Taken apart

Many today name their disorientation with a single word: deconstruction. It is the taking-apart of an inherited faith, the deliberate examining of each belief that was once simply handed over, often by people who were themselves wounded by the very hands that handed it to them. The process is genuinely disorienting, and it ought not be met with a sneer, because much of it begins in real pain. Where it ends, though, varies enormously, and that is worth seeing clearly. Some who take their faith apart are doing the work of a refiner, and some are simply lighting a fire and walking away from the ash. Job, in the depth of his own undoing, named the hopeful possibility. He could not see what God was doing and would not pretend that he could, yet he said: He knows the way that I take; when He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold. There is a deconstruction that is really a refining fire, and its purpose is not destruction but purity. It burns off what was never gold to begin with, the additions and distortions and the wounds dressed up as doctrine, so that what is true can emerge from the flame tested, clarified, and at last trustworthy.

If you are taking your faith apart right now, questioning what you were taught and unsure what, if anything, will be left standing, you are in a deeply disorienting wilderness, and you are far from alone in it. There is no use being told to stop, and little point in being shamed for asking; the questions are already real. But there is a question worth asking back, and it is the one that matters most: what is the fire for? A refining fire and a fire that merely consumes can look almost identical while they burn. The difference is in their aim. Job believed his testing would leave gold behind, not a heap of ash; he was looking, even in the dark, for what would survive. Let your own deconstruction be that kind of fire, a refining that genuinely seeks the true and the trustworthy, rather than a dissolving that has quietly decided in advance that nothing will be left. The honest taking-apart of a faith can be the very thing that delivers a faith worth keeping. He knows the way you are taking, even now, even here, especially here.