Deconstruction and Leaving the Faith | Theocast

Deconstruction, Christian Celebrity Culture, and the Rise of Doubt

So there's a popular movement right now where Christian celebrities, famous Christians are deconstructing their faith. They're walking away in some ways, walking away from Christianity. And I'm very sympathetic to this.

And in many ways, I understand why. So hopefully you're hearing me out. If you're thinking about it, if you are one of these people who are walking away from your faith, or you're trying to love on somebody that has these big questions, I want to try and give you a perspective that might be helpful here in walking through this.

This is an interesting time in Christianity because we're beginning to see some results from what Christianity was built upon for the last 50 years. We've kind of commercialized Christians. We've sold them all kinds of things.

And people grew up in the church, and they grew up being marketed to about how to have this kind of life. And they were sold all kinds of goods. And really, it was more about the experience of Christianity.

In youth groups, it was about having a good time. And then they got older, and it was about the music and the different sermon series. But they were never really told the hard questions of life. They were given entertainment, really, is what they were offered.

And so most people, when I listen to their stories, and they begin to talk about their experience of what started this journey of questioning, having big questions like, why does evil exist? And why would a good God allow evil to happen?

And the nature of man and hell, all of these questions, it mostly is because they've had a bad church experience. And I'm not saying that's the case for everyone. So I'm not trying to sweep everybody underneath that.

That is not what I'm saying. But most people have had a negative experience, whether it's in church or bad theology or a bad leader, a bad pastor, something, parents, something drove them to the moment where they started questioning everything.

And the cultural influence and really the negative influence of Christianity in the United States here has really seen this, and we've seen it bleed into other countries, obviously, as well. But I wanted to talk about a couple of things, how, one, where this came from, two, this isn't new.

This isn't the first time this has happened in world history. And what caused it the first time, what's causing it now, and what is the appropriate response to this, and how do we move forward from this moment?

Because I don't think it's going to slow down. I think it's only going to gain attraction, especially because the church seems to be failing more and more in responding to good questions, great questions that the church should have an answer for, and they don't.

And what we have is really an anemic theological foundation for most churches. So for those of you that are struggling with your faith, or those of you who have someone who is, let's first of all acknowledge that probably you aren't very aware of history.

Liberalism, Ethics, and the 19th-Century Roots of Deconstruction

What I have discovered in the research that has been done is that most Christians today are very ignorant of church history, and I would say history in general. We're just not well-versed in what has come before, and history has a tendency to repeat itself, which is exactly what we're doing.

We're actually repeating 19th century theology, and the whole deconstruction movement has already happened 200 years ago, and because we're unaware of the answers and the whole debate that happened back then, we're repeating ourselves all over again, and we're making some of the same mistakes that we made back then when this started.

Back during when liberalism first started, and sometimes that word liberalism has so many different meanings on it, so don't take whatever meaning that you currently have politically or even theologically.

It literally just means free thinking, to try and observe something without influences on it. So it's not necessarily a bad thing, but where it can conclude and where it ends, Christian liberalism ended up in a really bad place because they took out all outside influence, and the arbitrator of truth, or the final conclusion of what I must believe, came down to one's own personal preference, really.

It came down to what I felt to be true, or what I could see for myself, or what I could experience to be true, and that's literally when I'm watching people, I mean, Rob Bell was the first who started asking these questions, not the first, but one who was famous, asking the questions about hell and the nature of God, and how could God say that he is loving and yet send some people to such a horrendous place, and that really sparked a lot of interest in a lot of people a long time ago, what was that, 10, 15 years ago, when those conversations started, and a lot of people began to wrestle with the nature of the Bible, and they started to question things about Adam and Eve, and do we take that literal, and how do we understand the nature of sin?

What is fascinating about some of the questions that all of these videos and these podcasts and articles that I'm reading, as people are questioning their faith, what I am finding is that they aren't aware that this isn't the first time humanity has gone through this.

I mean, Pelagius and Augustine were fighting over this back into 400s and 500s AD, when they were dealing with the nature of man. Is man born one who is a sinner against God, and by nature does things that are contrary to God, or do they choose to do that?

I mean, Augustine said, no, you were born this way, because Romans tells us in Adam all died. It was passed down to us, and yet Pelagius was like, no, I cannot embrace that. It seems contrary to the nature of God.

He wants to believe that God would allow us the opportunity to determine our destiny, and it's not already predetermined, and so that battle, and then read down all over again between Arminian and Calvinist theology, and so you kind of see this cycle, this wrestling with the nature of God, the nature of man, and we're doing it again, where we're cycling back through, and because we aren't aware of history, we're really making...it's almost as if we're the first ones to really ever question the Bible.

We're the first ones to ever really stop and say, I'm not going to allow church, or my family, or culture, or race, anything to influence my perspective of the Bible. I'm just going to look at it arbitrarily and start pulling it apart, and as we do that, we assume that, okay, well, these things can't be true, because they're so weird, and they're so fallacious, and they're outlandish, and then we start to be able to explain them away, and this is what happened in the 19th century, where you begin to explain away the miraculous parts of the Bible, where Jesus really didn't walk on water, and there really wasn't a dividing of the sea, and these were just metaphors for dealing with the realities of life, and metaphors of how we deal with things.

What's interesting about liberalism and German theology in the 19th century is that one of the conclusions that were made after this movement of studying all religions equally, where we wanted to see what was at the center, the core of all religions, so Buddhism, and Islam, and Hindu, all of this, when we look at all of these world religions, and it really does come down to ethics.

That's what drives it. That's what's at the core, the center of what's happening in these religions, and ethics becomes really the driving point. Well, when I'm listening to these deconstruction videos, what I am hearing is pulling apart and pulling away anything that seems to be contrary to our own feelings, and what we're as a culture, and what we would deem as acceptable, and then we boil it down to, this is the ethical God that I would embrace.

Yes, it might be contrary to Scripture, but can we really trust Scripture? There's so much contradiction that's happening, and there's so many verses that disagree, and how do we know we really have all the right manuscripts, which all comes down to what liberalism did in the 19th century, so this isn't the first time.

What I hear is, what I want to do is live the life that Jesus really lived, which was a life of love and compassion, and he helped the poor, and he didn't judge the prostitutes, and he was just there to be loving for someone, and really, the resurrection of Jesus Christ isn't his bodily resurrection.

It wasn't that he conquered death and sin, but the resurrection of Jesus Christ really is that the love and ethic of Jesus lives on, right? After he died, we, 2 ,000 years later, can still see people who are living the love of Jesus, and really standing against poverty, and standing for those who are being unjustly treated, and all of that comes boiled down to all of the same as religions.

All other religions are just trying to deal with the ethics, and ultimately, we're accepted based upon our performance, so you're going to accept me, or whatever God that you conclude with is going to be acceptable of my choice of life, because at least I'm an ethical person that is trying to love and care for other people, and I'm not going to hoard over them this bad theology where we dictate what women do, and we dictate what happens sexually, and we use these antiquated ideas to manipulate people, and to guilt them, and shame them into different views of marriage and sexuality, and I understand all of that.

Moralism, Fundamentalism, and the Loss of the Gospel

But what is happening is when you're a child and you're raised up in Christianity, most people who deconstruct, they didn't come to faith later in their life, they probably grew up in Christianity, and they grew up in a Christianity where they weren't trained in the Bible.

They were given, as crazy as this sounds, ethics, or they were given what we call moralisms. You were told from the Old Testament how to be like David, and how to be like Daniel, and you were told all of these moralistic things to do, and the reason for it was, if you don't, then there's this judge called God, and he's going to come and thump you on the head, and he's going to send you to this place called hell, and the only grace you really understood was say a prayer, come down the aisle, sign a card, and then God will relieve you from that.

But if you don't live up to these moral ethical standards in your marriage and in your job, then God still could come and thump you, and the rapture's coming, and you don't want to be, I mean, there's so much that's just driven by moralism, and it's just therapeutic moralism, where it's all about trying to shape and mold our lives out of fear, guilt, and shame.

And I know there's even people who are deconstructing a grace or gospel-centered movement, but that too, when you're just trying to add it to fundamentalism, and fundamentalism was the response to liberalism back in the 19th century, a right one, because what it was trying to do is answer this question, what are the absolute basics, like we have to get to this baseline right here, and this is what the orthodox teaching of Christianity is, like where do we start?

And what they built on was, okay, if you deny this, it doesn't matter what denomination you are in, as long as you accept this baseline, then we know that you are evangelical, and you're in line with what the church has believed for the last 2 ,000 years.

On top of that, unfortunately, we got confused and we started adding in things like cultural debates on music and clothing, and what someone can drink and not drink, and that never was the original design.

My argument is this, most people have had really bad experiences with theology, understanding of the Bible, bad experiences of church, and what's been handed to them is what works, what draws a crowd, what gets somebody motivated, and I would here to say that this channel, Theocast, argues that you can find rest in Christ, that this weary soul that you're having where you're debating, questioning your entire existence as it relates to theology, there is an answer to it, and it's been the same answer for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and we are recycling back into the same issues that we've dealt with in the past, because the church failed to use an old word, catechize, to train, to develop people in understanding, one, who God is, what is God's perspective of them, and how did we come to these conclusions?

The church has failed to teach its history. Paul literally says that we are to hand down the apostles' teaching so that we can be built up and be able to answer and give a firm answer to anybody about the hope that lies within us.

Well, most people, when they are asked, what about the hope that lies within them, it's just moralism, right? Well, God accepts me because I'm a good person, and I said this prayer, and I have faith, and because I have faith, but they don't even know what faith is in and why Jesus has to be their righteousness and their substitute.

All of this stuff is lost, and because it's lost, there's a lot of people who are hurting and confused. Part of the mission of our church, Grace Reformed Church, that we say every week, is that we want to help those who are lost, who've never heard the gospel, those who are confused by the church and abused by the church, because we really have lost sight of our history.

We've lost sight of our foundation and what really truly centers us, and this is part of the Reformation. This podcast, this channel, really is about furthering the Reformation. The Reformation was peeling back humanism.

It was peeling back political agendas. It was peeling back power that started to control the theology of the church, the Roman Catholic Church, and it was reforming or reshaping it back into a Christocentric, a God-centric view instead of a man-centered view, and most everybody's theology that's been handed to them is a man-centered view, and so my encouragement to you is, as you deconstruct this, maybe what you need to think about is, instead of pulling everything back and questioning everything and leaning towards what I would say, really just no church history at all, if you still think that God exists, you might want to find out how did God communicate that to you, and how is it that we can know what God has said is true, and just believe this.

You aren't the first one to engage God and engage God's Word and have these questions. This is what sparked Martin Luther as he began to question the ethics behind what was happening in his own experience, and when he nailed the 95 thesis up on the Wittenberg door, he was doing that saying, I've got some questions for your ethics of how you were doing things, and it caused him to dive deeper into God's Word and find the answers, and where he found himself falling is at the feet of Jesus saying, without Christ and His righteousness and the blood shed upon me and trusting in Jesus alone to save me, I have no hope outside of this world, and my encouragement would be join us on this journey.

Let us help you start thinking through how maybe you've been misinterpreted or how the Bible has been misapplied to you, has not been handled correctly, and we'll start teaching you the difference between the nature of God and the nature of man, a law and the gospel, and there's massive confusion on what the law and the gospel is and the nature of God and how all that works.

If you have any comments or questions or follow-ups, I'd be more than happy to answer those in the comments below. We try our best to interact with you there. Hopefully this maybe has got you thinking.

We're going to do some follow-ups to this in the future, but my encouragement to you is this. If you're starting to question it, trust me when I say you're not the first one, not in history. This has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years.

There's been a lot written. There's a lot of debates going on. How about we start using this to our advantage instead of reliving history? Let's go read it so we don't make the same mistakes that people in history made and we can come to the true rest of Christ, what was designed that we can be set free from our sin and not be in bondage to it.

Hope you find this encouraging. We'll see you next time.