We would like to offer a solution that could bring the deconstructors right back to their senses if they will only accept it. They should put aside their rage, ask God’s forgiveness, and call on the One who purchased and provided redemption for all of us at His own expense. Deconstructionism is really just another version of an age-old story. It’s really the same angry conclusion that many ancient Israelites and Judeans followed.
In the late 1990s, I was asked by a professor at a local community college to teach a class on Christianity in their Religion 101 course. I agreed and spent nearly an hour explaining the reliability of the Bible, the claims and some of the evidences regarding Jesus, His life, death, and physical resurrection. Of course, it was just an overview. Only so much can be done in an hour. Before we finished, I invited questions. An adventurous student raised his hand, certain he was going to stump me with something I had never heard. He asserted, “You can‘t trust the Bible. It has been translated over and over, and it is full of mistakes.” I thanked him for expressing his concerns and proceeded to hand him my Bible, asking him to provide us with a few examples of the errors. He was caught off guard a bit and sheepishly responded that he hadn’t actually read the Bible. I asked how it was, then, that he was so sure it was full of mistakes? He replied that he had heard that was the case. I pressed a bit more for the source of his knowledge on this topic. He didn’t know. I followed up, wondering who he had heard it from. Again, he had no recollection. I then posed a different question.
“Doesn’t it concern you that you are gambling your eternal destiny based on information that you picked up from a source you can’t recall, and from someone who may or may not be reliable? Doesn’t that bother you even a little bit?”
He and the group became more animated as I began pointing to very popular seeming inconsistencies in the Bible and demonstrated how context resolves the alleged contradictions. I don’t know if any of them have come to the faith since those days, but it was a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate that asking questions is a good thing – and that there are solid answers for those who will take the time to investigate honestly. I have recalled that opportunity many times over the years when I interacted with those who know little about the Christian faith, as well as many who had been raised in the church and walked away. Perhaps they had been in an authoritarian group led by a false teacher like Bill Gothard and their view of Christianity was skewed. Many times, when we have interacted with “Gothardites” who have left the faith, we have to start with, “Just because God and Gothard both begin with “GO” and end with “D,” that doesn’t mean they are the same person. In many of these cases, they are unwittingly rejecting a caricature of Christianity and not the biblical faith itself.
There are now several new and “cool” names for those who have abandoned the church and left the faith. They are presently “deconstructing” – and call themselves “#exvangelicals.” But what are they deconstructing from? That is unclear. Even answering that question is difficult because, as Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett point out in their book, The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond, it could mean anything from someone trying to sort out the true from the false to those who reject the Scriptures entirely and look for a “personalized” faith separate from the Bible. The way Childers and Barnett describe it is:
Faith deconstruction is a postmodern process of rethinking your faith without regarding Scripture as a standard.1