Acts 3:1-10
Ps 105:1-8
Luke 24:13-35
I hope you will forgive me this morning if my topic is not exactly what you might expect for an Easter week sermon. As I understood until about a year ago, deconstruction is a kind of post-modern rejection of the notion that literary texts have any inherent meaning in themselves, but rather that meaning is imposed by readers. This was a philosophical movement associated with the French writer Jacques Derrida. However, in the last few years,“Deconstructing Christianity” has become a kind of movement among mostly former evangelical young people to describe their process of re-examining and usually abandoning their Christian faith. Just in the last couple of weeks, a book entitled Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church has become a runaway best-seller.
Some have suggested that a kind of reverse “Great Awakening” is taking place in American culture, and this movement is being compared in significance to the revival movements of the nineteenth century or the Jesus Movement of my own generation – except, again, in reverse. Given the sheer scope and influence of this movement, I think that it is something that Christians, especially those of you who are going to be ordained clergy, and seminary professors like myself, need to be aware of. To ignore it would be like a missionary setting out for India who knew nothing about Hinduism or Islam or Sikhism.
What I know about deconstruction at this point is sketchy, and largely derived from YouTube videos supplied by young people – former evangelicals – who have deconstructed their faith. There seems to be a pattern: they are young (usually in their twenties or early thirties), they describe growing up within the culture of American Evangelicalism. They were members of youth groups; they were home schooled; they went on mission trips. The churches they describe seem to be mostly Baptistic or Pentecostal, and the theology they left seems conservative or traditionalist to the point of being Fundamentalist. They understand Christian faith to be in conflict with modern science, with modern historical method, and with modern psychology.
And they regularly describe a conflict between faith and reason, in which Christian faith seems to be opposed to rationality rather than the traditional Christian understanding of theology as faith seeking understanding. They seem largely ignorant of historic Christian theology or serious contemporary biblical scholarship. I have yet to come across one of these young people who claimed that they deconstructed their faith because they had read Augustine or the Cappadocians, Aquinas, Luther or Calvin, Karl Barth or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, N. T. Wright or Brevard Childs.
We might be tempted to dismiss deconstruction as a cultural movement specific to North American revivalism and pietism that has nothing to do with the kind of historic Reformation Christianity represented here at Trinity: Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Presbyterianism. We may call ourselves Evangelicals, but we’re not that kind of Evangelical! I think that would be a mistake. (more…)
