Deconstructionism

             “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him. But it is your custom for me to release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release ‘the king of the Jews’?” (John 18:37-39)

 

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. (I Corinthians 15:12-17)

 

In the past two days, I’ve come across the word deconstruction with regard to Evangelical Christians. One was an excellent article by John Bloom (Link: What Does ‘Deconstruction’ Even Mean? | Desiring God.) It’s not a new idea. The basic premise is that we cannot trust ourselves, the writings, or anything else to provide us with actual, honest-to-goodness, real Truth. Instead, all we can do is find our own subjective truth. This isn’t a case of studying to learn what words were used, how they were used in the time in question, but of wholesale rejecting as having authority any person, document, or idea that claims to hold Truth. This was one of the focuses of The Jesus Project, in which scholars of Biblical “Higher Criticism” debated and voted on what we can trust to be historically accurate in the Bible. The only thing they agreed to trust as accurate in “The Lord’s Prayer” was the word Father.

C. S. Lewis started to deal with this in Mere Christianity by introducing what he called the Trilema.

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

          It doesn’t seem that Professor Lewis considered a fourth option, that everything Jesus said would be dismissed. It is not that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic, but that those who recorded what they claimed He said were the devils of Hell. It’s all made up in order to empower some person or some group over another.

          But the Higher Critics and Evangelical Deconstructionists miss a key point. If we cannot trust that what Jesus – or any of the writers who wrote what we consider Scripture cannot be trusted to be True, Christianity cannot be true. There is no sense in calling ourselves Christians, or in considering anything found in any religious text as True. We cannot claim that Jesus rose from the dead. We cannot claim to have salvation by faith. We cannot claim that anything is true – and therefore have no right even to object even to rape, serial murder, pedophilia, or the behavior of people like Hitler and Stalin on the basis of anything other than our preferences. Even objecting on the basis of personal preference is worthless, because our own authority must be as suspect as anyone else’s.

          Of course, if you say something against deconstructionism to a deconstructionist,  you’ll be told that what I’ve described isn’t what they’re doing at all. They “are just…” trying to find the truth, the essence, or something else that can’t possibly be found in Scripture, whether in English, Greek, or Aramaic.