Walking through deconstruction [July/Aug 2023 issue]

I’d like to add a twist to James Driedger’s good article on deconstruction in the church. Reformed evangelical Anabaptist Christians have been very good at deconstructing established (and perhaps complacent) older traditions. We look back to Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Paul, Luther, Grebel, and the founders of the EMC. We celebrate the ways some version of ‘we’ have stuck it to ‘them’ in the past whether it be paganism, the Egyptians, Judaism, Catholics, Lutherans, or the General Conference Mennonite Church. However, it is different and uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of the process as people deconstruct evangelical and anabaptist belief and practice or perhaps Christianity itself. Driedger does a good job of helping see a possible path forward on this topic.

It’s worth noting that the point of deconstruction—whether the object is a piece of literature or culture or a church tradition—is neither to save it or destroy it; the purpose is to scrutinize it very carefully. If either saving or destroying is on the agenda from the start, then whatever is happening isn’t deconstruction. When Jacques Derrida deconstructed a work of literature, or Simone de Beauvoir unpacked gender roles, or Michel Foucault examined the prison system, they went through the topic with a microscope. They saw how each detail relates to every other detail, to the whole thing, to the context, the culture and the reader’s expectations. Even the font of the text on the page and the relationship of blank space to text and images is up for examination.

There is no pass or fail for deconstruction; the point is to examine in tremendous detail. If it turns out that whatever is being examined contains inconsistencies or artificiality, then so it does. Maybe that’s what makes it interesting or dysfunctional or both. If it turns out that the thing being examined is simple, pure, authentic, and true, then so be it. Maybe that’s what makes it interesting or maybe dull. Those judgments, if they arise, come afterward. The process of deconstructing is only to examine in great detail. In fact, it may be an honour to an institution, a practice, or piece of literature to deconstruct it and demonstrate its integrity in the way that a clockmaker revels in taking apart a fine antique timepiece to see how beautifully and expertly it was made.

However, from the receiving end it’s not always fun or honouring to be examined in great detail. A clockmaker may discover that previous work was botched or that the clock was never well made in the first place beneath its nice outer surface. Not everyone is an expert—many of us have had the experience of taking something apart only to discover we don’t know how to put it back together so that it works.

In the church we may fear that our traditions or beliefs won’t stand up to close scrutiny or that those claiming to deconstruct faith aren’t qualified and don’t understand what they’re getting into. We may wish people would skip the deconstruction and get on to the reconstructing part before they’re ready. However, in the believers’ church tradition, encouraging one another to look carefully at the details of our faith and organization as a group of Christian disciples is at the core of our faith practice. Our tradition is premised on the idea that the everyday person is qualified to examine and understand their relationship with God and other believers. We honour our ancestors who discovered things that needed changing during those examinations and went off in brave new directions led by God’s Spirit. We’ve been doing this for many generations and should encourage one another to continue even if this current version of reformation is pointed at us rather than led by us.

– Jeff Thiessen, Austin, Man.

When baptism becomes works righteousness [July/Aug 2023 issue]

I, too, have questions. Do we have a posture of humbly submitting to being Baptized? It is Jesus’s blood that washed our sins away, not the water. How can a person take a humble posture when being immersed? Are we afraid of submitting to having Jesus as our Lord?

I like the way Ron Penner explained it in his article in The Messenger from April 24, 2002. I gave it to a young person who felt she had missed out by being baptized by pouring. After she had read the article she was satisfied.

– Agatha Rempel, Steinbach, Man.