Deconstructing the Constructed

                About a year and a half ago I stood in the inspirational section at Borders bookstore with a pile of books in my hand: Churched, Velvet Elvis, Adventures in Missing the Point, The Shack, How [not] to Speak of God, and Everything much Change. My cousin had just finished reading my memoir and called an emergency meeting to search for publishers of controversial Christian literature—one where she believed I should send my memoir to.

                “I stayed up ‘til three in the morning reading your book and it’s not because the book’s about you,” she had said about my memoir. “This is a really important book. I’m convinced that if you don’t publish a book like this, no one ever will.”

                At this point, I was getting a little uncomfortable. I didn’t know how good my writing was; I thought maybe she was putting me on because she’s my cousin and biased. My first drafts of my book had been crap. I knew I had improved as a writer, I just didn’t know how much.

                She pulled one more book off the shelf and stacked it on top of the pile of books I held. “Just be warned, I’m not going to let this go. You need to pursue publishing. A book like yours can’t sit unpublished in your sock drawer.”

                I took the top book and turned it over in my hand to check the copyright. “It says here that this book was published by Thomas Nelson Inc. That’s a big-name publishing house. Besides that, this book is a New York Times Bestseller. I’d be fooling myself to think that they’d actually want a book like mine.” I set the book back atop the pile and searched for a place to sit. “Publishing houses like this can afford publishing a controversial book. The smaller houses like the ones that would publish an unknown author would never take a chance on my book.”

                She pointed to the literature section. “There’re two chairs together over there if they’re not taken,” she said, but before I could go to where she pointed, she grabbed my arm, willing me to look at her. “I think you’re selling yourself too short. How could you know if a big publisher won’t take your book?”

                I sighed. “I’ve got a pretty good idea, okay? And if I go for a small publishing house and only sell 10 books, the ramifications for publishing my book would greatly outweigh the benefits.”

                The only action that came from that meeting with my cousin was not my vow to publish my memoir, but to make a $16.99 purchase of the book at the top of the pile: Blue Like Jazz.

                I read Blue Like Jazz in two days, after which I read The Shack. I loved both of the books and am now reading the other more weighty titles, and though they are overtly Christian, they hold the hint of controversy I was looking for at the time, something I had yet to find in Christian literature, thus beginning my exposure to what I now know is called the emerging conversation.

So on March 3^rd Jeremy and I decided to try a new church, a church more apt to entertain the emerging conversation, swearing that if this one didn’t work out, we would be finished with church, not finished with the pursuit of spirituality, mind you, but finished with institutionalized spirituality, one where the community of faith equaled more or less the commonality of beliefs. It’s not that Jeremy and I necessarily had bad experiences with church in recent years, but there always seemed to be this disconnect from our experiences and thoughts of God to what were others’ experiences and thoughts of God, which were of course the more widely accepted ways to go about Christian spirituality. We found that though we seemed to be accepted as a family into churches, our views were a little off, especially Jeremy’s, as Jeremy is by nature a more abstract thinker, which is one of the reasons why I love him so much. He is the catalyst for why I myself embarked on this journey to a different kind of spirituality—a more alluring an honest approach to what thoughts on God could be, one where every question or thought is given voice, and one where learning to sit with ambiguity is a strength and not a weakness.

                We walked into this church without knowing exactly what we were getting ourselves into. The message that day (Via Negativa) was one about apophatic theology (meaning negative theology, which is atheism at its core), or what is referred to as one of the four Christian mystic pathways to God, that is, the idea that one will be closer to knowing the nature of God by focusing on what God is not rather than what God is. If all we as believers do is sit around and name what God is, we end up limiting and putting boundaries on a being who we say is infinite, and in turn make that being finite. There’s this ancient rabbinic tradition which would say that to even speak the name of God would be to limit God. And so there’s this idea within this tradition that to name God by focusing on what God is, actually pulls one further away from the truth. Perhaps genuine faith is more likely to be constructed by the destruction of one’s presuppositions.  

                I think it’s highly possible that some readers of my blog get irritated with my writing, thinking I’m totally lost (which I am, I promise you). Some try to assure me that I’m on the right track and that I should simply drop the whole thing because I’m already there or that it really doesn’t matter. But there is something more important that I’m trying to accomplish. You see, I am not the type of person (like my husband) who becomes enthralled with books on philosophy or theology or whatever. It’s not that I don’t understand them, but it’s more accurate to say that I gain more from the discussions of theology and philosophy than by reading. Moreover, having a fan base (or perhaps an anti-fan base) through a blog forces me to ponder, and perhaps deconstruct, my presuppositions in order to become closer to the truth. I’m engaging in what is called the emerging conversation, and I’m inviting you to join in with me.

Testing the Limits of A-theism

             Someone told me recently that if I start rejecting bits and pieces of God’s Word (the Bible), for whatever reason, the whole foundation for answering any of my questions crumbles. The sentiment totally makes sense to me because it is, after all, the reason why I never thought to give my questions a voice from the time I was a little kid. I’m sure most people know someone who’s been brought up in a devout Christian faith, but once that person grew matured and started doubting any one piece of the structure, the whole foundation for his or her faith crumbled to the ground.

The thought of my faith crumbling to the ground terrified me so much that whenever I had a fleeting doubt, I’d shove it away as if I were trying to keep a wild animal out of my cabin in the big bad woods. This reaction worked for a long time. It was my defense mechanism to keep my faith safe and alive. As long as I could control my environment and stop cold the velocity and ferocity at which my doubts came, I was safe within this structure of my beliefs. If my doubts started biting and scratching away the structure, I’d rebuild it stronger and more rigid than it was before. And so, in that way, my faith became a faith that needed to be defended rather than lived out. Because a faith like the one I had needed to be defended in order to be kept alive.

Much of Christianity today is like that, isn’t it? I hear day after day, on the news, on the Christian radio stations, and wherever else that Christianity is under attack from every which way. “In God We Trust” is being considered to be taken off our currency. “Under God” has been taken out of our nation’s Pledge of Allegiance. Christians cannot pray in school. Science is progressing in a way that rejects a 6-day created, 10,000-year-old earth. Do you hear what I’m saying? Christianity is under attack! And so I wonder, why is it that I feel like something as personal as my faith needs to be defended? Is it the bad guys out in the big bad woods who are forcing me to defend it, or is it the structure itself that begs to be defended? And if it’s the structure that begs to be defended, why then do I believe that God is in that structure and that it is therefore God who needs to be defended? And if God needs to be defended, why would I believe in a god so weak that I, a mere mortal, need to defend it?

I don’t think God needs to be defended.

I wonder if I do believe that God is supreme, can God can handle if I doubt God? Do my questions, my doubts, my wresting, compromise God? I’ve turned down what I had once believed is a dangerous path, because whenever I start rejecting bits and pieces of this structure, when I take out that piece and turn it over in my hand to examine and re-examine it, just the fact that I removed that piece to examine it made the whole foundation crumble to the ground. And so I wonder, is this structure really what Christianity is about? As I grow, do I sit in Sunday school, then in youth groups, then in church and learn exactly how each piece fits in this giant puzzle, this structure that I must defend?

Let’s call this structure “theology.”

So I’ve turned down this road of examining my theology. There’s no place I can find to turn around, nor do I want to, because this path is so alluring to me. Now that I am here, where do I stop? Is there a point at which I should again shove away my questions, because if I don’t, my theology will be destroyed? At this point I wonder how important my theology is for me. I think about how exhausting it has been to try to live within my theology, and how when something unexpected has happened to me, testing one piece of my theology, my faith has totally crumbled to the ground.

I’ve heard it said recently that Christians were the first anti-theists, meaning that the biggest thing that set Jesus apart from other leaders in his day was that he chipped away at the structure of theology. So, in a sense, Jesus could be said to be the first a-theist. Countless times in the NT writings, Jesus was asked pointed questions by the leaders of his day and he dodged the questions, often answering their questions with more questions, ultimately committing to no concrete answer at all. And so I wonder again, how important is theology to me? What’s interesting to me is that, biblically speaking, I should test God. I should wrestle. I think about the story of Jacob wresting with the angel. All night Jacob wrestled, and then at daybreak, what was important was not who won, but that Jacob wrested with God. How many times have I been given a structure, a theology, only to swallow it whole, not questioning it, not doubting it, not wresting with it.

I think about how many people’s faith would be destroyed if tomorrow scientist discovered definitive proof that the earth is 3.9 billion years old. I think about how many people’s faith would be totally destroyed if they started to question whether or not it was an actual, physical snake who spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Recently, Jeremy and I had dinner with some acquaintances of ours. We get together maybe once a year if we’re lucky. Now, this couple is Jewish and incredibly educated, so I often feel like a little black bird perched under an eagle with a fresh kill, hoping that the eagle will drop some of the morsels down to my level so that I may partake of the same meal. I’d already been questioning for quite some time what makes my theology so special by comparison to others. I’d already been questioning my elitism, and so when this Jewish man said that he didn’t believe that Jesus was the Christ, I became intrigued. He said that even Jews who believe that the messiah is still to come believe that the messiah will be fully human and not fully God, so the idea that Jesus (or Ben Joseph, meaning son of Joseph) was born of a virgin makes absolutely no sense. It sounds like some distorted combination of Greek Mythology and contemporary Jewish ethics and tradition.

 If I test this one piece of the structure, will the foundation for my beliefs crumble to the ground? Will I lose everything that I’ve worked so hard to establish? The answer to my question is overwhelmingly, “yes.”

So I wonder once again; how important is theology to me?