In a few weeks at Hope City Church, I am going to address the theme of deconstructing and reconstructing our faith. If you have spent much time on TikTok, Instagram, or in conversations with new or old friends, you have likely heard about this concept of deconstruction. Many people today are deconstructing their Christian faith at some level, and although I will be talking about this soon in a message, I wanted to drop a few comments here as well.
Deconstruction is not new. One of the oldest books in our Bible is the book of Job, and a major theme in Job’s story is deconstruction and reconstruction. Job, like many people today and throughout world history, experienced a crushing season of life that required his faith and understanding of God to grow. Job had genuine faith and a genuine relationship with God, but when unthinkable tragedy touched his life, some of the things he thought were solid crumbled. His world collapsed in the first two chapters of the book, and the following forty chapters revealed his—and his friends’—process of deconstructing and reconstructing around a fresh understanding of God.
That’s essentially what deconstruction is, it is a dismantling of things in our faith that we thought we believed, or that we could rely on when we find they are no longer tenable.
Sometimes we come to this conclusion when pain or hardship becomes greater than what our religious answers can satisfy. Sometimes it happens when we discover new interpretations of our formerly held theological positions. And sometimes we simply grow weary of the Scriptures’ high moral standards, so our deconstruction is really just a decision to live out a more permissive world view.
Regardless of its cause, deconstruction can either be a necessary part of our ongoing spiritual development, or a temptation to walk away from faith altogether. Here are a few thoughts that might help us evaluate and navigate our own deconstructing moments.
- Deconstruction is not always bad, indeed, sometimes it is necessary. If you are deconstructing old teachings that were extreme, too man-centered, or that deviated from the clear revelation of God as seen in Jesus, that’s good! Those things need to be thrown away. Sometimes we need to jettison unhealthy teachings that shaped our religious perspectives when we were young. Sometimes our allegiance to Jesus requires us to reject legalism, hypocrisy, or unfair judgmentalism.
- Deconstruction is often quite emotional. If you are dismantling some unhealthy paradigms or shifting to some new theological positions, it can be very intimidating, especially if people from the former camps question your heart or your sincerity. Hold steady. God is so immense and expansive that our understanding of Him and His Word must grow and develop as we mature.
- Be careful with your reconstruction. As with any vacuum, empty spaces do not stay empty. Something always rushes in to fill the newly cleared area. We never merely deconstruct we always simultaneously reconstruct. So, if we are tearing down old understandings or belief systems, what are we replacing them with? A watered-down version of the gospel? An agnostic or atheistic view of life and eternity? Or are we reconstructing around a more truly biblical understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ?
That is where our deconstruction is supposed to take us. Jesus Christ is the purest, clearest, and fullest revelation of God that we will ever have. Colossians 2:9 tells us, “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” And Hebrews 1:3 asserts, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being.”
Deconstruction is essential when we are dismantling things that fail to align with Jesus’ revelation of God, and reconstruction must necessarily occur around Him too. Often, if people approach their deconstruction with sincerity and intellectual honesty, that is what they are looking for anyway. Most questions and criticisms of the Christian faith naturally go away as our understanding of Jesus gets clearer.
Job saw God clearer too, and his fresh encounter with God set some new anchors in his life. Some of his earlier anchors held and survived his tragedy, but after seeing God more clearly, some new ones were put in place, and the reconstructed Job was more humble, dependent, and unshakable than ever before. That is my prayer for you and your loved ones too. Let’s embrace deconstruction when it is for wise and biblical reasons. And let’s reconstruct more fervently around Jesus, the only one who promised to never leave us or forsake us.