ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
November 15, 2025
There is a word used in a lot of Christian circles these days. The word is deconstruction, or specifically the deconstructing of faith. A lot of people who grew up in what they might now call an unhealthy or damaging form of Christianity find themselves needing to rethink, from top to bottom, the ideas they once held so closely. Churches’ use of fear, guilt, or shame has often been an attempt to keep people from asking questions, until one day someone began to ask some serious questions, often beginning with the simple inquiry, “Why does the church and what it claims to be Christian look nothing like Jesus?”
I always loved the quote from the physicist, Richard Feynman, who said, “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” The moment a religion says, “You can’t ask that question,” is the moment, at least in my opinion, that religion loses all credibility. If we are talking about the things of faith, including love, mystery, and incarnation, then we cannot pretend that even the most pompous pontificators of religion can actually explain it all. In recent months, I have come across a different word. Instead of deconstruction, I believe a lot of people are in fact needing to disentangle old beliefs from important, even life-giving convictions.
Someone might say, “I believe love is the most powerful force in the universe, and in the end, love wins, but I cannot believe in a God who required the sacrifice of an innocent human being before God was capable of forgiving humanity.” How do you continue to embrace love as the most important attribute in all of creation, while disentangling it from an 11th-century theological idea known as substitutionary atonement? This was a theological idea developed by a guy named Anselm who was trying to make sense of Jesus’ execution, but did so within his historic context, which was a feudal system that emphasized honor and debt payment. Yet in many churches today, questioning substitutionary atonement is considered a heresy, punishable by a loss of salvation. But right there, the tactic of fear attempts to keep people from asking serious questions about important matters of faith, especially those that have historically been entangled in concepts that were neither sacred nor eternal. It was one guy’s idea that was very loosely based on scripture at best. Yet over time, the church firmly took hold of the theory because at the end of the day, the church believed it mediated that sacrificial gift that people required. If someone says that a question is out of bounds, I would encourage people to pause and ask an additional question, “Who is threatened when this question is asked?” Answer that question, and one begins to disentangle what is essential from what is not.
At its best, your church is amazing, O God of the Universe, and there are days when it embodied love in such a profound way that the universe itself is moved a bit closer to ways of Jesus. Yet there are other expressions of Christianity that seek to limit love, distribute fear, and assign as much guilt as possible. The damage done is one of the greatest sins ever committed, for it uses your name, O Holy One, to advocate for the very powers and principalities that Jesus came to dismantle, deconstruct, and disentangle. Forgive us! Amen.
