"To say that Rachel Held Evans and Nadia Bolz-Weber were important to me at the time would be an understatement. When I discovered Rachel’s blog, I was furiously sorting through the rubble of my deconstructed worldview. The more I read from and about Rachel and Nadia, the more I began to believe in the church and also in this emergent, progressive, different kind of Christianity. Over time, I began to reconstruct my faith—but it was a fragile faith, and admittedly, it rested in their hands. Once it became clear that they had no intention of apologizing and making things right, I knew I was done."1
Sean: There's lots going on in this article, and I don't want to diminish the grief people are feeling around abuse of leadership, but I've found myself reflecting on this paragraph from the author's personal narrative. It's interesting how she had "rested" her faith in the hands of Christian leaders and was “done” when the leaders gave reason for disappointment. This is concerning ... I’d suggest that this person has been discipled into a kind of idealism that's managed to survive the deconstructive process.
- idealism
- disillusionment
- redirected idealism
- unbelief
There’s a pattern here. And notice: Jesus is nowhere to be found in the story …
One of the problems with this practice of “deconstruction” is that it is treated as a prelude to “reconstruction”. That makes it something very different than what Derrida and co. meant by it. Deconstruction for him/them was about revealing and teasing out internal contradictions to a structure of meaning rather than leveling things to the ground. What "ex-vangelicals" are calling “deconstruction” seems more related to Cartesian doubt (cf. René Descartes - 1596-1650) than deconstruction in the classic sense. It’s a return to early modernity rather than an embrace of postmodernity.
Brad: Yes. I guess we need to admit that the current use of the term has as little to do with Derrida as the term gay has to do with joviality. Sixty years on, usage does determine meaning. But this is right where we need to apply Derridean deconstruction to the assumptions of the new usage.
Sean: I think that's right. Of course, terms can change over time, but the current popular practice is difficult to square with the classic one. Again, it’s more about Descartes than Derrida. In Discourse on Method, René Descartes recounts how he had practiced a kind of radical doubt in the interests of absolute certainty. It is a kind of certitude that is wrapped in notions of predictability and safety. That’s how many people are practicing “deconstruction.”
Brad: So even the goal (certitude) was off. And the means to that goal (radical doubt). The modernist lust for certitude. The current herd thinks they’re letting go of certitude while still desperate for it (as over against radical trust).
Sean: That seems to be part of the story at least. Derrida notes in "Structure, Sign and Play" that philosophers up to and including Nietzsche and Heidegger try to anchor their philosophies in some transcendental idea or concept. He accuses even the proto-postmoderns of “metaphysical thinking”. This is what deconstruction is about—revealing the internal contradictions. And rather than paving the way to "reconstruction" it basically reveals that we are bricoleurs or practitioners of bricolage.
Brad: What does he mean by that?
Sean: Imagine Robinson Crusoe washed up on the beach making use of anything he’s got on hand—the leftovers of previous systems and structures that no longer apply in exactly the same way in the current circumstances… That’s the spirit of bricolage.
Bricolage comes from the world of art and is closely related to rhetorical invention. Robinson Crusoe didn’t fret about the meaning things had in a different place and time. He got on with using them in his current circumstances. In bits and pieces--innovating and improvising, sometimes in ways that would’ve conflicted with earlier structures and systems.
Deconstruction in the classic sense can help us get to that place. We don’t have to worry about stock monolithic institutions and methods, worrying about which one is right and which one is wrong. We can discern the bits and pieces at hand and their use for thriving, given what’s been revealed.
There’s a risk built into this. It’s not easy to get everything right from the outset. So it goes with adventures. We need to find ways of being faithful ourselves and helping others to do the same but there may come a time when we run into difficulties and find ourselves disappointed or even disillusioned, and we should be wary of blaming an entire system or structure for these crises as if those systems and structures could have ever delivered. This is the risk of life within the church and beyond the church.
Of course, systems and structures can be improved upon and reformed, and that can be really important work. Please don't hear me saying that systemic problems aren’t worth correcting. Still, the goal isn’t to perfect the systems and structures such that we can finally be safe/secure in ourselves and our sense of identity. What we’re after is the abundant life that Jesus promised—a life that constantly arises from crisis ...
What’s interesting to me is that so many people undergoing “deconstruction” in the popular sense tend to be oriented to theology as system, hermeneutics as method, church as institution, etc., rather than faith in the living God via Jesus. You don’t hear folks who are deconstructing or reconstructing talk about Jesus.
Here's more from Derrida on bricolage from the same essay I refer to above:
“The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses 'the means at hand,' that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous—and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself… If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.”2
On this basis, the Sermon on the Mount would be bricolage. So too the parables. So all of Jesus’ teaching. Paul and the apostles too. And let’s add the church fathers … Something shifts in the so-called scholastic age with the great summas … There was this effort to systematize according to method in the interests of mastery and that instinct gets carried into the Enlightenment.
You’d expect more people to become comfortable with bricolage if they were really practicing Derridean deconstruction rather than Cartesian doubt.
All that to say, I'm with you. We need more Derrida—not only that we might learn a healthier practice of deconstruction but also that we’d become more self-aware bricoleurs.
NOTES
1. Caroline Ann Morris, "Why I Don't Care about Nadia Bolz-Weber's New Book," Women in Theology (Feb. 15, 2021). https://womenintheology.org/2019/02/15/why-i-dont-care-about-nadia-bolz-webers-new-book/?fbclid=IwAR2znc7lOsuZiYxyHkAGa4a9jIKA8Kgnpy5b-rbAvrI78fRE3PqurYG0N5g
2. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”1 (1970). http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f13/DrrdaSSP.pdf.
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