Dear Daniel,
This response has been a long time coming. Your first letter to me was July 17, 2025, almost eight weeks ago. There was already so much in your first letter I wanted to reply to, and now I’m left with a dilemma. Do I pull out specific sections/ideas from each letter and share my comments/reactions? It’s a tempting approach—valid and potentially productive. But I hope to do something more generative with this response, namely, address some questions that I am only now in a position to ask after our eight week exchange. I wouldn’t have given much thought of these questions, but now they seem important and maybe even essential:
What are the different images we use for this thing we call faith deconstruction/reconstruction?
Relatedly, and more importantly, are there images that should be given priority?
And are there images that are more harmful than helpful?
First, I’ll give some brief context from your letters. Then I will ask why these questions are important. If all proceeds according to plan, I might lastly have some answer to those questions.
Where This Question Is Coming From
The construction imagery is unavoidable. Even if one wants to come at faith deconstruction from a different angle—as we have to a certain degree by focusing on reconstruction—the core image remains the same: parts, a whole, and both negative and positive relationships between part and whole (taking away in deconstruction; putting together in reconstruction).
But I wonder, should we avoid the construction image altogether? Your reflections in your last letter Learning to Float on what reconstruction is not suggest that question.
Eg, love, hope, and faith are qualitative rather than quantitative, and so you write, “Reconstruction is not measurable…The moment we attempt to create a measurable framework for reconstruction, we’ve already missed the point.” If that’s the case, then why even use “reconstruction” as a metaphor, even the metaphor? Because any kind of construction, in the literal sense1, is necessarily measurable, whether that be a 4th grade construction paper origami frog or tacos deconstructed into taco salad.
Similarly, if “reconstruction is also not renovation,” and if “the blueprint mentality…stands as perhaps the greatest enemy of genuine transformation,” then is the reconstruction metaphor an obstacle rather than a help?
Your choice of ark rather than house is itself a criticism—implied, at least—of deconstruction as a core image. An immoveable building is our normal first literal referent for de/reconstruction. And while we can use de/reconstruction for the flood account2, the ark itself was only constructed. If we need a shorthand, symbolic metaphor for reconstruction, the ark is great. But what about deconstruction? If deconstruction doesn’t fit, then is that really the best primary symbol?
Why Ask These Questions?
Why might it be important to put this metaphor question on the front burner? I laid some relevant groundwork in Symbols, Deconstruction, and Your Neighbor’s Face. Iain McGilchrist was important for that post, and I think he can help us some more here. One of the core tenants of McGilchrist’s seminal book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is that reality is perspectival.
“Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay them, the disposition we hold in relation to them.”3
McGilchrist returns to this again and again:
“When a metaphor actually lives in the mind it can generate new thoughts or understanding—it is cognitively real and active, not just a dead historical remnant of a once live metaphor, a cliché. All understanding, whether of the world or even of ourselves, depends on choosing the right metaphor. The metaphor we choose governs what we see.”4
The power of metaphor, of symbolically picturing one thing as another, is plain in Scripture from beginning to end. But we live in a mechanized, digitalized age that has killed our capacity to imagine. We have despised our birthright to generative imagining and chosen instead Esau’s practical stew.
Drawing on Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries—the shared, implicit images and stories from which we live in human society—Kevin Vanhoozer writes,
“We may hold doctrines to be true, but if we cannot imagine the world the way these doctrines say it is then they will not be compelling…[T]he solution is not merely to believe harder. We must address the problem at its source: the captive imagination.”5
More testimony and explanation could be given to the foundational role of metaphor and imagination, but this must suffice. Deconstruction fits the category of social imaginary. Or it might be more accurate to say the social imaginary of deconstruction is at the same time the rupture of evangelicalism’s social imaginary.
With McGilchrist, we can say that when the deconstruction metaphor lives in the mind it can generate new thoughts. But the emphasis is more in degenerating old, decaying thoughts. “The metaphor we choose governs what we see,” and deconstruction leads us to see what shouldn’t be more than leading us to see what should be. This is an obvious observation; not a criticism, just the limitation of the image, and partly why we focused this series on reconstruction.
Trying to Frame a 3-Dimensional Painting
But if deconstruction as a metaphor is limited, are we constrained to choose and focus on a different, less limited metaphor? I tried to do this in my first letter with the double entendre razing the household of God: “Jesus razes the household of God. That is, raze to the ground (deconstruct), but also raise it up again (reconstruct).” While I admit to loving the phrase “razing the household of God,” I’m probably trying too hard to be clever, and in hindsight, probably reductive. The reality which we want to bring forth through a new social imaginary is simply too complex for any single image.
That brings to mind this line in your fourth letter: “I’m convinced, that in the work of reconstruction, we are not building a house, but an ark.” You compare the fittingness of different metaphors, with one being superior to another. But I’m wary of our left brain tendency to binary thinking (and I know you’re wary of this as well).
In my letters I focused on the construction motif in the Gospel of John where Jesus symbolically tears down the temple system of Jerusalem and builds a new temple-people in union with the temple of his body. However, that is far from the only image John uses for this reality. It’s there, to be sure, and central. But the image shifts into a more relational focus on family and friendship from John 14 onward.
That deserves more explanation, but I omitted it because it would have made a long Substack too long. In so doing, and in hindsight, I realize I governed not only what I could see, but others as well.
Different images/metaphors/symbols allow different aspects of reality to be seen and experienced. I think we are in agreement that an inherent limitation in de/reconstruction is the tendency to particularization. Construction, of whatever kind, involves parts. This is not bad, just limiting.
In contrast, one cannot build a family like one builds a building. Unlike the California High Speed Rail, pregnancy cannot be paused due to politicking bureaucrats. I worked at a Starbucks in Fresno, CA in 2015 which was closed down due to being in the way of the projected railway. But ten years—and $13 billion dollars!—later, no track has actually been laid.6 The ability for construction to be paused and delayed is actually a benefit of the de/reconstruction image: as you say, “reconstruction cannot be rushed.”
Building a family is different. Family imagery brings out both the pain and the fixed timeline: “When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her time has come” (John 16:21a). Again, I don’t want to fall into an either/or binary, temple vs family, reconstruction vs new birth. What I find so fascinating is how John brings family and temple imagery together in one of the climaxes of the Gospel, when blood and water flow out from the side of Jesus (John 19:34). In this single verse John weaves together images of the destruction of the temple (John 2:19), the new birth from above (John 3:5), and the giving of the Spirit (John 7:38). The metaphors John chooses governs what we see. The razing of the temple-body of Jesus, the raising of the new temple-household of God, and the Spirit-birth of the children of God coinhere; but they do not collapse into a jumbled mess. They remain distinct symbols which mediate distinct aspects of what is real in Christ. And deconstruction is one of those symbols.
Another symbol we could and should discuss is the destruction and reconstruction of God’s garden vineyard (John 15:1-8; 19:41-20:18). This would help bring forward the organic nature of our present season. But I’m out of space (although you can go back to the top of this letter and check out the intricate mosaic inspired by Jesus as the True Vine).
Jesus: the symbol of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction
Here again are the questions you got me asking:
Are there images related to deconstruction/reconstruction that should be given priority? And are there images that are more harmful than helpful?
The best I can do to answer the question here is follow the Gospel of John and say, we need a story. John’s narrative art allows for multiple metaphors, symbols, and images which, if divorced from the narrative, become competitive. The only real way to reduce all of that to a single word—which deconstruction definitely cannot manage—is a name: Jesus Christ. All of the symbols of Israel’s history, of the earthly story of Jesus, and of the Spirit-birthed church cohere in Jesus.
Jesus is still in the business of tearing down what doesn’t belong in his temple.
Jesus is still in the business of pouring out the Spirit from his deconstructed temple-side in order to transform his temple into a living family.
Jesus is still in the business of pruning God’s temple-vine so that his vineyard bears much fruit.
And yes, Jesus is still in the business of piloting the ark through judgment; he is the ark.
We could continue these images, but the point is: Jesus.
Perhaps it is still appropriate to focus—for a season, ie our present season—on the symbol of deconstruction, because of what the church tends to forget every 500 years or so. The symbol of deconstruction is integral to the person and story of Jesus Christ. But in order to be generative, that symbol must be seen in Jesus and what the Father is still doing in Jesus by the Spirit.
If we must continue to use the language of deconstruction and reconstruction—not only because our culture dictates so, but because the Bible tells us so7—we must more fundamentally return to seeing Jesus. “The evangelical imagination alone opens up the real possibility of living along the grain of reality: according to what is really the case “in Christ.”8
As is my habit, I leave you here with a relevant quote, and look forward to co-creating a meal—hopefully nutritious, if not delicious—from the various ingredients of our letter exchange.
Sincerely,
Aaron
Quote from Hans Urs von Balthasar
Here the world is becoming imageless and valueless; it is a heap of ‘facts’ which no longer say anything and in which an equally imageless and formless naked existence is freezing and anguishing unto death.
If Christ is the image of all images, it is impossible that he should not affect all the world’s images by his presence, arranging them around himself. There is no such thing as an isolated image; every image appears against a background of fellow-images…[W]hat Christ brings with him is not primarily his historical environment, but the world of creation and of redemption as a whole. His form imparts to the things of the world the right distance (from him and each other) and the right proximity (to him and each other). The believer does not believe all of this; he sees it…The believer may complain about the darkness of faith and may even be disquieted by the image of revelation in its concealment and opacity. Nevertheless, he can in faith cling to what he is given to see: the displacement and magnetic reorienting of the images of the world by the image of God in their midst.9
Or in literary terms, the “tenor” of the metaphor.
Indeed, this struck me in the sermon I heard last Sunday on Genesis 8. The flood is paradigmatic for the biblical typology of salvation through judgment, of which the destruction and reconstruction of the Jerusalem temple is the penultimate example, the cross being the ultimate.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 4.
McGilchrist, Master, 179.
Kevin Vanhoozer, Hearers and Doers: A Pastor’s Guide to Making Disciples through Scripture and Doctrine (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2019), 105, 106, emphasis original.
Apparently that is now scheduled for actual installation beginning next year: https://hsr.ca.gov/2025/08/28/news-release-california-high-speed-rail-accelerates-timeline-for-2026-rail-installation/.
Ironically, for me at least, this is similar to the fact that I must continue to use the name “John” in relation to anything I write and say about the Fourth Gospel, even though it is my belief that we cannot know and do not need to know any identified historical figure as the Gospel’s author. Participating in the conversation requires using vocabulary people will recognize, no matter how much I might disagree or criticize it.
Vanhoozer, Hearing, 110.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics Vol 1: Seeing the Form, Second Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 412, 409-410, emphasis original.