The Great Deconstruction: Part 1

I realize it's been a while since I've last wrote a blog.  Things in my world has been busy and tiring.  Actually, I've joined a book study about a month ago, studying a book called Out of the Embers: Faith after the Great Deconstruction by Bradley Jersak.  We as the study group are probably about half way through the book, more or less, and it's been an interesting study diving into Christian/spiritual deconstruction and different philosophies people have taken to get to where they are.

I think to summarize "deconstruction", it is where one takes a spiritual journey to dissect the meaning and nuance of their faith in the Christian religion.  For some folks, they may end up back to where they started, only with a deeper meaning of their faith, while others have totally drop out of Christianity all together.

How does it all started? Well, "deconstruction" (at least to me) is actually nothing new.  Each generation of folks go through some kind of re-analyzation of the faith which may resulted in a new way of practicing Christianity.  You may have heard about the Great Schism (split of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church), the Protestant movement of Martin Luther which splits the a new group of people called Protestants from the Catholic church, and the Great Awakenings which birth a lot of different denomination of churches.  I think with this century, there's been a great shift of folks leaving the church because of the movements that started probably in the late 60's and early 70's, where Christians responded to the sex revolution and other hot topics at the time.  There was a extreme movement of Christian preaching about sexual purity (aka Purity Cultural - I wrote a blog about this sometime last year) and a number of other things that results in a lot of goofy practices.  I think into the 60's, there were a lot of hell, fire and brimstone preaching that came out of one of the Great Awakenings, but also into the 80's, a lot of contemporary teachings and songs also came out of this era.  Into the 2000's, the tone of preaching has changed to something warm and fuzzy and some churches were dubbed "seeker churches".  But the institution of church (the church organizations) that was established in the 80's (or even as early as the 1930's-40's) was still there.  

In a sense, I, myself, am going through a deconstruction.  I became a Christian at the tail end of the Purity Culture movement, which resulted in me practicing and having ideas that, at the surface, seem like good intentions but at the end, it just plain legalism and made me question my own worth.  I wanted to do things that I thought pleased God only thinking I will gain something in return, namely a husband.  When I have approached my late 30's, I realize how I am going about Christianity was all wrong, and it was more of a question about, "What is the church? And how do I fit in this?"

What really got me started in my thinking is when George Floyd was killed during the early parts of the pandemic in May 2020.  It was already stressful with people staying mostly at home to deter the spread of COVID-19.  So, I think when George Floyd was killed by the cops in Minneapolis, it made me think about human rights but more importantly, what were the rights that God has granted us as his children.  I started digging into the Bible for an answer and in summary: God gave us life and God made us equal.  God not only created us but He created us in His own image.  And for this reason, people have worth.  God values us, thus we have value.  Our lives matter to God, so we all matter.  And we should value the lives of others because they too are made in the image of God.  

But what is life?  And what does it mean "the image of God?"  

I later joined a Bible study online to study the book of Genesis and I noticed a lot of interesting stuff, specifically:

1. Where did Satan come from?  
2. What is sin and what is the origin(s) of sin?

I've written a blog a year ago just about this topic.  and it addresses more questions:

• Why isn't this the original sin story in the Bible?  (The only explanation I can think of is because God wanted to tell us a story we can relate to in Adam and Eve, and eventually through Jesus Christ.)
• Why did God placed the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, knowing that man's curiosity will eventually lead them to eat the fruit of the tree?  It was in plain sight.  
• Why did God made angels in the first place, before he made man?  Did God made a mistake in creating angels?  Were the angels some prototype until Satan's fall?  In Genesis 1:26, God did say, "Let us make mankind in our image..."  
• The act of Satan just goes to show, God did not make robots.  The angels were created to have free-will.  And just like angels, people have the same free-will.

But to go one step further:

If God is good and perfect, why did He make Satan and if God knew his character enough that he (Satan) was going to sin against God, why didn't God stop him?  The only answer I can think of is that just like people, God gave free-will and choices to His angels and God allowed them to choose their path.  Like the bullet point I wrote above, God did not make robots.

But knowing that God made angels and cherubs as they were, but these are not perfect beings themselves (and for I know, they could be prototypes to humans), how can I trust God that He is actually good?  What if He made a mistake?  This thought made me really question God.  Or maybe God isn't all that perfect and He orchestrated the story of how a certain people group, called the Jews, navigate their lives through the many generations for God to reconnect them to himself through Jesus.  More like God is saying, "Sorry, I need you to come back to me."  

In a conversation with a friend, good and evil already existed when God made Adam and Eve.  That's why there was a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden of Eden.  As the Bible story goes, Eve was tricked by the serpent and ate the fruit of this Tree and then she gave some to Adam.  And that let in sin into the world.  My friend summarized that this event was when people came fully aware and conscious of the their own actions and their choices can affect their future.  It is the point in evolution that we went from being animals to being human beings. and because of this self awareness, we realize there are good choices and bad choices.  

Well, then what defines good and evil and where do we get this concept?  Here I'm starting to sound a little like C.S. Lewis where he kind of made a similar question in his book Mere Christianity.  Or more specifically: "If a good God made the world, why has it gone wrong? My argument against God was that the universe seem so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?... What was I comparing this universe when I called it unjust?" ~Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis (Book Two, 1. The Rival Conceptions of God)

In another blog I wrote in March 2023, I sort of started to explore what other religions say about good, evil, and sin, and addressing suffering as part of this.  The book I'm reading with the book study group kind of goes into suffering and afflictions and its part on the grand scheme of Christianity.

And this is mainly where I stopped in my thought process.  As there are other topics to explore with my deconstruction, I may dive into it in a later blog.  But some things I'm still thinking through:

• If other cultures in the world does not have a concept of sin, what it mean for salvation?  Salvation is sort of a rescuing from something bad/evil to a better place.  In some ways, other cultures have a concept of suffering, which is in some ways a universal experience through all people groups.  In the Hindu and Buddhist practices, they stress on an escaping reality of suffering into a spiritual world.  
• How should the church really look like?  Jesus often escape the crowds, although they always follow him.  So, is Jesus for corporate worship or is he kind of like, "These are my homies (12 disciples), we're just go around healing people-just don't tell anybody, so we're good."?
• If humans were made in the image of God, what are we supposed to look like?  In Hebrew, "image of God" is translated to "tzelem elohim", as if we are a shadow of God.  It paints an imagery that we are physical creations of God under His shadows.  I need to dig more into that... 
• Gays/lesbians and the animal kingdom.  Animals have also displayed homosexual behaviors, so what about humans?
• Is the Bible part of a bigger picture in connection with other religions?  I have seen a video where Zoroastrianism has influenced the Jews during the Babylonian exile.  Most religions have some similar meaning about treating others, etc.  But Christianity, as far as I know, is the only religion that say to have faith alone in God rather than doing work to achieve salvation.  

There's probably more topics to explore.  But I'll be blogging about one of these in my next blog(s).