Tradition and Deconstruction

This is part four of a series on tradition. Here are parts one, two, and three.

Within the sacramental imagination of the Church, tradition may be seen as a ‘handing down’ that always brings us back to the actual hands of the real, embodied persons who received what they have to give from the hands of the Lord Jesus. This is the central, stabilizing understanding of tradition on which all other corollaries of Christian tradition might be secured. Even as I wrote part three, however, I could hear the voices of many Christians (and even my own voice from a different time) reminding me of the dangers of identifying the Faith with real people who are messy, contradictory, and even plainly evil. Unfortunately, hands that are given to give and to bless can also be used to take and to curse. And this brings us to a necessary look at what happens when the good of tradition is distorted to enable falsehood, coercion, and abuse in the Church. In our present moment, this awful reality is at the heart of what many call the process of ‘deconstructing their faith,’ a process that traditionalists sadly often mock or dismiss. There is no thoughtful renewal of tradition, however, that does not attend to what is being truthfully expressed in the midst of this skeptical crisis; and so we turn to it now.

Before we address deconstruction, it will be helpful to look at its foundations in modernist and postmodernist thought. Modernism is notoriously difficult to define in a single sense, and is better understood as a cluster of tendencies and emphases arising out of a sense of shaken confidence in the definitions and institutions of a medieval world. Received knowledge of things became increasingly an object of reconsideration, which shifted authority from the repositories of that traditional knowledge–mainly the Church–to the agents of a fervent pursuit of inquiry and a new systematizing of that knowledge. As Carl Trueman observes, the modern period saw the rise of a sense of ‘self’ not previously asserted. One way to characterize the modernist tendency is as a fervent and religious devotion to the individual self as the agent of its own history endowed with an intrinsic impulse toward progress and limited only by knowledge and the means to enact what it knew. And there was nothing left untouched by this tendency, including our collective sense of what it meant to be the Church. Even so, the Church is not defined by culture, and so in the midst of the modernizing world was a retained sense of that ancient tradition, quietly passing itself along the generations. Occasionally, the two would be at severe odds (see the Russian Revolution) or problematically conjoined (see the Moral Majority). As Modernism aged, however, it came to reveal the inherent deficiencies of its own project.

Postmodernism is the logical outcome of modernism; it is modernism turned inward on itself. As Dr. Craig Bartholomew observes, it is also best seen as a cluster of tendencies and emphases. Postmodernism is a reactive zeal for inquiry as it is turned inward on the inquirer. This self-directed skepticism slowly undermines the modernist’s confidence to know and carry out his designs. Modernism spawned many monolithic theories of everything to replace the cosmologies of ancient philosophies and Christian theology. Postmodernism then became obsessed with the holes in those novel theories. But rather than form new theories, postmodernism took aim on the theorizers themselves. After all things had been questioned, they began to question the questioners and eventually they themselves were the only questioners left to question. Characteristic of postmodernism is a sense of hesitancy around what can be known or whether things can be known. Our sense of self is subdivided by a mounting urge to problematize what had previously been thought to be certain. But unlike political or economic arrangements, the self is an intangible mystery after a certain point, and so postmodern scrutiny into it has a habit of becoming endless and more myopic. The self cannot be exhaustively plumbed, and the more a self is turned inward on itself, it tends to produce a self-stymying lifestyle that never gets much done because the doer of deeds is increasingly undermined by self-doubt. In the end, postmodernism only accomplishes anything by stifling its self-despair and pretending to be modernism until its goals are achieved. It has to act with a confidence it cannot have in order to move beyond the quagmire of its self-perpetuating perplexity.

Out of the postmodern anxiety comes the practice of deconstruction. Here we must pause and correct for a common misconception. Deconstruction sounds at first like the opposite of construction in the sense of unbuilding something. I liken this notion about deconstruction to the frustrating experience of realizing three-quarters of the way through putting together an Ikea bookshelf that I have missed a toggle joint and so must pull apart my work to the point at which it went off script and then proceeding forward again in order. This is not deconstruction. Rather, deconstruction is a radical reconsideration of relationships. To pick up our Ikea bookshelf analogy, true deconstruction would be to point out how the shelf I build will never be the shelf envisioned by the designer of the shelf as represented by the instruction booklet and its ambiguous figures to communicate the intent for the shelf. As such, I am left to ponder what is possible for my shelf while being haunted by the specter of the shelf-as-intended. Eventually, I will have to arbitrarily settle for the shelf as being ‘shelf-enough’ to do what I need it to do in my home. I must always acknowledge that there is a fluctuating and impossible to determine relationship between the purpose of the shelf and my use of it. Eventually, rather than sit under the weight of such perplexity, I will opt instead to celebrate the instrumental value of my shelf as the expression of my mysterious sense of rightness and fulfillment.

Coherent deconstruction, as with coherent postmodernism, obliges us to a constant self-interrogation and subdivision of self within self. It is like embryonic differentiation without any growth or development. Eventually, to be effective, deconstruction and postmodernism have to adopt the techniques and strategies of modernism–even while promising themselves to revert as soon as the goal is attained. Deconstruction and postmodernism tend to focus on this adoption of modernism at the level of language, the symbolic ways we attempt to embody meaning in tangible expressions. My late mentor Dave Smith, who was my first guide into deconstruction, suggested to me that postmodernists upheld “free speech with a vengeance.” Their anxious self-doubt required a constant stream of change in language—useful for the time–while their intrinsic drive to undermine modernism required the same control mechanisms employed by their adversaries. They would uphold and denounce language systems at the same time. In the end, deconstructionists have to play the same game as the modernists because they are all reliant on the same basic premises. Both have abandoned the sense that something other than ourselves holds us together, holds us up, or moves us toward our end. And so both assume at some point the terrible sense of power to do so guided by their own devices and desires. The only real difference is how self-negating they are while doing so.

The ground-level deconstruction of our post-Christian brethren (whether they be lapsed Catholics, ex-vangelicals, nones, etc.) is often little more than the practiced anti-institutionalism of modernism. It requires none of the perplexity of unknowing, a humility that is willing to bear the healthy shame of ignorance (to borrow a phrase from Fr. Freeman). The deconstructing Christian will eventually have to become a constructing Christian again, and unless they return to some tradition beyond the constraints of their own inquiry, they will become a tradition to themselves and then a traditionalist of that tradition, as we described in part two of this series. They will begin to borrow from tradition just enough to ensure the self-assurance to turn and denounce it, and they will likely get stuck there. I have lost track of the number of Christians who were the deconstructionists of the 2000s and who have now just become thoroughly modernist self-help gurus in the 2020s. The only Christians I have seen escape the event horizon of self-guiding deconstruction are those who come to terms with their lack of certainty and begin again by entering into a tradition that is capable of guiding them in ways they cannot guide themselves. Deconstruction seems ultimately to be the final form of secularism, a rending of moment from haunted moment. And yet, in the midst of this deconstructing traditionalism, as oxymoronic as that is, there is a moment of opportunity for the Church–against which the gates of modernism and postmodernism have not prevailed–to exercise a prophetic voice and be present to the unique spiritual needs of this time.

Christians tend to be reactive around deconstruction. This is not that surprising, given that deconstruction is the shaking of confidence in systems and systematizers. To the extent we are confronted with uncertainty, it is common to regress into a kind of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn decision-tree. Some Christians opt for contradiction when doubt is cast on an entrenched notion, some refuse to consider it. Still others might exuberantly dispose of the matter at hand, if for no other reason than to escape the discomfort of perplexity. It is helpful to remember, though, that Christians do not need to live in a reactive state around deconstruction. After all, deconstruction can only really harm that which arises as a premise of the modernism that initially gave rise to it. The truth is never endangered by a question. To the extent we have made the faith an ideology–a traditionalism–we should rightly fear what deconstruction can reveal. It may present us with a belief that proves unworthy and unnatural to life in Christ. There have been and continue to be ways that we as Christians have adopted beliefs and practices that have hurt people. We may have to leave something behind and take responsibility for having called gospel what is really only ideology. Deconstruction is a tendency to pull at relationships that are vulnerable to being pulled apart, exposing them as temporal. This is only a problem if we have called eternal what is merely temporal and have built our lives around it. To have an unthoughtful reactivity toward deconstruction and deconstructing Christians is perhaps to reveal a sense of insecurity in one’s tradition.

Our life in Christ and the apostolic tradition of the Church, however, are not bound by the same game as the modernist project. We confess that ‘in the beginning was the Word,’ then ‘that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’ and finally that ‘the Word abides in us.’ That central encounter made possible by our Lord’s incarnation and through the sending of the Holy Spirit through whom we commune with God–this relational structure is immune to the skeptical powers of deconstruction. We might observe, as well, that the Passion and Resurrection of our Lord are, in the presence of modern and postmodern traditionalisms, the ultimate deconstruction. Modernist self-assurance and postmodern despair—these secular traditionalisms are themselves deconstructed by divine revelation, the continual apocalypse for all self-contained systems. What is left untouched by these events and their impact? In them is the reconfiguring of knowing and unknowing, of power and shame, of death and life. The more we enter into experience of these mysteries of our Lord, in whom we abide together, the more we can expect an upheaval. There, whatever is merely secular in us will encounter the life ‘ad saecula saeculorum,’ or little world will again encounter the life of the world to come. The encounter with God in prayer and a tradition grounded in that encounter is where we should rightly look to rebuild after deconstruction has done its work. That is where we can expect to find organic development of tradition as we seek to express what we have seen and heard, touched and tasted as the people among whom and in whom God has come to dwell.