By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames. (1 Corinthians 3:10-15)

Today, we’re talking about deconstruction. The term has been around in a popular form for a while, but over the last five years, and especially since COVID, it’s really taken off.

Most people or most of us, when we use the term aren’t using it like the academics. That is, to refer to the post-modern philosophical work of Jacques Derrida that sought to get behind the context and structure of texts, language, and the assumptions of the Western world.

I think more people are latching onto the term in a popular sense, to describe a journey of questioning their assumptions and beliefs in questions like this: How does one know what’s true? How do we know if there is a God? What about race, power, privilege, gender, and sexuality? How can we trust institutions, including the church, that repeatedly let us down because of things like broken promises, their defence of injustice and inequality, and these ever-present scandals of abuse?

There are a lot of doubts that arise these days stemming from just these sorts of questions. And, perhaps that’s why I’ve been hearing this term “deconstruction” around a lot more in the last few months from pretty much anyone and everyone under the age of 40.

It can feel like this is a new phenomena in the church and the Christian faith. It can feel like people are tearing down the foundations of everything that holds up their faith, world, and notions of the truth. And that’s a scary, isolating feeling.

But, I don’t think this notion of deconstructing one’s faith is necessarily a new idea. Christians have been doing it since the beginning. In the past it’s been called by names like “doubt,” or perhaps even better, “the dark night of the soul.” A time when everything in our faith seems to get stripped, or burned away, as Paul says it in 1 Corinthians. It can feel like even we ourselves might get swept away in the inferno as the walls of our beliefs and institutions collapse.

But there’s a promise hidden in this passage, and it’s been echoed by long centuries of Christian experience in those dark nights of the soul. And it’s this: that even if everything in our faith and world was constructed with shoddy forms, heretical beliefs, and abusive leaders and influencers. Even so, at the end of the deconstruction or burning away of everything we once knew and held dear: we will find that if our faith was built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, it will remain and we with it, even if it is just as one escaping through the flames.

This, I think, is what it means to cling to the cross of Christ through the dark night of one’s soul. When everything else dies away, burns up, or is taken from us we discover ourselves right there with Christ on the cross crying out: “why have you forsaken me?” But on that cross facing the death of everything we know: we are not alone. Jesus is right there, saving us.

And upon that solid foundation, the only solid foundation, we can seek to rebuild again. Deconstruction is not the end of the journey. The Christian faith is generative: it always ends in new Creation. New Construction. Life.

One last note: if you know someone that’s struggling through a journey of deconstructing their faith, pass this on to them. I’ve breezed through a really hard journey in a couple minutes in this podcast, which is obviously not how it goes in real life. It can be an agonizing season that spans years of one’s life. But I also believe that this is what pastors and the Christian community are for: to journey with one another through just these dark valleys in embodied community so that the questions of our darkness find their way into the healing light of the day. Don’t leave someone to the social media algorithms’ solutions: walk with them. And if this podcast has described your own journey at all: I’d be happy to talk and ask the hard questions with you too. Reach out. Let me know.