Chapter Four: In A World of Wobbly Wardrobes.
Evaluating Derrida, Embracing Christ.
Time for an unpopular opinion: I hate IKEA (“blasphemy!” I hear some of you say)!! Everything from where their shops are located in the UK (generally off motorways) to the design of the shop (you basically have to walk the entire length of the shop before you can get to the checkout) – the fascination that people have with this place utterly confounds me (although to be fair, their cafes are quite nice)! Most distressing of all, however, is the concept of flat packed furniture. I could never quite reconcile the delicate balance between convenience and quality when assembling flat packed furniture. I have on one hand, experienced a certain euphoria having assembled an IKEA wardrobe which does not wobble or collapse, and knowing I have used every supplied component. On the other hand, I have felt a sense of bloodcurdling frustration when something looks uneven even after every nut and bolt is tightened. I know at that point I have a choice; live with the slight unevenness, hoping that no one will notice and convincing myself that the piece of furniture is functionally operative even if aesthetically compromised. Or I can start unscrewing and untightening, attempting to retrace my steps and discover where I erred. The latter is, of course, preferable, even just for reasons of emotional satisfaction - but my goodness, the frustration! I hate IKEA.
The sense of triumph, however, is most emphatic when having corrected a wobbly wardrobe, realising precisely what I did wrong, I now see the edifice standing boldly as a monument to my perseverance! We are not here to talk about flat packed furniture, though I have no doubt that you know precisely why I raise this innocuous analogy in the first place.
What we attempt to do with faultily erected furniture, the celebrity philosopher Jacques Derrida attempted to do with words, ideas and institutions. His ideas are so dense, they border on the poetic. His critique of convention is so incisive, that controversy rarely lay far behind (indeed, on a trip to address a clandestine philosophy seminar in communist Prague in 1981, a police officer planted drugs on him, and he was accused of drug smuggling - he was only freed after intervention by the French premier President François Mitterrand intervened). It is not, as I have suggested in previous posts, my intention to delve into the murky quagmire of Derridean philosophy; I simply want to suggest how some of the ways in which he thinks about the world may help us think about our faith.
To those who are critics of Derrida, I want to be clear that I share many of your concerns. I do not wish to deny the existence of metaphysics, deny that there is any such thing as meaning, deny that words can convey truth or any other such fatalisms. Meaningfully surveying any of these elements of his thought is the purchase of philologists, philosophers and metaphysicians - I am nowhere near any of the above! Really, I want to situate this discussion along the contours of his thought and then suggest why I think doing so is useful for anyone who has serious critical questions about the scaffolding of Christianity but remains committed to, in awe of and in love with Jesus the Messiah. This is perhaps how I most immediately self-identify; there was no such thing as “Christianity” in the earliest strand of the tradition as we understand it from the sources - that is a subject I will broach on a later post. Jesus did not start a new religion – he revealed the heart and intention of the true God. The closer we can get to this ideal, the less threatening and bemusing our institutional structures become (as I write this, the global Christian empire known as Daystar is imploding in almost soap opera like fashion - this is, alas, a perfect example of the institutional structures of the Christian faith overwhelming, minimising and obscuring the message of Jesus. It is, of course, by no means the only example).
Having suggested some of the broad Derridean ideas which I am not intending to interact with, my argument will proceed with a very simplified overview of Derridean deconstruction followed by an account of those areas of his thought pertinent to the examination of Christian thought. This latter section I will expand under the following subtitles: exploring meaning, amplifying muted voices, dismantling blind loyalties, undermining logocentrism.
Derrida’s Big Ideas (Deep breath – I promise you will not need to hold it for long)!
You may remember our brief foray into the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. Derrida’s deconstructionist thinking really expands the work of Heidegger who was one of his mentors and critics. Heidegger had developed the idea of Destruktion, the purpose of which is to “arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being—the ways which have guided us ever since” (a quotation from his epic Being and Time). Do not over concern yourself with what this means precisely – for our purposes, it is necessary only to remember that Heidegger’s goal was to define being and this was the end point for the German - to look behind all our traditions and ask what it meant “to be”. Derrida considered all of this to be far too neat and fraught with too many assumptions about the inherent stability of our traditions. Deconstruction, as Derrida explained, was free of any of these assumptions - it has no fixed endpoint or goal. Deconstruction is always an on-going process because language itself is always shifting. This is why he never saw any text as having a fixed meaning or interpretation.
Indeed, he began his critique of the building blocks of philosophy with the very idea of meaning itself - stay with me! Take the letters “D”, “O” and “G” in English in that order; when you say the word, you will immediately imagine some form of four footed domesticated canine mammal. This was unstable for two reasons in the mind of Derrida. Firstly, there is nothing inherently ‘dog-like’ about the three letters DOG; nothing about that word necessarily implies a four-footed domesticated canine - it is simply a signifier of that animal we imagine when we hear the word. Secondly, the only reason we have a particular kind of animal in mind when we say the word is that we know it is not a cat or an elephant or a snake - those words are all signifiers for a different sign. The conclusion: words are unstable.
Derrida was particularly sensitive about words because of the typical way that philosophy and literary studies had always privileged speech over writing - writing was just a marking or codification of what was said. What was spoken was the pure primary form of the communication. It was this observation that pressed Derrida into thinking about all manner of polarities that exist in our social world, and how it is a natural human tendency to privilege one over the other - we privilege reason over passion, science over art - and if these were true, we could go on - we privilege men over women, white over black, educated over simple. He saw these social binaries embedded in our cultural thought worlds, and typically one was dominant, and the other was recessive (the structuralists, to whom Derrida reacted, saw these oppositional binaries as equal, and, as such, the building blocks of communicative experience). What, Derrida asked, might the world look like if we gave greater attention to the recessive partner in the binary? How might our institutions, politics and even thinking change if we privileged the recessive partner?
There are several caveats to this, and it should not simply be blandly applied - Derrida was perfectly clear that when we go to watch our sports teams play, we want our team to be dominant, and this was unproblematic. Equally unproblematic was privileging kindness over cruelty or love over hate - but these were self-evident. However, in raising these kinds of questions, Derrida was perfectly aware that he was attempting to pull the rug from beneath the feet of cherished ideas of truth, the safety net of philosophical certainty and the comfortability of tradition. Once more I assert that I do not agree with his every proposition; I would take huge issue with key elements of his thought – although, in fairness, the translations of his very dense and verbose French were sometimes subpar, and he often complained of being misunderstood by those inspired by his work. Fortunately, we only need the contours, about which I've said enough; remember the lens I look through constantly is Jesus, and in what follows I want you to look through that lens with me.
There – that wasn’t overly arduous, was it?
Exploring Meaning
Even Derrida would admit that there is such a thing as meaning - indeed he sought to remodel rather than eradicate meaning. However, meaning does develop and, consciously or not, Christians are engaged in reflection over the development of meaning all the time. At this juncture I would simply propose that being more deliberate about our reflection on how meaning develops would help us in moments of darkness. Let's consider what I think is a simple but very pervasive, if subtle and subconscious, example of this - the Greek word pistis, (and its associated cognates) which in the New Testament is traditionally translated as “faith”, although “trust” and “belief” are equally accurate analogues. Consider these passages from the New Testament (New American standard Bible translation) and the three citations from popular culture.
1. 6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for the one who comes to God must believe that He exists, and that He proves to be One who rewards those who seek Him (Heb. 11:6).
2. 17 (as it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations”) in the presence of Him whom he believed, that is, God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that do not exist (Romans 4:17).
3. 39 And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm. 40 And He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?” (Mark 4:39 – 40).
4. “Belief is the death of intelligence.” ― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger.
5. “Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” ― Rabindranath Tagore.
6. “Faith ― acceptance of which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.” ― Dan Brown, The da Vinci Code.
Hebrews 11 is one of the most beautiful pieces of literature ever written for a whole host of reasons. The author's understanding of faith is profound; apart from anything else, he considers it indispensable for anyone who seeks to please God. Earlier in the passage, in fact in the opening line of Hebrews 11, he effectively defines faith, writing in Greek:
Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζομένων ⸂ὑπόστασις, πραγμάτων⸃ ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων (Heb. 11:1), which I translate as:
“And faith is the realisation of things being hoped for; evidence for the truth of things not being seen”.
To the untrained and contextually insensitive reader, this might sound like confirmation of what Dan Brown says in quote number 6 above. In fact, the author means quite the opposite. Most of Hebrews 11 is an elaboration of Israelite heroes who because of their own experience of God, knew that overwhelming challenges were not cause for despair despite what they might have felt. As such, they embarked on fresh challenges. In other words, experience had taught them that what they had hoped for would come to pass even though the odds were firmly against them, and on this basis, they allowed God to use them for even greater things. The previous experience was evidence for the truth that God would come through even though they could not see how - faith in this case means God came through for me before, even when I thought my number was up - so even though I think my number is up again, I'm going to trust that God will still come through. Far from being blind faith, or ‘the death of intelligence’, as per quote 4, it was very much experience and evidence based dynamism.
However, in Romans 4 (quote #2 above), Paul is very specific about the object of trust - it is not just that God will come through in some generic sense, but very specifically (and this becomes foundational for Romans 5–8), trust that God can make dead things come to life. Indeed, it is on this very basis that he treats the birth of Isaac as a foreshadowing of the resurrection of Jesus (see Rom. 4:16–25).
In the Markan account of the stilling of the storm (citation 3 above), the context details key questions about Jesus’ identity. The apostles were understandably terrified that they were about to be drowned in a raging tidal wave. Yet, Jesus equated their fear with a lack of trust, which the ensuing discussion associated with their ignorance of the nature and substance of his messianic vocation. How might we understand faith here? The absence of fear? The knowledge that Messiah has control over nature (bearing in mind that there is nothing in the Jewish scriptures which might suggest that this were true)? Perhaps Jesus would have been more pleased if the apostles had the attitude of Rabindranath Tagore (#4 above)!
All this is to say that just as there are different ways of thinking about trust in ordinary parlance or intellectual thought, pistis (faith) does not necessarily mean the same thing throughout the New Testament texts. To be sure the meanings are not so disparate that they are totally disconnected - even in the three passages above the ideas are not utterly unrelated but they are far from identical. If someone then were to say that they were losing their “faith”, what would that imply? In the vernacular it would almost certainly mean that they were about to turn their backs on Christianity, but for those of us engaged in Christ centred deconstruction, it opens the doorway to a number of critically important questions. What exactly does the deconstructor think they are “losing” when they claim they are losing their faith? Is it the existence of God? The objective, factual truth of Jesus’ bodily resurrection? Is it that they are not turning their backs on Jesus in every sense, but because of some trauma, hurt, disappointment or pain, are no longer convinced that he can bring them through? It is not the case that meaning can never be reached or that meaning doesn't exist; but it is the case that meaning can develop and that meaning has to be explored. Even for those of us very much within the sphere of faith in Jesus, the continued exploration of the meaning of the big ideas in our faith serves to sharpen our embrace of Messiah.
Amplifying Muted Voices
28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise (Galatians 3:28–29, NASB).
There is something utterly sublime about Galatians 3:28, so much so that I know of at least four entire academic volumes devoted to it and it has become the charter of egalitarian thought everywhere in Christendom. As beautiful as this is, to cite it without v. 29 is to completely miss what it actually means. It actually rounds off an argument that begins in Galatians 3:6, which raises the question of who Abrahams true descendants are. The conclusion of the apostle Paul is that the true descendants of Abraham are those who belong to Messiah. Those who trust Messiah will have equal inheritance rights to the Abrahamic legacy and will thus be the people of God. Jew will have no advantage over Greek, a free person will have no advantage over slaves and despite the cultural milieu, men will have no advantage over women. This is why he rounds up the verse by saying all are one in Christ. Indeed, verse 27 outlines that everyone baptised into Messiah have put Messiah on as a garment - that says they are in Messiah just like a clothed body is in clothes.
Let us not be too quick to dismiss Jacques Derrida; Jews were also aware over world which rested on lopsided social polarities - some were upheld, and others were opposed. In the work of Paul, the resurrection of Jesus had levelled the playing field and upended the unjust status quos upon which the human experience rested. Whilst I think there is little to be gained trying to divide the world up into groups of oppositional categories, I think the Derridean idea of amplifying the muted voice where its neglect is indicative of a presumed dominance, could help us see the world more clearly.
How many times have you heard those who are confused about their faith complain that they just want to be heard? Why are their voices muted? These are not insignificant questions to be asked by those in positions of leadership in Christian communities, and few things are more isolating than when these questions are not asked for the sake of political expediency. In the wake of key social movements, there are many who are asking if the voices of certain races or ethnic groups are muted? Others ask if the voices of women are unfairly marginalised? What about the voices of the neurodivergent or disabled? Is there a case to be made that we privilege marriage over single hood, or parenthood over non parenthood? As someone of West African origin, I have seen the woefully sharp end of cultures which consider the unmarried to somehow be socially defective and even bringing shame on families. I have witnessed people being made to feel subhuman because of their inability to conceive children.
What about the voices of those whose deconstruction journeys are particularly messy, apparently devoid of concrete objectives or raising questions which cannot be addressed by simply turning to the right apologetics book? What about those whose deconstruction journeys are not rooted in theological or philosophical difficulties, but in spiritual, emotional or sexual abuse? It is particularly disheartening when someone starts to question Jesus because of the debased actions of “Christians”; trying to get a person in that situation to separate Jesus from some of his more corrupt and debased followers is not straightforward. It requires a particular kind of conversation, one which can often only be stewarded by people with highly specialised gifts and training.
Hearing these stories can be emotionally draining and in the lexicon of social media “modern-ese”, can be said to “hurt the brand”. This, however, is Christ centred deconstruction; Jesus welcomed those with emotionally draining stories – “come to me,” he said, “all of you who are weighed down and burdened and I will reenergise you”! This is Christ centred deconstruction - there is no brand to protect!
I long for churches great and small, Christian business empires known and unknown, Christian leaders celebrated or not, to see welcoming the burdened and heavy laden as a central component of discipleship by creating forums for the stories of those so burdened. So often healing is a coefficient of sharing challenging narratives. If leaders stopped thinking about their “brands” and stopped treating counselling the hurting as an imposition to the real duties of ministry (usually the showier things with more glamorous metrics), Christian communities would almost certainly become safer, stronger and more beautiful.
Dismantling Blind Loyalties
It is a most commendable virtue to show loyalty. It promotes relationship, enhances trust, encourages honesty and nurtures communication. What do you say, however, to people who are loyal to a fault to people who are manipulative, unscrupulous or amoral. We see it all the time: people who refuse to cut off relationships with those who constantly prove themselves to be unreliable and consciously hurtful; those who lie for people in order to hide their misdemeanours; people who tolerate injustice in order to limit reputational damage.
What can be even more damaging is people who are blindly loyal to perceived ideals or to traditional perspectives. This is in no way to demonise tradition, to which we are all beholden in one way, shape or form. However, when we allow ourselves to be married to an idea because it is long standing or because changing it is too disruptive, it is gospel truth which suffers. Think about the struggles that women endured to be given the right to vote or that Africans endured to secure freedom from European overlords. Power brokers in institutional settings, wedded to the idea that only men should vote or that Africans were intellectually, socially and genetically inferior, resisted because their power base would be jeopardised. Men might have to rethink their stranglehold on society; slaveholders would lose money and their unpaid labour force.
Sometimes dismantling blind loyalties is a question of social revolution. On other occasions it is simply a case of letting go of fear. The heart of deconstruction, which is Messiah shaped, asks what brings us to a more faithful position - not what is more comfortable. My great concern is not with commitment to traditional ideas, but self-centred resistance to change. My concern is when certain ideas are ring fenced and protected from critical deconstruction because of the various ways it will inconvenience those who confuse leadership with power. Healthy traditions can help us engage more closely with Jesus - when they do, we can celebrate them, but we should never be slaves to them.
Undermining Logocentrism
“10 For this reason I am writing these things while absent, so that when present I need not use severity, in accordance with the authority which the Lord gave me for building up and not for tearing down (2 Cor. 13:10, NASB).
“Now sight is superior to touch in purity, and hearing and smell to taste; the pleasures, therefore, are similarly superior, and those of thought superior to these, and within each of the two kinds some are superior to others” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 10: Part 5).
The ancient epistle was the functional equivalent of the presence of the author. When Paul could not be present with a congregation he wrote a letter instead, as captured in the citation from 2 Corinthians 13, above. As I have already intimated, Jacques Derrida was critical of the way structuralists divided the world into oppositional forces - he did not perceive simple opposition, but hierarchy. He gave particular attention to the ancient tendency to privilege speech over writing. Speech was considered pure communication because of the presence of the speaker - it was truth from the horse’s mouth and, therefore, a pure form of communicative truth. Writing was merely a representation or expression of that truth and was, therefore, always secondary. What, Derrida thought, if there was no audience there for the speaker? Would the communicative event be the same? What about you reading my Substack? I'm not in your living space speaking to you; rather, you are reading my written words. Does that in some way compromise the efficacy of my communication to you? In Derridean thought, the idea that truth is contained in a core or a centre or presence - what he referred to as logocentrism - was a flawed idea. As we have seen in Paul, writing becomes the equivalent vehicle for truth in the speaker’s absence. There are all sorts of reasons why this is not a straightforwardly applicable concept - clearing up misunderstandings is possible when a speaker is present in ways written communications do not permit. However, I do think there is an important notion to be reckoned with here.
It was common within the Greek philosophical tradition to privilege certain human senses – Aristotle considered sight as supreme and also placed hearing and smell over the more animalistic taste and touch. In other words, to get to the core, that is the “logos”, using sensory perception, sight trumps hearing and hearing trumps touch. It is fairly obvious why this is flawed. The ability to see would be useless if there was a gas leak in your house - by the time you saw anything it would be too late! Your olfactory senses would reign supreme! Someone conducting an orchestra would not be worried about their ability to taste things when judging whether the woodwind and string sections of the concerto were in harmony or not; however, when he or she got home that evening for dinner, taste would naturally be more significant than hearing. As with everything, context is key!
These ideas are important if you have ever heard expressions like, “everybody is capable, but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree it will be forever lost”! I see this as critical because so much modern religious deconstruction is inextricably tied to identity. For so many, especially Generation Z and Generation Alpha, the question, “who am I?” is always lurking in the very immediate background of the question, “what do I believe about the world”. The artificial ascription of value is a blight on Christ faith - and without a spotlight on it, it will happen almost regardless of our cognizance of it. I know I am generalising, but I think it is true of our denominations: Catholics prioritise the Eucharist; Evangelicals prioritise worship; Seventh Day Adventists prioritise Sabbath observance; restorationists prioritise evangelism; Pentecostals prioritise spiritual gifts; the Salvation Army prioritise benevolence, and so forth. Each group can provide a cast iron rationale for why the prioritisation of their central focus is the correct one. It happens within most believing communities; certain roles are seen as more significant than others. The preacher tends to be the centrepiece of everything; worship leaders are often more valuable than ushers, and don't even get me started on the relationship between preachers and teachers! Christians commonly refer to certain people as ‘prayer warriors’ - are there prayers longer, somehow deeper? Do they have some hotline to heaven the rest of us do not know about? Charismatic and extroverted types are somehow seen as more zealous or more joyful or more open and, by extension, more Christ like than the quieter more reflective souls. One part of navigating deconstruction is considering what people believe, think or hold to; the other, equally critical component, albeit often messier in practice, is considering how they feel. So often deconstruction is about trying to find out where one fits within the scheme and that can add an extra layer of complexity. It strikes me that when we privilege particular components of Christian living, those who don't make the perceived cut, can find themselves in a bewilderingly isolating no man’s land. We owe it to one another to utterly subvert any pecking order of importance that exists in our communities – after all, whoever wants to become prominent among you shall be your servant; and whoever wants to be first among you shall be slave of all (Mark 10:43–44).
Closing Remarks
Congratulations for bearing with me till the bitter end - I hope you thought it was worth it. I am not an advocate, propagandist or recruiter for the ideas of Rene Descartes, Martin Heidegger or Jacques Derrida. I am not part of any Derridean societies, Descartes appreciation groups and I have no intention of starting a Martin Heidegger tribute band. I see lurking behind the ideas of positive scepticism, the critique of substance and pulling apart complex ideas helpful tools for evaluating and re-evaluating Christian discipleship. They are a means to an end; but the end is Messiah. I want to hear about your deconstruction/reformation/revaluation stories and in my own small way encourage you that Christ is at the end of all of them. Naturally, I plan to use this platform to clarify why Jesus is the one true exceptional life about which every other life orbits. I hope in these initial postings (and a couple more much briefer ones to come) the stage is set for what can be and encouraging and fruitful dialogue which helps to clear some of the fog. This platform is about an exchange of ideas whose telos is greater harmony with Messiah. This is not a place for disputes to be settled or great conclusions to be drawn, but for that still small voice to say it's OK not to be OK - let's just talk, listen and rebuild those wobbly, flat packed wardrobes!