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To channel my inner-William Goldman via Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” That’s what I think whenever I hear most Christians use the word “deconstruction.” Conservatives believe it’s about dangerously questioning inherited tradition in nihilist despair. Meanwhile, for progressives it’s often taken on a pseudo-intellectual populism that’s content to ask hard questions without expending anywhere near as much effort pursuing answers. I don’t mind a term evolving, but I do mind strident and/or lazy ignorance.
The original premise of deconstruction explored the dynamic relationship between text and meaning. Instead of Platonism‘s belief that words point to the true forms, deconstruction says concepts are irreducibly complex and are unable to be fully captured. Complex notions also inherently contain an unstable fluidity, so there’s always a gap between sign and signifier. A name identifies a person but at no point fully encapsulates the totality of their being, for example. Language has meaning as a system of signs contrasting other signs, but all signs are limited.1
The applications to Christian spirituality are fairly obvious. The Bible is a collection of Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman texts written in different genres and edited over a long time. To read it through the philosophical lens of deconstruction, then, is to recognize the complexity of these ancient words and to explore how they relate to one another. Nothing is simple, everything is nuanced, and through unending analysis the meaning always goes deeper. As Cypher put it in The Matrix, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going bye-bye.”
The thing is, the meaning of deconstruction has itself evolved to encompass a wide semantic range of meaning. To my mind, spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction are like an orchestra with sections comprised of instruments that come together to produce layered sounds that are somehow more beautiful than the constituent parts. There’s not only the interplay between exegesis, biblical theology, historical theology, systematic theology, narrative theology, and different traditions, but also insights from anthropology, history, psychology, science, etc.
The original beatniks were down for some deconstruction. They loved the way improvisational jazz leaned into feeling and intuition to upend the expectations of sheet music in classical music. They also enjoyed playing around with traditional forms of fiction and poetry to produce some startling innovations (and an awful lot of bad fiction and poetry). Plus they had a receptivity to integrating elements of Eastern and Western spirituality. That’s why I believe the Beat goes on in Beatnik Christianity’s perpetual process of spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction.
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As an aside, I see no reason to choose between Platonism’s transcendent forms and Derrida’s immanent deconstruction.↩
