Letter to a Deconstructing Christian: Your Questions Are Good, But Not That Good

A person who's not open to answers doesn't really have questions.

Dear friend,

We seem to find ourselves returning to the topic of hard questions that your parents or youth pastor were never able to answer. That’s OK, I’m up for it! But before we go another twelve rounds on the Old Testament bride-price or whether Onesimus was right to run away, I want to make a quick point about these kinds of questions in general. This is not to declare these topics off-limits! But I do want you to avoid some of the common tropes that I’ve seen certain, widely-platformed deconstructing Christians fall into.

Here’s the thing about questions: they are like bright flashlights. You can use them to great effect by shining them on things that you can’t see. But as my 3-year-old daughter demonstrates, they work much worse if you turn them around and shine them directly into your eyeball. It seems like every kid in the history of forever has wanted to know what it would feel like to shine a bright light directly in their eyes. Oddly enough, it’s almost as if kids enjoy the feeling of being blinded like that. It’s new, different, and just the right amount of scary. They go blind for a few seconds then everything comes back, and in so doing it’s like they’ve discovered a kind of adventure they can easily control.