The Coming Demise of Deconstructionism

I want to try an idea out because it is at the root of what I have been struggling with.

Eugene Peterson became a friend of mine before he was famous, and I have very often sought his wisdom and advice when I have reached one of those points in life where I am bewildered and like Robert Frost in his poem have two (or more) roads to choose from as I journey through the wood of life.

I was talking to him the other day and he mentioned that he had been doing a blurb for a new book by Tim Stafford that is soon to be published by InterVarsity. In it Stafford says that in our baptism we are given solidarity with all the baptized, the whole Body of Christ, whether it be the craziest off-the-wall evangelist who makes us cringe and want to curl up in a corner, or those on the left whose whole ministry seems to be a celebration of packaging the zeitgeist and then marketing it as if it were the faith. Those words have hung with me because the issues we are wrestling with in the church clearly have a sacramental flavor.

I confess that I hate being identified with some of the things with which I have been forced to be identified with because of my denominational background, but I am equally uncomfortable with dividing the church further. Like another friend with whom I have been in email correspondence recently, Kevin Martin, I once went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher In Jerusalem and saw there the epitome of nauseating division that is displayed to the world every day on the traditional spot of Christ's resurrection. Did we so learn Christ? Would I honestly be able to look myself in a mirror in the morning if I have done something to further divide the seamless garment of Christ?

Deconstructionism is by its very nature destructive, although deconstructionists deny this. Walter Truett Anderson, for example, one of the gurus of this flood in our culture, denies that there is anything negative or nihilistic about this mindset that is at the heart of so much postmodern thinking. However, I would honestly have to say that living amongst the damage done by the deconstructionist/reconstructionist mindset as it has incarnated itself in the church, Anderson is wrong. Not only does deconstructionism undermine the substance of the faith, but creates and environment that engenders a response from those with an impulse to orthodoxy that further rips and shreds.

When we break away from the whole that has been invaded (and even taken over) by deconstructionist thinking and attitudes, do we not allow ourselves to collude with those who have done the destroying and as a result further intensify these divisions? Radical individualism and fragmentation are hallmarks of a culture that is at war with itself because an innovative approach to doing, being, and thinking has been injected into it, and those of us who contest this progressive impulse in the wrong way are prone to respond in kind. Rather than countering the ideas that are doing the destroying, we walk away from the field being contested, circle the wagons, and shout epithets.

My wife has just come back from her latest battle with deconstructionism, this being in the field of literary criticism. She was told that she had written an excellent PhD dissertation by her supervisor and others at the University of London, but there seems to be one member of her panel who is blocking her degree because of her very traditional approach to literary criticism. What is interesting is that deconstructionist thinking has now peaked in academia, and her doctoral supervisor suggested that it is ironic that by holding to an older approaches to lit crit she has, in fact, become avant garde! Fancy, he told her last week, being withheld a doctorate because the old-fashioned is becoming fresh, new, and exciting.

What the literary world seems to be starting to discover is that deconstructionism is not something that has staying power for the long term. The Christian world is, I believe, going to discover exactly the same thing. The problem we have amongst those of us who affirm orthodoxy is that no one seems to have the patience to wait for God to justify himself and reveal his hand. In his Essay on Truth, Francis Bacon wrote, "What is truth said jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer." What I see with so many of our contemporaries is that they will not wait for that answer either.

While the waiting might be far longer than most Americans have patience for, I suspect that in terms of the flow of history we may not have to wait very long at all, a generation or two at the most. If I live as long as my father did (he died in his 86th year), then I suspect I will live to see this happen.