5 Books You Need to Deconstruct Your Faith Without Losing It

When we first begin our journey of seriously interrogating our faith, tearing down in order to build up, it is as though the entire theological landscape lies before us. We are free to go anywhere, and question all things. Yet not all places are beneficial; without the proper guidance, we may find ourselves wasting hours, months, or even years, in forests or canyons that go nowhere and lead us to dead ends. Or worse, poor ideas may lead us to uninformed conclusions, causing us to prematurely lose our faith because of someone else’s bad philosophy.

What we need as we embark into the unknown are guides. We need those who have been there before, evaluated the ideas in that wilderness, and produced partial maps that can help us discern if indeed we are headed in a useful direction. For those of us who are trying to reconcile our intellects with our faith, those guides are insightful, brilliant, and shrewd philosophers and theologians who have taken the time to write down their discoveries and ideas.

As we travel into the world of ideas, we would do well to stand on the shoulders of giants, purveying the land with the help of good ideas and useful philosophies. To that end, I want to share some authors that gave me direction on my journey, and saved me from spending years lost in the woods of deconstruction.

Guide №1 — N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God

I grew up believing that having faith in Jesus meant that penal substitutionary atonement was the only atonement theory out there, and that when I died my spirit would simply fly off to the heavenly nether realms to sing Good Good Father forever and ever, amen. The problem with this anorexic view of Christianity is that it makes Jesus’ actual life basically meaningless; all that matters is that he was perfect and that he died so you don’t have to. What’s more, if we mix a bit of predestination into this problematic understanding, we quickly realize that life itself is a pointless exercise in a world destined to burn.

What Wright showed me was that the Kingdom of God is about transforming this world; that the incarnation affirms that this world is good; that eternal life is about living in a new heavens and new earth; and that penal substitution must be taught alongside Christus Victor, lest God turn into a tyrant who hates, rather than loves, human beings. In short, Wright brought me hope. I finally could long to follow Christ because the vision he casted two thousand years ago was good and desirable, not simply because I was afraid of hell.

Guide №2 — Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins

While this debate has become a thing of the past in Christian communities in larger cities, I grew up in a smaller town where confessing one believed the theory of evolution was the same as confessing that one worshiped Satan. To even entertain such an obviously satanic lie meant one doubted the inerrancy of Scripture and the truthfulness and power of God. So, as a good Christian boy, I toed the line for years, smugly making fun of my high school biology teachers and rehearsing all the embarrassing arguments from Answers In Genesis. Yet, as many of you well know, after a while this was simply no longer tenable. Evolution as a theory has mountains of evidence behind it, and I feared I would have to commit intellectual suicide in order to hold to my faith.

Enter Pete Enns and his controversial-at-the-time book reconciling the Genesis creation story with evolution. While I think Enns is perpetually stuck in a deconstruction phase, this book was instrumental in showing me that evolution can (and arguably should) be held alongside the creation stories in Scripture. Enns helped me see that the stories of the first humans, in their context, are much richer when read as theological poetry — as myths — and should not be expected to answer our very modern questions on the empirical details of creation ex nihilo.

(For those interested, biologos.org has a wealth of resources, and John Walton has done a great job comparing and contrasting the Genesis myths with other ancient near eastern stories in his Lost World series. Also, see this review by James K. A. Smith on Enns’ book as a helpful corrective in Enns’ tendency to do all his theology from the “bottom up.”)

Guide №3 — Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus

While he relies on the slightly outdated Documentary Hypothesis, Friedman’s book is a fantastic, accessible, and humorous introduction to biblical criticism. And for any Christian embarking on a serious intellectual journey regarding their faith, biblical criticism is a thick forest they must find their way through. Fortunately, many others have been and are in that forest, hacking away at various trees, creating clearings, and building structures to make sense of it all. However, like most academic disciplines, not all of it is actually useful.

Biblical criticism, at its worst, needlessly shipwrecks earnest faith. But, at its best, it forces us to reconcile our faith with history and dig deeper into how God actually interacts with human beings and reveals himself in the Bible. Friedman, then, does a remarkable job at easing the newcomer into the world of biblical criticism. He presents the evidence in an engaging way, and demonstrates that, even though archaeology and literary criticism don’t seem to support Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or that the exodus happened the way the Bible claims, there nevertheless is almost always a kernel of historical truth behind the story that we can work with. So, while slightly unnerving to those just dipping their toes in these waters, any serious Christian looking to be honest about exploring the historicity of their faith must confront this forest, and Friedman’s text is a wonderful place to start.

(For those interested in going even deeper, William G. Dever’s Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? is a great introduction to biblical archaeology.)

Guide №4 — James Kugel, How to Read the Bible

For any Christian hoping to get a grasp on biblical criticism without becoming a radical skeptic (an issue I will address in an upcoming post), Kugel’s book is indispensable. What Kugel manages to do is, instead of turning a blind eye to the mountain of evidence that shows that the Bible was not dictated word for word by God but rather compiled (at times rather messily) by human authors with human intentions, find a way to reconcile this reality with faith in God. By not shying away from the challenges of scholars, he redeems biblical criticism, showing that it can lead us to a deeper understanding of what the Bible is indeed for, and that, done well, biblical criticism can enrich rather than destroy our reverence for the Word of God.

(A good companion to Kugel’s book, at a more accessible level, is Enns’ How the Bible Actually Works.)

Guide №5 — David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God

Any honest effort in today’s world at deconstructing one’s faith and deliberating if indeed it is as true as St Paul claimed it was must grapple with the challenge of materialism. No, not the idol of consumerism that we as Christian capitalists in the West accept a little to readily (That’s for another post). I mean the reductive, vacuous materialism of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Daniel Dennett. These pseudo-philosophers make the case — in an argument that for some reason western secular culture has found highly persuasive, myself included — that the material world is all that exists, that all reality can be explained by analyzing the mechanical structures that we can see. There is, according to these so-called New Atheists, no reason to believe in any sort of God; indeed there is no room for such foolish conjecture. Science will eventually give us all the answers; no need to believe in this “God of the gaps.” To be honest, this was one of the most difficult lies to see through and a large part of what drove me to relentlessly interrogate my faith.

Yet, despite all their moralistic hubris, these men do have a point, at least when it comes to insufficiencies in popular conceptions of God. The God many Christians believe in does seem to be akin to an invisible being in the sky stirring things up now and then. This view of God should be criticized and deconstructed.

In light of this, Hart’s book is a godsend. Marshalling some of the best arguments from philosophers from across the world from Plato to present day, Hart manages to time and again demonstrate just how untenable and ludicrous the reductive materialism of the New Atheists is. He deals with arguments regarding the mystery of Being, the hard problem of consciousness, and the necessity for transcendentals such as beauty, truth, and goodness. Further, Hart offers a view of God as not just a being, but as Being itself, a metaphysical belief with a long pedigree in all the great monotheistic religions, and a view that goes a long way in dealing with the New Atheists and that is bound to give some Christians a radically new view of God. In short, The Experience of God was the book that enabled me to see that Christian faith truly could be the faith of honest intellectuals.

(Though I do not agree with Hart’s idealist leanings, Experience is still the perfect book to expose oneself to some of the best arguments for classical theism.)

So there you have it, five of the best books I found for guiding me on my journey of deconstruction. Now, obviously I read many, many more — some helpful, some not so helpful — and I will share those in subsequent posts. These books, however, are enough to get a broad feel for the areas you can explore when deconstructing, and keep you from going too far into weird and wild theories (I’m looking at you, Richard Carrier). In future posts I will share more academic works, works of more extreme biblical criticism, and give critiques on theological works that can push the bounds of orthodoxy.

Until then, let me know what you think, and if there are any books you have found helpful on your journey.

If you are interested in reading more of my work on philosophy, theology, and deconstruction, please visit www.christandmind.com.