Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - Nathan Busenitz - Deconstruction

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis: Big Questions, Biblical Answers, is a series that seeks to provide biblical answers to some of the most prominent and fundamental questions regarding God, the Gospel, and the Bible.In this episode Nathan Busenitz, Executive Vice President, Dean of Faculty, & Associate Professor of Theology at The Master's University, answers the question, "What is deconstruction?"Watch VideosVisit the Website Follow on InstagramFollow on Twitter

Hey guys, my name is Johnny Artavanis and this is Dial In. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Nathan Busnitz, the dean at the Master Seminary, and I ask him about the subject of deconstruction, a subject that has grown in popularity in recent years amongst many professing evangelicals and amongst those who formerly professed to be a Christian but have since left the faith. You're going to want to listen to this episode with Dr. Nathan Buznitz. Let's dial in. Well, Dr. Buznitz, thank you once again for sitting down. I wanted to talk to you about a rising and growing term in the evangelical sphere. It's known as deconstruction. And even within that term, there's a number of different ways that people define it. But we often hear it being referenced

synonymously with deconversion. And then sometimes people use the label exvangelical to describe their experience as someone who once was a part of the church, loved God, served God. And now because of things being exposed in the Word or in their faith, they're leaving the faith. At least that's one of the ways that it's being popularly identified as. But how do we look and understand the subject or the topic of deconversion? And I guess the best way to start is, what does that even mean? Well, deconstruction is something that arose in philosophical circles in the 20th century

through a French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. And he introduced this idea of deconstructionism, where you take philosophical systems or worldviews, and the idea is that you take them apart into their component parts, and then you evaluate each component part, and you discard the parts that you think are unhelpful. And then you kind of reassemble it into something that is supposed to be an improvement over what you had before. And those ideas were taken by a Syracuse professor, John Caputo, who applied them to religion and to faith. So you had something that started in the world of philosophy that's come over into the world of religion, and it has started to become popular in some circles for people to talk about deconstructing their faith. And I think that became sort of a headline a year or so ago when Joshua Harris publicly came out saying that he had deconstructed his faith and that he had then left his faith and he was now an ex-evangelical.

And he even created a curriculum that he was beginning to sell. I think he ended up taking it offline. But it was this idea that he had a deconstruction starter kit for Christians who wanted to also deconstruct their faith. So again, the idea is we're going to take Christianity, we're going to get to its component parts, we're going to discard things that we don't like, and we're going to put it back into something that we like better. So going back to the philosophy of it, because I think right now, if you're researching the subject,

part of at least Jacques' idea in the past was to at least tell people that you can never truly come to absolute truth because meaning is always distorted because the use of language over time changes. So you can't go back and read someone else's words and think that that's exactly what they meant because the way we're perceiving that meaning has a malleability to it. Like I can't read something from 1400s and go, well, this is exactly what this means because I don't know the certain experiences, the backgrounds and the perspective that had shaped that word that he was using. But in the religious context that you're saying now,

it's being used in such a way where it's almost a criticism of our faith where people are evaluating it, taking bits and pieces of it, and then disregarding maybe certain elements. And what would be the chief reason for why they're disregarding or getting rid of the evangelical faith? Like what would Joshua Harris say to that regard? Like, here's why I ultimately left. Do you know why he would reference that? Well, Joshua Harris had become famous all the way back in 1997 when he wrote his book,

I Kissed Dating Goodbye, and had kind of become even a poster child for the Christian homeschool movement and those kinds of things. He was then a pastor of a fairly large church out on the East Coast in the Maryland area for about a decade before he decided to step away from ministry. And then a few years later, announced that not only was his marriage ending, but he also no longer considered himself to be a Christian. And he went on an interview with some of the guys from Christianity Today and tried to explain all of this. I listened to that interview. To me, it sounded like he was saying there were certain moral norms in Christianity, especially Christianity's view of sexual ethics that he no longer ascribed to.

Part of it was that he felt that he had contributed to what he called purity culture. And I think this was a reaction against that. He felt like the Bible's articulation of what it means to walk in holiness in all areas of life, including sexual purity, was something that he felt like he could no longer endorse. That, to me, seemed to be the main reason why he said, yeah, I'm, you know, I kissed dating goodbye, now I'm kissing Christianity goodbye. What's interesting about that is when we look in scripture at the reason why people leave the faith, what scripture calls apostasy, it means defection.

When people leave the faith, they don't leave the faith for intellectual reasons. They leave the faith for moral reasons. They leave the faith for moral reasons. Or another way to say it would be this, that the road to apostasy always passes through the gate of immorality. I think that's true with Joshua Harris. That was my sense from that interview that I heard. And it's certainly true of many in church history who abandoned the faith, even all the way back with Demas in 2 Timothy 4, because he loved this present world. Now, I mentioned at the beginning that there was perhaps a few different definitions

of deconversion, and I want to get at least just your perspective and your wisdom in this regard. During even the recording of the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, the podcast, there's this interview with Paul Tripp. And at the end, Paul Tripp talks about how we need to do basically a level of deconstruction on the things in our, basically our understanding of Christianity that has been shaped by celebrity Christians and celebrity pastors. And so he uses that term. So that's where people kind of come to this position that there's multiple types of deconstruction. One is deconversion, and that's the far side of the spectrum. But then there's other helpful types of deconstruction. They would say, like Paul Tripp said, we need to do that when we decipher between biblical Christianity and

celebrity Christianity. And even people would use that same reference to describe what Francis Schaeffer had when he had his crisis of faith. And he began to evaluate the teachings of the Bible with the way that many in modern evangelicalism were living. And so now that's being looped in all under the banner of deconstruction. How should the Christian think through that? What would be your response there? And really even knowing the nuance of even all that's within under that topic? helpful. It's a secular term. It's not a biblical term. And it's a confusing term because it is almost always negative. So for people to try and rescue the term or redeem the term, I think only results in confusion, to be honest. Biblically, we are to be discerning. So discernment is something that Christians are called to apply as we think through what is biblical and what is not biblical. But when it comes to doubt,

which is usually what deconstruction I think is used as a almost synonym for, when calls us to respond to doubt in faith by looking to Christ and his word. So there's nowhere in scripture where doubt is made noble or where doubt is elevated as something that Christians should pursue or engage in. As a virtue. As a virtue. In fact, in the garden, what does Satan use to tempt Eve? He begins with doubt. Doubt the word of God. Did God really say that? I mean, he starts by planting seeds of doubt. So Christians need to see doubt as dangerous, not as noble. Discernment,

yes, apply discernment, but doubt, be very careful with doubt. Don't celebrate it. Instead, turn to the Word of God, which always provides the answer to the questions that we might be considering. I think that's super helpful because I think a lot of people today are almost viewing being a Berean, that we're carefully considering and evaluating and investigating scripture as being a deconstructor, meaning that I'm going to look at the Bible and see what it really says and see if I can pull out the meaning, but it's being combined, that investigation with doubt as if it's a virtue and not as something to be weary of.

So I think that's really helpful. What would you maybe say to someone that is in, knows someone or is in the process of identifying as someone who's deconstructing their faith? What would be your encouragement to them? Yeah, a passage that comes to mind is 1 Corinthians chapter 1, where Paul says that the wisdom of God is viewed as foolishness to the world. The wisdom of man is viewed as foolishness to God. And really, I see deconstruction, because it comes out of the world of philosophy, I see deconstruction and deconstructionism as part of the tool of the

wisdom of man. It's part of the wisdom of this world. So, when it's wielded to almost as when it's wielded over the Word of God, it's as if the wisdom of man is elevating itself above the word of God. And Christians need to do the exact opposite. We need to elevate the word of God above the wisdom of man. So rather than using a secular philosophical tool to try and evaluate scripture, let's use scripture to evaluate secular philosophical tools. And so when we take what the Bible teaches and apply it to this subject, what we see is that doubt is not a virtue, apostasy is a grave sin, and those who play with fire like that are in serious danger. So my encouragement would be to cling to the wisdom of God found in the word of God and don't be fooled by the empty philosophies of men.

That's so helpful. And I think to many people that have been influenced by the philosophy and have been entertained by even the thought of deconstructing their faith. I think that'll be really helpful and biblical, the stuff that you've said. So thank you, Dr. Busnitz, for your time.