A Musing on Deconstruction

I was at the bookstore the other day, and I found myself flipping through several books by Jacques Derrida, trying to figure out if I felt up to the task of reading more of that most interesting and difficult of fellows just now. Though I am not entirely comfortable with every place Deconstructionism will go, the basics of it seem to fit the way things really work. I've spoken mostly of Deconstructionism in the sense of the hermeneutical spiral, but let's consider it somehow other than that.

Consider faith. We accept Christ. We try to make Him the center of our lives, and to that end Christians start and continue churches to be used by Him. The churches are meant to be centered around Christ with the aim to spread the Good News. But, our attempt is futile. In as much as we attempt to pursue “His goals” on our terms, we find that our churches are not so much accomplishing the spread of the Good News, but rather maintaining their self-perpetuating existence as organizations and finding ways to amuse our members with ever increasingly spectacular displays.

It isn't malicious intent, but rather the complete inability of humans to be centered. We are constantly slipping away from that which we most aim to do, and, in fact, our attempts in and of themselves are as effective as is the effort of pulling one's fingers out of a Chinese finger trap. It simply does not work.

The key of course, and the place where the Christian parts way with the agnostic Deconstructionist thinker is that something I hinted at above. The problem appears inasmuch as we depend on our terms. God certainly is powerful enough to do what needs to be done, but if He is going to use us, we need to quit thinking we can escape the gravitational force exerted by the phenomena we call Deconstruction and allow God to deconstruct our frameworks for us.