermining of forgiveness of sins. In other words, just because Exvangelicals want redecorate the church according to the bland tastes of Deconstructed thinking, it is incumbent upon faithful Christians to just say, “That’s kitschy.” God spoke creation into being, which tells us something. We live in a world, made by the Word. This is the only solid ground.