Dismantling Human Tradition

When I was young, I told my mom a name I wanted to give to a future child. Her quick response was that if my future husband had ever known someone by that name—and didn’t like the person—he wouldn’t want the memory of them in his home.

The same name, the same word, can have different connotations.

The term “Deconstruction” has taken on a definition all its own in Christendom. It is basic etymology. As words popularize and morph meaning, they assume new preconceptions and sometimes baggage.

Maybe you know someone who deconstructed and ran screaming from the faith, destroying others. So, you hate the concept. It is scarier to watch someone else do it, but this is where westerners get to experience “Though none go with me, I still will follow.”

When God reveals a lie that I’ve believed, it’s usually painful. But it is an exhilarating process and increases my faith. The writers in my critique group who wrote for Love Inspired Suspense always incorporated a lie that their heroes and heroines believed: to be overcome before the end of the novel.

But what happens when it isn’t just a lie about your worthiness or purpose, but a lie about your faith? And what if it’s a dozen at once, more confusion than you can handle, so you are not sure if you can trust what is truth from your entire foundation?

I feel like continuing to build upon lies because you don’t want to lose your faith is more dangerous than realizing that you have something weak in the foundation and then inspecting or tearing it down.

A few years ago, some of my foundational bricks eroded.

An existential crisis of faith can become a spring cleaning if you don’t fear what you’ll find. Be more afraid of ignoring it. Deconstruction for me was merely inspecting which bricks were made of hay and stubble, fingering them out of the foundation, and replacing them with something worthy.

I guess that’s more like dismantling. When you want to keep all the good parts of a machine but pull every piece out and line them up to find the broken cog and replace it.

When terms take on baggage, we can try renaming them. But that’s just semantics. If everyone started using the new term, replacing deconstruction with dismantling or something else, it would just morph in definition and still offend some and not others.

Dismantling Human Tradition

For me, deconstruction was not questioning the Bible. But it has involved not fixating on single word inerrancy and literalism. Because it’s a simplistic translation that says Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Man doesn’t have one missing rib and, metaphorically, the word could mean side. As in, a side of man that is no longer in him is now embodied in woman.

But more than multiple translations of a single word—I’ve had to wrestle with the way the Bible was deciphered in our country and era. It was through the lens of human tradition that made me assume what certain things in the Bible meant.

As I’ve altered my view on eternal conscious torment I realized my belief can reinforce my understanding of scripture when I’m reading.

Some form of deconstruction has to happen to every believer. At least everyone who comes to faith as a child or is raised under someone else’s faith. That’s how to make what you’ve heard your own faith.

We also need to dissect things we’ve heard that were just a tangent of someone else’s faith journey. A situation where you never heard the resolution, only the plaguing question. “Why did he have to die?”

Or maybe we only heard the answer to something, but not the process. This is frequent in the New Testament. We’re often given a specific answer to a specific question in a context that is not explained, because everyone knew it. “Women cover your heads.”

Misunderstood

Premarital sex in the church comes with a lot of shame, so I remember someone quoting to me, “The marriage bed is sacred.” It was lovely… very redeeming… and good in the moment I first heard it. But it was also quoted to imply that “everything goes” in the marriage bed. If you’re married, it’s kosher…

Without the whole-Bible framework, this example of misquoting scripture can become license for anything. Because the verse is actually a command to, “Keep the marriage bed sacred.” Imagine my surprise when I found it written very different than free-license. Keep the marriage bed sacred is a lot more congruent with the whole of scripture which says God will judge fornicators and adulterers.

The Letter of the Law But Not the Heart

Scripture does not need to be misquoted to be taken out of the whole-heart of the gospel. If you read that someone cannot deny their spouse intimacy without also applying God’s design for equality, consent, and selfless love, it allows marital rape and oppression.

Or the popularly quoted OT scripture that a girl must marry her rapist. At the time, and still in some current cultures, a rape victim was utterly destroyed. She became ineligible for marriage, and since children were the only way to provide for her future, she would be completely destitute. So, giving her “raised status” as a wife, in a home, and then not being allowed to divorce her actually redeemed her living needs.

This is why I bristle when someone wants to look up a scripture to prove a point.

Be careful when you accept thoughts and statements that sound biblical. Be careful when you quote a portion of the text without the whole-heart, or use it as a weapon against yourself or others. You might lay a brick of stubble in someone’s foundation.

Also, be wary of taking your interpretation or personal directive as prescriptive law. Just because God revealed to you that you should not masturbate, it doesn’t mean you should tell the whole high school youth group that masturbation is sin. Rather, share how God can speak individually through the heart of scripture for a specific need in the moment.

Acts 18:24-26 says Apollos was mighty in scripture and knew many things but a husband and wife team, Priscilla and Aquila, took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.

More Accurately

Some many people have used the verse “God hates divorce” as a weapon. God hates me, or God hates that a person got divorced. It’s quoted with disregard that God is speaking about hating the violence of divorce against the vulnerable, inside of a covenant which should protect them. Doesn’t it make more sense that he hated the blood on the garments of men who abused women by treating them like objects and divorcing them?

Yet, my grandma couldn’t teach Sunday school because she’d been divorced. That’s human tradition.

The Bible Project App has a great series right now about the Sermon on the Mount. You listen to a pleasant reading of scripture, a snippet of a discussion, and a short video commentary each week while working through the passage.

Week 20 speaks to divorce, and it helped me wrestle with some of the misquoted verses and lies I’ve always had. (Week 18 also validated why looking at someone with lust dehumanizes them.)

The Bible Project unpacks the specific question surrounding that cultural debate of divorce. It speaks to a situation which doesn’t align perfectly today, since men can’t cast aside their wives without income and protection because she ruins dinner. But when we take this reply from Jesus and repeat the Bible literally word for word, we think the only legit reason for divorce is infidelity.

Human tradition uses the Bible to justify social power. Dismantling and deconstruction can remove the barbs of weaponized, incomplete thoughts from scripture to see the larger context of God’s provision for humanity. Dismantling human tradition has been beautiful. I am meeting a good God.

Deconstruction isn’t just pulling the entire structure down because of tragedy or tough things you don’t understand. It’s testing all the bricks with fire. And even if most of them burn up—can’t God build from the ground anew? All we need is the cornerstone. Hold on to Christ and wrestle with everything else.

You don’t need a brick that says “7 day creation with dinosaurs.” You don’t need a brick that says “musical instruments and dim lighting followed by a 35 minute, three-point sermon.”

I mean… wasn’t the Jesus freak movement just removing the bricks that said, “men can’t have long hair” and, “you must wear shoes to church?”

Don’t fear the wilderness if your worthless structure is burning down. Let human traditions turn to ash, keep only the cornerstone.