The Crushing Yoke of a Deconstructionist Pastor
I recently came across this article by Hans Fiene, the article is a response to Pastor (or I should say, former Pastor) Alexander Lang, who stepped down as the Pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, Ill. He blogged about why he left the pastorate (which can be found in a link below) with the challenges and hardships that can come as a Pastor. I have found that most people who are going through a deconstruction of their faith end up building back up a god in their image and likeness and not what the Bible shows us about God.
And while my heart goes out to people who have been hurt by people in the church or are trying to make better sense of their faith in Christ, the route of deconstruction seems to mostly end in people leaving their faith altogether. That is why I found this article by Hans Fiene a great read in looking at some of Lang’s misconceptions about what it means to be a Pastor which may have (and I am thinking most likely) led not only to his resignation as a Pastor but leaving the faith behind together.
According to Brian Zahnd in his book When Everything Catches Fire, deconstruction is “a crisis of Christian faith that leads to either a reevaluation of Christianity or sometimes a total abandonment of Christianity.”
In the 1960s, French intellectual Jacques Derrida introduced the term "deconstruction" to describe a method of analyzing Western philosophy. According to Derrida, "deconstruction" refers to how language can be complex and contradictory, making it impossible to limit a text to the author's intended meaning. He argued that texts, regardless of their genre, cannot possess any absolute truth or meaning.
Deconstruction is one’s process of learning how to view the world.
In After Doubt, A. J. Swoboda puts it this way:
“Deconstruction is a double-edged sword. It can edify our faith by helping us critically rethink wrong beliefs. But it can also go too far and bring our faith to nothing. Any belief that we uncritically received at some point that remains hostile or opposed to the biblical message of Jesus Christ needs to be deconstructed. But the minute deconstruction undermines our faith, the gospel, or the Bible, we’ve deconstructed too much.
"There is a world of difference between deconstructing wrong beliefs and deconstructing the faith, just as there’s a world of difference between remodeling a room in our home and tearing down the house. Distinguishing between the two is essential: one is intellectual repentance and the other is faith abandonment.”
Swoboda is saying there is a big difference between soft deconstruction (intellectual repentance) and hard deconstruction (faith abandonment).
Click below to read the article.
Hans Fiene is the pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Crestwood, Mo., and the creator of Lutheran Satire, a multimedia project intended to teach the Christian faith through humor. He is also a frequent contributor to The Federalist. A graduate of Indiana University and Concordia Theological Seminary, Hans and his wife Katie have four sons.