Deconstruction

Series: Clickbait

May 2

Written By Kevin Canterbury

Pastor Kevin Canterbury
May 1, 2022
Series: Clickbait
18 min. read

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2 Corinthians 10:1-5

1 I, Paul, myself entreat you, by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—I who am humble when face to face with you, but bold toward you when I am away! — 2 I beg of you that when I am present I may not have to show boldness with such confidence as I count on showing against some who suspect us of walking according to the flesh. 3 For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. 4 For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5 We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.

A quick recap from last week…

We live in a world that is full of opinion and information,
but is bankrupt of truth and wisdom.

This is nothing new. The apostle Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth about some Christian leaders of the church who had allowed standards in the world to inform the church. Instead of allowing the truth and the Way of Jesus to change them, they were changing their faith and their teachings to conform to a worldly standard.

The challenge I offered last week was simple: Could ideology be the idolatry of this generation?

We all have a pull toward an ideology, whether it is progressive or conservative. The issue is when we take an element of the ideology and make it the main thing.

You can’t talk about the Way of Jesus and orthodoxy without also talking about this generational phenomenon coined as “deconstruction”. The deconstructing of orthodoxy.

I don’t want to assume we all had the same exact upbringing and church experiences, but I want to share a few interactions with you I had growing up in the bible belt, in a more conservative church. On three separate occasions from three different bible teachers, I heard these phrases: “If you’re a true Christian, you’ll never doubt” and “True Christians have faith, not questions.”

Some of us may bristle at that, and some of us may say “that tracks”! Regardless, I choose to believe the hearts and intentions of those men were good… but every time I heard it, I had a pit in my stomach because I thought I was going to hell. Because I had ALL SORTS of questions!

So, I want to say I do not agree with those statements. As I’ve matured, I have come to realize God is big enough for your doubts and questions.

There is a good type of deconstruction and there is a need for it. Every generation has a need for it. This is the type you see in Jesus as He made a radical critique of the religious leaders and systems of His day and the way they upheld human traditions that had corrupted biblical truth.

Two Sides of Deconstruction:

1. Healthy deconstruction is a way that uses scripture to critique the world’s corruption of the Church.

Author Pastor Carey Nieuwhof recently featured preacher and author Christine Caine in an episode of The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast. On the topic of deconstruction, Christine talked about how the re-evaluation of our faith is needed and we need to ask ourselves: “Was I part of a cultural system or was I really taught the Way of Jesus that allows the Holy Spirit to transform my life?”

“Deconstruction doesn’t have to lead to destruction.”
-Carey Nieuwhof

Deconstruction doesn’t mean you are destroying your faith but pressing in and asking tough questions. Needed questions. This can lead to reconstruction in a healthy way. Healthy reconstruction IS possible.

The other side of this deconstruction coin is the unhealthy and unhelpful way.

2. Unhealthy deconstruction is a way that uses the world to critique scripture’s authority over the Church.

I certainly believe that healthy deconstruction is the Way of Jesus and it should cause us to reconsider everything. The latter is not the Way of Jesus.

From my pastoral perspective, I am finding that alongside sincere doubt and challenge (which is needed), there is a trend among Christians of analyzing the bible through a cultural lens. As the apostle Paul warned years and years ago in 2 Corinthians 10, the same thing is happening today. Deconstruction is not new, but the cultural climate certainly is.

To re-visit last week’s quote from theologian Charles Spurgeon,

“Visit many good books, but live in the Bible.”
Charles Spurgeon

I think my generation has flipped this idea around in the name of making Jesus relatable and cool or to fit our ever-evolving ideology.

Hear me out… I know you can read anything, but should you? No guardrails at all? I know you can stream anything but is that wise? Is it wise to watch every show that piques my interest, whether it pushes the bounds of human depravity and sexuality or not?

For me, when some Christians go through deconstruction, it is difficult to take their claims seriously because the questions they have don’t often come from a place of love for the bible, love for God, love for the church, or even a love for Jesus! But they often come from a place of cultural critique, informed by culture. Not scripture.

I think our natural tendency is to live in many good things and visit the Bible.

We embrace many good things the world will offer us, yet only visit scripture.

That is unhealthy and is grounded in the elevation of one’s self. It is grounded in hubris and a deep-rooted desire for the world to like me and my version of Jesus.

Deconstruction is the middle of a maturity process that at some point ends.
Deconstruction is not the end-goal.

Religion aside, developmental psychologists suggest there is a three-stage process in your childhood.

Stage One: Construction

From your family of origin, you are handed the building blocks for a worldview along with a template for you to construct one. That’s normal, it’s good, and it is healthy but it tends to be very black and white. Stage one construction is very rigid, most of us become very self-righteous, we think we know way more than we actually know, and we believe life is more clear-cut than it actually is.

During construction, we don’t have a great capacity to wrestle with nuance and ambiguity. Construction doesn’t have the capacity for that. Construction can carry on well into adulthood.

Stage Two: Deconstruction

Deconstruction then takes place when you grow up a bit and realize all the problems you have with your worldview. You discover all the ways your “template” was skewed, wrong, or biased. So, we then begin to doubt, challenge, and seek after the truth. “What was I handed that was good and true? And what was I handed that was corrupted by sin?”

Stage Three: Reconstruction

We can then reconstruct a worldview based on the best wisdom of past generations but one that we now own with humility, wisdom, and conviction.

As you rebuild a worldview to live by, you don’t need to start with a blank slate, you don’t have to learn all these lessons from scratch. Other people have made mistakes and if we will humble ourselves and read and study to adopt a posture of a student then we can be spared so much pain.

When Reconstruction takes place, as French philosopher Paul Ricoeur said, we enter into “…a second naïveté.”

Meaning… It’s almost like what you see in a child. They are just so happy and naïve of what’s happening around them, remaining oblivious and happy.

Paul Ricoeur writes of this second naïveté that takes place for adults who have walked through the desert of skepticism, the wasteland of humanism, philosophy, and deconstruction. And then with age: experience, wisdom, scars. Through the gambit of emotions, these adults arrive back at a posture of humility and trusting joy.

Now for us, we live in a stage-two culture. And there are slants in these stages, both liberal and conservative. I grew up in a conservative, stage-one culture. Bumper sticker theology was everywhere: “HELL IS HOT BUT JESUS SAVES.”

That sort of slant doesn’t really allow space for doubt or questions or emotion. And just like everything else, it is corrupted by the Fall of humanity. For stage one, there is a slant of progressivism that parrots the trending linguistics of culture and various ideologies. People will unthinkingly accept almost any idea that is full of contradiction and bias… but hey, everyone on the internet is saying it so it must be true! And just like conservative cultures that don’t allow space for doubt or questions, neither do progressive cultures. You are labeled or shamed or canceled if you question or challenge the dogma.

But overall, we are in a stage-two culture. A lot of people eventually move through that because you can only stay fervent for so long… then you get stuck in a kind of limbo. We become more against certain things than we are for anything specific.

More doubt than faith, more skepticism than confidence.
Very few of us are stage-three.

We have constructed, we have deconstructed, and have reconstructed. Those incredible people who have a deep conviction about God, scripture, the Church, and reality also have a high capacity for the human experience and just how fragile life truly is. These are the people with deep compassion for others AND a burning conviction.

While these people may be small in number, they do exist, and I praise God they are part of our church today.

All of that to say, deconstruction is not the end-goal, but is a phase you are meant to pass through. If you are deconstructing, I know historically the Church hasn’t done a great job of holding space for you. Our fear and ego come in and try to squash sincere questions and that should never be the case. Please know you are loved here and you don’t have to be alone in your doubts because no one should be alone as they venture through the desert of modern skepticism and deconstruction – let’s walk through it together with some guides who have made it through to the other side who can say “there is a peace waiting for you…”

Keep walking, keep asking, keep pushing, or like they would say in my church growing up – “Keep the faith. Press on.”

At the external level, there is a convergence:

Shout out to Bridgetown Church out of Portland as they talked about deconstruction
as an access point involving three external factors and three internal factors.

1. “Cheap grace” & Low discipleship

What Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to as “cheap grace”, requiring no real repentance thus no real transformation AND low discipleship, meaning a hyper-focus on large gatherings that appease emotions and get initial converts, but have no structure in place for meaningful discipleship.

If your Sunday morning gathering is your greatest means of discipleship, you are in trouble

2. Ascendant secular ideologies

Again, on both sides. Quasi-religions that attempt to replace the Way of Jesus. We just had an entire sermon on this last week.
These secular ideologies are predicated upon our consumption of digital media and educated into us through pop culture and capitalist marketing departments

3. Broken trust from spiritual leaders

There is a tragic breakdown of spiritual leaders. How many gross stories of sexual abuse, scandal, and misconduct can a generation take before all trust in pastors and the Church is completely broken?
Why would you even trust me when you can google pastoral scandals and read page after page of results?

Externally, deconstruction involves low discipleship and cheap grace, dominant secular ideologies, and broken trust.

At the internal level, there is a convergence:

1. Lack of Fear of God

Generation wide, and with it comes a lack of knowing God’s fierce love for you
Essentially, you have a Christianity without a cross, resulting in an undisciplined flesh that gets coddled and spoon-fed rather than being overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit

2. Wounded Heart

I know almost no one who has deconstructed their faith that was not first wounded by a spiritual leader, a religious parent/guardian, their family of origin, a church, or some type of Christian experience
Or like we talked about last week, woundedness happens when the right or the left corrupt the Church

3. Digital inputs and low scripture

Then you have a mind that is filled with digital inputs rather than saturated in scripture or in prayer
The BARNA group conducted a study recently where they found that strong Christian millennials consume over 3,000 hours of digital content a year, only 150 of which is Christian. That is about a 20-1 ratio. As someone a lot smarter than me once said, “We become what we contemplate.” You become what you give your attention to.
If your ratio of secular ideas to Jesus is 20-1, that is going to have a destructive effect on your faith. No wonder you are struggling

Internally, deconstruction involves a lack of trust and honor for God, trauma or wound that remains open, and is then accelerated by the overabundance of secular media with low regard for scripture.

I think everyone has someone they love or care for that hasn’t just deconstructed…
But has destructed.

I love this city but let’s not be naïve, this city will celebrate that destruction. I love that our church is in the Highlands and it is a great opportunity to see the lost come to Christ, but if you aren’t strong it will eat your faith alive.

The loss of cultural favor toward Christian faith has really wrecked a lot of people. We all want to be accepted and liked- So the thought of your belief system now being critiqued or referred to as archaic or even narrow-minded can make you compromise and adapt in the wrong way. When culture no longer finds your orthodoxy favorable you will feel the gravity to move your convictions with culture… and we are seeing that take place right now.

In our scripture today, Paul is warning against this to the Corinthians and we could read it much the same for ourselves today. When culture begins to set the standards for your convictions, you are no longer dealing with Christian faith, but secular ideology.

For a Christian caught in deconstruction, to make such compromises, means you are deconstructing in an unhealthy way – examining the authority of scripture and the Church through a worldly lens.

And maybe right now, it feels like I’m coming after the more progressive-minded of us today… I am not attempting to do that. Please, hear my heart. I just believe the Gospel is convicting and correcting to us all and if last year I pressed my more conservative-minded friends with my preaching about the dangers of nationalism and conflating conservative ideology with Christian faith, on the Fourth of July mind you, then hear my heart for you today: We simply need to come back to the Way of Jesus. Left, right, conservative, liberal, whatever. What is the Way of Jesus and what does it look like in this city?

It is difficult. Our city is so different from the rest of our state, it’s far-left, and for someone deconstructing, it is even harder since culture celebrates the destruction of faith. I think it is even harder when you are raised in a more conservative church environment and move to a place like Louisville. There is a definite danger of ultimately going from Christian> to progressive Christian> and landing in post-Christian, where deconstruction leads to destruction. These people are just floating out there and it hurts to see them walk away and hurt. And there is where I hope to encourage us, who follow the Way of Jesus. We can’t go about giving our faith to others the same old way.

Luke 19:10

“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

This is our mission and call- To bring the lost into a transformative relationship with God through Jesus. The word “lost” now has a bit more nuance. Think of the “lost” in two ways:

1. “Church the Unchurched”

There will always be the unchurched, truly lost with no Christian faith or real experience with Christianity. That call remains for us to reach them. But now there is a generation walking away from faith so on a larger scale, we must also-

2. “Re-church the Previously-churched”

The reality of deconstruction brings about a complexity of reaching the previously-churched. By that, I mean people who were once churched, but have walked away saying, “It’s corrupt, it’s outdated, it’s narrow, it’s unlike Jesus, I can’t trust it anymore…”

Please don’t get lost in the semantics here. I use these phrases as a way of simply saying we need to invite people into the Way of Jesus! Not tradition or religion.

But to my deconstructing friends walking through the desert now:

Today is not my attempt to label you, please do not take it that way. But this is my sincere appeal to you: Don’t allow your heart to be taken captive by the enemy. Turn your heart to the love of God – there is simply nothing better for you than the true love of God.

For the rest of us, who aren’t deconstructing, but we aren’t exactly thriving right now either, my appeal to you is to sincerely guard your heart and DO NOT go this alone. To be frank, don’t stay home on Sunday. The war for your soul is real and is happening now. The local church can be a safe place of encouragement and worship, community and communion, accountability and great grace.

And let’s not forget that there is real demonic power and influence in the world and Paul tells us to demolish these ideas and deconstruct these strongholds. How do we do that? How do we refuse the captivity of ideology and run toward the freedom of the Way of Jesus? How do we demolish strongholds? It’s simple, but it’s not easy:

Scripture: A library of writings that are both human and divine that together tell a unified story that leads us to Jesus.

Jesus’ mind was steeped in scripture. He would teach it, preach it, quote it, pray it, obey it, and live it. For Jesus, Scripture wasn’t just beautiful literature, but God-breathed truth.

This may get me into trouble but I think it’s important to say: I do not trust in Jesus because of the Bible. I don’t believe what I believe about Jesus because I read it in the Bible – that’s backwards. I trust in the Bible because of Jesus. Jesus taught the Bible, Jesus loved the Bible, and Jesus said, “This is scripture.” Jesus said it and I believe it.
I have plenty of questions, but I trust and follow You, Jesus.

As followers of Jesus, our aim isn’t just to read scripture, or know it, or even agree with all of it all the time, but to obey it as an act of faith in Jesus.

Scripture is actually a way for us to abide in Jesus…

“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” John 15:7

To abide in Jesus is to allow His ideas, His words, His truth, His love, and His wisdom to permeate through us. I think part of this also means strict discipline with our intake of media, news, and social media that will allow our minds to be guided into the words of Jesus. Who will you place your faith in?
The question isn’t: “Do you have faith?” But “What do you place your faith in?”

If you place your faith in culture then you will be told to live your truth, pursue your own happiness at all costs, and if it doesn’t serve you- then walk away.

But the Way of Jesus is the opposite. There is a reason many of Jesus’ disciples walked away from Him in John 6 – His teaching was too difficult for some of them to hear. Jesus calls us to sacrifice, to serve, to give away, to forgive, to love.

There are many things in this world to love and trust, we Christians choose to love and trust Jesus and we invite you to join us. We make invitations, you make decisions. So what is your decision today? Will you appease yourself, your friends, your culture and societal pressure? Or will you follow the transformative Way of Jesus?