Mega Edition: Christian Outlets Respond to John Cooper's "Deconstruction" Statement

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I am itching to get to it today. I don't always have that, sometimes

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I do, but this is one that I'm fired up about. It's on deconstruction. We're gonna talk about that topic, deconstruction.

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You probably heard the word, and you're gonna hear it a whole lot in this episode, but there's a current controversy that has erupted, and I think it's still possibly gonna erupt further, and I wanna weigh in on it.

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And I see so much absurdity in the way that some evangelicals are handling this controversy.

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There's some glimmers of hope out there, but for the most part, it looks like it's weakness. Weakness is the word that jumps out at me as I read some of the explanations, responses, just the ways of handling this phenomenon of deconstruction.

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We're gonna talk about that current state of affairs. Before we do, though, real quickly, I do wanna thank the sponsor for this episode,

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Gold River Tea, goldrivertradingco .com is where you can get the tea, and it's excellent.

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I'm actually drinking some right now. I keep the bag in the mug. That's different, I guess.

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Most people don't do that. Why just dip it, get a little flavor? And I mean, you can just immerse it.

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And this is really, I mean, there's a theological significance, perhaps. Probably not, no. The Presbyterians just dip their tea and take it out.

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We Baptists just, we immerse it. So anyway, it's good, it's really good.

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And it is a company that shares your values, made in the, well, I mean, the tea isn't grown in the

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They are totally against cancel culture for Christianity and for America, really.

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I mean, that's part of it, too. They're for the success of this particular country, and they want to keep their tea company as much as possible within the

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United States, employing American workers. So I just encourage you, get some Gold River tea, goldriverco .com,

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promo code CONVERSATIONS. I also wanted to briefly highlight my schedule as far as traveling around.

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I'm not gonna pull it up just for the sake of time, but I will be in Pennsylvania.

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Here's where you can go, worldviewconversation .com and look at speaking engagements, top right. I'll be in Pennsylvania next week, next

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Wednesday. Muncie, Pennsylvania, I'll be in Texas. And Idaho next month.

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And then in April, I'm gonna be in Arizona and would love to see you. Please, I haven't made all my travel arrangements for Arizona, so if you're in the

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Southwest and you think it would be beneficial for your church or political organization to hear about how social justice is a religion that contradicts

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Christianity and Christianity has an answer to this, then I would love to come speak with you. I'll bring my PowerPoints, I'll bring my books.

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I'll bring some copies of Enemies Within the Church as well, and we'll just have a good time. So let me know. You can go to worldviewconversation .com

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and again, another tab on the top right, it says Book John, and there's a form you can fill out if you'd be interested in that.

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So looking forward to seeing all kinds of people across the country, really for the entire year.

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Every month, I think, just about, I'm gonna have something. So I'm very much looking forward to it. One last thing, and this is early, but in July, early

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July, I'm gonna be in Charleston, South Carolina, and I just had a conversation about that the other day.

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So I don't get as many requests for some reason from people in the Deep South. It could be the

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Southern Baptist thing. I've gone hard after some Southern Baptists. I don't know if that's what it is, but if you are in the

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South Carolina area and are interested in learning about social justice, I don't ask for a fee.

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I don't ask for really anything, but can I set up my books on a back table if possible?

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And that'll just help me pay for gas and getting there. I believe this is something God has called me to, at least for this moment, this temporary moment in my life when this battle is raging and there doesn't seem to be a clear direction.

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And we're gonna talk about that more today. Let's get into it. A clear direction. We could use that on so many issues right now.

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Clarity from the pulpit, from the halls of power in evangelicalism. That's right, I said it.

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Evangelicals have some power, even if they think power's a bad thing and they talk about it in negative terms, let's face it.

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Some of them are pretty obsessed with it, and some of them have it within evangelical organizations. And we need to hear with the platforms that exist some clarity, some direction, some conviction.

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People are going to hell. I mean, look, this is just Orthodox Christian theology. We shouldn't be afraid to say that people are going to hell.

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They're going to a place of torment apart from the grace of God. And as Christians, that should really bug us.

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It should really disturb us. We should really want to do something about it. And in fact, we have a message, the gospel that does do something about it.

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We have Jesus Christ who came and gave himself for us. And what does that look like?

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That means that he sacrificed himself. He took a punishment that we deserve for our sins, our breaking of God's law.

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He took that punishment on the cross and he rose from the dead. He conquered death and he gives us hope.

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And the world does not have this hope. The world is hopeless. They don't have a sense of belonging.

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They don't have a sense of identity. They're just paddling around in the storm, not clear on the direction they're supposed to be going and making stuff up as they go.

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I mean, that's the world that I live in. That's the world I think most of us live in. That's what we're seeing out there is a lack of direction and we need the clarion call of the gospel.

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We also, for the here and now in this life, when it comes to issues of Christian ethics, we could really use some clarity.

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The law of God is important because it convicts people of their sin. It's also a guide for right living.

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There's also certain aspects of the law that work themselves into civil law and the regulation of society so that things can move in an appropriate and orderly manner.

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And so we need to understand the law of God. That's so important, right? And I see anything but clarity on these things.

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We could really use some of that right now. Let's get into it. Let's get into deconstruction. Let's talk about what set this whole thing off.

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And it's a clip from John Cooper. I'm gonna play it. John Cooper, lead singer for the Christian rock band

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Skillet and he says something that honestly should be kind of a duh, we all agree.

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This is basic Christian thinking on this issue. Of course, we have a great problem with Christians deconstructing and leaving the faith and attacking

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Christianity and we stand with John Cooper. This is what he said. Listen to the young people up in here.

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This is so important. There is no such thing as divorcing Jesus Christ from the

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Bible. That is not a thing for their repentance, but listen, they have divorced themselves from God and they wanna take as many of you people as they can and it is time for us and your generation to declare war on this idolatrous, deconstructed

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Christian movement. They are ripping all of our kids off, but the word of God never changes.

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And he offers us hope in a time of a pandemic, in a time of people losing their jobs, losing their hope, falling back into drug addiction and alcohol addiction and sexual immorality,

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Jesus offers hope. Jesus sets the captives free because of the cross.

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Last thing I'm gonna say before we play this next song, I wrote a book I gotta tell you about very quickly.

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It is called Awake and Alive to Truth. I wrote this book specifically because we have a generation of young people who have not been taught the basic principles of the word of God.

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It is not their fault. We did not do our jobs properly. We need to do our jobs better.

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So parents, leaders, that sort of thing, this is on sale. We have a bundle, $20 for the book and our new

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CD. You can pick it up tonight. Last thing I'm gonna say about this book, I just want you to understand, you're not getting something crazy, all right?

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This was approved, read and approved and sold in the Billy Graham Library and on Focus on the

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Family. This is something that young people can understand. So go check it out. Do you have this already?

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Do you have it? Well, this is yours then. You're my first person singing out there, I love you. We need a generation of young people not ashamed to say that Jesus Christ is

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Lord, to say that Jesus Christ is my Savior, that Jesus Christ is my hero.

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Now that's pretty straightforward, pretty simple, right? I would think just base,

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I mean, look, think about it this way. People have cancer, they're dying and you have the chemo, you have the cure and it's a deadly disease and you're just saying, hey, this is really deadly and we need to stop going down this path.

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We need to reverse course. Chemo is good, right? Just because some forms of cancer aren't as harmful as others, they can all kill you and this is pernicious and it is killing people.

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It is taking people to bad places and let's stand against it, right? So simple and it should be a forceful denunciation of deconstruction, this whole movement.

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And we're gonna talk about that movement for those who are unaware. I think most of you probably are, but the reactions to this are just surprising to me.

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So let's talk about some of these, if I can. Let's pull up, let's start here. Let's start here with Joshua Harris from a while ago, right?

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This is from what, 2019, July 26. Joshua Harris made this whole post and I think this is one of the, there's so many examples of this,

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I just wanna bring one to you and probably one of the foremost and well -known examples was when he said, look,

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I'm not a Christian anymore. By any definition that I'd be familiar with. And this is what he says. The information that was left out of our announcement, let's see, about their divorce, him and his wife, is that I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus.

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The popular phrase for this is deconstruction. The biblical phrase is falling away. So he, Joshua Harris says, hey, deconstruction, falling away, same thing.

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By all the measurements that I have found for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian. Now look, I don't remember articles coming out talking about, well,

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Josh Harris, man, you do not understand the phrase deconstruction. I mean, the way that you use this phrase to parallel falling away, you're saying deconstruction and falling away, same thing.

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I mean, what lack of nuance, Josh Harris? What lack of education? How could you say something like this when there's positive elements to deconstruction?

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Do you remember any of that? I don't remember any of that. Not one bit. In fact, the articles that did come out were not focused on that hardly at all.

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They were focused on Josh Harris and his trajectory and how could this have happened? How could one of our rising stars have done this?

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Why did he leave? I mean, what was it that was lacking in Christianity that he couldn't see or that he missed?

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Those were the articles. Those were the kinds of things that were coming out. I don't remember anyone picking apart, just being nitpicky about his use of the term deconstruction.

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Everyone seemed to just kind of accept it at the time. Well, we are not living in those times now.

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John Cooper can say something in some ways similar in just making an equivalent between deconstruction and falling away.

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And he talks about, of course, Christians who wanna keep Jesus and they don't like the Bible though.

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I mean, I don't even need to give you examples of this. This is just the way it is. Christians who don't like the church, Christians who don't like the

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Bible, Christians who think Christian ethics is really harsh, but they really kind of have this soft spot for Jesus still, right?

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I mean, this is common. We know that we probably can think of people in our own circles that think this kind of thing, right?

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And so this is out there, it's prevalent, it's big. And so for John Cooper to say that this deconstruction movement is a negative, that he doesn't have time for it, this is wrong, we should oppose it.

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And this isn't a form of Christianity to say that we can still kind of keep a sense of Jesus while rejecting everything else.

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He's absolutely spot on. And yet the reaction to him, not the same as the reaction to Josh Harris, not the same at all.

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Even though what they're saying is somewhat similar. Joshua Harris says deconstruction, falling away, kind of the same thing.

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John Cooper saying, yeah, deconstruction, falling away, kind of the same thing. And yet the response is very interesting.

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And so I want to share with you, let's start with deconstruction, let's start here.

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Let's just, let's define this. This is gonna take me some time. I wanna bring you through some things. I want you to be educated on it, right?

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This audience, from what I found from most of you is you like to get into the nitty gritty.

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You like the details. You like, and I'm not talking about nitpickiness. I'm talking about being thorough.

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You really like to understand an issue. And that's why I think you listen to this podcast. You're not listening just to get the headlines.

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You're not listening because of the fireworks. You're listening because you want to understand an issue and be able to intelligently talk about it.

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And I've said this before, don't just quote me. Don't just send videos of me to people. In fact, people who are on the fence even, that might not be a good thing sometimes.

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And it's not because of my content's bad. Sometimes it is good to do that, right? And say sometimes my content's bad.

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Sometimes it is good to do that. But it's sometimes better for you to be the source.

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I just, I believe this thoroughly. I think what I'm doing is I'm trying to equip you. I'm trying to give you, point you in the right direction, show you what you can do in a conversation with someone who's on the fence about some of these things, or firmly in a camp that's the opposite of what

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I believe and what the Bible teaches perhaps. I want you to be able to talk to them intelligently.

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And that's the purpose of this. So I want to bring you through some things and I'll try to, along the way, just tell you what sources

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I'm using. And then you can use them yourself. So let's start with something basic.

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Oxford Learner's Dictionary. What's deconstruction? Deconstruction. In the literature and philosophy, literature and philosophy, a theory that states that it is impossible for a text to have one fixed meaning and emphasizes the role of the reader in the production of meaning.

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I like that. It's very, very simple. Of course, you could bring more nuance to it.

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Yes, of course, but we have to start somewhere, right? And I think that's a very good way to look at a theory that states that it is impossible for a text to have one fixed meaning.

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There's no objective meaning, okay? And it emphasizes the role of the reader. There's individual meanings.

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And in fact, meaning is something that's just produced. It's a byproduct of individual interpretation.

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So that's deconstruction. And so when you're looking at something, I mean, it can mean something different.

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There might not be a fixed meaning. Meanings can, meaning itself.

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So we're not talking about just the way that words are used. We're talking about the underlying, the meaning here can change, what something actually denotes.

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And so a text, the way that we communicate this form of language, it doesn't actually root into something that is stable necessarily.

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There's an instability to the underlying meaning. And that means that texts can also change meaning.

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And meaning is, where does it come from? Where is it located? It's derived in the self, in people, in individuals.

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There's not really an objective reality out there. Now, let's keep going.

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There might be more questions than there are answers at this point, but that's why we have more information.

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I like going to this website, Online Etymology Dictionary, because it often will give you the history of a word.

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Deconstruction, it says now 1973 is a strategy of critical analysis and translations from French of the works of philosopher

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Jacques Derrida, who lived from 1930 to 2004. And he was one of the French deconstructionists.

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That's literally what they're called, the French deconstructionists. Him and Foucault and Levinus. Anyway, the word was used in English in a literal sense from 1865 of building an architecture.

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Now, it's saying, hey, there was a way that this word was used before then. Now, it's kind of like the word social justice.

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You can find little instances of this word being used. This is not the sense, the tradition that we are drawing upon today.

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And dictionaries will often have more than one meaning for a word, depending on the social convention, the way it's used.

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And you say, John, isn't that what we're talking about, this theory that meaning is located in the individual?

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And I would say, no, actually. This idea that we have multiple ways of using a word, like I can use the word love, and it means different things in different contexts.

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The social convention that we apply to a word, and we understand, everyone understands what I mean when I say

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I love chocolate versus I love my wife, two different uses of the word love, but two different meanings behind it.

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Meaning is fixed and objective. The word that we're using and applying in certain contexts is the same word, but the meaning behind it, the underlying fabric of reality that exists when

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I have the thought in my mind of what it means to love my wife, and someone else has the thought in their mind of what it means to love their wife, these concepts is a fixed thing.

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And so deconstruction says, no, no, no, no, no, these aren't fixed things. These are actually, these are subjective.

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And in fact, you can really take this in all kinds of directions. And today, queer theory is drawing on deconstruction to take things like gender and say, well, it really can mean anything for anyone.

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And you can have your own pronouns, even if it doesn't make grammatical sense, and we're just breaking all the social conventions, but underlying all this is meaning is produced.

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It's not constant. It's a production of individuals. And that's where the substance is located.

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Any kind of firm designation, any kind of stability, if there is to be stability, there really isn't, but it would be located in individuals.

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So anyway, that's much different than saying that different words or the same word can have a different meaning in different contexts.

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So I need to clarify that for everyone because postmodernists will often use this idea that well, love can mean different things in different contexts to try to drive their point home that meaning is subjective, and that's not the case.

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So meaning, deconstruction, deconstruction would be in the sense we use it today, the popular sense, the sense it's really mainly been used.

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You hardly see it used in the way that it was used on architecture from 1865. The way that we're thinking of it is from Jacques Derrida.

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It's from the deconstructionists. And before him, it would have been Heidegger to some extent, but this is where it got popularized.

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This is what we're talking about. So we need to understand that. And I'll show you, let's see if I have it.

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I don't have it pulled up yet. I had an order to this, so we're gonna get there, but I'm gonna show you kind of where this term deconstruct, where we find it, how popular it is, when it was popular, and all of that.

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And that helps us. I do the same thing with the term social justice in my book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict.

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You see that the term social justice really gets off the ground, and it kind of has this upward trajectory for the past century.

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And of course, being used quite a bit now, but it really came from people in America, primarily who were

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Christians and said they were, and wanted to make popular

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Fabian socialism. That's where we get the term. It's not from the Catholics in the 1800s.

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Yes, the term social justice was used, but very rarely, and not in the sense that we mean it today.

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And so that's the same thing with deconstruction. We're gonna stay within the tradition of the meaning and the way in which it's used and thought of today, and the concept that it denotes.

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So let's go through some more sources that define this. Modern French philosophy by Vincent Descombe says this, deconstruction appears to denote a negative operation, whereas description suggests the simple acceptance of the given.

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So if you're describing something, you're just that this is the way it is. Deconstruction though, has a negative operation.

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It's not, so it's a tool of taking something down, which would make sense. Deconstruction, taking something down.

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Jump ahead here. Deconstruction is a method which results from the unmasking of this phenomenological naivete.

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The word deconstruction was first proposed by Derrida to translate deconstruction of which

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Heidegger speaks in Being and Time, saying that it must not be understood in a negative sense to demolish, but in a positive sense to circumscribe.

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So anyway, I don't wanna, let's not get into the weeds here. The whole point is that, look, it comes from Derrida.

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Before that, you could say you could trace it to Heidegger. Again, Heidegger, some would also consider him to be in this vein of postmodern thinking and subjectivity.

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And then we have the Dictionary of the Social Sciences has a more in -depth definition.

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Deconstruction, a method of philosophical and linguistic criticism originally associated with the work of, who do you think?

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Jacques Derrida. But now widespread in the humanities and to a lesser degree, the social sciences. The goal of deconstruction generally involves illuminating the process of construction of binary oppositions within texts and philosophical systems.

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Now, the binary I often use, because it's a modern application, is male -female. There's this binary. And how often do you hear, we gotta reject the gender binary?

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Okay, this is an extension of this. And really what this sentence just said is that the deconstruction has escaped from the lab.

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It's no longer just this linguistic analysis thing that a bunch of nerds do at the local university.

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This is something that has gone into all kinds of different places in a local university.

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And it's jumped from the local university into popular culture more broadly. The method extends the structuralist understanding of language as a system of differential relationships in which concepts acquire significance only in relation to other concepts towards a consideration of the limits of structure itself.

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This is the core of Derrida's elaborate critique of metaphysical claims to truth and the concept of an adequate or fully present language that underwrites them.

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Okay, so let me just try to explain this in the best way I can. There's a present nature to the way that words are used.

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The meaning that a word has now in the present is the meaning it has in that moment in time for the people that are using it.

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And you can't extrapolate that and say that, well, that meaning is fixed or there's something underlying that that is objective and stable.

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It's just a temporary thing. The reader in the moment gives its meaning. And then in the next moment, that meaning is gone.

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It could mean something else. It's not something that carries through. So this is an attack on objective reality itself.

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This is the core of Derrida's elaborate critiques of metaphysical claims to truth and the concept of an adequate or fully present language that underwrites them.

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Derrida insists on the diverse ways in which meaning is a partial, never fully achieved act, both divided internally and deferred in time.

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I don't wanna get into the weeds again on this. Let me just skip ahead here. As a method of analyzing texts, deconstruction has had its greatest impact in literary studies, but it goes on and it's had a big impact in social sciences, especially anthropology, and linguistically constructed characters of categories of gender, race, and other marketers of difference.

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Now, I'm gonna show you something about Derrida that's gonna, I think, explain this more because there's a

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Marxist element to this, but you could think of this as an application of Marxism to meaning, and I don't think that would be inaccurate.

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I think Derrida would even, in some ways, agree with this. That's why it's not a surprise it jumps from literary analysis into other fields where Marxism is drilling down deeper, not just on the surface, but drilling down into the very concept of truth and meaning themselves.

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So, let's go to the next one. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Herschel's Theory of Signs.

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Now, this book is by Jacques Derrida. He is the author, right? So, the person who popularized this term, deconstruction, he is the author, and in the intro to the,

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I think this is the intro, yeah, or it's a footnote, I guess. So, this is, the editors put this, and it's trying to explain to people, here's what

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Derrida means by deconstruction. The term deconstruction, while perhaps unusual, should present no difficulties.

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It signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and take apart those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought.

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Those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. Okay, so let me just, some big words here.

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Metaphysics, we're talking about reality. We're talking about the nature of reality. And this is an attack on that.

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This is an attack on that the nature of reality is something fixed, and there's these axioms, if you will, these core unquestionable truths.

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This is the process by which we question those, and we want to second guess, and we wanna cast doubt on the things that have just always been assumed, and we wanna say, wait a minute, why assume those?

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And I'll bring it back to the gender thing. Why just assume that there's men and women? How come there can't be other genders that people have for themselves, and pronouns they use for themselves?

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Why not? Why does it have to be this binary thing? So that's kind of what we're talking about in application.

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The work of deconstruction does not consist in simply pointing out the structural limits of metaphysics, rather in breaking down and disassembling the ground of this tradition.

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Its task is both to exhibit the source of paradox and contradiction within the system. This is like a deeper critical theory.

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It's just, it's nitpicking at language, and in trying to question the way that we use words to determine, to apply, or to signify a certain kind of meaning.

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I think some of you are starting to probably figure out, wait a minute, hold on, what about Jacques Derrida's words? What about his books?

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I mean, he's engaging in the use of language here, so if he's engaging in the use of language, wouldn't, couldn't you deconstruct deconstruction?

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Couldn't you deconstruct Jacques Derrida? And make his books mean whatever you want it to mean in the present according to your own predetermined ideas and for yourself, what you conceive a reality to be.

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Can't you do that? Can't you just render his work at that point to be meaningless? And the answer would be, I think, yes.

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That's why this whole thing's dumb. But it's a way of tearing down assumptions.

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Now, let me give you, in my own words, from the book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions in Conflict, which, by the way, is now on Audible.

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You can go to audible .com and you can hear me read. I read the whole thing, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions in Conflict, and there's a section.

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So you're getting the freebie preview for here. But this is my section on radical subjectivity in that particular book.

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And so I'm tracing out social justice. This is one of the elements of it today. And I talk about Marcuse from the

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Frankfurt School and how he actually studied under the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party and forerunner for what developed into post -modernism.

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He believed that things were, in part, defined by their context and not simply their essence. For example, factors like time, language, philosophy, and reason itself shaped the identity of individuals.

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Marcuse put a Marxist spin on Heidegger by applying this idea to the examination of social arrangements, economic orders, and political formations.

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Thus, cultural institutions and associations should be defined and described not according to what they are in and of themselves, but by their overall effect.

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So there's a man -centeredness to this, okay? It's supposed to be pragmatic, practical, but what they're saying is, in this radical subjectivity stream of thought, is that the cultural factors, primarily, are very determinative of a number of things.

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And so if you can break the code, if you can figure out what culture's determining, then you can rearrange things.

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You can play with that. You can tamper with the way that things are viewed. And you can come up with different visions of reality at that point, right?

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There's not this fixed reality, this truth that's capital -T truth, objective out there.

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We shouldn't even think in those terms. We should look at the overall effect, the outworking of ways of thinking and what they produce.

30:32

I mean, this is kind of like, Tim Keller goes down this line to some extent with the speech -act theory thing. I can't sign the

30:38

Dallas Statement, he said, why? Well, it's not that I disagree with it. It's by its overall effect. It's how those words can be taken.

30:46

And so it's this attack on meaning. All right, two influential French postmodernists,

30:52

Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, took these ideas much further. Derrida, who is often called the father of deconstruction, believed language did not correspond to reality, but rather to itself.

31:01

This was summarized in his famous statement in 1967, that there is nothing outside the text. In other words, the symbols which make up language are enmeshed in a sea of other symbols, which relate to one another according to the arbitrary norms and rules of institutional structures.

31:16

To put it another way, meaning was not found in what was said, but rather by what was meant in accordance with the hegemony of language.

31:25

Using certain tools of analysis, many of which were inspired by Marx, Derrida endeavored to deconstruct messages in order to expose the prejudice embedded within them.

31:35

In so doing, he was actually deconstructing the entire identity of nation states as represented in their language.

31:40

Derrida stated himself that deconstruction was a radicalization of a certain Marxism, and its purpose was political.

31:47

Because language applied to everything, everything became political. In the same way, Derrida deconstructed language,

31:53

Michel Foucault deconstructed knowledge. Now, we're not gonna go into Foucault right now. Let's keep it with Derrida, all right? So I understand this is like a cloud, and hopefully that cloud is starting to lift.

32:03

It's very abstract. It's very esoteric in some ways.

32:08

But what's being said here, what I'm trying to relate and simplify and break down and explain is that Jacques Derrida, this

32:15

French deconstructionist, is what he is teaching people to do is to look beyond the words and how they're generally meant, and think of them as being corresponding with some kind of fixed meaning.

32:34

Saying, look beyond all that, because there really isn't a fixed meaning. There's this surface level way in which that we conceive of reality.

32:45

And this is subjective. This is something that changes with circumstance, time, people, and the way that they view things, and different cultures, the reason that they would think in different ways and have different habits and formations is because, look, they're conceiving of reality differently, and that manifests itself in language.

33:05

And so oppression can embed itself in these things, bigotries in language.

33:11

And so we can locate these things. We can identify the bigotry. This is the deconstruction process. We identify these things, and then we have a way in which to, extract the bigotry, to turn things on their head, to really deconstruct not just the language, but in so doing, the whole hegemony, the whole, really the whole interlocking structure of control that exists within a culture.

33:42

We can look at that, and we can take it down. Can make things more fair, more equitable, because we're gonna start conceiving of things differently.

33:49

And the way we're gonna do that is we're gonna use the language differently. So that you can see the Marxist tie in this.

33:59

Now, let's go back to John Cooper, and let's talk about this whole situation with John Cooper. And I'm gonna bring, what

34:06

I'm gonna do, let me just give you the path here. So now that you understand a little better what deconstruction is, how it works, and you've been thinking about maybe the people that have used this term and said, and used it to apply to Christianity, and said, hey,

34:20

I'm not a Christian anymore, or I love Jesus still, but I don't like the Bible, or the law, or the church.

34:26

And they're saying, this is my deconstruction. Or decolonizing is another term. We won't get into that now.

34:32

It's, there are similarities there. This whole movement, this is what

34:37

John Cooper kind of stepped in. This is what he was addressing. And this is the reaction from supposedly

34:45

Christian organizations. Let's start here with Relevant Magazine. This is February 9th, 2022.

34:52

And so they go over this whole, I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but they report. Here's what John Cooper said.

34:59

Here's, I want you to focus on this. Cooper's talk had a lot of good points in it. This is the last sentence, last paragraph.

35:06

It is true that celebrities don't always make for great role models, and we should be concerned about the suicide rate in the

35:11

US. But the connection to deconstruction, however you define it, is tenuous at best.

35:19

They're taking issue here. They're saying, let's see if I can go back in the article. There's Christians who enter a process of deconstruction where they start to re -examine their beliefs.

35:30

And then you enter a time of reconstruction, rebuilding a belief system, ideally with the help of a trusted community. So postmodern.

35:39

What do you not find in this? What's the truth? Yeah, what's the truth? We're gonna talk about the

35:44

Bible's emphasis and what the biblical understanding of this whole process would be.

35:50

But you don't find that in this article. Things aren't always this straightforward. Some people get stuck in a season or find themselves revisiting old seasons that they thought they'd already gone through, but in no case is it particularly helpful to accuse these people of a false religion or to declare war on them.

36:05

Let me just translate this. John Cooper, you're being mean. Yeah, you're being mean. Yeah, people have cancer, they're dying.

36:13

But you know what? Chemo can also have negative side effects. You shouldn't promote chemo so much. And you know what?

36:18

Some cancers just, they're not as deadly as others. In fact, some cancers just, they won't even kill you.

36:25

And at least, they move slowly and they're very treatable. You're making a big deal about this,

36:33

John Cooper, and you shouldn't be. Now, this is, I sense the serpent's whisper in all this.

36:41

This is just, the fire alarm's going off, there's a fire in the building, people are abandoning

36:47

Christianity for, and leading others, major figures, leading others to, you're talking about artists, and I mean,

36:55

Josh Harris is just one, I mean, Rhett and Link, that was a recent one. I think they even use the term deconstruction. They're leading people, they're influencers to on the broad path that leads to hell, okay?

37:07

And here's Relevant Magazine. You know what? Not that big of a deal. There could be positive qualities to this whole thing.

37:14

And man, John Cooper, don't connect this to deconstruction, however you define it, that's very tenuous.

37:24

Peace, peace, when there is no peace. All right, here we have the Roy's Report, the Roy's Report by Josh Shepard, February 11th.

37:31

Christian rocker, John Cooper declares war on deconstruction and provokes controversy. Oh, you wouldn't wanna do that.

37:37

You wouldn't wanna provoke controversy. I don't even wanna read through all these.

37:43

They get their experts together from Christianity and fellow,

37:50

I guess there's fellow rock stars and stuff in here to really pour some cold water on what

37:56

John Cooper said. And they criticize the scornful approach of John Cooper.

38:01

Yeah, scornful. Here's one, let's just, who's this? Lena, I never heard of this person,

38:10

Abujamara, I'm gonna be in trouble for not being able to pronounce this. Abujamara, I think is how you pronounce her name.

38:17

And she released fractured faith about her own journey. Okay, so I've never heard of this person, maybe some others have.

38:23

But she contributes to this article by saying that Cooper may have had a valid point in warning young believers against the cultural phenomenon we're seeing in evangelical circles, yet she also found the warlike slant to his message, unlikely to help people struggling with faith questions.

38:38

She said, Cooper comes across as angry and preachy. Wouldn't wanna do that. Didn't Jesus come across kind of angry and preachy at times?

38:45

I don't know. Anyway, she said, while he might appeal to those who already agree with him, he may not connect with those honestly wrestling to understand the goodness of God and slowly drifting away from the church.

38:56

So that's what deconstruction is. That's the assumption here that, you know what, there's people and he's talking about them that are just struggling a little with their faith.

39:05

That's what deconstruction is. He sounds like a fundamentalist preacher with no discussion approach to people's honest questions.

39:12

Yeah. Well, there's a context to this. People dying, the building's on fire and John Cooper's saying no.

39:19

And these people are saying, yes, peace, peace. You know, you need this gentle, gentle approach.

39:25

Yeah, there's people who struggle with their faith. There's no doubt about this. And here's the thing. I think there's a conflation going on here because that's the reason

39:33

John Cooper used the term deconstruction. People struggling with their faith don't generally say I'm deconstructing my faith.

39:39

They say I'm struggling with my faith. And there's a big difference there. And in fact, scripture makes distinctions, okay?

39:47

We're supposed to help the weak, encourage the faint -hearted and do what to the unruly? Admonish the unruly.

39:54

Help the weak, encourage the faint -hearted, admonish the unruly. Let's do some triage now. What's John Cooper talking about? Is he talking about let's help the weak or is he talking about let's admonish the unruly?

40:05

I would submit to you, he's talking about let's admonish the unruly. And you have outlets like the Roy's Report saying, oh, no, no, no, he's admonishing the weak.

40:13

He's admonishing the faint -hearted. No, that's not what he's doing. And that's not what deconstruction is. And why would they do this?

40:19

Well, we'll talk about that. But I want you to think for yourself, why? Why would they conflate these things?

40:25

Why would they confuse that and try to pigeonhole John Cooper into this as if he's being this meanie when they didn't really have a problem with Josh Harris, when he equivocated or said the same thing about deconstruction, essentially.

40:41

Deconstruction, it's losing your faith. They didn't have a problem with that at the time, but they're really getting nitpicky on John Cooper here.

40:49

All right, evangelicals must stop consulting themselves for guidance from the Religion News Service. Yes, your left -wing

40:54

Marxist outlet, the Religion News Service, claiming to represent Christianity. Recently, New York Times columnist

41:01

David Brooks threw it along, opinion piece. He called the dissenters trying to save evangelicalism from itself. The dissenters

41:06

Brooks cited were Russell Moore and Tim Keller and Karen Swallow Pryder and Thabiti Anabwile and Lecrae and Kristin Kobez Dumez, Kristin Dumez.

41:18

And let's see, all these people. Okay, so that's how it starts. And today's dissenting leaders are eager to enter into another cycle of evangelical soul -searching, okay?

41:29

So they're questioning the Christian national, they're rebuking it actually. Evangelicals have siloed themselves for far too long.

41:36

Let's get to the end here. I do not hold out hope that evangelical elites will make the right choice and begin talking with, instead of preaching to or against, as John Cooper of Skillet recently did by declaring war on deconstruction, those who have left.

41:51

The church will survive, but evangelical hegemony may not, it must not. So there's this evangelical hegemony, it's bad, it's narrow -minded and cats off to the people questioning this and trying to expand the tent and draw outside the lines.

42:07

They're the good guys. And John Cooper here, he's not the good guy. He's declaring war on deconstruction.

42:16

And evangelical elites, they need to make the right choice here. They can't follow John Cooper on this.

42:23

They need to be sensitive and examine why people left. Is it Christian nationalism? Is that the problem?

42:29

And so there's this, again, a binary going on here. The thing that Jacques Derrida was questioning is these binaries that exist, either this or this, and we need to get away from that.

42:43

That's narrow thinking that we need to question. And yet binaries are inescapable, and you have one here popping up.

42:50

And on one side, you have the Christians who are more broad -minded that are trying to expand

42:57

Christianity so it can survive as people are leaving the church because of Christian nationalism.

43:04

And then you have the John Coopers, these narrow -minded people who are declaring war on deconstructionism. So this is the way that they're phrasing it.

43:11

Now, I wanted to point out to you, this is something that's been going on for a while. This is underlying, I think, a lot of this, is this assumption that we can somehow, as Christians, kind of take advantage of this whole move towards deconstructing one's faith.

43:26

And a lot of the times you'll hear people, when they are deconstructing, they're saying, well, I'm deconstructing the Americanism in my faith, or the

43:33

Western lenses that I use, or the male way that I've looked at things, male -centric, or the just, oh,

43:42

I don't know, the way in which, this is where we're getting into the decolonizing, but the colonial lenses that I have, there's just so many, straight lenses, whatever.

43:55

And I'm just trying to get rid of those things. And there's a sense in which

44:00

I think Christians, evangelicals, even people who claim to be, I mean, Gospel Coalition would represent that, they're trying to kind of be allies.

44:11

They wanna act in accord with these kinds of people, attract them, be adjacent to them.

44:18

And this is one example. I could give you so many, this is one. This is, Before You Lose Your Faith, Deconstructing Doubt in the

44:26

Church by Ivan Mesa. And it's sold at the TGC website,

44:32

Gospel Coalition. And let me just read this for you. I think this is very symbolic of everything else that we've seen, or a lot of what we've seen in reaction to this phenomenon.

44:44

I'm deconstructing. Yet another social media post announces departure from the Christian faith. The cause could be sex, race, politics, social justice, science, hell, or all of the above.

44:51

For many, Christianity is becoming implausible, even impossible to believe. While it might be tempting to leave the church in order to find answers,

44:59

Before You Lose Your Faith argues that church should be the best place to deal with doubts. Featuring contributors, and I don't know all of them, but I'll tell you the ones

45:08

I recognize. Rachel Gilson, Brent McCracken, and Karen Swallow Pryor, and Jared Wilson, I recognize them. Which I would say all more on the left in the evangelical world.

45:19

This book shows deconstructing need not end in unbelief. In fact, deconstructing can be the road towards reconstructing, building up a more mature, robust faith that grapples honestly with the deepest questions of life.

45:32

And Colin Hansen gives it this great, great endorsement. And so this is the strategy.

45:39

Trevin Wax contributes to this too. So this is the strategy. Find, and I've seen this so much, find what's kind of popular, what's happening in the world, or what's threatening

45:52

Christianity in some way. And then try to, Tim Keller is like this to a

46:00

T in my mind. Find out what that objection is. Find out what that stumbling block is, and then validate it.

46:08

So yes, we can see that you're having trouble with Christianity. You don't like the sexism, and you know what?

46:14

We agree with you. That Christianity, that tradition, the hegemony that exists, this narrow -minded

46:22

Christianity, we reject that too. In fact, you know what? Jesus would have rejected it. And I think that you're on the right trail, and you're gonna find true

46:30

Christianity, which is the one that we advocate. Look at our particular reinvention of Christianity over here.

46:35

And we think that actually that's the kind that Jesus endorsed, and for 2 ,000 years, people were off track.

46:42

I mean, they don't say it that way. They don't say that for 2 ,000 years, but that's the assumption, honestly, is that for centuries, there's been this narrow -minded, horrible, racist, sexist church that was just, everything about it was wrong, and it was filled with whiteness and colonial power, and we're the ones coming to you and saying, no, that's not authentic Christianity.

47:04

We reject that too. It's horrible, and we're gonna actually stand with you. We're gonna be belligerents. We're gonna be on your side, adjacent to you, fighting against this kind of Christianity.

47:14

And instead, we're gonna propose the true Christianity, supposedly. So that's what's going on here, and that's the big message that I see going out.

47:25

And so there are some articles from TGC. Let's start with the negative one, and then

47:31

I'm gonna give you the positive one. The negative one is this, from James Walden and Greg Wilson. What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

47:38

It's kind of a provocative title. Deconstruction is an overused but under -defined slogan in contemporary

47:44

Christian circles. Its broad range of meaning has contributed to numerous misunderstandings, especially between the fracturing groups emerging from American evangelicalism.

47:52

Well, is that really the category we wanna put this in? It's all a misunderstanding, or is there fundamental diametrical opposition?

47:58

Truths in people that are in conflict with one another, because one is saying the opposite of another.

48:04

Or is it just a misunderstanding, a semantics or something? See, that's a big question in all this.

48:10

And I know TGC, some of the writers there, I think, would love to make this a big, like I just described, misunderstanding.

48:16

You know, you're not seeing the real Christianity or something, but these terms mean something.

48:23

They are used in a particular way, and there is an underlying reality that the term is drawing upon.

48:30

And when people say deconstruction, they really do mean something by it. And they are saying that, look,

48:37

I'm leaving Christianity, or at least the version of Christianity that I grew up with or adopted. Okay, let's keep going.

48:44

On the other hand, the term can be understood pejoratively, referring to a kind of tearing down of ancient boundary stones within historic orthodoxy, resulting finally in apostasy.

48:51

In this case, deconstruction is simply destruction, reducing the Protestant impulse of reformation to demolition.

48:57

On the other hand, it can signify an honest reprisal, critically evaluating the various elements of one's faith, rather than settling for an unreflective confession.

49:06

In this case, the aim of deconstruction is a positive reconstruction. So it doesn't even, it's the opposite, apparently.

49:13

Deconstruction actually means reconstruction in the light of searching and fearless inventory. Both of these connotations, we might note, are far removed from the original meaning, really.

49:21

What's the original meaning? So however we think of the term, most would probably agree that not all forms of faith deconstruction are good, but not all are bad.

49:31

Ian Harbour, who deconstructed his own progressive Christianity, says, the goal of deconstruction should be greater faithfulness to Jesus, not mere self -discovery or signaling one's virtue.

49:41

Ivan Mesa, editor of Before You Lose Your Faith, Deconstructing Doubt in the Church, similarly writes, deconstruction can be the road towards reconstructing, building up a more mature, robust faith.

49:50

Jacques Derrida, the so -called father of deconstruction, coined the term as a translation of Heidegger's concept, deconstruction or destruction.

49:59

And they try to link that with Luther, which is interesting. Anyway, contrary to postmodern wisdom, the foolishness of God has brought us face -to -face with the eternal word.

50:07

This word deconstructs all our wise words. So, you know, apparently that's what the Bible's doing, is deconstructing things.

50:13

They try to reference Cornelius Fantel here, that every fact is an interpreted fact, including facts of faith.

50:21

This is why we're always being reformed. There exists a space between our faith and the faith, a space of questioning, as James K .A.

50:28

Smith names it, to call into question the received and dominant interpretations that often claim not to be interpretation at all.

50:35

James K .A. Smith is a postmodernist, guys. I read, I forget the name of it, I read his book on postmodern thinkers, and he goes,

50:41

I think, through three of them, and he's like, hey, Christians can learn from this. And look, it's very similar to presuppositional stuff.

50:47

It's, Fantel would agree with this. And I'm not gonna get into the Fantel stuff right now, but it's subjectivity at the end of the day.

50:56

This is idealism and subjectivity, and there's no fixed meaning, and we're always just being reformed.

51:05

Look, we have to be corrected in error, fixed error that we believe. And that's why we have tools by which to do this.

51:14

We have confessions. We have people who have come together and synthesized truth from the word of God, objective truth, and applied it to present circumstances.

51:26

And that's the thing that changes. Present circumstances can change. The questions that come up can change.

51:31

We see this in the early church. Different heresies are condemned at different times because they became issues at certain times.

51:37

In fact, right now, this ought to be happening with social justice, and it's not. There needs to be a very clear clarion call.

51:44

This is what the gospel says. This is what justice is according to the word, and this is different than the justice that is being emphasized right now or promoted, the type of justice, the perversion of justice, really, that is being heralded.

52:00

So we deal with different things at different times, but the truth never changes. And so, yeah,

52:07

I would agree that no one's got perfect theology, perhaps, and there is a space between the truth and sometimes what we believe.

52:17

But a space between our faith and the faith, if that's what you're saying, okay. But if there's this just space of questioning that we can never get past, that's always there, that is this eternal process, and there's this limitation we have because we're just so blinded by the context that we live in, and we need to step outside of it, and we're in the chains of the culture and the hegemony of that culture.

52:43

And if that's what you mean, then we can't really know anything at that point. We're just, we're in prison.

52:50

We're in the box, we can't transcend the box. Ironically, all the people that say that we're in the box somehow transcend it to know that there's a box.

52:58

But I do digress. Clarifying mission and community. We're still on the TGC article. It's important to acknowledge that this includes many aspects of American evangelicalism.

53:07

The task of disentangling the gospel from its more dubious cultural forms and expressions is called disenculturation.

53:14

It's a word -based and spirit -led project, and it's imperative for gospel renewal.

53:20

It's also missionally driven. So he goes through, the authors go through this whole thing of disenculturation.

53:29

So you can sense the desire here to we're going to be adjacent to and act in concert with the deconstructionists by, we're gonna use our own word.

53:43

And it's very similar. And this is the good kind of deconstruction. That's what's going on here. The biblical community becomes a necessity when the majority culture is unsympathetic or even hostile to the gospel.

53:53

Moreover, as religious minorities in a post -Christian city, marketing strategies for church growth are not generally effective.

53:58

When it takes decades for the average person to convert to Christianity, the church must be in it for the long haul.

54:03

We evangelize because Jesus commands it and because we love others. So there's this process one goes through, and you have to go through it in a community of disenculturation, of coming from this post -Christian culture.

54:16

And I mean, it could take a decade to really just root out those thoughts that you have that are not in accord with Christianity and to adopt a

54:23

Christian understanding. And that's kind of what deconstruction could be. Right? That's the implication here.

54:29

Jesus Deconstruction Project. Theologian and philosopher John Caputo wrote a book titled,

54:35

What Would Jesus Deconstruct? And by the way, the Ford's by Brian McClaren. Brian McClaren. Not Brian McClanahan.

54:41

We like Brian McClanahan on history. No, Brian McClaren, who is a heretic, a false teacher, postmodern.

54:48

I just looked it up real quickly and that's what I saw. And so he said, they say though we don't subscribe to this radical theology, the concept is not entirely without biblical warrant.

54:57

As Joshua Ryan Butler put it, Jesus deconstructs bad teaching in order to reconstruct good teaching. All right,

55:03

I don't wanna spend forever on this podcast. So we're gonna try to move a little quicker here, but I think we need to be thorough.

55:10

I think I really want everyone to understand what's going on. This TGC article is terrible. The whole vibe of this is an attempt to, for evangelicals to partner with deconstructionists by using their own word, and then trying to define it in a way that could be in league with orthodoxy, consistent with a biblical approach.

55:32

That's the whole attempt of this. And so where does this leave someone like a John Cooper? And the actual movement that's going on?

55:39

Why do you say actual movement, John? Well, because look at this. Books Ngram viewer on Google.

55:46

This is just charts out words that are used in books. Let's look at the word disenculturation. Wow, you didn't even have that word until 1968.

55:55

And it wasn't popular until the 1980s. And it loses some popularity, has a bit of a revival in the early to mid, well, 2009 looks like the peak of that.

56:07

And then it come, people aren't really using it much. And guess what? Hardly anyone uses it. Let's go to the peak here. 0 .0000000225

56:16

% of uses. Now let's go to this word. Oh, actually, we're not done with disenculturation.

56:24

I typed it into Google Books just to see, okay, where is it being used? And it's Christians, it's missiologists.

56:29

This is not a word that is used broadly speaking. This isn't what people are talking about.

56:34

How many people that are deconstructing their faith say, well, I'm just disenculturating my faith. Would you ever hear that?

56:41

Like, that's not a thing. That's not something that people use. This is just to even bring this term up and try to say, well, that's kind of what deconstruction could be.

56:51

You're just out of touch with reality at this point. The actual thing that John Cooper is talking about, the thing that's happening out there in the real world, not in this imaginary world, is deconstruction.

57:02

And guess when it becomes popular? 70s, 80s, 2000s, and it's super popular right now.

57:09

And in fact, I bet if we charted this further, because this only goes to 2019, you'd see a little hump going up here.

57:15

And at the peak popularity, 0 .00016. I mean, way more popular than the term disenculturation ever was.

57:27

So this is just, it's a weak response. There's a real problem going on. And this is an attempt to say, peace, peace, when there's no peace.

57:35

That, hey, this deconstruction thing, it's not all bad. We can, as Christians, we can kind of get behind some of this. And so I want to point out, well, let's go to one more article.

57:46

And then I want to point out a positive response. February 15th. What does deconstruction even mean?

57:52

By an article by John Bloom and Desiring God. And I don't want to read for you the whole thing.

57:58

Let's, so he goes through, you know, Jacques Derrida, deconstruction. He kind of has a critique of Derrida that probably a lot of us would agree with.

58:08

And then he, so here's what he says. What evangelicals mean by deconstruction? He says, and I believe it's why some evangelicals and former evangelicals have also adopted

58:16

Derrida's term. Perhaps we might say it like this. Deconstruction is a critical dismantling of a person's understanding of what it means to be an evangelical

58:22

Christian. And in some cases, a refusal to recognize as authorities those perceived as occupying privilege evangelical institutional positions who supposedly speak for God.

58:30

But this definition still leaves plenty of room for confusion because the dismantling can look quite different for different people.

58:37

For instance, here are four primary ways I hear evangelicals applying the term deconstruction. So it's just, it's broadening this whole thing beyond what the vast majority of people who are using the term actually mean by it.

58:51

There's dismantling harmful cultural influences. And he quotes Paul Tripp.

58:57

And there could be a good part of this, a good aspect to this. And then there's dismantling doctrines.

59:05

A larger group, let's see here. A larger group use deconstruction to describe ways they have arrived at the conviction that certain historic evangelical doctrines must be adapted or altered.

59:16

And then there's dismantling Christianity itself. And this is more what John Cooper would be talking about.

59:22

Guys, this is like how it's used. This is just how it's used. And then constructive dismantling and tries to bring in Francis Schaeffer to say, well, there's kind of a good deconstruction.

59:35

And it's a sort of, he even says, it's a sort of deconstruction. What Francis Schaeffer does when he points out flaws in secular thinking.

59:43

And then here's the practical part, responding to deconstructing Christians. So how do we respond to this whole thing?

59:50

How should we? He says, well, the grace of Christ will have various manifestations and measures in various contexts.

59:58

So there's not this one size fits all approach to this. It's helpful to keep in mind that a deconstructing

01:00:04

Christian is often someone in significant pain. And so that would require us to have some level of compassion on them.

01:00:16

We send the grace of Christ. Now this is so opposite. Like this is, I don't think he's mentioning John Cooper at all in this article, but this is like John Cooper's war on deconstructing

01:00:25

Christianity is now, this is the shot at him that like that was wrong, that we need to have just all this grace.

01:00:32

And that's really the emphasis that is missing apparently out there.

01:00:37

So that's going on, but I just find it interesting it says that in the article that deconstruction, when people use it to describe their departure from Christianity altogether, that's the most frequent way that he sees the term used on social media.

01:00:53

And it's the use I prefer the least, he says, because it tends to conflate deconstruction with deconversion.

01:01:02

Why say that? Yeah, I recognize that's how it's being used out there, but look, that's not how

01:01:07

I wanna use it. I don't wanna use it that way. Like there's a reality, and this is what

01:01:12

I just can't understand for the life of me from Desiring God, from the Gospel Coalition, from Relevant Magazine, from Julie Roy's, it's like, there is a house on fire, people are burning, people are getting hurt.

01:01:24

And that's the situation. And you're just like, well, fire can be used for some good things. And if someone's like,

01:01:30

I'm against the fire. And like, everyone knows what he's talking about. And then just like, well, you know, hey, you put too much water in there, you might hurt someone.

01:01:40

Like that would be ridiculous, but that's kind of what they're doing. Like water can be used for some bad things and fire can be used for some good things.

01:01:47

And so like, not the situation guys, everyone knows what we're talking about. Everyone knows how the terms use.

01:01:52

It's arson, okay? You know, let's be more specific. Arson happened, arson's evil, we're against arson.

01:02:00

And arsonists, we have a war against them. And it's like, well, held on, sometimes fire's good.

01:02:05

And I was in Boy Scouts and I learned, you can learn constructively how to use fire.

01:02:11

And some people, you know, that are arsonists, we need to really, we need to, here's what we need to do.

01:02:17

We need to find the arsonists and we need to tell them about the good news about fire and how Christians have used fire throughout time.

01:02:24

There's some really good applications there. And water can be damaging. I mean, people have drowned and we need to talk to them about that.

01:02:32

That would be ridiculous. But that's, when a house is burning down from arson, right?

01:02:38

That's kind of what I'm seeing here. Now, there is a glimmer of hope. There is, and I saw this and I was like, wow.

01:02:44

You know, I don't know what to think of this completely, why Gospel Coalition would put this article out there, but they did.

01:02:51

February 18th, Elisa Childers, why we should not redeem deconstruction. And so they actually put out someone giving an opposite take.

01:02:59

And one of the things she says in this, I thought was really good. Deconstruction has little to do with objective truth and everything to do with tearing down whatever doctrine someone believes is morally wrong.

01:03:06

Amen, absolutely spot on. That's the whole thing missing. There's an objective truth.

01:03:12

That's what people are ripping down and we need to return to objective truth. What is the truth? That is the question.

01:03:19

Not how did the church, quote unquote, hurt you? Not how can we be sensitive to you in this moment?

01:03:25

There's something way more fundamental than all of that. Are you rejecting truth and the concept of truth itself?

01:03:32

And yes, and that's why I went over everything I did about deconstruction from the beginning. This is a whole discipline, a whole practice of tearing objective truth down.

01:03:46

If you miss that, then your response is gonna be completely inadequate. And so I would say it's a little surprise to me that they're gonna post

01:03:55

Elisa Childers here. And I don't know what the method, what the reason behind Gospel Coalition doing this completely is.

01:04:02

I don't know if there's, you know, I don't wanna speculate actually. I'm not going to. I have my own thoughts of why they might've done this and why they would wanna link with someone like Elisa Childers to some extent.

01:04:15

But they're getting a lot of heat for a lot of things. And I'll just leave it there. So I'm glad that this was posted, but you know, they are also posting this.

01:04:24

And actually, is this the same? Well, it's four days beforehand. What would Jesus deconstruct? So that's the situation in evangelicalism out there.

01:04:33

Now, John Cooper wrote a great follow -up. I don't have time to go over the whole thing. And he clarifies what he means by this.

01:04:38

But a lot of the emphasis of this is, his Facebook post is like, guys, the nitpickiness is insane.

01:04:45

Like you're nitpicking me over this. Let me like really explain to you what I meant. And it's completely within orthodoxy.

01:04:53

It's completely rational. And he draws on gotquestions .org and their definition of deconstruction, which

01:04:59

I think is good. And he's saying, this is what I'm seeing. That people that are leaving the

01:05:05

Christian faith, they're rejecting orthodox theology. And that's what I'm talking about, guys.

01:05:11

Like, duh, right? Like this shouldn't be, I shouldn't have to explain this, but I do. And he does, and he does a good job of it.

01:05:17

And so then the Christian Post posted, I think it's after this, yeah. They posted an article where they actually, very favorable, just reporting what he said.

01:05:27

And I think that was really good. So I wanted to share with you one more thing, what this could look like, deconstruction in a

01:05:34

Christian setting. Let me play something for you, if I will, if I may. This is from the

01:05:40

Jude Three Project. And I wanna give credit to Reformation Charlotte for pointing this out. 2016,

01:05:46

Courageous Conversations, Part One, Black Liberation Theology. And let's play this. This is just a section from it.

01:05:53

And I'm gonna read for you some James Cone, and we're gonna look at how this can, well, what this means for evangelicals.

01:06:00

Supposedly, an evangelical organization, the Jude Three Project. Here's what they have to say. Cone comes in and wants to inject the reality, or not really, but he sacralizes black experiences in that way.

01:06:14

Particularly, he has a bent towards slavery and a bent towards Jim Crow.

01:06:22

But he uses those experiences, as Pastor Cam said, that we can now think about doing theology, not only from these so -called sacred sources, but we can now do theology by thinking about, well, how do black people understand the world?

01:06:37

And how do they give us this window into how they understand the world by their music, by their poetry, by their arts?

01:06:50

And so, a great contribution that black theology gives, and I'm not saying that this is the only liberation tradition that does this, but it allows for other sources of theology to add to the canon.

01:07:05

So it's not just the Bible that we use to think about God. It's not simply the traditions of the church that we use to think about God.

01:07:11

It's not simply the doctrines that we've inherited from the African fathers of the church, or from the

01:07:19

European. I'm gonna stop it there, because it just keeps going. But do you hear that?

01:07:25

Now, he didn't use the term deconstruction. He's talking about James Cone's theology. And he's saying that this liberation theology that James Cone adopted is injecting the black experience as this authoritative way.

01:07:38

It's the primary, actually, authoritative way of looking at the Bible, interpreting the

01:07:43

Bible, and theology. And it's not just gonna be these other sacred sources that we've, with this word he uses,

01:07:51

I think, sacred that we traditionally use, that we look to as authoritative. It's a rearrangement of the power structure is what's going on.

01:07:59

Now, you say, what does that have to do with deconstruction, John? I wanna read for you, this is a book, I've actually read this. James Cone said,

01:08:05

I wasn't gonna tell nobody the making of a black theologian. And if you're gonna read a book about James Cone, this is the last one

01:08:10

I think he wrote, and I would suggest reading this one. He even gets into some LGBT stuff in it, and says we should read with those lenses, and that kind of thing.

01:08:20

But let me read for you this particular paragraph. All right. I didn't discard European theology and philosophy.

01:08:26

I continue to read it today, but black theology began with deconstruction. That is dismantling the oppressive white theologies

01:08:32

I was taught in graduate school, theologies that not only ignored black people, but blinded me to the rich treasure in the black religious tradition.

01:08:40

Using Barth, Tillich, and Naber as my theological authorities would never liberate my mind and black people from white supremacy.

01:08:46

Their theologies were not created to free me to think independently and to liberate black people. They were created to keep white people free and blacks enslaved.

01:08:54

I had to deconstruct white theologies to destroy their effects on my mind so that I would be opened to listen to the black voices from slavery emerging from the ashes of the black

01:09:03

Holocaust. I had to look back and recover the black heritage that gave birth to me. Now, a lot of this language, you're gonna hear in evangelical circles now.

01:09:10

I mean, comparing, really reading slavery through the lens of the Holocaust, which is basically the historical profession at this point.

01:09:17

I mean, it's not even the neo -abolitionist narrative as much when it comes to slavery, which was, in my opinion, bad enough in some ways.

01:09:24

Had tons of holes in it. Now, it's really like reading it through the Holocaust.

01:09:30

And it's, and so I just, that stuck out to me because I'm like, wow, you hear this now in evangelical circles where this was in radical circles, like James Cone circles, not too long ago, but where evangelical supposedly, they claim to be, are now adopting these things.

01:09:48

And so it's this view of the Bible and reality you get from this oppressed experience in slavery that now is used as the

01:10:00

Rosetta Stone for understanding reality and understanding theology and understanding the Bible. And this is deconstruction.

01:10:07

This is taking out, I'm gonna take out the European influences, or at least I'm going to decenter them.

01:10:13

And I'm gonna instead center this oppressed African -American from slavery understanding.

01:10:20

And that's going to give me the truth. That's gonna give me, or a better reading, I should say, because, you know, is there really any truth?

01:10:26

It's not, you know, it's, everything's power. It's, and which really goes back to Foucault, but there's these power plays going on.

01:10:34

And so Cone is deconstructing. And you saw in that video, this is, again, evangelicals adopting

01:10:41

Cone are saying, yeah, we bring in as authoritative these other sources. That's what Cone's saying there.

01:10:47

And he, and Cone calls it deconstructing. This is happening in quote unquote evangelical circles today is the proof is right there.

01:10:55

I mean, what more do you need? This is happening and it's the road that leads people.

01:11:01

It's the off -ramp from Christianity to treat this as good or something positive because we're getting rid of these white

01:11:08

European influences. And once you, the thing is, it's not about white

01:11:14

European influence. When they say that, what are they actually talking about? The theologians, where, so where's

01:11:21

Christianity? Where has it had the greatest impact in the last, I don't know, 600, 700, 1 ,000, 2 ,000 years?

01:11:29

Mostly Europe, okay? Now today we see through missionary efforts, especially we've seen

01:11:35

Christianity blossom in so many other places. But the scholarship, the important documents, like confessions and theologians, all of this has been primarily been

01:11:49

European. Even the North African church fathers and stuff. I mean, this is culturally, this is a

01:11:55

European project for the most part. And that's not to say that, I think the deconstructionists and the evangelicals now to some extent, they see this as it's the

01:12:07

European -ness of it, the Western -ness of it, the whiteness of it, if you will, the maleness of it, all of these negative things in their minds.

01:12:17

These are the things that control the interpretation. And that's no different than what Derrida said.

01:12:22

That's no different than Heidegger. That these are these external things control the interpretation. So we gotta get underneath that.

01:12:28

We gotta get away from that. Or we need to cast that aside. We need to disengage and untangle where there's embedded within our understanding of the

01:12:37

Bible, this European lens. And the problem with all of that is, what primarily is the objective?

01:12:45

What's the objective in understanding scripture? And understanding firm truth that God has revealed. What are we trying to do?

01:12:52

Are we trying to center a certain culture's understanding so that we read the Bible through that lens and more oppression means greater truth or something?

01:13:00

Or is the objective just to find out what truth is? What did the author mean to the original audience?

01:13:07

If you're gonna go with authorial intent and objective reality, then what you're gonna have, and everyone assumes that they should be read that way.

01:13:16

I assume that when you're listening to me, you're gonna listen in context. I'm doing this podcast at a certain time in a certain situation.

01:13:23

And there's a fixed reality that I'm drawing upon. And I want you to understand it according to my intention.

01:13:30

Everyone wants to be read that way. But this theory just totally destroys all this, this deconstruction.

01:13:38

And so the goal should be objectively understanding, and that's really what this

01:13:44

European theology was attempting to do. Trying to understand what, I'm saying in their mind.

01:13:51

I don't call it European theology. I just say there's theology. There's good theology, there's bad theology. If someone is not

01:13:56

European and they have really good theology, then praise God, I'm gonna learn from them. I mean, like there's no barrier there.

01:14:02

Like we only learn from white men. No, like that's not. I mean, in fact, the scripture is primarily written by, it is written by Jewish people, right?

01:14:12

That's who God chose. So like, am I going to cast doubt on the Bible because, oh, it's this

01:14:17

Jewish lens? Like, no, we want truth, okay? That's the objective is truth.

01:14:23

And so what I think needs to happen is we need to get back to this objectivity.

01:14:31

It's understanding that there's objective truth out there. And that's the goal.

01:14:38

I think that was the last slide I had. So let me just wrap up with this, if I may. Let me give you some Bible verses.

01:14:45

Matthew 23 is the first place I wanna go. And then

01:14:50

I wanna give you some specific verses on just the importance of truth. So Matthew 23, Jesus is correcting the scribes and Pharisees and one of the things that jumps out to me, aside from they're trying to get the approval of men, which

01:15:02

I very much see with a lot of these evangelical elites is he says to them that, woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law, justice, mercy, faithfulness.

01:15:19

You blind guides who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. He says that they clean out the outside of the cup of the dish, but inside they're full of robbery and self -indulgence.

01:15:31

And he goes on along this vein. And one of the things that you see that they lack is a sense of proportion and a nitpickiness.

01:15:37

They're nitpicky people. And their motive seems to be the approval of men.

01:15:44

Do you see that in these evangelical circles? Because that's jumping right out of these articles in my mind. I'm like the nitpickiness of this.

01:15:50

You're not seeing the houses on fire. John Cooper is a good guy here trying to say that there's a problem and we need to reject this whole movement towards deconstruction.

01:15:58

And you're trying to be nitpicky with, well, did he really define it correctly? Is there a good definition we can use?

01:16:05

Can we be somehow show solidarity and compassion and be adjacent with these deconstructionists in some way?

01:16:12

And why? What would be the motive? Would it be the approval of men? Because I can't think of another motive for this.

01:16:18

Wanting the approval of the people who are deconstructing, wanting them to, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand, come back to church.

01:16:24

We have the true authentic version of Christianity. No, people deconstruct because they hate

01:16:30

God. I'm not saying they question everything because they hate God.

01:16:35

I'm saying deconstruction. And I've already spent a long time going through what that is. They hate the created order, the objective reality that he's made.

01:16:44

They want to create their own reality. They want to be gods of their own universe. They use excuses like, well, this is Eurocentric or something, but what they're rejecting is firm truth, objective truth, stability.

01:16:57

That's what's going on. They're rejecting the creator. And they're changing the whole way they look at reality.

01:17:05

Instead of approaching reality and looking for truth, objective truth, so that they can have something to sink their teeth into, to ground themselves.

01:17:14

Instead, they're looking to oppose something they consider to be oppressive.

01:17:20

They're looking to oppose... The chief goal is to platform perspectives that are either minority or oppressed or some other qualification that gives them authority in the minds, in popular circles today.

01:17:41

And to get rid of ecclesiastical authority and quote -unquote whiteness and all these things.

01:17:49

And objectivity is one of the things that would be a byproduct in their minds of whiteness. And this goes to the root of the deconstruction project.

01:17:57

This isn't just scripture that this is happening with. This is happening with reality itself. But scripture is one of the places that this is happening.

01:18:06

So very disappointed with the way that so many are reacting to John Cooper. And right on for him sticking to his guns, having conviction, and really being a voice of reason, honestly.

01:18:19

And he's proving himself to be more valuable to the cause of Christ than any of these publications that are spouting this nonsense.

01:18:28

So I wanted to just point out that there's a pharisaical element in my mind to all this. And the other thing

01:18:33

I wanted to point out is that truth is so emphasized in scripture. John 14, six,

01:18:39

I am the way, the truth, and the life. John eight, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. John 16, when the spirit of truth comes.

01:18:47

John 17, sanctify them in truth. All over the gospel of John. Second Timothy, present yourselves as an approved worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly dividing what?

01:18:57

The word of truth. Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who act faithfully are his delight. Proverbs 12, 22.

01:19:04

Truth is so emphasized all over the place. We have the belt of truth from the armor of God. Little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth.

01:19:15

God is searching for worshipers to worship him in spirit and in truth. That's the whole, that's what we want. Where emphasis is the truth.

01:19:22

We want the truth. There's an objective truth out there. It's not, these cultural factors aren't things that produce different realities and different versions of truth.

01:19:31

There's a fixed truth you don't find in scripture. This, well, you gotta shed your lenses, your

01:19:36

Greco -Roman lenses. I talk about a pagan culture. Did you have to, what did the

01:19:42

TGC article say? That you have to, such a weird word that I'd never really, disenculturation.

01:19:51

You have to go disenculturate yourself from this Greco -Roman world, and it's gonna take a decade to do it.

01:19:59

And it's just, it's giving up these, all these things that are in your culture and then adopting the new artificial culture that we've created here.

01:20:12

That's the community of believers. And this, you don't find this language. What you find is, reject the lies, adopt the truth.

01:20:20

Pretty simple. There is a fixed reality, there's a truth. And it's actually, it's determined by God.

01:20:28

It flows from his nature and his character. It's a fixed thing.

01:20:35

And it's woven into, it's part of the fabric of reality. It's not something that changes.

01:20:42

It's, we can apply a little common sense here,

01:20:47

I think. We don't have to get so nuanced and nerdy in all this about this to try to bend over backwards, to be somewhat winsome and acceptable to those who are deconstructing or like deconstruction.

01:21:01

Bible doesn't, you don't find this language. You don't find this approach, you don't find this posture. Even with the children of Israel and pagan nations that are engaged in idolatry, it's just reject idolatry.

01:21:13

It's not, well, there's this whole system created from this idolatrous lens. And children of Israel are, you need to shed these glasses in this.

01:21:20

And it's just in the surface level culture thing. It's no, it's like, boom, there's error.

01:21:28

And then there's truth. And when the Bereans were examining Paul, Paul commended them for it.

01:21:35

It's the approved workman that rightly divides the word of truth. I mean, this is the emphasis throughout scripture.

01:21:42

So kudos to John Cooper. And that's, I know this is a mega edition, long podcast. I hope though it was beneficial to you because I think this is a big deal and I think we're gonna keep seeing more and more of this.

01:21:51

So God bless. Go on the website, worldviewconversation .com if you wanna see where I'm gonna be.

01:21:57

If you wanna request me to come, I would love to come if it works out with my schedule. And that's it for today.