The ‘Deconstruction’ Thing vs. ‘Assurance’

This post is the second in a series. The first can be found here.

Alas, the world of human relationships can be a morass of guesswork and insecurity. People are unpredictable. They don’t say what they really mean. They don’t really mean what they say. Very few rules are absolute. And when you misread the social cues and Kim Bradley turns down your request for a couples skate to Cindy Lauper’s ‘True Colors’, no amount of cheese fries from the snack bar will ever be enough to bury that pain you feel deep inside.

If only interpersonal dynamics could offer the solace and beautiful consistency of mathematics. Safely ensconced within its arms, downtrodden and socially awkward souls find that numbers combine and divide and relate to each other in predictable ways. Patterns can be discerned. Problems can be solved through established methods and procedures. Behind the scenes, mathematical algorithms even unlock information at our fingertips – like, I don’t know, the fact that Kim Bradley’s high school boyfriend-turned-husband is a lazy dropkick playing bass in a Ratt cover band, according to social media, proving she chose wrong and wasted her life.¹

Confidence Schemes

There was a similar kind of calculus in operation in the evangelical churches in which I grew up. The equations had been balanced, the variables accounted for, the formulas distilled. Questions and problems of theology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology, in their minutiae, had been answered and resolved, then slotted neatly into clockwork systems, with every ‘t’ crossed and every ‘i’ dotted.

At the popular level, these tightly-woven theological systems found modest expression in our churches’ ‘statements of faith’, easily located on their websites and publications – in detail that easily transcended the terse formulations of the early Christian creeds². I suppose these systems and statements, still very much present in the evangelical world today, supplied a sense of safety. The puzzle pieces fit together. The questions had clear answers. For every point, a supporting scriptural reference – look it up yourself! For every doubt, a counterpoint. You didn’t need to feel at all uneasy. You could instead be supremely confident that everything important (and almost everything unimportant) was addressed and known and certain.

The word we used for these feelings of certainty was ‘assurance’ – first and foremost, assurance of salvation from God’s holy wrath. But in practice, our assurance went well past salvation to a great many other things: scripture interpretation, post-mortem destinations, justification, sanctification, propitiation, predestination, ‘End Times’ prognostication, 6-day creation, chosen nations, political affiliations, militarisation, foetal gestation, male domination, physical relations and sexual orientation, to name a few.

Un-surance?

The Christian deconstruction phenomenon doesn’t, won’t and can’t offer this kind of broad-spectrum, elite-level assurance. And that, I’d argue, is why so many evangelicals treat deconstruction with suspicion and even fear. It asks too many questions. It questions too many answers. There seem to be no sacred cows, no doctrines beyond scrutiny, no tenets inviolable. Deconstructing Christians strike out from established institutions for destinations unknown, with little idea of how they’ll get there.

Whatever the destinations or directions, the journey will carry them away from the safe walls of the known, of a confident and structured Reformed theology, a traditional hierarchy, a time-honoured morality, and western conservative political ideology. That idea itself can be disconcerting to the people still at home within those walls. Accusations arise: Deconstruction compromises with culture, it abandons objective truth, it surrenders to moral relativism³. And Bible verses are quoted:

...let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings... 

                                                                                                             Hebrews 10:22, NIV

...that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ...
                                                                                                            
                                                                                                             Colossians 2:2, ESV                                                                                                                         

Yes, these verses talk about assurance – but what kind of assurance? Assurance not in tightly-woven theological systems, or in rigorous doctrines, or in a particular theory of atonement, or in the inerrancy of scripture, or in Young Earth creationism, or in black-and-white moralising, or in gender roles, or in political philosophies, but assurance in Christ himself. And assurance that comes not from thinking all the right things or knowing all the right things or assenting to all the right things, but from faith in Christ.

It’s faith in Christ – loyalty to Christ⁴ – that so many deconstructing Christians want to maintain. Yes, some deconstruct out of faith, and there are any number of reasons behind this. Yet I find the great majority of those I encounter or know don’t wish to leave faith behind. What they instead want to leave behind is the excess baggage lugged about by evangelicalism. They want to leave behind the unquestioned and spoon-fed doctrines, the burdensome church structures, the narrow readings of scripture, the legalistic approaches to morality, the antagonistic relationship with science, the one-sided political posturing, and – it must be said – the not-entirely-unwarranted evangelical reputation for anger and bitterness toward their opponents.

For evangelicals to say this means abandoning objective truth is to equate their own precepts, their own philosophies, their own interpretations, their own agendas, and their own practices with objective truth. And yes, that idea really is as absurd as it looks. No, deconstructing believers don’t set out to abandon objective truth; to suggest they do is a mischaracterisation. What they do want to explore is this: How much of what we have been taught is objective truth? How much has been interpreted with a suspect hermeneutic, or with a poor understanding of ancient language and culture? How much has been filtered through our own prejudices? How much of today’s church has been the product of white, western, capitalist culture? How much of what we were assured was black and white is actually grey, or even multi-coloured?

The Certainty of Hope

What’s engaging, though, is not so much what they want to dismantle as what they want to learn (deconstruction as pre-construction!). In so many conversations I’ve had, these Christians want to discover a more positive view of God, of life in the world, of life after this world, of scripture, of people, of Jesus, of his teaching, of his death, of his resurrection.

Maybe, just maybe, that sounds like an opportunity for hope. And the New Testament has far more to say about hope than about the evangelical notion of assurance:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

                                                                                                             Romans 8:22-24, NIV        

 I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness— the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

                                                                                                             Colossians 1:25-27, NIV

And again, a passage quoted above, in fuller context:

...and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.

                                                                                                             Hebrews 10:21-23, NIV

To me, these and the many other statements by the New Testament writers show a posture of humility, much more than of an overconfident kind of assurance. Don’t think I’m suggesting any and all those deconstructing are humble and full of hope. It’s true, to hold on to hope is often a great struggle, and some have lost it. Others, sadly, have traded humility for a smug and misplaced assurance of their own.

But for those who hold on to them, humility and hope might prove far more fulfilling than the evangelical version of ‘assurance’.

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Notes

1. No, there’s no real Kim Bradley. She’s an amalgamation of hundreds of girls who’ve turned me down for skates, dances, dinners, movies, coffees, and conversations.
2. Thankfully, the church where I spent my high school years has, at some point more recently, condensed their faith statement to something more foundational than the ‘Director’s Cut’ version I once knew.
3. Take for example, these gems from Answers in Genesis, Alyssa Childers, this from Faith Bible Church in Spokane. And hell, you can Google ‘Christian deconstruction and objective truth’ and find more.
4. An interesting book makes the point the Greek word ‘πίστις᾽ which we often translate as faith can also be translated as ‘loyalty’ or ‘allegiance’ in many cases: Salvation by Allegiance Alone by Matthew W. Bates