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Two Approaches to Reality, One of Which Is True: Either Construing or Constructing Reality
Let’s say that I’m on vacation to Turkey. I want to look at Asia Minor and the geographical locations of the Apostle Paul’s churches there. In addition I’m interested in Istanbul and the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. While touring, I’m grabbed, a gunny sack pulled over my head, and thrown into the back of a dark cargo van. The next thing I’m sitting on a metal chair in a crumbling urban brick building with a camera pointed at my face.
Moslem terrorists rip the sack off my head and through very bright light I see several swarthy, angry men each with AK-47s. One of them puts a crumpled paper in my hand with English text, that says I must admit confess that as an American spy I reject the Republican form of government and pledge my allegiance to Allah.
I look up from the script my interrogators gave me and tell them that I can’t read this, because it isn’t true. One of them punches the side of my head with the butt of his rifle and I see a flash of bright lights. I shake out the cobwebs and everything looks blurry. As my brain starts to clear again, I feel a stream of blood down the side of my head. As everything starts to clear, I look at the script and reassess whether I might go ahead and read it.
What’s on the piece of paper isn’t true, even if the audience believes it. The kidnappers constructed a reality. It isn’t true. I don’t believe it. I reject it. Someone else wrote it. Saying it or writing it more doesn’t make it any more true. What they’ve constructed is not reality. The language on the paper means to construct a new reality.
Maybe you’ve heard that perception is reality. A person can create his own reality based on his perception, one which might not be true. A person with perceptions will call it reality, when it isn’t. This is a reality again of his own construction, perhaps based on his misconstruing his own reality. Perception is reality, is not reality. He could perceive reality, but his perception does not make it reality. Very often it is not. Even though it isn’t reality, he forms language to construct a reality as he perceives it.
Construct or Construe
A popular postmodern notion today is that people construct their own realities. Reality is what people want it to be. Therefore, they reject objective reality and/or objective meaning.
For the sake of discussion, I am saying that construing reality is describing reality as it is, as it really is. Constructing reality describes reality as we want it to be. God alone constructs reality outside of our own perception. At most, we construe it. If we truly construe reality, then we describe it as it is. If we don’t like the reality God constructed, out of rebellion against him we might construct our own reality. It still isn’t reality though.
Postmoderns say men constructed the patriarchy, that is, the patriarchy is a social construct. They constructed the patriarchy using language. They say language is powerful. Language constructs reality. Language also changes reality, so using language they construct a new reality, an egalitarian one. Construction of a new, different reality starts with deconstruction of the old. Then using language, they construct a new one.
The patriarchy is reality. People’s job is to construe reality. People might not like the patriarchy but that does not change the reality of patriarchy. Since God constructs reality, reality is objective and, therefore, meaning is objective. Our life only has meaning if it describes reality as it really is. Someone construes reality only when he describes it or understands it as it really is.
Is patriarchy construing reality or constructing reality? It construes reality. It construes what God constructed. Why do people then construct reality? Objective reality, what we should call “the truth,” contradicts people’s lusts. They then construct a reality that conforms to their lust and call it their own reality. Also, they call it their truth. They use language to construct their own reality. This is why language becomes so important in secular institutions. They reject God, leaving themselves to construct their own reality.
The Idolatry of Using Language to Construct a New Reality
In the beginning, God constructed reality out of language. John 1:1-3 read:
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
The Word made all things. With Him was not anything made that was made. God alone did this or does this. When a man constructs his own reality using language, it is a form of idolatry that proceeds from pride and lust. Therefore, he worships and serves the creature rather than the Creator (cf. Romans 1:25).
Rejecting reality, that is, not describing it as it really is, also rejects God. It is a more subtle and significant way to eliminate God or to dethrone Him. God created everything for pleasure. Man deconstructs reality and constructs his own reality for his own pleasure.
Scripture reveals the reality God constructed, using language. God spoke the world into existence. He upholds all things by the Word of His power. God’s Words construct reality.
Those God created are responsible to construe reality based upon scripture. No one is neutral. When they don’t receive what God said, they will construct a new reality with their own language in defiance of God.
More to Come
How Even Apparently Conservative Evangelicals Justify Disobedience to Scripture as a Deconstruction
Today churches have gone “woke.” Many accept critical race theory and same sex relations. Before contemplating those extremes, we might consider something short of that and what leads to it.
A man I know well pastors in the same city as a conservative evangelical does, and the two discussed separation. The conservative evangelical church accepts membership of many and widely varied doctrinal and practical positions. Everyone is worldly also to sundry degrees, many very much so.
The conservative evangelical graduated from Masters Seminary and in general follows its way of thinking and operation. In a conversation, the man who I know well mentioned to the conservative evangelical 1 Timothy 1:3:
As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine.
Paul besought Timothy to charge the pastors at Ephesus that they “teach no other doctrine.” That’s very clear. “Teach no other doctrine” is one Greek word, heterodidaskaleo. This matches up with what Paul also said in 1 Timothy 6:3-5:
If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness . . . . from such withdraw thyself.
Here’s what the conservative evangelical, who went to Masters Seminary, said: “We teach that “doctrine” there [in 1 Timothy 1:3] is [or means] ‘the gospel.'”
This is the kind of dealing with scripture or teaching that justifies disobedience to scripture. Is “doctrine” “the gospel” in 1 Timothy 1:3 and in 1 Timothy 6:3-5 among other verses of scripture? Of course not. Still, that’s how conservative evangelicals will go ahead and understand “doctrine.” “Doctrine” refers only to “the gospel” in that passage.
Calling “doctrine” “the gospel” is a type of deconstruction. Rather than a verse asserting absolute truth, a person assigns a meaning that he conceives at that moment in time. In Is There Meaning in this Text? Kevin J. Vanhoozer writes (pp. 21-22) about the deconstruction of the postmodernist Derrida, the one most associated with it:
The belief that one has reached the single correct Meaning (or God, or “Truth”) provides a wonderful excuse for damning those with whom one disagrees as either “fools” or “heretics.” . . . Neither Priests, who supposedly speak for God, nor Philosophers, who supposedly speak for Reason, should be trusted; this “logocentric” claim to speak from a privileged perspective (e.g., Reason, the Word of God) is a bluff that must be called, or better, “deconstructed.”
A teacher or preacher may dismantle Christianity by deconstructing the language. Christianity is based upon language, the language of the Bible. Rather than say you don’t believe the Bible, you can just deny a “single correct meaning.”
Deconstructing the biblical text allows and even instructs men not to believe and obey the Bible. They not only disobey, but they disobey while thinking they’re obeying, because of the deconstruction of the language of scripture. A church can grow in numbers from the welcome of plenteous and diverse disobedience, while still labeling it obedience. It doesn’t fool God now or ever.
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