A New Word for an Old Question
Someone you love may have used the word. A son home from college says he is deconstructing. A friend posts that she is unpacking the church she grew up in. Perhaps you have used the word yourself, quietly, because some of what you were taught no longer holds the way it once did. Deconstruction has become one of the most common words in the conversation about faith, and it means different things to different people.
At its simplest, deconstruction means taking apart the beliefs you were taught so that you can examine them. Some people mean by it that they are testing their church's customs against the Bible. Others mean that they are taking apart the Bible's own teaching, piece by piece, and many of them never put it back together. One word covers two very different roads. So a fair answer starts by asking what a person means.
The process of taking apart the beliefs a person was taught in order to examine them. In church life the word can mean sifting human traditions by Scripture, or it can mean dismantling the Christian faith itself.
“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”1 THESSALONIANS 5:21 · KJV
Paul's command has two halves. Prove all things tells believers to test what they hear, the way a refiner tests metal. Nothing a man teaches is exempt. The second half, hold fast that which is good, tells them why. We test in order to keep. A believer who only tests becomes a skeptic. A believer who only holds fast may end up clinging to a man's opinion as though God had said it. Scripture asks for both.
When you test what you were taught, what are you testing it by? What is your measure? Everything in this study turns on that question.
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For Deeper Study
- The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It's Destructive, and How to RespondAmazon Alisa Childers and Tim BarnettA clear account of where deconstruction comes from and how to answer it. Evangelical. We would make more room than the title does for the healthy sifting of human traditions.
- Another Gospel?Amazon Alisa ChildersOne woman's account of meeting progressive teaching in a church setting and testing it against Scripture and history. Evangelical.
- Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of PostmodernismAmazon Douglas GroothuisA fuller treatment of the ideas about truth and language that gave deconstruction its name.
- Know Why You BelieveAmazon Paul E. LittleA short, warm classic that answers common questions about the faith in plain language.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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Why People Walk Away
People walk away from the faith through wounds, unanswered questions, slow drift, and desires they will not surrender, and Scripture calls us to take each one seriously, to judge no one's soul, and to point every wanderer back to Christ.
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