Many articles have been written on the particulars of the Deconstruction phenomenon, which is intricately linked with so-called Progressive Christianity. It seems that discussing Deconstruction from the standpoint of the details of its process and the symptoms it creates (e.g., leaving the church, affirming sexual perversity, denying basic gender categories, etc.) has been exhaustively covered. I try my best to avoid writing articles that have already been written and written much better than I could have.
Hence, my aim in this article will be to discuss Deconstruction from a presuppositional standpoint, which is my realm of specialty. That is, I want us to look at the foundations of the phenomenon so that we are enabled to combat its errors in our lives and in the lives of those we love.
The “Progressive” Approach to God’s Word
The focal point of the discussion regarding Deconstruction, which is the brainchild of Progressive Christianity, is to discuss the definitional aspects of Progressive Christianity from the standpoint of their most basic faith commitments. We will seek to then contrast Progressive Christianity’s most basic faith commitments with true Christianity’s most basic faith commitments, especially regarding the nature of Scripture. This article will serve as an illustration of the presuppositional method of apologetics in action.
The following are the most basic faith commitments of Progressive Christianity, and they are what provide the necessary prerequisites for the process of Deconstruction:
1. It denies the divine nature of Scripture.
2. It assumes the obscurity of Scripture.
3. It assumes the insufficiency of Scripture.
4. It denies the absolute authority of Scripture.
When the Progressive Christian (PC) approaches the Bible, he generally assumes that the words of Scripture were written by man alone. That is to say, the PC rejects the fullness of divine authorship of the books of the Bible. Rather than men speaking from God as they were moved along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21; i.e., God spoke His own Words through men in Scripture), men spoke from their own interpretation and will when they wrote the books of the Bible. As a result, the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture are not even a remote possibility; they are heartily scoffed at.
When the PC approaches the Bible, he assumes that the various, fallible, human authors of Scripture do not and cannot agree on all points of doctrine. He assumes that there are “tensions in the text,” which is his euphemistic way of saying that the various authors of Scripture contradict one another in their teachings on life and God.
This flows naturally out of a denial of the divine authorship of Scripture across all its authors and books. The implication of this assumption is that, even if God has perhaps spoken in some places in the Bible, He has most certainly not communicated clearly on all points. In other words, if God did inspire the Bible, He made mistakes that man has no responsibility for. The PC believes that there are real contradictions within the Bible that cannot be resolved, and they are perfectly okay with that.
When the PC approaches the Bible, he assumes that it is not sufficient in and of itself to be the “sole, infallible rule of faith and practice” in the Christian’s life. The PC assumes that one must rely on a diversity of extra-biblical authorities for guidance, such as one’s “lived experience,” one’s culture, the time in which one lives, and extra-biblical voices of “wisdom.”
Remember, the Bible is just one more ancient text written by man, attempting to explain the Divine without Divine inspiration. To rely on Scripture as the highest authority, and to subject all other authorities to it, is to “narrow” one’s perspective and limit one’s ability to learn the fullness of truth and obtain guidance for life. This means that, in practice, the PC always subjects the authority of Scripture to the authority of his own experience, not the other way around.
Because of all these prior assumptions, the final assumption that flows from them is that the Bible is not the absolute authority over “everything pertaining to life and godliness (2 Pet. 1:3).” If the Bible does not have divine authorship, if it is riddled with internal contradictions, and if it is but one source of wisdom amongst many, then it most certainly does not carry absolute authority over the life of man.
Progressive Christianity is defined by these foundational faith commitments. And these presupposed beliefs determine the way that the Progressive Christian approaches and interprets and responds to the words of the Bible.
In Man’s Own Eyes
“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” – Judges 21:25
The best way to refute the Progressive Christian’s position is to demonstrate the folly of its own logical conclusions. All belief systems which oppose God’s Word can be shown to result in folly, because all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge have been deposited in Christ (Col. 2:3).
If Scripture is not divinely inspired, is self-contradictory in nature, is insufficient to guide humanity, and does not carry absolute authority within itself, then there is no way for the PC to prevent his descent into the dark abyss of pure relativity, subjectivity, and skepticism; to become one who gropes in utter darkness for truth (Acts 17:27). Let me attempt to demonstrate this in a stepwise fashion:
1. If the all-knowing God who transcends the limits of His creation has not clearly revealed the foundational truths necessary for man’s knowledge and ethics, then man is forced to discover and determine these foundational truths by the power of his own intellect, independent of God and His Mind. Man must shoulder the burden of being the original knower and organizer of all facts in space-time.
2. If man, then, must justify the reliability of his own mind, and, therefore, the possibility of man having true knowledge of the world outside his mind, then he is forced to reason in a circular fashion at the most basic level of his thinking: “My mind is reliable because I experience my mind to be reliable (i.e., “I think, therefore, I am.”).”
3. Question: How, then, does man resolve the immense differences in foundational beliefs found across different cultures and individuals, if he cannot appeal to a standard of truth that transcends his limited experience and fallible mental activities? In other words, how is it possible for man to have knowledge of any one fact, if he does not have knowledge of all the facts in advance?
4. Answer: He cannot resolve these differences of thought between individuals and groups precisely because he has rejected the existence of any revealed, transcendent standard by which to discern truth from falsehood, knowledge from pseudo-knowledge, subjective perception from objective reality.
5. Conclusion: Therefore, man has no way of acquiring objective knowledge (Skepticism); he has no way to bridge the gap between his mental activity and the world which exists outside of his mind. All he has is his own mind, his own perception, which he has trapped himself within. All his beliefs, then, are reduced to the mere opinion of the individual with the result of “everyone doing what is right in his own eyes (Relativity, Subjectivity).”
The utter destruction of knowledge, truth, and morality is the inevitable end of Progressive Christianity and Deconstruction. On this basis, any teaching in Scripture can be arbitrarily accepted or rejected according to the whims and preferences of each reader. And on this basis, Progressive Christianity must be rejected as the irrational and foolish position that it is.
The Biblical Approach to God’s Word
If it hasn’t been made obvious, I do not believe that one can affirm the beliefs of Progressive Christianity and be a true Christian. Likewise, one cannot go through the process of Deconstruction, in its typical meaning, and come out as a true Christian on the other side.
This is because Progressive Christianity is opposed, at its core, to the most foundational beliefs of Christianity. Biblical Christianity, in contrast, whole-heartedly proclaims and defends the divine authorship, total sufficiency, infallibility, inerrancy, perspicuity (clarity), unity, and absolute authority of every word found in all 66 books of the Bible. And this approach to Scripture finds its origin and source in Scripture itself: “All Scripture is God-breathed… (2 Tim. 3:16).”
God has clearly and extensively communicated to us in His Word regarding the nature of His Word and what our response to it ought to be. The Bible is living and active and self-identifying. The Bible presents itself as unified, absolute, and authoritative, so it must be accepted or rejected on those terms alone. It may not be turned into a wax nose, which can be shaped in whatever way the reader chooses.
Only the Christian, who submits to and stands on the solid Rock of the Word of Christ, has access to objective knowledge, eternal truth, and sufficient moral guidance in life. Those who reject Jesus Christ and His Word, which is contained in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. “And the rain descended, and the rivers came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall,” (Matt. 7:26-27).
