Deconstruction of Faith

In today’s podcast we want to discuss the “deconstruction” of one’s faith.  Deconstruction is a deeply philosophical idea which been applied to architecture, art, poetry, and a host of other disciplines.  Terminologically, it  has been incorrectly applied to watching movies or anything one wants to analyze and in today’s podcast to the area of faith. All analysis is not deconstruction.  Deconstruction is a particular form of analysis tied to a postmodern paradigm.  Nonetheless, rightly or wrongly from a technical perspective, It has become something of a popular and mildly meaningful process to take apart the faith as a whole and evaluate its constitutive components in hopes of finding what is real and relevant for our times. It is a self-seeking process not surprising prefigured in the works of the Pre-Socratic philosopher, Protagorus.  He is credited with the following statement,

“Our knowledge of all things in the world come from human observation and reflection, and thus it is inherently the only meaningful point from which to begin.”

The result of much Deconstruction is Relativism as evidenced by the goals of the quote by Protagorus.  A self-orientated lens on the world focuses on a human view rather than a divine perspective. Goals, Purposes, Rules, Individualism, renewed analysis of existing doctrines and ideas, etc., are not given as truths, let alone absolute truth.  What is truth?  All ideas are up for review in the deconstructionists purvey. In 2005 Pope Benedict decried this Cafeteria mentality of Christians. He expressed the need to keep the faith as we enter the 3rd millennium of Christianity.  The church cannot maintain its integrity and cohesion as a body with an overly diverse set of theological ideas. What would the even look like?

So today, we discuss Deconstruction touching on Relativism and Post modernity.