The sound of the Master's voice

I’m old enough to claim the Beatles as part of my childhood soundtrack, so I was intrigued by the story of how the surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney & Ringo Starr, produced Now and Then, dubbed “the last Beatles song” because it blends their music with the vocals and instrumentals of their late bandmates, John Lennon and George Harrison.

What most fascinated me was the technology they used on John’s demo cassette tape to separate his vocals from the piano track that obscured them and made them unusable until now. In 1995, when they first tried to use the “lo-fi, 40-something-year-old cassette recording” to create the song, George Harrison described it as “rubbish,” preceding that declaration with an expletive emphasizing just how bad it was. It took famed director Peter Jackson, with artificial intelligence (AI) extraction technology he used on a previous Beatles documentary series, Get Back, to uncover John’s vocals so they could be heard clearly. Paul McCartney spoke of how moving it was for him to hear his old friend and bandmate’s voice once again:

"They said this is the sound of John's voice. A few seconds later or however long it took, and there it was: John's voice, crystal clear. It was quite emotional."

Ringo Starr recounted, "Since Peter took John off and gave him his own track, it was like John's there, you know? It was far out."

Hearing the original cassette recording followed by the extracted audio was a revelation. John Lennon’s unmistakable high baritone was as clear as if he had been recorded in a modern studio. It was as if the mud and dirt were removed from a rock to reveal a gold nugget.

As I followed this story, I thought how analogous it was to the spiritual journey millions of Americans are undertaking if the polls and studies are to be believed. There has been and continues to be a lot of talk about deconstruction in the faith context. While this philosophical methodology has become the description of a modern movement that some say is damaging to Christianity, it’s 1) not unique to issues of spirituality, 2) not new, and 3) entirely biblical. Just as the John Lennon track needed to undergo a process of extraction for his voice to be clearly heard, our faith practices and traditions sometimes must be disassembled and the obscuring elements removed to get to the one true Jesus.

Despite its current association with Christianity, deconstruction is applied in multiple contexts outside spirituality, whether as a philosophical, literary, linguistic, or cultural methodology. While it is extraordinarily complex in definition and application, deconstruction can be described simply as analyzing something by breaking down its elements and examining them critically. As the Merriam-Webster Dictionary website says, “most of us have run into it by now even if we didn't realize it.” The person who first used the term to describe their critical reevaluation of their faith beliefs happened to be studying the work of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher credited with the development of deconstruction.

Ecclesiastes 1:9 tells us. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” What we’re calling deconstruction today was called Reformation back in the day. The introduction of the printing press and the expanded availability of the Scriptures to the laity, along with Martin Luther’s protestations against the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church, led to one of the most significant religious shifts in world history and stripped away the cultural and institutional barriers between Christ and the common man, in much the same way as the early church, through the council at Jerusalem, removed Judaism’s strictures that placed a rabbinical hierarchy in the path between believers, particularly Gentiles, and their Lord:

After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.” (Acts 15:7-11)

There is no more powerful metaphor for the removal of all obstacles between us and our Lord and Savior than what occurred immediately after Christ’s death on the cross:

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Matthew 27:50-54)

Certainly, the appearance the Sunday after Jesus’ crucifixion of formerly dead holy people in the streets of Jerusalem, especially after Jesus Himself was rumored to have risen from the dead, had a few folks a little freaked out! However, we mustn’t miss the significance of the veil being torn from top to bottom at the moment of his death. This veil was a heavy and elaborately adorned barrier that separated the Holy of Holies, an ornately decorated chamber, from the rest of the Temple. The Holy of Holies hosted the Ark of the Covenant, where the Jewish faithful believed the Spirit of the Lord resided since the Exodus from Egypt. The Holy of Holies was accessed only by the High Priest on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to offer the most important sacrifice of the year.

However, with Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross as the substitutionary atonement for our sins, past, present, and future, the need for a veil separating us from the presence of the Lord and a high priest as an intercessor on our behalf evaporated. As Paul writes in Hebrews, “For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Hebrews 10:14). And if the significance of the tearing of the veil wasn’t clear, Paul stated it emphatically:

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. (Hebrews 19:22)

In short, even the early church in the New Testament underwent a process of deconstruction to determine what was essential to Christianity and what wasn’t, and this was central to the teachings of the apostles as they planted churches amid varying power structures, cultures, and customs throughout the known world.

Many in the faith community are critical of deconstruction because some Christians who go through the process choose to leave the church. Such an outcome is inevitable, particularly if the individual has been grievously wounded within the church; not everyone who deconstructs their faith can reassemble the right pieces and restore their devotion. I pray they can find their way back to Jesus without the obstacles placed in their path by institutions, cultures, and people. However, I see many more people in a deconstruction process who are rediscovering Jesus, minus the baggage with which American Christendom has burdened Him.

I am one of those people, and it has deepened my faith, not diminished it. I prefer the term disenculturation to deconstruction, but whatever one calls it, the process of extracting the detritus of American culture to reveal Jesus, standing alone and above all things, is life-giving if you humble yourself enough to critically examine your upbringing and peer groups and how they conflated your faith with beliefs and practices that have nothing to do with Him.

I am probably on my third journey of deconstruction, to be honest. There is my initial profession of faith at the age of nine, a belief that was challenged and fell apart in my college years because I lacked the spiritual maturity or the discipline of a consistent faith practice in my younger years. My church background was somewhat mongrelized, with the homogenous Protestant Sunday services of military chapels interspersed with the black Baptist church services we attended in my mother’s hometown of Lake Charles, Louisiana, when my father was on unaccompanied tours of duty with the U.S. Air Force. That is the church where my great-grandparents and grandparents served as deacons and deaconesses and where I accepted Christ and was baptized. However, our chapel attendance waxed and waned when we were at my father’s various duty stations, so we weren’t immersed in a church culture.

Looking back, I recognize that while I knew and understood the salvation story of Jesus Christ, my motivation for becoming a Christian was based more on my trust in my family and their beliefs than a rock-solid personal assurance in Jesus. When a friend in college who wasn’t raised a Christian challenged me with a question of why my family’s gift of faith, conceived in love, was somehow more valid than what his family taught him, I had no answer, and I walked away from the church, confused and lost.

I recall that Jesus was still with me, and I never renounced my belief. I just stopped practicing my faith and became quite cynical about the shortcomings of those I witnessed who were mean-spirited, licentious, political, or exclusionary while loudly proclaiming to be Christians.

My 2nd deconstruction occurred after my grandfather’s unexpected passing in 1992. I credited him with my salvation, and his death rocked me more than I anticipated, even though a literal and personal distance had come between us over the years. My travels with the Air Force kept me from my family in Louisiana, and I was starting my own family. Also, I was more often at odds with my grandfather over politics, race, and his devaluing of my “book learning,” which he didn’t think equated to real work. We had a rapprochement near the end of his life, and he spoke to me like a man leaving instructions before he passed, although he didn’t know he was sick at the time.

After he died, I needed assurance that there was indeed life after death, and I went back to the church, determined to find an anchor for my faith. I found it in the resurrection of Jesus, specifically my conclusion that it was a historical fact and not a fable. Once my mind grasped the veracity and enormity of that event, I rededicated myself to Jesus and returned to the church, ready to be discipled and grow in my faith. My wife, who grew up Catholic in her home country of France but became agnostic as her family drifted away from church, came to faith as I rediscovered mine.

My wife and I gravitated toward the Willow Creek contemporary style of worship and ministry, and we were not wedded to a specific denomination. However, two churches where I revived and refined my faith happened to be affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Because of that affiliation, my presidential appointment to the Bush Administration, and the culturally conservative leanings of the congregations at the nondenominational churches we attended, my faith was infused with the cultural and political conservatism prevalent in a large segment of evangelical Christianity. My decisions to run for public office, become a political party activist, begin a blog on political and cultural matters, and write a book that documented my faith and political journeys as one led to an accumulation of baggage that improperly influenced my faith and relegated it to a status of first among equals among my priorities.

This amalgamation of conservative politics and faith eventually led me to Liberty University, a destination I didn’t expect since I wasn’t an academic but entirely appropriate for someone of my inclination at that time, as it turned out. Other circumstances also steered me in that direction, unemployment chief among them, but little did I know that my current journey of deconstruction, or disenculturation, would begin there.

I don’t want to overwhelm you with my personal story, although it illustrates how one constantly examines one’s faith to ensure that it is only and all about Jesus, so I’ll be brief about my current state. The past 12 years have brought me closer to a purity of faith than ever. The total immersion in a politically charged faith culture clashed with what I observed and experienced as an elder in a small church filled with people broken by life, sometimes by other churches; my work in the community with hurting people and families; and my extraordinary health challenges, and I was deeply humbled as a result. Being stripped of pride and certainty regarding my life and worldview led me to surrender to God in a way I never had before.

Since then, He’s been leading me back to Him and helping me discard what’s not of Him, and I am so much lighter without the baggage I was carrying!

I said earlier that deconstruction is neither new nor confined to spiritual matters and is also entirely biblical. We are never asked to accept what we are told without question but are encouraged to examine everything and trust the Holy Spirit within us to show us the truth. The encounter Paul had with the Jews in Berea illustrates this:

Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men. (Acts 17:11-12)

Furthermore, the Scriptures tell us:

Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord. (Lamentations 3:40)

But test everything; hold fast what is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1)

Beloved ones, that’s faith deconstruction in a nutshell. Contrary to the naysayers who believe it threatens the church, I believe it is the Lord’s way of reforming the church into His bride. History proves that the church strays when it is proximate to power and popular influences, and a culling of the ranks is necessary to bring it back to God’s purposes and not those of man. To that end, the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John are faithful:

I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. (John 15:1-8)

Listen to old assumptions with fresh ears and apply the discernment of the Holy Spirit to what you hear. You’ll be amazed as the noise clears, and you hear the unmistakable sound of the Master’s voice.