You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.
This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Poole and Gary Schick.
Ben Poole
So our question morning is on a new topic I've never really heard of. So I've been doing some reading and some digging into this, and I'm excited to talk about it. So here it is, "Can you talk about the deconstruction movement? Where are its origins? What are the premises of its teaching? What are the dangers? What is the appeal and how should we view it?" So a lot of questions in there, but the kind of main point is, what is this deconstruction movement? How is that affecting the church? Things like that. So, Gary, why don't you open this up?
Gary Schick
Well, and do you want to go a little bit into the roots of it first? I mean, I got some scripture stuff I want to talk about.
Ben Poole
I didn't have much on the history, just more kind of the now culture of it.
Gary Schick
From what I could gather, and it's new to me too, is that basically it kind of comes along the concept of taking your faith, examining it, kind of breaking it down and looking things over and saying, is this what I believe? And then going forward. And the way from what I read, I could see something, a positive direction to take with this, and I could see a negative direction. You know, it kind of made me think of Socrates' old quote, "The unexamined life is not worth living." And so maybe the faith premise would be the unexamined faith. Is it worth having or holding onto? And I think that there is biblical grounds for examining our faith. 1Thessalonians 5:21 says, "But test everything, hold fast to what is good." Elsewhere in scripture, we see, "Test the spirits, for not every spirit is of God." And I think in our own lives, we are constantly doing this as we grow. We're taking what we've learned, Paul tells Timothy, "Remember what you've learned from your youth, hold on to that," but we're also digging deeper, re-examining our lives. I think the question for me really is, what is the standard we are testing our faith against? Is it scripture? Is it Jesus? Or is it me and what appeals to me? You know, we do read in Matthew 24:10-13, Jesus said, "And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another and many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold, but the one who endures to the end will be saved." 2 Timothy 4, "Now the spirit expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared." 2 Timothy 4:3, "For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but have itching ears. They will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions." Am I going after what appeals to me and slowly rejecting my faith, as I believe some in this deconstructionist movement have done? Or am I deconstructing the old self and putting on more and more of Jesus? Jesus said in John 17:17, "Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth." So there is the bottom line for me. What is your truth standard? If your truth standard is your own judgment, your definition of truth is going to shift and drift over time. And you may be among those departing the faith. If it is God's word, you will be anchored firm, and you will be slowly, piece by piece building your house more and more carefully, I hope, on Jesus. I think there is a deconstructionist heartbeat to the gospel that says, "Putting aside the old self, putting on the new. Taking off the old, putting on Jesus; dying to self, living to Christ." And that's what you mean by deconstructionism, let's go for it 100%. If it's, "Well, I don't know if this appeals to me, you know, really, I don't think this part of Jesus' teaching is culturally relevant today." Then I'm sorry, we part ways there. I'm not going down, I'm going with Jesus. Jesus the same yesterday, today, and forever. God in the flesh, the image of the father, that's who I want to follow, regardless of what new wind of teaching is blowing today and blowing smoke tomorrow.
Ben Poole
Yeah. So this is something that I think, the terminology I've never heard of, but the more I read into it, I've seen it. I think it's so clear. One person I was reading from, from an atheistic perspective was talking about, you know, the sixties and seventies when there was kind of this movement out of the church. And, "We should be pushing that and we should become more like Europe and we should just exclude religion altogether and just focus on humanism essentially." And so what's crazy to me is, this is actually a larger issue than I think I ever realized. I'm gonna read just a little bit from one author, from Relevant Magazine, which is a Christian magazine. But I just want to read something he wrote. He says, "As a life coach working with deconstructing Christians, most of the people I've seen walk away from the faith did so, not because of their struggles with God, but because Christian churches have become too wrapped up in the very things Jesus spoke against with the Pharisees. Who could really blame a person for walking away from a religion when it has been so intertwined with systems of greed, oppression, manipulation, and control? I get it, it often seems all of Christiandom has forgotten the greatest commandment, love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. People are not deconstructing because they want to hear theology that tickles their ears. They're deconstructing because most churches have forgotten the core principles of Jesus's ministry. They've forgotten their first love." And I understand that, to a point. I get that we can sometimes see problems in churches.
Gary Schick
Because there are people there that are sinners that need to be saved by grace.
Ben Poole
A hundred percent. And he talked about some bands that have left the Christian faith, church leaders that have left the Christian faith, and kind of place them under this deconstructing movement. They have examined what they believe, then they examine what the church is doing or teaches, and they say, "You know what, this isn't jiving, and so I'm out." And I know that it's probably a lot deeper and probably, you can't put a blanket statement like that over all of them. Everybody has their reasons for the decisions they make. But I think my struggle here, is that I agree completely with what you said. That there is a call for deconstructing, in the right way. What happens is, people don't want to do it the right way. They want to look at the culture and they want to look at themselves and say, "I need it to fit me, and not me fit what God has called me to be." And I think that there's a healthy way to do this, if our goal is to become more Christ-like. So the struggle is, why I'm part of a church that doesn't do this. So my problem here that I would wrestle with is, then why would you leave the thing, you know that needs help?
Gary Schick
Well, yeah, and again, there's nothing new here. Unfortunately, it's true, a lot of people, churches full of hypocrites. And how well do you live up to the full teaching of Jesus? I mean, the sermon on the Mount, it's exactly who we should be, and we all fall incredibly far short. So the easiest person for me to forgive is me. You know, I can pass over just about anything I've done. But if you were to say, or think the things about me that I may have thought about you and forgive, well, I might not forgive you for that. It's always hard to forgive somebody else. It's always easy to forgive ourselves. And so, you know, does the church need constantly to be reformed to scripture? In fact, one of the principles of the reformation was reformed and every forming, and I'm not talking about reformed theology here. I'm talking about the principle of reforming back to God's word. The whole concept in the days of the reformation was that the church has drifted away from the clear teachings of the gospel and the word. I know some listeners are gonna agree and some are going to disagree. But I think the principle really should be good for all of us that we want to get ever closer to Jesus and closer to his word. And so, does the church get comfortable as a group with certain sins and certain blind spots? Absolutely. Representative of many individuals with those, including ourselves. And so I think we need to be constantly breaking out of our sin and breaking into more of Jesus. And it's a challenge for the church as well, but that brings revival. When we humble ourselves before God and make him and his word our standard and not ourselves.
Ben Poole
So another direction that I kind of want to go for just the last few minutes we have here. When I was reading from the perspective of someone who is not a Christian, and I said, atheist. I don't know if they're atheist or not, I don't know exactly, but definitely from a non biblical worldview. A lot of the things that came up and says, "Well, examine the facts because so much can't be proven, so much taken on faith and all these things." And so people will use that as almost their own proof text of, "If I can't see it, touch it, smell it, you know, whatever, it's not real enough for me. That the lack of evidence proves to me that there's holes in this belief system. Therefore I'm not going to be part of it." And I wanted to, because I don't have in my head and my knowledge, all this beautiful information that is out there for proof towards the truth of the gospel message, the truth of scripture. One of them is one of my favorite books. I think every Christian should have in their libraries, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. A phenomenal story of a man, you probably know this, there's even a movie about it, who was an atheist. His wife became a Christian, and then he decided, "I'm going to prove her wrong," essentially, and went out and ended up finding Jesus and the truth of the gospel. Another one is by Josh McDowell, again, grew up an atheist. Went out to absolutely prove the Bible was false and came to the point where he said, "There's so much evidence pointing towards the truth, it's undeniable." And he wrote, he's written lots of books, but one of them is Evidence That Demands a Verdict.
Gary Schick
Followed by more of Demands a Verdict, and More Than a Carpenter. And he's written so many.
Ben Poole
Basically what I'm saying is, if there's issues you're struggling with, there are resources, extra biblical resources out there. Never place those above scripture, scriptures above all, but use these other resources. Like guys like Josh McDowell or Lee Strobel that have invested unbelievable amounts of time in their life who began out as atheists, who found the proof.
Gary Schick
And don't forget C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. He was another one of those guys, he didn't believe.
Ben Poole
I quote C.S Lewis almost every sermon he is so, just gold. There's so many resources for you, if you're truly seeking the truth. Because I think that's the point is, you can be critical if you want, but I think if you would choose in your heart to seek the truth.
Gary Schick
But, and I think, and this goes beyond our talk today, but I think they've called it like, post enlightenment. Just the idea that out there, it's out there for some, that basically you can't know anything. I mean, even things that we accept as scientific fact, so to speak. And of course we do, we live in a culture and in a time when everything is questioned. And it really comes down to, "Well, what's true for me versus what's true for you." But there again, if you are in the standard of truth, there is no basis for truth. Truth has to be something that's out there independent of us. And if there is a God in the universe who created all, he ultimately is that standard of truth. If there are true laws of nature, there are things he put in place. So you can come to a knowledge of the truth, if you're really desiring that. On the other hand, if you're just looking for a life of, what pleases me, well, I got nothing to say. Because you're just going to kind of keep recreating the universe around yourself. And even if you wanted a perfect church, there was a guy who founded it and it's a church at zero, cause he couldn't attend there either. But Jesus died to save sinners, among which we include ourselves, because people who are following him, but he's our standard.