When it comes to thinking about #deconstruction in Christianity, Paul Ricoeur rightly argues for the creative and spiritual uses of Freud, Nietzsche, Lessing, et al. They are helpful on many fronts. They help us see what is “not God” and hear God more clearly.
They allow us to use a “small hammer” to tap the idols we are worshipping and hear their hollowness and emptiness. We need deconstruction as we learn to reinterpret the sacred texts and dogmas once again.
In interpreting a text, we will be forced to be disinstantiated from our Sitz im Leben and existentially re-emplotted by the Word, the Sitz im Wort, into the new world of God’s green country.
If there is no possibility of some kind of deconstruction of our current narratives (or whatever you want to call it), there’s no possibility of divine revelation intruding on our current course.
Nevertheless, there are folks who just want to stay in either the naïveté of fundamentalism or the deconstruction of liberalism and then atheism.
But this is not possible for one who has been confronted by Christ in his meekness and love. He will pull us through the door of western idolatry and worship of power to the ancient ways and paths.
Christ leads us to what Ricoeur calls the “second naïveté” of a renewed cosmic symbolism of redemption.
When Christendom and cultural Christianity are indistinguishable from empire, idols need smashing and tinkering. We need the voices of Nietzsche (not Joshua Harris) to see how intertwined cultural Christianity has become with western power.
We need deconstruction to wipe away the cobwebs of white supremacy, misogyny, abuse, racism, etc. Since these misadventures are in reality a hatred of the Other, we cannot hear God or have faith in him until these idols are deconstructed.
The hermeneutics of suspicion must give way to the hermeneutics of restoration if we’re to have an integrated and whole self.
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