If you're a longtime and regular reader you've watched me, over the history of this blog, make a journey from deconstruction to reconstruction. From The Authenticity of Faith to Hunting Magic Eels.
I've also taken to describing where I am in the Christian landscape as post-progressive. Not ex-progressive, but post-progressive, taking the positive things from progressive Christianity and moving on to a distinctively different location. And a lot of that movement has to do with issues of deconstruction and reconstruction.
One of my criticisms of progressive Christianity has been its reactivity toward evangelicalism. Many progressive Christians are ex-evangelicals, and that history casts a long shadow. The faith of many progressive Christians is devoid of any positive content (Do you actually believe in God? Read the Bible? Go to church?) and is mainly maintained as a vestigial and critical posture toward evangelicalism. Much of progressive Christianity among the ex-evangelicals is a reactive, Oedipal stance.
And yet, I have to confess that it's very, very hard to escape being reactive. I know this because, as I've made my own journey into reconstruction, I've found myself growing impatient with people in the phase of deconstruction. Since I've been through that phase already, and see its various issues and limitations, I want to quickly point people toward reconstruction. Because, naturally, I think this is the better, more healthy location to be.
Trouble is, I'm not letting people take their own journey. I walked through the Valley of Doubt, for twenty-years I walked through it. Yet here I am getting impatient with people who find themselves on a similar journey? I'm being hypocritical.
Some of this, of course, is just wanting to be helpful. When people are struggling with doubt and deconstruction you want to share what you've found helpful. But still, we need to be patient and let people take their own journey at their own pace. For goodness sake, I deconstructed for twenty years. So what makes me think that one conversation with a person is going to result in decisive, rapid change? I find myself holding onto some very stupid expectations, which leads to some very stupid disappointments.
So, yes, reactivity is hard to escape. We tend to judge the world from where we stand today, forgetting where we were yesterday. And it's very hard to see yourself as being in a good, right, and healthy place without that taking on contrastive aspects in relation to other people. Our self-concepts are highly contrastive, so prone to making evaluative comparisons between my right versus your wrong.
All that to say, I'm entering a season where my reconstruction is starting to lose, by the grace of God, its reactive, contrastive, comparative edge. Everyone is on a journey. Let's give each other the space and time to make it.
