This is the second part in a series of posts that explore my subtitle, Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity.
Part 1 explores the word “New”
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So why did I choose the word “Reconstructing” in my title.
Over the last five or six years I’ve been exploring the concept of Emergence. I’ve written extensively on it because I believe we are continually reforming our understanding of the faith and what it means to follow Jesus in today’s world. Emergence finds its roots in a biological process long before it ever made its way into the church dialog.
A central part of Emergence has been the deconstruction of our faith. We have reached an unprecedented moment in history where two things have taken place. The advent of media to empower the individual with information and the loss of the church’s power to excommunicate. I wrote about these ideas in Listening To The Fruit Of The Church.
I suggest that much of our wrestling with theology is a Quest To Understand Ourselves. As human beings created in the image of God we are continually informed by a story. Deconstruction is a process of stepping away from our old embedded stories that didn’t work…for the sake of discovering a new one. We search for God because we are informed by God. But deconstruction is NOT the end result. Biologically we need a story, so to step into the void is to step into an uninformed space. This liminal space allows us to see a new story because our brains are prewired to search for evidence that supports the existing story and ignore evidence that conflicts with it. This works really well in a state of wholeness but not in a state of conflict. I never entered into the conversation for the sake of living in the void. I wanted a story that reconciled.
In order to reconstruct a new story I had to step away from the previous assumptions that were made in history. I had to consider the possibility that there was a new way of being informed by the story that we already there. And there was. What blew me away was that it coincided with what I was learning about our biology through neuroscience. In other words, the advent of our understanding of our brain actually helped me see what was already there.
And what I found was liberating. When I could see the problem God was solving it invited me into relationship and engagement with God’s mission. I could participate with God in a way that was deeply meaningful and hopeful. It informed my understanding of the story in a way that gave me life.
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Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity offers a sweeping new interpretation of the narrative of Christianity, Jonathan Brink explores the remarkable dissonance between our historical understanding of Gospel and what the story in Scripture actually reveals. It offers a compelling possibility for those looking to reconstruct their faith in a whole new way. Available today from CreateSpace and Amazon. Order from CreateSpace and use code 5GFARGT9 to receive a 15% discount.
