Here now is the final installment of James McGrath’s series of posts on his book, in which he shows how the kind of knowledge experts on the New Testament have can affect those who are questioning their faith or have left the faith, which people these days often refer to as “deconstruction.”  This issue of deconstruction is the topic of another now-forthcoming book of his that will be appearing soon.  Here is what he has to say about it.

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There is a natural connection between the first book I wrote that was published by Eerdmans, The A to Z of the New Testament, and the most recent, Beyond Deconstruction, due out in early February. The term “deconstruction” has become the popular term for what happens when you start taking a close look at elements of your worldview, especially as a Christian, and find that there are elements of it that you can no longer subscribe to. For some it is a thoughtful investigation and careful selective replacement of beliefs and values. For others, it is a traumatic experience of the whole thing coming crashing down as piece after piece is removed and discarded.

This experience might be called the “dejengafication” of one’s faith or worldview, but calling it that might get you sued. Jenga means “build” in Swahili. Eerdmans wanted the book to feature the word “deconstruction” in the title so as to connect with those for whom that term is meaningful, but my original working title was Reconstructing Your Faith. The positive imperative is the heart of the book’s message. Jenga! Build! Don’t just tear down.

The experience that nowadays is labeled “deconstruction” is one that is familiar to academics who study the Bible. Many of us got into this line of work because of our faith and the role the Bible played in it. Imagine our shock when the very act of studying the Bible forced us to rethink the things that we had been told about the Bible in our faith communities!

What this means is that biblical scholars have been doing the “deconstruction” thing for as long as there has been academic biblical scholarship.

In the wake of deconstruction, people often define themselves over against what they used to believe, whether as agnostic, atheist, or “not that sort of Christian.”

The book reflects my own journey of trying to articulate my worldview, my values, and my beliefs in a positive way.

A book that was particularly helpful on my journey was Keith Ward’s What The Bible Really Teaches. At the point in my life that I read it, I was at the phase of saying things like “I’m still a Christian even though I don’t subscribe to inerrancy.” Ward’s book convinced me to stop apologizing. It made unambiguously clear something that I ought to have figured out by that stage. I was never a “Bible-believing Christian” who accepted the biblical texts as inerrant. No one is. Whenever someone who subscribes to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy encounters something that is clearly an error if it means what it says, you know what they do. They insist that the text doesn’t mean what it says! That’s not inerrancy.

It is also not accepting the Bible as the ultimate authority. I spent a long time defending my doctrine about the Bible from what the Bible says. It took time, but I realized that was inherently self-contradictory, and ultimately self-defeating. It was also, I would eventually see, a form of idolatry, treating the Bible, the work of human hands, as though it had the attributes of God.

Marketing churches and individuals as “Bible-believing” is thus one of the most effective false advertising campaigns in history! I bristle every time I hear someone talk about “biblical literalists” as opposed to people who claim to be literalists but in fact pick and choose in precisely the way they accuse others of doing.

My writing of The A to Z of the New Testament and my writing of Beyond Deconstruction both reflect my conviction that people in churches should not treat biblical scholarship, and simply being honest about the Bible, as at odds with Christian faith. It only seems that way because there are people who have turned the Bible into an idol. Human beings instinctively desire certainty. Close examination of reality challenges that. The false claim that God has provided a book that offers absolute certainty is a sinister temptation away from the very things the texts in the book emphasize, such as “trust in Yahweh with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” In fundamentalism, that gets twisted into “trust in the book with all your heart, and then you can claim that your own understanding of that book is in fact what God says.”

I understand the meaning of the divine speech at the end of the Book of Job to be making a similar point. Norman Habel’s commentary emphasizes that the Book of Job, as wisdom literature, belongs to a genre that doesn’t appeal to divine revelation. It shouldn’t have a theophany, an appearance of God. So what is going on? Habel suggests that the author is engaging in irony. The author has God show up and talk about the weather, and other things that people can observe. At that time, things like snow were inexplicable. Today we understand them, but the universe shows no sign of running out of mysteries. Yet then as now, as human beings we arrogantly think we have a handle on it all and can declare its meaning.

The divine speech in Job also mentions the birthing of deer and the feeding of young lions. What do lions eat? The deer, among other things. How did people ever look at the world and claim that everything works in a nice neat fashion, so that only the wicked suffer? The Book of Job is ultimately about the limits of the wisdom tradition, and the limits of human wisdom itself.

The book ends with God praising Job for speaking rightly about him, unlike Job’s friends, with whom God is said to be angry. What did Job’s friends do? Defend their theology (imagining that in doing so they were defending God). What did Job do? Complain a lot, and insist that the theology he used to hold was disproven by experience. The Book of Job insists that God prefers the latter to the former.

Studying the Bible, working through a process of deconstruction if studying the Bible challenges things that we were told about the Bible, should ultimately all be positive things if we approach them in the right way. Whereas fundamentalism praises the Bible while silencing many of its voices, honest reading of the Bible provides example after example of people wrestling with reality and figuring out what values and beliefs make sense in light of it. Both of my recent books, The A to Z of the New Testament and Beyond Deconstruction, are invitations to engage with these ancient texts and with our current understanding of the world in a way that is humble and honest, and that leaves room for mystery and poetry, for agnosticism but also conviction.