Four Biblical Resolutions for the New Year

 I have written these on a 3X5 card and am carrying them into the new year.

The Cure for Entitlement and Victimization

 

 

Sleeping Bear Dunes, Michigan

(There are many true victims. This post is not about them.)

I recommend John Townsend's book The Entitlement Cure: Finding Success in Doing Hard Things the Right Way.

One of the bitter fruits of entitlement is externalization. Townsend writes: "People with an attitude of entitlement often project the responsibility of their choices on the outside, not the inside. The fault lies with other people, circumstances, or events. They blame others for every problem." (p. 61)

The worship songs of externalization are...

"It's Them, It's Them, It's Them, O Lord, Standin' in the Need of Prayer," and...

"Change Their Hearts, O God." 

Externalization-people fail to look at their part in their problems. "Instead, they default to answers outside their skin. The result? They tend to be powerless and unhappy. They tend to see life through the eyes of a victim. And their suffering is unproductive — it doesn’t get them anywhere." (Ib.)

The classic victim mentality is:

"Yes, I did what was wrong. But you forced me to do it." The "victim" persists in recruiting other people for the self-justification of evil. In this they destroy others, along with own soul.

Entitled people rarely say "thank you." Because they are deserving. Instead, they blame

"Blame," writes Townsend, "is a first cousin to entitlement." The constant blamer is the perpetual victim. 

The antidote to this bondage is to take responsibility for your own choices and attitudes. Be open to seeing yourself as the problem. Reject a global victimization that views yourself as someone who is always being "done to," and own your own part in your problems. 

Forgive those who have trespassed on your heart. 

Take responsibility for your own trespassing.

How I Prepare for a Sermon

 

(I re-post this periodically to keep it in play.)

1.  I print out the biblical text and carry it with me throughout the week.

2.   I meditate on the text. I read it over and over and over. I let it get into me. As I am doing this, God speaks to me. I write down what God says to me.

3.   I ask these questions:

a.   What is the text saying?

b.   What is the text saying to me?

c.   What will this text say to our people?

4.   I study the text.

a.   I use biblical commentaries.

b.   The rule is: not just any commentary will do. Find trusted Jesus-following scholars who have invested their lives in studying the text. I have a list of trusted names. For suggestions, see 

bestcommentaries.com.

c.   When God speaks to me while I am studying the commentaries, I write it down.

d.   I take notes on the commentaries. These notes appear in my sermon notes.

5.   As I am doing these two things – meditation on the text, and study of the text – I type out the sermon, often word-for-word, that God wants to speak through me.

6.   I take these notes and walk with them…, reading them over and over…  take drives in the car with them…  go to the state park overlooking Lake Erie and preach them (see photo above.). It always happens that, while doing this, God preaches to me. This gets emotional for me. I feel passion building towards the text, and what God has said, and what God is saying to me, and what God is going to say on Sunday morning.

7.   When I preach on Sunday morning, I want to know that I have given my entire self to preparing for this message. I never step up to preach without having given it my all. Average sermon preparation time each week is 10-20 hours. (Because, I cannot get away from it. It consumes me!)

8.   I feel a holy responsibility in preaching. I do not want to lead my people in the wrong direction. Therefore I study long and hard. And, I pray the text,

9.   I always have the expectation that God is going to show up, and make my mere human words into words from Him, for us all.

10.               With my focus on meditating on the text, and studying the text, and praying the text, my belief is that God, in the sermon, will give me and my people words from Him that are rooted in Scripture but provide extrabiblical revelation – viz., “now-words from God.”

11.               As I preach, I give God the right to lead me, even into things that I have not yet thought of. Usually, God does a fair amount of slicing and dicing my message into His message.

12.               If my people are spoken to by God, rather than being impressed with some “great sermon,” then I know the real thing has happened.

13.               I assume and expect God will do something through the preached Word. I am alert and attuned to this. Sometimes, even while preaching the message, I don’t know what God will do when the message is done. At other times I have a strong sense of what God wants to do, and I lead my people in this. In no way do I think I’m going to end the message with an “Amen” and then say “We’re out of here.” The preached word is going to bear fruit in people’s lives, immediately. The preacher needs to respond to this, and lead their people. 

Five Core Beliefs of a Praying Life

 

Five Core Beliefs of a Praying Life

(Linda, on a Lake Michigan beach)

(From my book Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.)

Since 1981 my extended praying day has been Tuesday. On Tuesday afternoons I go alone to a quiet place, away from distractions, and talk with God about what we are thinking and doing together. Solitary praying is one-on-one, God and I, for several hours. As I meet with God, I carry certain core beliefs about God with me. They are...  

1. God exists. God is real. There is a God. God is. Without this, praying is an illusion. In the act of praying I am keeping company with the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, necessarily existent (everlasting; without beginning or end), personal agent who created and sustains all things. This is no small appointment I have! 

2. God is a personal being. God desires relationship. The Christian idea of God as a Trinity makes sense of God as essentially relational. God, in his being, is three relating Persons in One. God, as a Three-Personed Being, makes conceptual sense of the idea that God is love. Everlastingly, the Father has been loving the Son, the Son has been loving the Spirit, the Spirit has been loving the Father, and round and round in the Big Dance. To pray is to accept God’s invitation to the Big Dance. 

3. God made me. For what? For relationship with him. God desires relationship. He made me for such a partnership as this. When I pray, I am living in the heart of God’s desire for me. 

4. God knows me. In praying, God’s Spirit searches me out. God is aware of my deepest thoughts and inclinations, many of which are beyond me. God knows me better than I know myself. This would be devastating, were it not for the fact that… 

5. God loves me. God, in his essence, is love. Therefore, God cannot not-love. This is good news for me! As I put 4 and 5 together, I’m singing “Amazing Grace,” accompanied by tears of gratitude and joy. God desires me to love and know him in return. God has called me into a reciprocal relationship. Between God and me is a give-and-take.

My Favorite Devotional Books

 

Over the years I have used several devotional books. The one that has been most valuable to me is:

A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants, by Reuben Job and Norman Sawchuck.

 Others I find valuable are...

A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works, by C.S.L.

Seeking the Kingdom: Devotions for the Daily Journey of Faith, by Richard Foster

You Are the Beloved: 365 Daily Readings and Meditations for Spiritual Living: A Devotional, by Henri Nouwen

Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith, by Henri Nouwen

God Is With You Everyday: 365-Day Devotional, by Max Lucado

A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals, by Thomas Merton

Hearing God Through the Year: A 365-Day Devotional, by Dallas Willard

Faith that Matters: 365 Devotions from Classic Christian Leaders, by Eugene Peterson, Brennan Manning, A. W. Tozer, et. al.

My Utmost for His Highest (Updated Language Edition), by Oswald Chambers

I have these devotional books lined up and waiting for me every morning. On occasion, time permitting, I read them all.

I am interested in Kevin DeYoung's devotional book - Daily Doctrine: A One-Year Guide to Systematic Theology. Yes, DeYoung is a Reformed theologian. I've read a few things he has written - excellent. I am not a Reformed theologian. If I only read things that I totally agree with I would end up reading nothing, not even myself. 

My three 31-day devotional books are...

31 Letters to the Church on Praying

31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship

The Great Invasion: Thirty-One Days of Christmas

'Twas the Day After Christmas

(Bozeman, Montana)

Today is December 26.  

The days after Christmas are

 important for all who follow Jesus. 

How we spend our time, talents, and resources today signifies who, and what, we believe in.

Linda and I live in the overflow of the birth of Christ. Christ is the gift that keeps on taking, and giving. 

Today, Christ is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, reconciling us to our Creator.

Today, our sorrow is traded for His joy.

Today, our imprisonment is acquitted on all counts, and His freedom is bestowed.

Today, Christ takes and gives. Today is a day of taking and giving.

The Incarnation is the pivot upon which our lives turn. 

Because of Christmas, we will never be the same. 

As splendid as Christmas Day was, today is better. The long winter waiting has ended. The long-expected Messiah has come. 

Today, He is wonderful.

Today, He is counselor.

Today, he is Mighty God.

Today, He is everlasting Father.

Today, He is Prince of Peace.

Decades ago, Linda and I met Him. And everything in our lives changed. Christmas, the day of endless taking and giving, began, in us. Christmas, with all its transcendent realities, was born. 

Christ-mass. 

The worship of Christ. 

It's December 26. The real celebration goes on in the hearts of all who have been found by Him.

Violent Night (an alternative Christmas story)

This is from my book The Great Invasion.

In Revelation 12:1-7 we have an unfamiliar nativity story. Eugene Peterson writes: “This is not the nativity story we grew up with, but it is the nativity story all the same.”  

This is why C.S. Lewis referred to the birth of Christ as an act of war. Christmas, said Lewis, is about "The Great Invasion." In chapter 7 of Mere Christianity, writes:  

"One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe--a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin... 

Christianity agrees that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.

Enemy-occupied territory--that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage."

Christmas Eve was the night before the Great Invasion. The creatures were stirring, even the mouse. We see this upheaval in the non-holiday telling of Christmas found in Revelation 12:1-7. It reads: 

A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days. 

    And there was war in heaven.

What’s happening here is this.  

1. The woman is not Mary, but the messianic community, the ideal Israel.

2. Out of the messianic community is born a child, a Messiah. 

3. The seven-headed red dragon is Satan (Rev. 12:9; 20:2). 

4. Satan is looking to devour this child; AKA Jesus the Christ.

Mary has already been prophetically warned about such things. In Luke 2 we read that...

... the old man "Simeon took him [baby Jesus] in his arms and praised God, saying:

"Sovereign Lord, as you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel."

The child's father and mother marveled at what was said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his mother: 

"This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too."

Violent night  

Holy night  

All's not calm.  

All's not bright

Christmas Eve - that violent night when the Light of the World descended into darkness.

(Pp. 77-79)

The Joy of Living Without Things

 

                (Our grandchildren, Levi and Harper)

The biblical idea of contentment is circumstance-independent. As are peace, joy, love and so on. 

The "fruit of the Spirit" is circumstance-independent. Were this not so, things like inner peace would be conditional, and that's bad news for all of us. That is, "IF I have _________, THEN I will have inner peace."

This "If... then" mentality results in our being captive to our circumstances.

Philip Yancey shares this story In his excellent book on prayer.

"I remembered reading the account of a spiritual seeker who interrupted a busy life to spend a few days in a monastery. “I hope your stay is a blessed one,” said the monk who showed the visitor to his cell. “If you need anything, let us know and we’ll teach you how to live without it.”" (Yancey, Prayer, Kindle Locations 1012-1015)

CHRISTMAS AND THE POWER OF HUMILITY

This is a year old, so the dates don't line up with the present. Nonetheless, I am re-posting it for Christmas week. Blessings!

Horizontal Church vs. Vertical Church (The Presence-Driven Church)

(Preaching at Faith Bible Church in New York City (Flushing))

The Vertical Church is a people group of Jesus-followers who desire nothing more than God's earth-shattering presence, and who experience that presence whenever and wherever they gather. The presence of God is the glue that holds them together. This is the meaning of Jesus' words about "whenever two or more gather, there I am in their midst." That's all that's needed: Jesus in our midst.

The Horizontal Church needs more than "Jesus in our midst," even to the exclusion of Jesus, leaving only us and "our midst." Here people have been seduced by the god of relevancy. Many are good people who have been mis-discipled. They have been taught - by culture - to rely on their own natural charisma to attract consumer-seekers. 

Much energy and money is spent on catering to the prevailing cultural ethos and its chronos-mentality; hence, there are temporally choreographed services because people (it is assumed) will pull out their cell phones if the earth-shattering presence of God hovers among them for more than an hour. The Horizontal Church unwittingly adds to Scripture, and has Jesus saying, "whenever two or more gather, with a fair trade coffee bar and stage lighting and short services and apps and creative add-ons, there I am in their midst, if only for an hour."

Horizontal churches burn people out in striving to measure up to the ever-shifting bar of cultural coolness. Even name changes and stage lighting cannot rescue these sinking vessels. (Vertical Church is not essentially about external makeovers, not that serving coffee or tight blue jeans are evil.)

James McDonald has written: 

"Eventually everyone vacates church where God is not obviously present and working. Getting people back to church is pointless unless God comes back first— that’s what Vertical Church is all about!

Ritual church, tradition church, felt-need church, emotional-hype church, rules church, Bible-boredom church, relevant church, and many other iterations are all horizontal substitutes for God come down, we all get rocked and radically altered, Vertical Church.

The problem is you can’t fake glory. You can’t manufacture it, or manipulate it, or manifest it at will. Only God Himself can bring glory into a church, and when He does, communities get shaken and lives get changed, and the fame of Jesus Christ curls continuously upon the shore of human hearts like a Hawaii 5-0 wave. Church is supposed to be a tsunami of glory every Sunday, and that is what we gather for." (MacDonald, Vertical Church: What Every Heart Longs for. What Every Church Can Be, Kindle Locations 104-105)

McDonald says, "In Vertical Church God shows up, and that changes everything."

***
I know McDonald has his problems. But he is correct about vertical and horizontal churches.

Search Me, O God

 

University of Michigan campus. "Angry Neptune," by Michele Oka Doner.

Search me, O God, and know my heart.

- Psalm 139:23

You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

You perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue

You, Lord, know it completely.

You hem me in behind and before,

and you lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

too lofty for me to attain.

- Psalm 139:1-6

I have gone to quiet places and sat silently before God for countless hours, requesting God to search me and know me. I cannot know myself fully. I am easily deceived about myself, thinking I am one thing while I am another.

Theistic philosopher Dallas Willard writes:

"The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our "within" is astonishingly complex and subtle - even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do." (Willard, Renovation of the Heart, 17)

At least I am aware that there is a profound epistemic gap between my feeble cognitive abilities and an omniscient God. This compels me to do the one thing I can, which is:

Get before God and pray, "Search me."

Purity Is the Result of a Great Longing

 

                                                                       (Our back yard)

(I'm re-posting this for someone who asked. Someone told them that God affirms premarital sex. I think not.)

1 John 3:2-3 say:

We know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, 

for we shall see him as he is. 

All who have this hope in him purify themselves, 

just as he is pure.

This is not a religious thing, not some legalistic command accompanied by an angry face telling us to "Be pure!" It is a RESULT. 

It is the RESULT of an GREAT DESIRE. Purity is a fruit of desire-attachment.

This GREAT DESIRE is TO BE LIKE HIM. 

This GREAT DESIRE to BE LIKE HIM is fueled by a HOPE. 

This HOPE is the expectation that one day WE SHALL SEE HIM as he is.

All who share this hope desire and admire Him and long to not only be with Him but to be like Him. We want to be like Jesus, not to impress anyone, but because we are His children and children want to be like their parents. Like Father, like daughters and sons.

I become what I long to behold. One day I shall behold Christ face to face. N.T. Wright writes:

"What an amazing moment! To come face to face, eye to eye, with the people he had loved but never seen. There is something transformative about eye contact. People who spend a lot of time looking at one another sometimes come to resemble each other. Perhaps this is because they are instinctively copying one another’s facial expressions until their muscles and tissue begin to be reshaped in that way. Imagine beginning that process at last after years of love which had been expressed through words and touch but never before through sight." (N.T. Wright, The Early Christian Letters for Everyone, p. 149)

Our deepest longing is to come face to face with Him. "To see his smile, to catch his facial expression, to begin to know him in a whole new way." (Ib.)

All who have this GREAT DESIRE purify themselves now as the RESULT of wanting to be like Him.

Purity is the result of a great longing.

True Praying Breeds Compassion for Others

                                                               (Praying at Redeemer)

1 John 2:7-11 tells me -  If I say I know God and love him but hate my beloved Christian brothers and sisters, I'm walking in darkness and blindness. Since God has no fellowship with darkness (in him there is no darkness at all), I disfellowship myself in the act of hating.

These verses haunt me, because I have hated other Christians. At the point of my hatred I have not known, loved, or followed Jesus. Worshiping Jesus as Lord on Sunday morning and hating people is just acting, and hypocritical.

A Jesus-follower who hates others is a contradiction. Because "God so loved the world," right?

The antidote to my hate-filled heart is a Spirit-transformed, Jesus-shaped heart. So, I am praying for a heart of love.

I want to look at others with the same compassion Jesus had. I want to love and forgive others from the heart, as Jesus did when he hung on the cross. I want the freedom Jesus had from a spirit of victimization.

How can this happen? One way is in the act of praying for others. True praying breeds compassion. And togetherness.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:
"A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner. This is a happy discovery for the Christian who begins to pray for others."[1]

---

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 86

A Disciple Grows in Compassion

 (I'm re-posting this for a friend.)

​Jesus looked on the crowds and, 

seeing they were like sheep without a shepherd, 

had compassion on them.  

Matthew 9:36

In my fifty-four years of following Jesus, my compassion for people has grown.

The word compassion means to feel with others. Jesus told me, years ago, that my capacity for feeling with others must increase. Here is one way Jesus has mentored me in compassion.  

I had just finished my seminary degree. My plans were to go immediately to a doctoral program. This did not happen. I applied to two universities. Both applications were too late. I would have to take a year off my studies.  

I needed a job. My sister-in-law Lora was working as a teacher at United Cerebral Palsy Center of Will County, Illinois. She suggested I apply as a teacher's assistant.

I interviewed with the Director of the United Cerebral Palsy Center. Her name was Gretchen Lantz. For part of the interview she took me to the boys' bathroom. She said, "I don't want to mislead you. You will be spending a lot of time in this room toileting handicapped boys and young men."  

I took the position. Over the next year I fell in love with students like James, Helen, David, Jimmy, Tony, James, and Gail. My heart aches a bit as I write these names. I grew to feel with them. That feeling is still part of me. Jesus, my Lord and Teacher, had a brilliant idea for me. He was mentoring me in having a heart of compassion.

When the year was over, I enrolled in a doctoral program at Northwestern University. I continued working as a teacher's assistant at the Cerebral Palsy Center for two additional summers. The disabled students had become my instructors.  

I began to look at others in order to understand, not judge. The more understanding I gained, the more I felt with them. Just as Jesus is able to “sympathize with our weaknesses,” so am I.  

This is how disciples of Christ feel. Apprentice yourself to Jesus, and you will experience the same.  

I would not be Jesus's disciple if I looked down on the people Jesus came to rescue. In my weakness, Jesus came to me and loved me. In the same way, I am to love others.  

Disciples of Christ go deeper. This is where the Pharisee missed it, as he said, “Thank God that I am not like these other horrible people.” He failed to understand that he was. The result was, no compassion.  

The secret to a compassionate heart is understanding. The more I comprehend about a person, the more I feel as they feel. The more I feel as they feel, the more I love.  

I want to be more like Jesus! He sympathizes with my weaknesses. His influence causes me to grow in compassionate understanding of others. Who am I to look down on others in their infirmities?  

My dear brothers and sisters, I long for this to be your experience.

DECLARATIONS  

I am increasing in compassion towards others.  

I focus on understanding people, not judging them.  

I know that understanding always precedes evaluation.

My heart goes out to people who are struggling.  

I am a rescuer of people.  

As a student in the School of Jesus, I am learning how to love as Jesus loves.

(From my book 31 Letters to the Church on Discipleship.)

Deconstruction (Not What You Think It Is)

                                                                           (Cancun)

The culture war is a battle for the meaning of words.

In her book Another Gospel Alisa Childers gives her definition of 'deconstruction.'  She writes:

"In the context of faith, deconstruction is the process of systematically dissecting and often rejecting the beliefs you grew up with. Sometimes the Christian will deconstruct all the way into atheism. Some remain there, but others experience a reconstruction. But the type of faith they end up embracing almost never resembles the Christianity they formerly knew." (Childers, Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity, p. 24).

Elsewhere she adds, "[Deconstruction] has little to do with objective truth, and everything to do with tearing down whatever doctrine someone believes is morally wrong."

That's incorrect. 'Deconstruction' has nothing to do with "tearing down," and its antonym is not "reconstruction." Childers uses a pop-version of 'deconstruction' as dismantling or tearing down. If 'deconstruction' were but another way to say "tearing down" then its employment is uninteresting, and hermeneutically impotent. 'Deconstruction,' in the scholarly sense, is far more interesting and provocative.

Pay attention now. This is from David Gunkel's book Deconstruction.  

"If you ask someone to explain it [deconstruction], what you typically get is a rather confused shell game of word substitutions, where “deconstruction” is loosely associated with other concepts like “disassembly,” “destruction,” “reverse engineering,” or “the act of taking something apart.” 

Despite the circulation of these familiar (mis)understandings, the term “deconstruction” does not indicate something negative. What it signifies is neither simply synonymous with destruction nor the opposite of construction. As Jacques Derrida, the fabricator of the neologism and progenitor of the concept, pointed out in the afterword to the book Limited Inc: “The ‘de-’ of deconstruction signifies not the demolition of what is constructing itself, but rather what remains to be thought beyond the constructionist or destructionist schema.” For this reason, deconstruction is something entirely other than what is typically understood and delimited by the conceptual opposition situated between the two terms “construction” and “destruction.” In fact, to put it schematically, deconstruction comprises a kind of general strategy by which to intervene in this and all the other logical oppositions and conceptual dichotomies that have and continue to organize how we think and how we speak. (Pp. 1-2. Italics mine. See Gunkel's chapter on deconstruction's (Derrida's) indebtedness to Hegel.)

Let's give a hat tip to Jacques Derrida. "Deconstruction" originated with Derrida. Since then, it is used in a variety of ways that are alien to what Derrida was saying. Often, perhaps always, the more a term is used, and as it enters public domain, it becomes misused, and gets vaguer and vaguer. This is what has happened to "deconstruction," which in America, has become synonymous with "destruction."

Now...  fasten your seat belts or, perhaps, just eject...  here is one of the best explanations of "deconstruction" I have read. It's from Christopher Norris's book Derrida.

Don't be offended as I say this. If you don't have some grasp of what Norris is saying, then you don't understand deconstruction. If you don't understand deconstruction, then wisdom says don't use the word. But, alas, this is what people do. I've done it too; viz., use words that, when I am pressed, I am unable to explain.

Norris writes:

"Deconstruction is neither 'method' on one hand not 'interpretation' on the other. In fact it is not too difficult to come up with a concise formula that would make it sound very much like a 'method' and yet describe accurately some of Derrida's most typical deconstructive moves. What these consist in, very briefly, is the dismantling of conceptual oppositions, the taking apart of hierarchical systems of thought which can then be reinscribed within a different order of textual signification. Or again: deconstruction is the vigilant seeking out of those 'aporias', blindspots or moments of self-contradiction where a text involuntarily betrays the tension between rhetoric and logic, between what it manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean. To 'deconstruct' a piece of writing is therefore to operate a kind of strategic reversal, seizing on precisely those unregarded details (casual metaphors, footnotes, incidental turns of argument) which are always, and necessarily, passed over by interpreters of a more orthodox persuasion. For it is here, in the margins of the text - the 'margins', that is, as defined by a powerful normative consensus - that deconstruction discovers those same unsettling forces at work. So there is at least a certain prima facie case for the claim that deconstruction is a 'method' of reading with its own specific rules and protocols. And indeed, as we shall see, the above brief account of Derrida's deconstructive strategy does provide at least a fair working notion of what goes on in his texts." (p. 19)

Let me add a teaser here. For Derrida, deconstruction considers all subject predicate sentences (of the form S is P) false. To understand deconstruction includes understanding why Derrida thinks this way. And it is to understand why, for Derrida, writing is inferior to speech. But who has time to understand such things, except for a pastor like me who only works for two hours on Sunday mornings?

(And, BTW, deconstruction, when understood, has some intractable philosophical problems. Scientists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Pinker despise it. That's another story...)

What Is "Deconstruction?"

 

(Sterling State Park, Lake Erie, Monroe)

The culture war is a batt4le for the meaning of words.

In my recent book I "deconstruct" progressive Christianity. To understand this, one must know what "deconstruction" is. In popular culture it is synonymous with "destruction," with its antonym being "construction." If that's all "deconstruction" means, then it's unnecessary, except perhaps as used to impress others with a big word.

Here's from my book, chapter 15.

"What is “deconstruction?” It does not mean “to destroy.” Please pay attention to this. Postmodern scholar Mark C. Taylor writes: 

“The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure—be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious—that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion.” (Quoted in "Derrida: The Excluded Favorite," by Emily Eakin.) 

What deconstruction is, is this. You unravel an event, or a text, to expose what is not there, yet presences itself as required for what is there. Deconstruction is about finding what is excluded, what is absent. Because what is there is only fully understood by what is not there. For example, the letter a is not b, but cannot be understood apart from the excluded b. 

James Faulconer writes, "I take that to be the general meaning of the word deconstruction as Derrida has used it: not just using our words and concepts against themselves, but showing what has been left out or overlooked… Deconstruction is used to show that a work does not adequately address something, not that it should have."...

Deconstruction points to marginalized ideas. Christopher Norris, in his biography Derrida, writes, “To 'deconstruct' a piece of writing is therefore to operate a kind of strategic reversal, seizing on precisely those unregarded details (casual metaphors, footnotes, incidental turns of argument) which are always, and necessarily, passed over by interpreters of a more orthodox persuasion. For it is here, in the margins of the text - the 'margins', that is, as defined by a powerful normative consensus - that deconstruction discovers those same unsettling forces at work.”

(Piippo, Deconstructing Progressive Christianity, pp. 219 - 221)

For those who appreciate expertise, here are explanations of deconstruction in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If you don't understand this, then you don't understand what deconstruction is.

Definitions of Deconstruction – mostly upon Jacques Derrida’s death (2004)

“Mr. Derrida's name is most closely associated with the often cited but rarely understood term "deconstruction." Initially formulated to define a strategy for interpreting sophisticated written and visual works, deconstruction has entered everyday language. When responsibly understood, the implications of deconstruction are quite different from the misleading cliches often used to describe a process of dismantling or taking things apart. The guiding insight of deconstruction is that every structure -- be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious -- that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out. These exclusive structures can become repressive -- and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems.”

Mark C. Taylor, “What Derrida Really Meant,” NYT Op-Ed, p. 26, Oct 14, 2004.

“[H]e was known as father of deconstruction, method of inquiry that asserts that all writing is full of confusion and contradiction, that author's intent could not overcome inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence.”

Jonathan Kandell, “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, dies in Paris at 74.”

NYT-Arts, October 10, 2004, p.1.

Derrida himself (qtd. [selectively] in Kandell):

“[In a] 1993 paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, [Derrida] began: ‘Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible.’

and

“[T]o Dinitia Smith, a Times reporter, in a 1998 interview. ‘Deconstruction requires work. If deconstruction is so obscure, why are the audiences in my lectures in the thousands? They feel they understand enough to understand more.’ / Asked later in the same interview to at least define deconstruction, Mr. Derrida said: ‘It is impossible to respond. I can only do something which will leave me unsatisfied.’"

“Derrida partly provided the thrill of sheer nerve: daring to write something that wouldn't just modify interpretations but challenge the entire philosophical and literary enterprise. His was an imperial ambition, one inherited from Nietzsche and Heidegger: don't reinterpret. Uninterpret. Show not just that some formulations are mistaken, but that all are. And that, moreover, they have to be. Show how all of Western thought is based on a type of ignorance or incompleteness, that everyone

who claimed to get the point was missing the point.” Edward Rothstein, “The Man who Showed us How to Take the World Apart,”

NYT-Arts, Oct 11, 2004, p.1.

“Deconstruction, Mr. Derrida's primary legacy, was no exception. Originally a method of rigorous textual analysis intended to show that no piece of writing is exactly what it seems, but rather laden with ambiguities and contradictions, deconstruction found ready acolytes across the humanities and beyond -- including many determined to deconstruct not just text but the political system and society at large. Today, the term has become a more or less meaningless artifact of popular culture, more likely to turn up in a description of an untailored suit in the pages of Vogue than in a graduate seminar on James Joyce.”

Emily Eakin, “The Theory of Everything, RIP”, NYT Week in Review, p. 12.