Who is deconstructing your faith?

Sometimes I hear someone say, “I am deconstructing my faith these days.” What this usually means is that they’re taking apart their faith, inspecting it, and putting it back together again, hopefully for the better. But what makes some of us cynical about this “deconstruction” trend is that what emerges can often be predicted: it’s what culture now finds digestible about Christianity—which isn’t much.

This trend has a long backstory. In 1799 the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. He meant this to provide a defense of faith to his friends and colleagues who thought we were beyond religion now. But it ended up being a defense of those bits of Christianity which Schleiermacher thought might still connect to modern personal experience—which wasn’t a lot.

Schleiermacher is called the father of modern Protestant theology for good reason. Compared to our ancestors before the modern age, we have a much greater belief that our faith is something we create, shape and construct, rather than something we receive, discover and absorb.

In the modern age it often seems like it’s the modern Self doing the work. It’s me creating a faith that makes sense within my categories.

This has taken different forms. Some people try too hard to shape the church to be an awesome personal experience. Some expressions of Pentecostalism, evangelicalism and the seeker sensitive church movement have tendencies in this direction. Others sift out all the parts of Christianity that no longer seem relevant to modern people like themselves. That’s the more liberal approach. What they both have in common is the assumption that it’s my duty to make the faith compelling to me and people like me.

This desire to deconstruct faith is a good thing, if I could insist on one key distinction. Remember when the prophet Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up with his glory filling the temple? It severely deconstructed him and he cried, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5). Or remember the blind persecutor Saul picking himself off the road to Damascus after being thrown by a vision of Christ. He is now completely deconstructed (Acts 9:1–17).

The important difference between Isaiah or Saul, on the one hand, and Schleiermacher or some modern deconstructionists on the other, is who is doing the deconstructing. In the modern age it often seems like it’s the modern Self doing the work. It’s me creating a faith that makes sense within my categories.

But in the Bible deconstruction happened through a vision of God, a shattering encounter with the living Lord of hosts. Our pitiful idols, delusions and carefully coiffed appearances are shattered by the glory revealed before our eyes. That’s holy deconstruction.

So, for an “Isaiah 6” deconstruction, instead of asking what sort of faith your “cultured” friends might find attractive, or asking what sort of faith might impress your grandchildren who have left the church (not that those are always bad questions), ask yourself, what deeper teaching of Scripture have we missed? What aspects of the glorious life of Jesus have we neglected? Where is the Spirit exploding into the world now, and how can we join up?

One sign of a holy deconstruction is when it immediately turns to self-sacrificial mission, like it did for Isaiah and Saul. Holy deconstruction results in engaged, passionate people after all. But it’s not about me; it’s about being taken into the greater mission of God through the church.