Beyond Deconstruction: Seventh Term

Many deconstructors find a new way forward by re-constructing their faith from the ground up, slowly, carefully laying one brick on another until they form a Christian faith that they find consistent with Jesus and what the church should and can be (all over again). I don’t know the numbers of those who move through a deconstruction phase to find reconstruction. I don’t know if it is a majority or a minority. What I’m providing in this series is a look at how some are reconstructing and what bricks are laid and can be laid to rebuild.

Photo by Ansh Bhagania on Unsplash

Here are the bricks we have lined up:

Jesus

Justice

Model or Exemplary Lives

Salvation reworked

Friendships leading to fellowship

Honesty

Today we look at another term: Humility.

I could mention many names but we don’t need to. There is a cocksuredness about many evangelical leaders that turns many totally off. I’m a professor and we’re supposed to be knowledgeable about our field – mine is NT studies – but we know from our knowing that we don’t know jacksquat about other fields, including OT and church history and systematics and pastoral theology and liturgics. I could go on, but you get the idea of specialization. Those who have specialized can know tons about their field and be totally ignorant about other fields.

Some preachers give off more than a whiff of knowing everything about everything. They know Genesis 1-2 and they know the law and they know David and they know Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jesus and the Gospels and Paul and Peter and James and Hebrews and Revelation and Irenaeus and Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and Luther and Wesley and Edwards. They know science and sociology; they know politics and economics; they know the inner motives of governors and politicians. They know what Dallas needs and what NYC needs; they know what our nation needs; they know what England needs; they know what Mexico needs; and they know what Israel needs.

They think their theological knowledge approaches the scientific certainty of Enlightenment mentalities. Mark Dooley said of science what some have transferred into the pulpiteering. He said, “The hubris which leads us to believe that science has the answer to all our questions, that we are nothing but dying animals and that the meaning of life is merely self-affirmation, or at best the pursuit of some collective, all-embracing and all-too-human goal - this reckless superstition contains already the punishment of those who succumb to it.”

They converse with a cocksure confidence that turns people off. And they clearly don’t know that. Those who know have learned what they don’t know too. (Lots.)

Marilynne Robinson catches our attention with these words: “I have never heard anyone speculate on the origins and function of irony, but I can say with confidence that it is only a little less pervasive in our universe than carbon.”

Many of us were alive and well and interested in the emerging church days. I was and I enjoyed those conversations. One of the most significant thinkers I read in those days was Lesslie Newbigin. As he wrote in his important study Proper Confidence, in coming to faith “There is no possibility of the kind of indubitable certainty that Descartes claimed …. There is no insurance against risk. We are invited to make a personal commitment to a personal Lord and to entrust our lives to his service.” Personal knowledge of a personal Lord is not certaintist, cocksure claims to knowing everything but instead a kind of knowing that finds confidence in the Lord Jesus – who he is, what he teaches, what he reveals about God – but that kind of proper confidence simultaneously unmasks our unknowing. Newbigin, as P.D. James said, was “spared that braying, offensively upper-class voice which it took centuries of arrogance and insensitivity to develop.”

Not all have been spared.

Faith is not science. Faith transcends logic as love transcends calculations. Faith is not statistics but a relationship with God that over time makes one wise, not certain. Faith that knows God has a kind of confidence, again what Newbigin called a proper confidence, the kind of confidence appropriate to the kind of knowing involved in knowing God.

Reconstructors respond to the wise; they are walking away from the overly confident.

Reconstructors that I have talked with over the years want leaders who know the Lord personally but who have learned what they don’t know. They want leaders who admit their doubts, who know that developments in knowledge require listening, learning and shifting.

They want Christian leaders who know what they know in the way they should know it, and that means they also know what they don’t know.

They admit it. Often.

I remember asking one of the finest scholars of Greek I have ever known how many languages he knew. His response was, “I’m working still on English.”

Not knowing compels us to know that only God knows all, and we can let God be the only One who knows it all.

Everybody else is like the bird at the edge of the nest with a parent dipping morsels into its mouth.