Shall the Dust Praise Thee?
A new book on #deconstruction misses the mark as apologetics, but raises interesting questions for the convinced.
Review by Charlie Clark
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.
Why did some practitioners of Judaism in the Second Temple period come to believe in the resurrection of the dead? The gospels indicate that the resurrection was a subject of ongoing debate by the time of Jesus. On the one hand, we might say that the belief in resurrection emerged the way all true beliefs emerge: through revelation from the one God. But why was the doctrine relevant at all; what question rendered its answer intelligible? On this point, we can—drawing upon a wealth of others’ biblical scholarship—offer some explanation.
With respect to theological belief, the Jewish people were the elect, the chosen people of the only true God. Through their obedience to His Law and through His blessing them with security and prosperity, God would make the Jewish people the greatest of all peoples, and all the non-Jewish peoples would joyfully submit to the Jewish people’s leadership and thus to the one God, establishing justice and peace, repairing the brokenness of the world. But with respect to historical fact, the Jewish people were the remnant of a short-lived independent kingdom, which had spent most of its existence internally divided, a client of successive pagan empires, then been carved up and its tribes carried away into exile, some never to return.
How to reconcile the theology with the history? First, the writers of the Old Testament commonly attribute the Jewish peoples’ defeats—military, political, or economic—to their unfaithfulness to the Law. God withholds His blessing to encourage their obedience. But then, if the Jewish people remain unfaithful and unblessed, isn’t God Himself defeated? How to account for the apparent broken promise, the apparent failure of God’s plan for the repair of the world? And even if the Promised Land were to be reached someday, where did that leave all the generations who, as it were, died in the wilderness along the way? What good was God’s promise to them?
There were diverse approaches to answering these questions, but one influential approach was to affirm that the Jewish people were indeed the elect of the one God and that the one God would indeed repair the world through them, and furthermore, that this repair would extend to raising from the dead those who had not lived to see it accomplished. The resurrection, the restoration of all things, would be the true return from exile, the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise.
As comforting (and true) as a belief in future resurrection may have been to its writers, in reading the Old Testament, one should not lose sight of the agony of the question (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) that resurrection answers. The anguish of the apparent failure would have been far more present, far more tangibly real, than the promise of restoration. The defeat inflicts infinitely more anxiety for its supposed impossibility. It could lead one to despair.
They have little comfort to offer for those whose formerly Christian children will not, in this life, stop voting Democrat and return to the fold.
Like the Old Testament, The Deconstruction of Christianity is addressed to people who find themselves in a situation that—according to their own worldview—Should Not Be Possible. It opens with a vignette from co-author Childers’s life on the Christian conference circuit: “I was approached by an elderly couple with downcast faces…. ‘Our son deconstructed. He isn’t a Christian anymore…. We brought him up as a Christian, raised him in church. We taught him to love God and his Word. We thought we’d done everything right.’” Childers and her co-author Barnett are explicit that people like this elderly couple are the audience for their book. A few pages later, they drop into the second-person, “Perhaps you, like so many, have someone in your life who is going through a process of deconstruction or who is being tempted to deconstruct their faith. Maybe you are experiencing heartbreaking loss and confusion, and are desperate for a lifeline. You are why we wrote this book.”
I begin my discussion of The Deconstruction of Christianity with the question of audience, because while Childers and Barnett do devote some of their book to arguing with “deconstructionists” and “exvangelicals”—both terms for people who formerly practiced evangelical Christianity but who have either migrated to progressive Christianity or ceased to identify as Christians altogether—I don’t believe that they are truly engaged in apologetics. They have clearly spent enough time consuming #deconstruction content on social media (The authors constantly reference blogs, tweets, Instagram posts, TikToks, and memes, sometimes resorting to graphic descriptions like “Harris posted a picture of himself pensively staring out over a serene lake, surround by beautiful ice-capped mountains…” or “After more quick cuts and quotes from these deconstructionists, the voice of Jeremy Camp is heard…”) to understand that their arguments are unlikely to convince anyone who has made the turn to identifying as an #exvangelical themselves.
For example, responding to the charge that evangelicalism is compromised by its “identification and partisanship with political and social conservatism,” they double down, explaining that “Limited government reflects the biblical teaching that humans are inherently sinful.” Later, discussing “difficult questions” on “hot-button issues,” they write, “Unfortunately, some professing Christians aren’t interested in answers that contradict their personal preferences. Questions about salvation, sexuality, gender, and abortion all have answers that aren’t theologically complicated.” These positions are, to put it mildly, not calculated to persuade outsiders. That’s because what Childers and Barnett are doing isn’t apologetics; it’s theodicy.
“Maybe you feel guilt and shame over your failures. Maybe you feel that if you had just done more, said more, or been a better example, this wouldn’t be happening. We want to help you with that.” Like the Jewish people living under successive Persian, Seleucid, and Roman occupations, the Christian parents to whom Childers and Barnett are writing are mystified by God’s failure to deliver on his promise. Whatever happened to “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it”? Their confusion is only deepened by the particular claims of their evangelical tradition, especially the sufficiency and perspicacity of the Scriptures. How can someone deny the truth of God’s Word when it’s right there in black and white (and red), right in front of their faces?
Undoubtedly, there is some truth in the answers Childers and Barnett offer to this question (mostly variations on “The devil uses postmodernism to get you to reject the correspondence theory of truth; your sinful desires do the rest.”) and some of their practical advice is thoroughly sound (make space for questions at church, be willing to say, “I don’t know,” etcetera). But what they fail to offer their audience is anything on the order of the hope for the resurrection of the dead. They’re not uncompassionate people: “we aren’t writing this book merely with weapons drawn. We are writing it with broken hearts as we watch people walk away from eternal life.” But they have little comfort to offer for those whose formerly Christian children will not, in this life, stop voting Democrat and return to the fold.
I confess to having little exposure to #deconstruction qua social-media phenomenon. (I minimize my exposure to all social-media phenomena.) I admit that from what I’ve seen of deconstruction in Childers and Barnett’s book, it looks not all bad but mostly bad—intellectually flimsy and frequently mean. But I would offer those in deconstruction, as well as their friends and family, three words of consolation. First, that just because you’ve given up on God, perhaps God is not forced, compelled, required to give up on you. Second, that even if your progressive Episcopalian daughter (or reactionary Southern Baptist mother) has some false beliefs mixed in with her true beliefs, perhaps they are, even now, not beyond the reach of God’s grace. Third, that—as Christians or former Christians—perhaps we should not be surprised if, in order to be born again, new life must pass through something very like a death.
