Is deconstruction a bad word?
Written by Mark Van Steenwyk : November 16, 2007
Somehow the comments in a conversation about Hell have moved towards the topic of deconstruction. The conversation was interesting enough, it seemed to me, to warrant its own post.
Here’s our conversation thus far (please comment with your own thoughts).
Sighing deeply, Mark grumbled:
…why is “deconstruction” a bad word for so many people? Deconstruction is a healthy and helpful thing, if understood the right way. You could say Jesus deconstructed the Law in the Sermon on the Mount.
Pausing for effect, Matt Stephens retorted:
I see deconstruction and critical inquiry as separated by motive. Deconstruction is, I believe, helpful and indeed necessary when its object is worthy (or at least potentially worthy) of being dismantled. I believe the concept I proposed is worthy of critical analysis, but my assertion is that it is true and that we ought to seek to understand how it might be true rather than automatically attack it as if it weren?t.
BTW, in my understanding, Jesus was deconstructing not Torah, but Torachic interpretation which had (wrongly) come to be synonymous with Torah. He does this throughout the Gospels when he says, “You have heard it said,”–by the religious teachers, that is, not the word of God.
With a sinister twinkle in his eye, Mark replied:
Deconstruction isn’t something that one does to false things and not true things. It is something we should do to all ideas. It doesn’t need to be understood destructively. It is a way of taking things apart to look at the inner workings. So, hell is definitely worth deconstructing: to understand my own assumption, to understand the biblical assumptions, to peel back the layers of the doctrine to get at the dynamic truth of what hell is–and is not.
Jesus’ treatment of the Torah goes way deeper than simply challenging the popular ways of reading the Torah–he changes everything without destroying the Torah–he deconstructs the Torah. He does away with violence, he does away with eye-for-eye. This is more than just “you don’t understand the words of the Torah.” Jesus is reclaiming the Torah and reinterpreting it in new and frightening ways. Because the Torah was written to those that are hard of hearts and now, Jesus will write the Law on those hearts and there is no longer any need to bow to stipulations. That is deconstruction at its most profound.
With dictionary in hand, Ryan reasoned:
de·con·struc·tion (d?’k?n-str?k’sh?n) Pronunciation Key
n. A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings (from dictionary.com)
So the idea of deconstruction is borrowed from literary theory. How has it been applied to Christianity and the Bible?
I think the key verb in this definition is “questions.” Some people claim we have no right to question the Bible, but look at how gracious Jesus was to “doubting” Thomas. I think God honors those who humbly approach him with questions, or even doubts, prepared to forsake the comfortable answers, and to accept troubling answers, mysterious answers, or no answers, so long as they come from God.
The reason I named our church plant “The Core” is because I believe each generation is called to deconstruct the work of its forebears, and understand the heart of the gospel for themselves. But Matt is right, it’s all about motives. If your goal is to deconstruct what man has made, to get closer to God, and the re-construct on his own foundation, then you are pleasing him. However, if your goal is to deconstruct God’s own message, and build your own foundation in place of his, then you are guilty of pride and idolatry.
What do you think?
By the way, I’ve created a related forum topic called “Which Doctrines are Non-Negotiable?” Check it out.
for further reading . . .
- None Found
Christarchy! is a growing network of small groups for people who want to put the ethical teachings of Jesus into practice.
Submergent is a network of leaders who, embracing the Anabaptist impulse, are living into the Kingdom of God in a postmodern, post-colonial, post-Christian world. Together, we will re-baptize the Christian imagination!
Anchored in the West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis, Missio Dei is committed to following Jesus' way of peace, simplicity, prayer, and hospitality.
The Missio Dei Breviary includes morning and evening prayers for one month. Edited (and freely shared) by Missio Dei, it draws primarily upon the Gospels, reflects Anabaptist convictions, and emphasizes missional commitment.
I’m not sure I can draw the line between what constructs are man-made and which are God-made in Scripture. I’m not sure a line can be drawn. It isn’t as though some truths in the Bible are “universal” while others are “cultural.” All of Scripture is cultural. I’m not sure we can get at what the Spirit of God is saying in and through the text apart from doing some deconstruction.
After all, it is the Spirit that is authoritative, not the words on the page. And all words, as suggested in the definition you gave, have meanings determined by other words.
I think we have to deconstruct the words of the Bible in order to find the truth of the Bible. Otherwise it is a dead document.
Deconstruction… First off, it is primarily a philosophical thing that the Anglo-American philosophical establishment has misunderstood and ridiculed, but the literature departments have gobbled it up without understanding it well either. So, right off the hop, deconstruction as “literary theory” is already a good step away from what Derrida was writing. Of course, he would say that this is unavoidable and would not try to “purify” people’s understanding of his texts.
The problem with deconstruction is that people tend to take it only just so far. In a particularly American way, most deconstructionists don’t call their own radical individualism into question, which is precisely what deconstruction does in the hands of its lively practitioners such as Derrida and Caputo. They turn deconstruction into an arrogant way of proving everyone else wrong rather than turning it on their very cherished notions of selfhood and individuality.
Deconstruction is more about the other than the self, of clearing away the mental cruft that makes us unable to welcome and recognize the other. Deconstruction sees that trying to “nail things down” and to “grasp” things tends towards violence (as those metaphors of objectivity show) and therefore simply points out that inquiry is still open; that anyone saying that we have arrived at truth (or justice, or democracy, or …) is laughable.
I fail to see how this account of deconstruction is anything other than completely consonant with the life and teachings of Jesus.
Sorry, after re-reading my previous comment, I realized that I had an misplaced pronoun in the last sentence of the second paragraph. They “they” there should not be referring to Caputo and Derrida, but rather to those who do not question radical individualism.
I think for the most part my thoughts on this matter will come out as I discuss What Would Jesus Deconstruct? over at Absolution Revolution.
I will say that deconstruction was never intended to be relegated to literary theory. As it pertains to literary theory, deconstruction is intended to reveal the tenuousness of the relationship between language and meaning and explore the ways language actually creates the world we inhabit. It’s a sort of philosophical child, if you will, of Levinas’ ethical expression of phenomenology.
As Derrida says in Caputo’s Deconstruction in a Nutshell, deconstruction is not about saying “no” to the world, but rather it is about saying “yes” - and not only “yes”, but “yes, yes”. It is about stripping away the baggage with which a commitment has been burdened in order to be faithful to the commitment itself. Or, as Caputo says in What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, deconstruction is a theory of truth, in which truth spells trouble - trouble to the established order, trouble to the ways our language games and reality constructs have taken the dynamic reality of things and constrained it into a framework. By that reading, then, deconstruction as a kind of negative dialectic is not a relativizing of all truth or a destruction of truth, but rather a strategy of “reversal” meant to expose the contingency of what we like to call the Truth with a capital-T.
Caputo goes on to say “while deconstructors have made important gains exposing the hypocrisy of temporal and contingent claims that portray themselves in the long robes of Eternal Verity, it is also necessary to point out that deconstruction is at the same time a hermeneutics of truth, of the truth of the event, which is not deconstructible.”
He also says deconstruction is not something a person does, but rather something an interpretation does to itself - deconstruction is more like auto-deconstruction, or as Caputo says “it happens in the middle voice”.
Regarding deconstruction and the church, I think a primary purpose to deconstruct our theological constructs (and I hope it would be primarily the Spirit that facilitates deconstruction) would be to lessen the impact of our own constructs as we seek to experience the story of Jesus and the church, the fulfillment of Israel’s story and the agent through which God has redeemed/is redeeming the world. Of course, we don’t have access to the “event” itself, but only to interpretations of the event - the interpretations of scripture, but since scripture is pluralistic (there is more than one account of the story of Jesus and, while they are not irreconcilable there is tension in the narratives - tension that I believes points to the truth of the person of Jesus) it is not as if we have to depend on a monolith for our understanding of the story. Indeed, scripture deconstructs us and our constructs and practices.
It should be noted that deconstruction is a precursor to reconstruction - something is deconstructed so the event can be expressed in the now in a way that is more faithful to the event itself, instead of primarily flowing out of a later construction based on the event.
I’m seeing this all over my post on Ecclesiastes, and I really didn’t have deconstruction that firmly in mind when I wrote that.
I’ve started my discussion of the book proper in my series on What Would Jesus Deconstruct? if anyone is interested.
Shalom!
Deconstructionism as just described deconstructs itself when it comes to intersecting reality. I’ve always perceived that the aversion to “grasping” Truth decisively leads to purely emotion-based (or, worse yet, purely instinctual) decision-making in praxis.
Maybe Emergents just haven’t taken their philosophy far enough, but I see the Emergent movement (a) entertaining theological inquiry, but (b) maintaining just action as the primary goal of both the individual and corporate life. They grasp awfully tightly to certain values (openness, ‘humility’, justice, reconciliation, equality, etc.) and vigorously resist other values (authority in general, dogma, gender complementarity, etc.).
Deconstruction is then seen as the only absolute, a critique not infrequently levied by people like myself who recognize and submit to the authority of the written word of Scripture by faith, “the certainty of what is hoped for, the assurance of things unseen.”
It does deconstruct itself, this is the so-called “deconstructive paradox” that was widely observed by philosophers in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s (and was seized upon incessantly by people who felt they needed a way to easily dismiss it, as did a lot of Christians who pointed out the “there are no absolute truths” paradox). It is not entirely unrelated to a similar phenomenon in Nietzsche’s philosophy, wherein he claims that all statements are perspectives, rather than absolutes themselves. He is certainly correct in a sense, but the only way to make a statement on this is to make it from a perspective. However, instead of considering it a refutation of his point, he said “So much the better for my point.”
I kind of feel the same way about deconstruction - in fact, I tend to think the way we formulate knowledge systems in general involves a certain amount of circularity - the concept of the hermeneutic circle. Now some people do actually take that to mean “there are no absolutes” in a sense that leads to relativism, and (especially in the world of literature) some, even several people, use deconstruction as a guise under which to maintain essentially an alternative foundationalism, while in the name of Derrida maintain that they are actually doing deconstruction. They’re not, if they were doing deconstruction they would first apply its methodology to their own preconceptions and ideology, and not simply to that which they oppose.
I very much disagree with the notion that deconstruction leads to emotion-based or “instinctive” decision-making (while admitting that many people go this route in the name of Derrida - though I fail to see how that is different from people who went that route in the name of Rousseau or Kierkegaard). If you want an excellent inquiry into a non-foundationalist theology that is quite rigorous (and that I think more people, both “emergent” and “mired in the pitfalls of modernism” should pay attention to), pick up Stan Grenz and John Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism.
I don’t think it’s so easy to sum up the emerging movements as you do, but most of the emergent gatherings I’ve seen and participated in have had a strong emphasis on maintaining the identity of the church as the Body, the identity of the individual as a part of the body, and our actions as flowing from that identity. I’m sure not all of them are like that (and I strongly question your inclusion of gender complementarity as a Christian value). I have my own questioning of authority (I’m an anarchist for crying out loud), but I do tend to think the postmodern/emerging tendency to suspect authority is at least partially based on a modern sense of individualism, so I have my issues with that - seems to me to just be liberalism in new clothing (as do other things I’ve seen in emerging circles, don’t get me wrong).
I would never say deconstruction is the only absolute or even an absolute. Jesus is. But our relationship with him is not based on some kind of unassailable, foundational principle - it’s based on the fact that he was and is a living person with whom we can have a relationship. I would say it’s not even based on the scripture so much as it’s mediated through the scripture - the foundation of faith is not the scripture, it is Jesus. And deconstructing the modern-influenced lenses through which we perceive scripture to help us more clearly see Jesus can only (IMO) be a good thing.
Jason,
Your thoughts are helpful and worth exploring. Thanks for the book recommendation.
See my recent Call to a New Ecumenical Hermeneutic for the status of my thoughts tangential to this conversation.
Recently, taking Derrida and trying to make him into a Christian has been all the rage (see James K. Smith “Taking Derrida et al to Church” and Carl Raschke’s “The Next Reformation”). I’m not implying that Derrida is a hellion bent on destroying the Church proper, but to make “deconstruction” into a Christian thing is only possible if we really make “deconstruction” into something other than what it is in Continental Philosophy circles. In my opinion, what Mark is doing here is not really in line with a Derrida or Nietzsche. Having a healthy dose of skepticism and reexamining our understandings of doctrine and biblical interpretation is one thing. But making the claim that “religion is all about texts” and then deciding that “all we have are texts,” which only point to more illusory texts, is another thing all together. “Deconstruction” is hopelessness with a French accent in my opinion. It has done some good for the Church, but let’s not baptize it. A more hope-filled hermeneutic is more in line with the Jesus manifesto.