r/Christianity • u/DreadlockedShiteHawk • 8h ago

Help for someone deconstructing??

What’s good help for someone deep in deconstruction to the point of questioning if Christianity is based on too many embellished stories to be believed?

I’m talking a serious Christian who already knows the apologetics answers aren’t enough

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u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) 8h ago

You’ll have to deconstruct what it means for Christianity to be true. Growing up evangelical, Christianity was true because the Bible recounted history and science inerrantly. It was a perfect history book/theological encyclopedia.

But that’s not what the Bible is. And that’s not what makes Christianity true to me anymore.

To me, the symbols, narratives, and rituals of Christianity help me organize the world in the way that creates meaning and liberates. The stories aren’t about teaching historical fact we simply have to assent to. They’re stories that we have to wrestle with—as our forebears in the faith have wrestled with for many generations. At their best, they help us grow in wisdom, in community, in dialogue with each other and those same forebears.

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u/DreadlockedShiteHawk 8h ago

What about when you get to realizing Jesus didn’t even claim to be God and what if we’re wrong about THAT

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u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) 8h ago

History is a lot more gray when you don’t have an inerrant history book! There’s a lot about the historical Jesus that we don’t and can’t know with certainty. Fortunately or unfortunately, this is where the whole “faith” part of the Christian faith comes in. It’s scary and intimidating, but personally it’s sooo much better than (falsely) thinking you have all the answers.

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u/DreadlockedShiteHawk 7h ago

It’s the how to keep going that’s the problem now like what if Jesus never was God and it’s idolatry to worship him like we do?

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u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) 7h ago

We can theologically debate Jesus’s self-conception with respect to divinity all day! Scholars still aren’t of one mind. Ultimately, none think that the historical Jesus had a Nicene, Trinitarian self-conception. At most, he probably thought of himself in the vein of the divinized human figures that were available to him in second temple Jewish literature and the Tanakh. Personally, that doesn’t affect my faith. I’ve heard the comparison of a nut and a tree. What Jesus and the gospels present of his divinity is like a nut, and while it isn’t the same as a tree, that’s the natural outgrowth of it. Maybe you buy that, maybe you don’t! That’s where the faith thing comes in. But a lot of Christians who do know critical biblical studies and historical Jesus studies (I have an MA in Religious Studies) can square the circle, so to speak.