DOUBT, DECONSTRUCTION, & JESUS (Part 4): My Four Deconstructions
I have deconstructed some aspect of my faith multiple times in my life.
As a believer
As a student
As a pastor
As a sinner
The first three happened because of my questions.
The last one happened because of my failure.
The first three changed my view of God.
The last one changed my view of me.
The first three were intellectual chess.
The last was open-heart surgery.
This is my story of deconstruction, reconstruction, and renovation.
As a believer.
I was raised Evangelical, primarily Pentecostal. And I'm so grateful for my Pentecostal upbringing. So much of it was helpful - except for the part that wasn't.
I'm not blaming Evangelicalism or Pentecostalism, or later, Calvinism per se. I am blaming the combination of these faith structures and my personal wiring. It's like how in Romans 7 and 2 Corinthians 3 the apostle Paul says the Law of Moses brought death, but he doesn't blame the law - he blames the spiritual reaction between our sin and God's Law. It's like Coke and Mentos.
I was taught that when I became a Christian I was born again, made new, and indwelt by God's Spirit (all true!). So, I expected my desires would become godly, my habits would become holy, and my choices would become naturally righteous (not so true). Even better, I was assured that when I finally got "the Baptism of the Holy Spirit" with the evidence of speaking in tongues that I would be empowered even more to live a righteous life. I spent countless hours at altar calls pleading with God for the baptism of the Spirit and I encountered many well-meaning believers praying for me and even coaching me how to speak in tongues. But it never happened. What was wrong with me?! I thought.
I was also taught that God was a loving Father who wanted to answer our prayers. In fact, God promised that he would always answer our prayers if we prayed with strong enough faith. (For some corrective teaching on prayer, see this post here.)
I didn't receive (or didn't retain) enough teaching around the Bible's warning that our flesh can still be active in the life of a "saved" person, à la Romans 7 or Galatians 5:16-17. And I didn't realize that the case for the doctrine of "the Baptism of the Spirit as a second work of grace with the evidence of speaking in tongues" was not biblically strong (e.g., 1 Corinthians 12:30). So much time invested in trying to obtain what God may not have intended for me in the first place.
My faith was getting more complicated, and if I'm honest, more disappointing.
Eventually, when I was a young adult, I experienced a crisis of faith that almost ruined my capacity for believing altogether. Something dear to my heart that I prayed for and believed God was going to do fell to pieces. I questioned God's kindness and character, and eventually his existence. None of the promises of Christ were making sense to me any more.
I went to an older wiser friend of mine and poured out my heart, all my doubts and disappointments with God, and he listened to me cry and complain for a long time. I told him, through a lot of tears, that I was ready to give it all up and walk away from Jesus. And after I was done my rant, he had these sage words in response:
"Ya. I hear you. But what else are you going to believe?"
That was it? That was his best "talk me off the ledge" speech? Yes. And it was just what I needed to hear. I knew all the arguments for and against faith in Jesus. And I knew that leaving Jesus wouldn't clear up my doubts - they were coming with me wherever I went. (More about doubt in the next article.) So my friend simply helped me remember that, in a world of unsatisfying options, Jesus is the least unsatisfying.
Put THAT on a t-shirt.
This all reminds me of a conversation Jesus had with his disciples in John 6. Jesus has just finished teaching some scandalous things about eating his flesh and drinking his blood and it turns a lot of people off. So Jesus asks his disciples if they are going to leave him too. And Peter responds:
Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. ~ The apostle Peter (John 6:68)
That's it Peter. Where else are you going to go?
I continued to follow Jesus, but something broke in my faith after that. I was still a Christian, but I felt jaded. Like God somehow owed me since I put up with his crap and still followed him. (I'm just full of those t-shirt slogans today.)
As a student.
I had a lot of questions, about God and about myself. So after high school I went on to study psychology to figure myself out, and then theology to figure my faith out. I was using education as therapy. (Can I get a witness?)
Growing up Pentecostal, I'm sure I wore out a lot of youth pastors with my constant questioning. So at seminary it was basically a race for my brain - whoever got there first with answers to my plaguing questions - that worldview would win my loyalty. And while working on my Masters of Theological Studies, I was introduced to a system of Christian thought that gave me answers to a lot of my recurring questions: Calvinism (or Reformed Theology).
In brief, Calvinism is that school of thought that puts the emphasis on God's "sovereignty". And Calvinism used the idea of sovereignty to emphasize not only God's kingship, but also his full control over the events of history, including who is saved and who is damned.
The most important thing that can happen within this Calvinist framework is that God receives glory. Glory is a major theme within Reformed theology. And God gets glory both by showing how he can save and how he can condemn. His power is on full display that way. God choosing some people to go to hell makes the salvation of the elect even sweeter and the glory of God even more magnificent.
For instance...
"The end of our election is, that we may shew forth the glory of God in every possible way. (Exodus 14:4, 17, 18.) The reprobate are, indeed, the instruments of the glory of God, but it is said to shine in us in a very different manner." ~ John Calvin (Commentary on Isaiah 43:21)
"The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever." ~ Jonathan Edwards (The Eternity of Hell Torments, April 1739)
This was a new headtrip for me, better than all the drugs I had never tried. I believed I had chosen to follow Jesus, but really I was only choosing to follow Jesus because God had already chosen that I would choose to follow Jesus. Nothing was chance. No other wills could thwart God's will. Everything that happened was God's decreed will.
God makes all the decisions like a Potter working with clay (Romans 9:20-21). Even our decisions, our free will, happen as part of God's decree. So, unanswered prayer wasn’t because of my weak faith; it was God’s sovereign will. Ongoing sin wasn’t a broken promise; it was total depravity, which the system expects.
During my years at seminary I deconstructed my lifelong Pentecostal beliefs and fully embraced this new way of thinking. John Calvin had become my theological hero. He had a brilliant, mechanically exquisite mind and I wanted to learn all I could from his writings and his life.
That for me was a significant deconstruction and reconstruction of my worldview. I remained Christian, but a very different kind of Christian.
As a pastor.
At twenty-six years old, I became a senior pastor at a Baptist church. I qualified because, among other reasons, I was now a newly minted and very committed Calvinist.
And just like my continued appreciation for my Pentecostal background, I learned a lot of valuable things during my Baptist years that I still treasure. Like a deep appreciation for Scripture, clear-headed thinking, and theological precision. It was also in the Baptist church that I first learned a way of praying that made emotional sense to me - a way of praying I still use to this day. (I touch on that in this article here.)
But over time, doubt crept in.
I began to grow uneasy with one aspect of John Calvin's life: his belief that people should be killed for believing different religious ideas or being a different kind of Christian. In fact, most of the Protestant Reformers believed and taught this.
There is a lot of stuff in Jesus' teaching that I find challenging to understand - his bit about nonviolent enemy love isn't one of them. I began to wonder, if John Calvin and the other Protestant Reformers could be this wrong about an issue this important, maybe they could be wrong about other important things too.
This is a long quote taken from John Calvin's defence of the execution of the pronounced heretic Michael Servetus. The English is an old translation and difficult at places, but let the full impact sink in, as it did in me:
“Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt. This is not laid down on human authority; it is God who speaks and prescribes a perpetual rule for his Church. It is not in vain that he banishes all those human affections which soften our hearts; that he commands paternal love and all the benevolent feelings between brothers, relations, and friends to cease; in a word, that he almost deprives men of their nature in order that nothing may hinder their holy zeal. Why is so implacable a severity exacted but that we may know that God is defrauded of his honor, unless the piety that is due to him be preferred to all human duties, and that when his glory is to be asserted, humanity must be almost obliterated from our memories?” ~ John Calvin (Declaration of Orthodox Faith, 1554)
Our disagreement and disappointment with Calvin and other Reformers is not anachronism. We are not reading today's values into the past. We cannot soothe our hearts by saying, "Those were just the times. They didn't know any better." Because at that very same time many Christians were protesting this kind of Church-inspired violence. And many of them were killed for their protests, by other Christians.
"To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is to kill a man." ~ Sebastian Castellio (Contra libellum Calvini, written 1554)
So over the years as a Baptist pastor I slowly began to question my beliefs, including issues surrounding human free will, complementarianism (the belief that, among other things, women cannot be pastors), and my understanding of the importance of the nonviolent peace teachings of Jesus. Certain confident stances I had held since seminary began to become, well, less confident.
Then one day, my doorbell rang. And the conversation that followed started more of my mental dominoes tipping.
It was two Jehovah's Witnesses - a friendly husband and wife team. I invited them in, we cracked open our Bibles, and the Bible study we had that day turned into a more than two-year weekly routine. They thought they were converting me; I thought I was converting them; everyone was happy.
And here's the thing: whenever I felt like I was making a winning argument - about the Trinity, or the identity of Jesus, or salvation by grace alone through faith alone - they always had an ace up their sleeve: "You might be right Bruxy, but then again, your kind of Christianity used to think it was okay to kill people for the sake of God's heavenly kingdom, and you still think it's okay to kill people for the sake of your earthly kingdom. That doesn't sound like Jesus."
Dang. They had a point. I began to question Christianity's relationship with violence more than ever. The Just War theory that was and is popular among most Christians - I just couldn't justify it. But I also couldn't find any orthodox Christians who embraced the nonviolent peace-teaching of Jesus. The only friends I knew who believed Jesus taught nonviolence were the couple sitting in in my living room who belonged to what I considered a cult. So this didn't bode well.
Then eventually I discovered Anabaptism, and I knew I had found my forever home. Many of the original Anabaptists (also called the Radicals or the Radical Reformers) were students of the Protestant Reformers. The Protestants told them to study the Bible because it was the Word of God. And when they studied the Bible, they realized that it all pointed to Jesus. Anabaptists are so Jesus-centred in their faith, they interpret the rest of the Bible through a Jesus lens, which means his peace teaching is preeminent over all violent passages.
According to Anabaptists...
Jesus is not just another Bible character, but the whole point of the whole book.
Practically speaking, this view sees Jesus as God's final and fullest revelation of himself (John 1:18; 12:45; etc). Which means, whatever other information we get about God in the Bible, it all must be submitted to and viewed through Jesus. After all, we are Christ-ians, not God-ians or Bible-ians or Church-ians or Tradition-ians or Faith-ians or... you get the point.
And so, I deconstructed my Calvinism and much of my conservative Evangelicalism and I fully embraced Anabaptist thinking and living. I don't mean I became a conservative country Mennonite or urban Amish. The early Anabaptists were young radicals, willing to stand up against the status quo. And it cost many of them their lives, usually at the hands of other Christians. Over time, persecution drove them into living quiet, unassuming, insular lives. But the radical Anabaptist vision and spirit lives on. And I continue to be encouraged, inspired, and mentored by it.
As a sinner.
Then I screwed everything up. I failed myself and my Saviour, and I hurt everyone I loved. Being exposed as a hypocrite forced me to deconstruct the ultimate idol: my curated religious self-image.
I wasn't conscious of having a curated image, but of course we all do, and mine was epic. And now that I look back at that phase of my life, I am ashamed to think that I worshipped at the wrong altar.
I knew I was far from perfect, but I also believed I was still a pretty good person. At least I would never, could never, be that guy. And then I became that guy, and all bets were off as far as my self-understanding was concerned.
I became someone I couldn't recognize any more. I hurt everyone who trusted me. I abused the trust of my wife and family who deserved better from me. My failure had made me feel like some external force must be manipulating me. But I had to look inward and admit the painful truth: I had no one to blame but myself.
In Bible-nerd terms, I had slipped from Romans 8 and landed squarely back in Romans 7.
So my first three deconstructions dismantled my understanding of God.
This final deconstruction dismantled my understanding of myself.
Over these past few years, with the help of amazing sisters and brothers, therapists, pastors, family, and the best friends a guy could ask for, I'm tearing down idols and receiving my place again as a child of God and friend of Jesus.
So, as I look back over my life's deconstructions, I notice that Calvinism replaced my Pentecostalism, then Anabaptism replaced my Calvinism.
But what replaces a deconstructed religious self-image?
I'm thinking that the answer is not another, better self-image. Perhaps it's learning to stop depending on any curated self-image at all. Perhaps that's being "poor in spirit" - the very place Jesus starts his Sermon on the Mount.
And now even my relationship with the Bible itself has changed. I read it differently. I see things that I always knew in my head, but didn't experience in my heart.
Let me share some examples...
First, I used to find the Beatitudes boring. Seriously. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the gentle, the merciful, blah blah. I couldn't wait to get to the good stuff, the meaty stuff, the theologically rich stuff, the controversial stuff. And now? All of the Beatitudes, including and especially that opening line, go straight to my heart.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens. ~ JESUS (Matthew 5:3)
As someone who has lost everything because of self-inflicted wounds, I have become spiritually bankrupt. And I hear Jesus talking to me in a different way.
Second, When I used to read Romans 7 (the things I know I shouldn't do I keep on doing, etc), I used to think, "Man, that guy's screwed up". Now I just say "hello" to the man in the mirror.
And, with all my heart, I can't wait to get to Romans 8...
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. ~ The apostle Paul (Romans 8:1)
In seminary I had learned Martin Luther's line:
SIMUL JUSTUS ET PECCATOR
(At once righteous and a sinner)
It made sense in my head; now it makes sense in my heart.
Third, when I used to read the parable of the lost sheep (Matthew 18; Luke 15), I always had compassion for lost sheep, but I also always felt they were someone else. My takeaway was, "We should get out there alongside Jesus and look for lost sheep!" But when my world came crashing down, my thought about this parable was, "Please someone come and get me".
And now, finding other lost sheep, black sheep who, for whatever reason, feel like they are lost and need to find their way home, feels like my full-time passion.
Fourth, when I used to read the Parable of the Prodigal Son, I was compassionate toward prodigals, but I didn't see myself as one. I used to think, "We need to make room for prodigal sons and daughters!" Now I just think, "I need to go home".
Fifth, when I read the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14), I think I actually used to pray something close to, "Lord, I thank you that I don't have to go through what those people are going through. Thank you for giving me a good, righteous, and blessed life." Sigh. I still thank God for my blessed life, but that's because he has been merciful to me, the sinner.
Sixth, when I read David complaining about the heavy weight of his sins, I used to think, "What a whiny wiener."
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. ~ King David (Psalm 51:3)
When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer. ~ King David (Psalm 32:3-4)
Because of your wrath there is no health in my body; there is no soundness in my bones because of my sin. My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear. ~ King David (Psalm 38:3-4)
Now I just read these and breathe a quiet "Amen".
And lastly, when I used to read the many New Testament references to wanting Jesus to return soon, I would think: "Just hold on Jesus, I'm enjoying my life too much for you to shut things down already."
He who testifies to these things says, “Yes, I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. (Revelation 22:20)
Now, as I struggle not to jump the gun and try to get to heaven ahead of schedule, I can at least agree with statements like this one. Amen. Come Lord Jesus!
In all of this, the Bible hasn't changed. I've changed. My role in the stories of the Bible has changed. And I'm reading it all with new eyes. And wow - the stories Jesus told, the prayers David prayed, the emotions early Christians felt - they have all come alive to me.
I feel like I have ears to hear the Gospel as though it was being shared with me for the first time. And it's really good news. Life-saving, actually.
And yet, even with a renovated faith, there’s an old companion that still rides shotgun with me everywhere I go: doubt. And that’s where we’re going in the next article.
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