twenty-three

This weekend at the retreat I had an interesting conversation with our speaking guest, Mark Nelson, and a couple of students about the concept of "deconstruction" and trimming the excess fat off Christianity to reach into the essentials of our faith. We found ourselves on this topic as we pieced through some of Mark’s weekend talks on things he wished Jesus had never said.

Our conversation led to a discussion of deconstruction or "debugging" faith with hopes of finding God’s purpose within all the trappings of our socially constructed religion. We discussed the Christmas story, for example, and all the extra-biblical and often ridiculous things we think are a part of the story that actually have very little, if any, relation to scripture. Mark had a great quiz on his computer about what really belonged in the Christmas story: What did the innkeeper say to Mary and Joseph? What kind of building was Jesus born in? How many wise men were at the birth of Christ? Things like this are so saturated with tradition, but have so little to do with what we actually know about the story based in scripture.

And so, we got to talking about deconstruction. This idea of breaking down the myths, the traditions, the hearsay that ultimately shapes what and how we believe. It is a difficult process, refining our beliefs, our faith, into a distilled, pure, unbiased, untainted version, but I think that it is a process we have to try to engage. And I think for me, this idea of tearing down the extras around my faith has been one of the most important, healthy, difficult, and fulfilling aspects of my faith journey over the past few years.

When I stumbled upon a quote from Brian McLaren’s new book, Everything Must Change, I thought I should share it, for the sake of this breaking down of the superflous, for the sake of debugging our faith with hopes of refining it into what God would have it be.

"We don’t want to reject whatever is good and true in the Christian faith. But to hold our faith in conscience, we [need] to debug it from viruses (modern, Western, colonial, imperial, rationalist, reductionist, and other types of viruses) that seem to have invaded its software. We [need] the freedom to seek and articulate a debugged version of the Christian faith that we can hold with confidence, honesty, and hope."

As I move ahead, growing, developing, refining my faith with God’s direction, my prayer is that I would have conversations like the one described here that help me and others to strip away the excess baggage of our faith, the delusions of self-help, health and wealth, Jesus the smiling white guy, sin management, and instead find a small treasure of God’s grace and direction.

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