In recent years, I’ve talked to a number of people who describe their spiritual journey as going through a period of “deconstruction.” These “deconstructors” are usually younger folks, in their 20s and 30s. But I believe people of any age, and any spiritual identity, might embark on this particular spiritual path.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of deconstruction, it comes out of French philosophy, associated especially with Jacques Derrida. Derrida and his followers use this term in a rather technical way to describe a type of hermeneutics (interpretation of writing) that sees the meaning of language (and therefore, of writing) as never fixed or final, but always contextual and relative: in other words, our language, words, ideas, and concepts derive meaning not from some ultimate authority (like God or the Bible), but from the social and historical context in which they are written or read. Philosophically speaking, this is a repudiation of Plato’s philosophy which saw ultimate truth or reality as existing beyond the world of appearance and form in which we live. Plato’s philosophy was the engine that drove much of Christian thinking over the last two thousand years; so even though Derrida’s theory of deconstruction is not meant just to apply to Biblical interpretation, but it does have profound implications for how the Bible (and other sacred texts) are read and interpreted.
In the last decade or so, Christians who are in the process of re-thinking what they do (or don’t) believe about the Bible, God, faith, theology, and doctrine, have adapted this concept of deconstruction as a kind of short-hand for moving through a process of letting go of old beliefs or doctrines that no longer seem true or acceptable. Deconstructing one’s faith can lead to adopting a different way of believing, or it can lead eventually to abandoning faith altogether.
Needless to say, some traditionalist Christians see deconstruction as a Trojan horse: a path that leads ultimately to atheism, agnosticism, or nihilism. But others see it as a necessary step on the path of moving away from a limiting, simplistic faith to a more robust, mature type of faith that is less oriented toward dogmatic teachings and more based on an appreciation of paradox, ambiguity, myth, and mystery.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, I bet you can see where I’m going with this.
Faith: From Certainty to Mystery
A few years before the pandemic Fran and I attended the Wild Goose Festival, a gathering that takes place in North Carolina every summer for people interested in the intersection of art, justice, and spirituality. It’s kind of an annual family reunion for people who identify as progressive or emergent Christians (among others). At this particular festival, we attended a fascinating workshop on communication skills that was facilitated by a well-known Christian author and another person who was the adult son of another big name writer. This person spoke movingly about how he had grown up in a relative progressive evangelical household, but as an adult he simply lost his faith. By this time, he identified as an atheist. The workshop was all about how to talk about difficult or sensitive topics — like deciding you’re an atheist, and then telling your family of conservative Christians all about it. It was a wonderful workshop and I learned a lot. It was not about deconstructing one’s faith, but since one of the speakers had done just that, it left me thinking a lot about the process of — as R.E.M. put it — losing one’s religion.
As I listened to the former evangelical-turned-atheist speak, I kept wondering how his spiritual journey might have looked different if he had been exposed to the mystics. It seems to me that many evangelicals and other conservative Christians mistrust the mystics, because they tend to place importance of our personal experience of God — and not just on the importance of obeying an external authority, like the Bible or the pope. Furthermore, many mystics also acknowledge that God is never fully revealed to us through rational or philosophical thought — as chapter 6 of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it, God
can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking. It is good sometimes to meditate on God’s amazing love as part of illumination and contemplation, but true contemplative work is something entirely different. Even meditating on God’s love must be put down and covered with a cloud of forgetting.
God is accessible to us through love, just as God remains ultimately inaccessible through reason, logic and philosophy. And I believe a big piece of this is that our fallible human logic ultimately breaks down when presented with a mystery as vast as God. Nothing we can say, or think, is ever adequate at describing or knowing God. Sooner or later, all of our ideas about God must be deconstructed: because they are all imperfect and incomplete.
A contemporary Christian Biblical scholar named Peter Enns wrote a book with the provocative title The Sin of Certainty. I haven’t read it, but I love what he sets out to do in this book: to affirm that God wants our trust more than our “correct” beliefs. Perhaps that’s because, sooner or later, even the most watertight dogmas and doctrines fail to stand up to the relentless scrutiny of logic and reason. In other words, sooner or later, every doctrine, dogma, and proposition about God must be deconstructed, for God ultimately is a mystery that cannot be squeezed into the mind of humanity. That would be like trying to hold the entire ocean in a teacup.
So when we are faced with the recognition that our doctrines are imperfect and incomplete, what do we do? The atheist response is to give it all up as only so much hogwash. But the mystic response is to humbly recognize that love still matters, that the universe is still filled with wonder and beauty, and that God-as-mystery still has something meaningful to say to us, even after the God of the philosophers has been thoroughly deconstructed.
After Faith is Deconstructed, Should Mysticism Be Deconstructed Too?
As I’m writing this post, I realize that I’m speaking about “atheists” and “mystics” in very simplistic and two-dimensional ways. But let’s be clear: mystics, like skeptics, come in many different shapes and sizes. You can read some of the writings of great Christian mystics and think it sounds more like fundamentalist dogmas than open-hearted mystery. That’s because the mystics are themselves products of their time and culture, and many of the great mystics lived in an age when external authority simply was not questioned.
Meanwhile, some scholars who have studied mysticism suggest that mysticism, itself, needs to be deconstructed (even if they don’t use that specific language). A great example of this is the book Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism by the feminist theologian Grace M. Jantzen. Following the principles of Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, Jantzen argues that mysticism in Christianity is just as patriarchal and dismissive of women’s experience as Christian theology in general. For all of mysticism’s talk about union with God, it appears that the mystics themselves can be just as limited and dualistic (and, yes, sexist or fundamentalistic) as any other Christians (or anyone else, for that matter). It is a sobering book to read, but important especially for anyone who thinks mysticism is the great hope to save Christianity from itself.
The Gift of Deconstruction
Individuals deconstruct their faith when it no longer makes sense to them. Even mysticism, which begins with the assumption that God is ultimate mystery and therefore never can “make sense,” ought to be deconstructed so that we can be aware of its limitations. Does deconstruction ultimately mean that there is no absolute truth, that anything anyone says or believes is subject to interrogation and revision?
I don’t believe that deconstruction must necessarily lead to nihilism, although I’m sure that some people who undertake the deconstruction journey might end up rejecting all truth claims. The problem with nihilism — or, more broadly, with skepticism — is that ultimately, even our questioning must be questioned. Deconstruction suggests that while there may be no unquestionable “truth” on which we can base our life and faith, we can still orient ourselves toward the best understanding of life that is available to us. In that sense, mysticism, despite its flaws, seems to be a more reliable foundation for spirituality than dogma, simply because at least some of the mystics acknowledge that God is Mystery, and that finite human knowing will always fail to give us God. This may be cold comfort to those who idolize certainty, but it can be a great help and comfort to those who have conscientiously rejected the old dogmas because they no longer work. Mysticism, like deconstruction, invites us into the possibilities that await us when we are willing to question old dogmas and seek meaning and purpose even in the mystery.
Featured image: Christ and Charity, Germany, ca. 1470. Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Fondation Corboud, Cologne, Germany. This work of renaissance art was used for the cover design of Jantzen’s book.
