Deconstructing faith, deconstructed 

Before You Lose Your Faith from The Gospel Coalition tackles a burning issue – the “deconstruction” of faith. Deconstruction is the pulling apart and examination of an object, an idea, or faith. And sometimes, as editor Ivan Mesa points out, “Sometimes the Christian will deconstruct all the way to atheism. Some remain there, but others experience a reconstruction. But the type of faith they end up embracing almost never resembles the Christianity they formerly knew.

Because deconstruction seems to become more prevalent, The gospel Coalition set some of their best writers – and the Gospel Coalition is a writerly group – on to it. The book examines deconstruction, but more importantly, perhaps, how to achieve a healthy reconstruction of faith

Trewin Wax finds there are two sorts of doubt. “Is Christianity true? It’s easy to find some of Christianity’s truth claims implausible. Can we really believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, that the miracles we read about in the Old and New Testaments truly occurred, and that the enchanted world of the Bible is a better description of reality than the scientific world of natural laws we experience every day?”

Is Christianity good? As people scan Christianity’s record over the centuries and see the wreckage left by many who’ve done atrocious things in Jesus’s name, they grow unsettled with religious certainty that could lead to more acts of violence and unjust discrim- ination. Can we really believe the church is a force for good in the world when so many tragedies can be traced back to its members?”

He does not tell people to grit their teeth and believe. “How, though, should I respond to deconversion, to the doubts and questions that have now overwhelmed someone’s Christian identity? You might expect me to tell you simply to “have faith,” to set aside these doubts and take a leap: believe something to be true before you’re convinced of its veracity or goodness. But this response makes the Christian faith seem too disconnected from tough questions.

“No, the last thing I’d want you to do is to suppress your questions and squelch your doubts. Instead, I hope you’ll discover more questions and entertain more doubts. You heard me right. You need to doubt more. You need to question more.”

Ian Harber recounts a journey from the faith of his youth to #exvangelical, then back to #revangelical. He found the path to progressivism tracked by the #exvangelical podcasts he listened to simply mirrored “the conformity of conservative Christians to whatever the Republican Party told them to believe.”

Studying theology was for him a way back. “I was taught how doctrines that I assumed were contradictory—like penal substitution and Christus Victor—actually need each other to form the full, beautiful, biblical picture. I learned about union with Christ and all the blessings it brings. I learned about spiritual disci- plines and the life-giving freedom that flows from a disciplined pur- suit of God. From there, the wide and rich world of historic Christian orthodoxy swung open for me to explore.”

What of someone who looks around and it seems the atheist are having more fun. Do they have a lay-in on Sundays and more? Hunter Beaumont, a pastor, is speaking of people, students maybe, who have left home and a childhood faith. “We can learn a lesson, actually, from missionaries,” is his advice. “They translate the gospel of Jesus from one culture to another. Like a kernel protect- ed by an outer husk, the gospel (kernel) is always encased in a culture (husk). The missionary’s job is to ensure that the gospel kernel is free to enter new cultures without being captive to its old husk. This pro- cess is called “disenculturation,” and it can help you discover a faith that contains all the riches of original Christianity without the dry husk of your old religious subculture.”

But further on, politics raises its ugly head. “In the unfinished basement of our church on a Wednesday night, my friend Robby turned to me and asked, ‘“’Do you think it’s sinful to not vote for George W. Bush?” writes Samuel James, a publishers acquisitions editor. “It was 2004, and Robbie and I were as conscious as everyone else of the U.S. election. To someone else, it may have seemed a strange question, but not to me and not to anyone else present that evening. The idea that one candidate could represent the Christian option was, if not something Robby and I had fully contemplated; certainly something we assumed—probably because it was something our parents and church teachers assumed before us.

“Not every Christian is distressed by being raised to hold certain beliefs about faith and politics, then rethinking those beliefs later. But some experience this tension as if they need to deconstruct everything they’ve known. Sometimes politics devours the theological, leaving a particularly thick wreckage behind.”

 He gives examples “This is what happens when right-wing Christians make peace with cruelty toward immigrant children because it “owns the libs.” This is what happens when left-wing Christians fail to speak up for the unborn because doing so would put them alongside people they dislike.”

Another important essay by Karen Swallow Prior, a professor of English, raises the anti-intellectualism that hides beneath brash certainty. She begins with a telling anecdote of a young student who confidently asserted

“’Literature is trash.’ Or so a college freshman once informed me an English professor.

“The student, who was majoring in one of the sciences, felt indignant about the English requirements in the university’s core curriculum. If Christians have to read literature, he said, the literature should be explicitly Christian. Even the best classics are ‘“a waste of time,’”’ he complained. Shakespeare might be clever, but he’s not edifying.

“… When I shared with him a biblical basis for studying and enjoying literature, he responded by pontificating on the doctrines of presuppositionalism, on the failures of Paul’s approach to apologetics at Mars Hill, on the glories of the pure gospel untainted by worldly imaginations. It seemed like a hopeless case.

“Within a few years, he had renounced his faith.”

This sad story of a brittle, defensive faith, with lesser issues, raised to the level of first-order matters of faith, is shattering in more than one sense. ‘Failing to differentiate among first-tier, second-tier, and third-tier doctrines writes [the apologist] Randall Rauser, encourages believers to mistake ‘an interpretation of Christianity for Christianity itself.’ When an ‘excessive number of doctrines and practices’ rise ‘to the level of the non-negotiable,’ this creates “a house of cards faith,’ and if any one doctrine is rejected, ‘the entire edifice will collapse.’”

The mystery of faith, that some people believe, and others exposed to similar experiences and teaching do not, is tackled by Jared Wilson of For the Church podcast. He holds out hope to those seeking to hang on, hoping for reconstruction. “However, I would say that the desire for salvation is itself the initial sign of the gospel’s work. And if you genuinely choose Jesus, you can be sure it is because he has chosen you. The danger of disbelief could not be greater. It is indeed eternal conscious torment in the place called hell. But those who come to Jesus in faith need not have a strong faith or even a totally knowledgeable faith—just a true faith. It can be small. It can be weak. It can be battered.”

These easy-to-read but thoughtful essays, and this is only a sampling, form an excellent book to giveaway!

Before You Lose Your Faith Edited by Ivan Mesa, the Gospel Coalition.$21.99 Available from The Wandering Bookseller