June 9, 2022
The Almost Daily will be on Summer Vacation until August 8th. But fear not! You will receive a devotional each Monday through Friday from the excellent Mockingbird Devotional entitled Daily Grace. Enjoy! - Paul Walker
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” (1 Corinthians 1:18-19)
If you grew up in an oppressive religious environment, there’s a good chance you’ve had to “deconstruct” your faith in order to keep it. That’s what I’ve done anyway: taking apart the beliefs I received and trying to analyze, sort, and reassemble them as something I can stomach.
This method of “deconstruction” came from a twentieth-century French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. (Stay with me.) For him, it was a way of protecting minority voices, of opposing absolutism, of dismantling dominant ideas by pointing out internal incoherence. What’s more interesting to me, and more relevant to everyday life, is where Derrida got his idea. He got it from another modern philosopher, who got it from Luther.
In Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, he wrote against pretended wisdom. Anyone considered moral or powerful had gotten it all wrong, he said. They were “theologians of glory,” believing God was only in obvious progress and success. “Theologians of the cross,” however, could see God’s activity where it really was—in the worst parts of life, “destroy[ing]” (literally, deconstructing) established power and knowledge. God didn’t delight in people’s pain and humiliation, but God delighted to identify with people there, first and finally in the cross.
Yet Luther didn’t come up with this idea either. He got it from Paul, here in 1 Corinthians. And Paul in turn got it from Isaiah. God’s work won’t be contained by what’s polite, convenient, or presentable. God “destroy[s] the wisdom” of those things, because they try to ignore God’s real activity, and its friendship with shame and confusion and failure. And that’s where God is, in Jesus, on the cross.
This history of “deconstruction” helps me orient my faith in “secular” contexts. But even more than that, it actually addresses my experience. Against my intuition, and against what I’d have done, God tells it like it is, and meets us where we are, and shows up where we don’t expect.
[Kendall Gunter, Daily Grace - Mockingbird Devotional Vol. 2]
