BEMA Episode Link: 231: Introducing the Team — Deconstruction w/ Reed Dent
Episode Length: 1:02:21
Published Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2021 01:00:00 -0700
Session 6
About this episode:

Marty Solomon and Brent Billings are joined again by Reed Dent, staff member with Campus Christian Fellowship at Truman State University in Missouri, to discuss his new role on the BEMA team and consider the idea of deconstruction.

Discussion Video for BEMA 231

Reed’s Handcrafted Kayak

Impossible Constructions — M. C. Escher

The Architecture of Dr. Seuss, a Brief History — Architizer

Kingdom, Grace, Judgment by Robert Farrar Capon

Campus Christian Fellowship, Truman State University

Transcript for BEMA 231

Notes

*Note: The following notes are handwritten by me, Adam, and I reserve the right to be wrong.

BEMA 231: Introducing the Team - Deconstruction w/ Reed Dent

Title & Source Summary

Episode: 231 - Introducing the Team: Deconstruction w/ Reed Dent Hosts: Marty Solomon, Brent Billings, and Reed Dent (new host) Focus: Deconstruction and reconstruction of faith

This episode introduces Reed Dent as a new host on the BEMA Podcast teaching team. The conversation explores the concept of deconstruction in a pastoral and philosophical manner, addressing what it means to deconstruct faith, why it happens, what exactly is being deconstructed, and how to do it well within community. The discussion reframes deconstruction using metaphors of pruning, journey, and scaffolding, moving beyond the destructive connotations often associated with the term.

Key Takeaways

• Deconstruction is not inherently destructive but can be a natural part of spiritual growth and learning
• BEMA has always been about deconstructing typical evangelical readings of the Bible and reconstructing them around a more contextual, rabbinical hermeneutic
• Multiple catalysts drive deconstruction: new information, cognitive dissonance, disillusionment, disconnection, and trauma
• Deconstruction involves questioning interpretations, theologies, and experiences rather than necessarily rejecting God or the Bible itself
• Alternative metaphors for deconstruction include pruning (removing what’s dead to promote growth), redrawing maps (adjusting understanding based on new perspective), and removing scaffolding (taking away what blocks access to the actual structure)
• The Bible itself is a construct pointing to something beyond itself: the life lived with God inside it
• Healthy deconstruction requires community characterized by mutual friendship, love, humility, and both permission to question and permission to challenge
• Reconstruction is an essential part of the process that deserves direct conversation

Main Concepts & Theories

Defining Deconstruction

Deconstruction has become a social media buzzword, but the concept has deeper roots. For BEMA, deconstruction has been core to their mission since the early 2000s: deconstructing typical evangelical readings of the Bible and reconstructing them around a more contextual, rabbinical hermeneutic. The term doesn’t have to carry negative or destructive connotations but can describe the natural process of unlearning and learning that accompanies spiritual growth.

Reed emphasizes that many people hear “deconstruction” and think “destruction,” but these are not synonymous. Deconstruction can be a healthy, necessary process for faith to remain dynamic and alive. The key is understanding what exactly is being deconstructed and why.

Alternative Metaphors for Deconstruction

Rather than viewing faith as a building being torn down, Reed proposes several alternative metaphors:

Pruning (Agricultural Metaphor): Faith is like a plant that needs pruning. Jesus speaks of pruning in John 15, where branches are cut away so that fruit-bearing branches can thrive. This isn’t just about correcting character flaws but can also involve trimming away false ideas about the Bible or God. Sometimes God even prunes away painful things like community or church experiences to promote healthier growth.

Redrawing Maps (Journey Metaphor): Faith is a journey, and we receive maps from others to guide us. As we gain new perspective (like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time when you didn’t know it existed), we must redraw our maps to account for new discoveries. Refusing to update the map because “we know the land is flat” can be dangerous. The journey itself is dynamic, never going exactly as planned, but that doesn’t make it less valuable.

Removing Scaffolding (Building Access Metaphor): This connects to the extended parable Reed shares later in the episode.

Catalysts for Deconstruction

Reed identifies five common catalysts that can trigger deconstruction:

1. New Information: Discovering ancient Near Eastern flood stories that parallel Noah’s flood, learning about historical-critical scholarship, or encountering biblical scholarship that challenges previous understanding.

2. Cognitive Dissonance: When theological systems clash with real-world situations and don’t make sense. Reed’s example: believing Afghan women burned with acid would be sent to hell by God, making God a partner to monsters—a belief that couldn’t hold when faced with the actual situation.

3. Disillusionment: When influential Christian figures are revealed to have dark, twisted pasts, or when local pastors fail to live up to expectations. This can lead to questioning whether the underlying theology is the problem.

4. Disconnection: Failure to develop meaningful relationships within the church community. Sometimes people are intentionally or unintentionally left on the margins without deep friendships, which can trigger a deconstructive process.

5. Trauma: When victims become targets of someone in spiritual authority whose identity is tied to Christianity. This is the darkest catalyst and requires particular pastoral sensitivity. Trauma is not “training,” and dismissing it as such is deeply harmful.

What Exactly Are We Deconstructing?

Reed emphasizes the importance of asking specificity: what precisely is being deconstructed? Options include:

• Interpretations of the Bible: Not the Bible itself, but specific ways of reading it
• Particular Theologies: Systematic frameworks like biblical literalism, inerrancy statements, or specific doctrinal positions
• God’s Self: Did we assume we had God constructed in the first place? We must be careful not to confuse the Bible with God or theology with God
• Experiences: Altar calls, salvation moments, spiritual practices that now feel unclear or questionable

Understanding what’s actually being questioned helps create empathy and prevents unnecessary conflict between people who may not actually disagree as much as they think.

The Parable of the Scaffolding and the Seuss Building

Reed shares an extended parable (credited to his friend Danny Wesley):

Imagine wandering through a desert and discovering a building that looks like an M.C. Escher drawing or Dr. Seuss illustration—twisty, impossible, yet standing. To study it, someone builds scaffolding around it. Eventually, the scaffolding completely surrounds the building.

Later, another wanderer arrives and sees only the scaffolding—straight lines, 90-degree angles, neat and orderly—and mistakes it for the building itself.

In this parable:

• The Dr. Seuss building represents the biblical text as it is—sometimes messy, paradoxical, not fitting neat categories
• The scaffolding represents doctrines, interpretations, and systematic theologies—both conservative (Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, biblical literalism) and progressive (genre criticism, “Bible as literature” approaches)
• The inside of the building represents the life lived with God—the actual point of everything

Key insights from this parable:

1. Scaffolding isn’t inherently bad. It helps us reach parts of the building we couldn’t otherwise access. The question is: which scaffolding helps us get to and understand the Bible, and which scaffolding blocks doors and windows?

2. The Bible itself is also a construct, put together by people, but it’s “living and active”—encounters with God happen within the Text as we engage it individually and in community.

3. We often spend all our time in the scaffolding (reading about the Bible) and never actually engage Scripture itself. As Jesus said to the scribes: “You search the scriptures looking for eternal life and you don’t realize they are pointing to me.”

4. The point is not analyzing the architecture from outside but getting inside and dwelling there, living the life with God.

5. Healthy deconstruction removes scaffolding that has overgrown and blocks access, but we must be careful not to indiscriminately hammer away at everything. When scaffolding is built close to the Text, tearing it down carelessly can damage the structure itself.

6. “Sometimes the truth is hard because it’s not what you’ve always been told, but sometimes the truth is hard because it is what you’ve always been told.” Humility is required to recognize both possibilities.

The Door Metaphor

Building on Robert Farrar Capon’s metaphor from “Kingdom, Grace, Judgment,” Marty notes that every house needs a porch to access the door, even though porches rot and need replacement. You can’t eliminate the porch entirely—you need some way to access the door.

The Text (the door) is essential to life with God. We need constructs and scaffolding (the porch) to access it. But the point was never the door itself—it’s what’s on the other side. If we only study the door, love the door, know everything about its construction but never go through it to dwell with God, we’ve completely missed the point.

Brent adds: Even if you’ve opened and closed the door and examined every part of it, if your only experience is being outside the door, it’s totally different from being inside. The relationship changes when you’re dwelling inside rather than analyzing from outside.

The Role of Community in Deconstruction

Reed emphasizes that deconstruction done well requires community characterized by:

Mutual Friendship and Love: Quoting Pope John Paul II: “The appropriate context for theological investigation is love and mutual friendship.” Real theological work happens among people who really know each other.

Permission to Question: People need safe space to voice doubts (“I really don’t know about inerrancy or what I mean by that”) without fear of being cast out.

Permission to Challenge: Friends must also have permission to push back and ask questions when appropriate. The problem is when tolerance becomes such an absolute value that no one can challenge anything, even lovingly.

Humility on All Sides: It takes humility to invite challenge, and humility to accept the role of dialogue partner without either running someone over with your opinions or failing to speak up when something needs addressing.

Flesh-and-Blood Relationships: While online tools like BEMA, Facebook groups, or TikTok can be helpful, they cannot substitute for local communities, local pastors, and friends who can look you in the eye. Real-life people are vital to healthy deconstruction. Echo chambers online can prevent the kind of pushback and perspective needed for healthy growth.

Jesus’ Model: Jesus comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable. Communities need to recognize when someone needs comfort in their deconstruction, but also when someone has become too comfortable in “only tearing things down mode” and needs to be challenged in a different direction.

Who Reed Is and What He Brings

Reed Dent serves with Campus Christian Fellowship at Truman State University in Missouri. He describes his gift not as providing new information or technical expertise (like Hebrew language study) but as articulation—helping people put words to things they’ve already known or felt but haven’t had language for.

He’s philosophical in a popular sense (not academic philosophy) and thinks deeply about concepts, always looking for other angles and other ways to say something. He excels at taking abstract or concrete concepts and phrasing them in ways that provoke more thought or create clarity.

Reed values being thoughtful and accessible rather than overly heady or technical. As demonstrated in the previous episode on “What is Truth?”, he can take deeply philosophical questions and make them practical and accessible.

Examples & Applications

Ancient Near Eastern Flood Stories

Reed recalls learning about flood narratives from other ancient cultures that paralleled Noah’s story. This new information forced him to wrestle with what that meant for how he read the Bible, triggering a deconstructive process.

Afghan Women and Theological Systems

Reed shares a powerful example of cognitive dissonance: reading about Afghan women burned with acid and realizing his theological system would send them to hell even as victims of monstrous violence. The system worked in abstract but collapsed when confronted with real human suffering. This cognitive dissonance revealed that something needed to change.

The Grand Canyon Analogy

Reed uses the Grand Canyon as an example of redrawing maps. You can be 50 yards away and not know it exists if you’ve only seen the flat land leading up. Once you have a bird’s eye view and discover the canyon, you must rethink how the land moves. Refusing to update your map to account for new perspective can literally get you killed if you walk toward the canyon pretending it’s not there.

Reed’s Handcrafted Kayak

As an amateur craftsman, Reed built a kayak (described as beautiful by Marty). He notes that building anything right the first time is very hard—it involves testing, modeling, reworking, and sometimes undoing. We shouldn’t expect faith formation to be any different. Why would we expect an 18-year-old leaving home to have no more questions, nothing left to correct, set for life? That’s unrealistic.

Marty’s Back Deck Replacement

Marty shares that he’s currently replacing his rotted back deck and can’t use his back door. The porch/deck is necessary to access the door, even though it rots and needs periodic replacement. This illustrates how our constructs and scaffolding need maintenance, replacement, and updating, but we can’t simply eliminate them—we need them to access what matters most.

The Peter Enns Example

Reed notes that Peter Enns is excellent at seeing through conservative scaffoldings and identifying where they obstruct understanding. However, Enns is also creating his own scaffolding through his progressive interpretations and approaches. Both conservative and progressive approaches function as scaffolding—the question is which helps us access the Text and which blocks it.

Paul Confronting Peter

At the end of the episode, Reed jokes about looking forward to the biblical moment where he challenges Marty to his face, referencing Paul’s confrontation of Peter in Galatians 2. This playfully illustrates the kind of honest, challenging community the episode advocates for.

Potential Areas for Further Exploration

1. Reconstruction After Deconstruction: What does faith look like after deconstruction? Is it okay to hold faith that’s less detailed and specific than before? What does it even mean to be a Christian once scaffolding is removed? This deserves direct, extended conversation.

2. The Nature of Biblical Authority: If the Bible is a construct pointing beyond itself, how do we understand its authority? What does “living and active” mean in this framework?

3. Trauma and Spiritual Abuse: Reed mentions this briefly but it deserves a full series. How do we pastorally care for those whose deconstruction is triggered by trauma? What does healing look like?

4. Progressive vs. Conservative Approaches: Marty mentions he typically comes from a more progressive, liberal mindset, surprising some listeners 220 episodes in. What are the actual differences? How can conversations remain accessible across the spectrum?

5. The Emerging Church and Postmodernity: Marty mentions this goes back to the early 2000s, examining the emerging church and postmodern thinkers. What were the key contributions of that movement to these conversations?

6. Biblical Theology vs. Systematic Theology: Reed distinguishes between biblical theology (which can be messy) and systematic theology (which tries to make clean lines). What are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach?

7. Ancient Jewish Thought and Paradox: Marty notes that ancient Jewish thought embraces much more paradox and “double point truth” compared to Western systematic approaches. What does this look like in practice?

8. Local Church Context: How can local churches create safe spaces for deconstruction while maintaining theological integrity? What does pastoral care look like in these contexts?

9. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy: Reed mentions this as an example of scaffolding. What are the specific limitations and benefits of this framework?

10. The Role of Doubt: How does doubt function in healthy faith? When is doubt productive and when does it become destructive?

Comprehension Questions

1. Reed proposes several alternative metaphors for deconstruction beyond “tearing down a building.” Explain the pruning metaphor and the redrawing maps metaphor. How do these reframe deconstruction in a more positive light? What aspects of spiritual growth do they capture that the building metaphor might miss?

2. In the parable of the scaffolding and the Seuss building, what does each element represent (the building itself, the scaffolding, the inside of the building)? According to Reed, what is the danger of spending all our time in the scaffolding? Give an example of how this might play out in someone’s spiritual life.

3. Reed identifies five catalysts for deconstruction: new information, cognitive dissonance, disillusionment, disconnection, and trauma. Choose two of these catalysts and explain how they might lead someone to question their faith. Why is it important to ask what is catalyzing deconstruction rather than simply dismissing it as rebellion or weakness?

4. What role does community play in healthy deconstruction according to this episode? Describe the balance between “permission to question” and “permission to challenge.” Why does Reed emphasize flesh-and-blood relationships over online communities? What might go wrong without this kind of embodied community?

5. Reed states: “Sometimes the truth is hard because it’s not what you’ve always been told, but sometimes the truth is hard because it is what you’ve always been told.” What does he mean by this? How does this statement require humility from both those deconstructing and those who are more conservative? How might this help people across the theological spectrum engage with more empathy?

Personalized Summary

This episode introduces a new era for BEMA with Reed Dent joining as a host on an expanded teaching team, bringing his gift for articulating complex theological and philosophical concepts in accessible ways. The conversation reframes deconstruction from a destructive process into something that can be natural, healthy, and necessary for spiritual growth.

Rather than viewing deconstruction as tearing down a building, the episode offers alternative metaphors: pruning dead branches to promote fruit, redrawing maps when discovering new landmarks, and removing scaffolding that blocks access to the actual structure. These metaphors emphasize that deconstruction is often about removing what’s false or obstructive rather than destroying what’s true and life-giving.

The episode acknowledges five common catalysts for deconstruction—new information, cognitive dissonance, disillusionment, disconnection, and trauma—and emphasizes pastoral sensitivity toward those going through this process. It’s crucial to ask what specifically is being deconstructed (interpretations, theologies, experiences) rather than assuming someone is rejecting God or the Bible itself.

The parable of the scaffolding and the Seuss building provides a powerful framework: our systematic theologies and interpretations (both conservative and progressive) function as scaffolding around the sometimes messy, paradoxical biblical text. While scaffolding helps us access parts of the text we couldn’t otherwise reach, we often mistake the scaffolding for the building itself and spend all our time there. Worse, we never go inside the building to actually dwell with God, which is the entire point.

Healthy deconstruction requires community characterized by mutual friendship, love, and humility—space to ask hard questions combined with permission to challenge and push back. This cannot happen primarily online but requires flesh-and-blood relationships with people who know us and whom we trust. The goal is not merely to tear down but to remove what obstructs and then reconstruct based on encounter with the living God through Scripture, dwelling inside the house rather than endlessly analyzing the architecture from outside.

The episode ends with an invitation to continue this conversation, particularly around reconstruction—what faith looks like after deconstruction, how to hold less detailed and specific beliefs while still maintaining Christian identity, and how to navigate this journey within community. This is not an ending but a beginning of expanded conversation with new voices bringing different perspectives to the table.

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