When It Feels Like Your Faith Is Failing

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Ian Harber

When you understand doctrine is the script of the story of reality. The script of the true story that God is writing and assenting to these doctrines is not just you trying to believe the right things, it’s you actually trying to align your life with reality as God has made it, and to live your life in light of it, to play your part in that story, then those doctors take out an entirely different flavor.

Collin Hansen

Five years ago, Ian harbor wrote an article that went viral just before the world shut down for the COVID 19 virus. The article tells the story of leaving and returning to an evangelical church based on the exuberant response or contentious in some ways, response to that article is far from alone in doubting the church and Christian beliefs back in his history, at least, and hopefully not the only one who has made his way home now, Ian has a new book called walking Through deconstruction, how to be a companion in a crisis of faith, published by IVP. Ian neither valorizes deconstruction nor dismisses this painful experience, and as a result, he’s written a brutally honest, defiantly hopeful book that can help anyone undergoing this process, as well as everyone who loves them. Well, rather than waiting for the interview, I’m going to go ahead and offer his definition of deconstruction, because that always comes up in these conversations. Deconstruction is a word that originated with the philosopher Jacques derrada In writes this, deconstruction is a crisis of faith that leads to the questioning of core doctrines and untangling of cultural ideologies that settles in a faith that is different than before. I’ll say it again. Deconstruction is a crisis of faith that leads to the questioning of core doctrines and untangling of cultural ideologies that settles in a faith that is different from before. Ian harbor is a writer and Christian media producer. He writes about reconstructing faith in his newsletter, back again, and about faith Media and Technology at Endeavor, though, I think, Ian, you just have a new job.

Ian Harber

Is that right? That is right? Yeah, I now am the Director of Communications and Marketing for mirror orthodoxy. So that is a recent change since the book came out.

Collin Hansen

Wonderful. Well, we’d love to hear more about that and talk to more on gospel. Ian, thanks for being here.

Ian Harber

Thank you so much, Colin. I’m very excited to be here.

Collin Hansen

Well, yeah, many people, obviously, as I mentioned the introduction, they’ve read your story. We’ll link it in the show notes. But not everybody watching and listening knows it. So how did you go through deconstruction and reconstruction to end up writing the writing this book? I know in family and church, you’ve definitely faced a lot of adversity.

Ian Harber

Yeah, I’ll do my best to keep it brief, but it is, you know, tangled up with my life story. And so I was born into a broken home. My parents were not capable of raising me, and so very early on, when I was three, I went to live with my grandparents, and they raised me to the church. They were wonderful. I love my grandparents. They were amazing, amazing, wonderful Christian people, and they had me Christian Church, Christian schools. The problem with that is that a couple things. One, I was very aware of the brokenness that I came from when I was very young, and that clouded and shaped how I was figuring out who I was and my identity and all those different things. So suffering was a very potent part of my life. From my earliest memories and my grandparents, the environments that I was in in terms of schools and churches were, you know, one word that you could say is fundamentalist, where to kind of pivot to in the book a little bit, is this word anxious? Just this idea of, there’s a is a kind of a very narrow idea of what it means to Christian that isn’t entirely wrong. But when you look at church history, you see in other traditions that it’s not the only you know. They emphasize these secondary, tertiary doctrines as at the level of being salvific. And so if you started to question those, even though, you know, they never really emphasized these core doctrines that Christians have believed forever. So questioning the secondary and tertiary doctrine sort of gets you to questioning everything, all of it. It’s a very anxious, anxiety, anxiety inducing place and so raised by my grandparents, my grandmother passed away the day after Christmas of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and that triggered, not triggered. It’s not wrong, right word for it, but that was the beginning of what would be 12 funerals that I went to over the course of two and a half years that ended with my mother’s suicide. So that was very formative for me, experiencing a lot of death at a pretty young age. And not long after that, a mentor of mine, who was in the church, ended up abusing five of my close friends. And so that was that was very, very tough. All at the same time is that this is kind of early internet, social media days, and so, you know, they’re kind of a dime a dozen now, but at the time, I stumbled across one of the original. To conversion stories on YouTube, and I did not have the resources to deal with that. Even to this day, I think it’s a credible challenge. It’s a tough like tough things raised against the faith, and so you kind of couple that with the suffering, with the doubts, with the broken home, with how all that plays into identity, and everything just sort of fell apart. For me. It just completely fell apart. I didn’t know what I believe. It was maybe only a year there where I would say I wasn’t a Christian, but even when I would call myself a Christian, I was kind of swimming in, you know, I guess what we’d call more progressive Christian waters, things like the liturgists and Rob Bell and Richard Rohr and you can kind of, you know, that kind of crew that is over there. And so just a long time where I did not know what I believed. I would call myself a Christian. I was even involved in ministries and things like that, but really believing, you know, heterodox at best, heretical things at worst, and all this kind of came to a head the year after I got married. My grandfather, who raised me, passed away in a plane crash, completely fluke, 100 million situation. And that was the darkest time of my entire life. Was that and the fallout from that. And I was, you know, 24 years old at the time, 23 when that happened. And so I was just thrust into a lot at that time. I had just, right before that happened, I had just gotten into a theological training program at a church in Dallas, and it was the first time I had ever could have formally gone and studied theology. You know, if you were to shrink theology down to the church, that’s that’s what that program was. And so I had just gotten accepted, then the plane crash happened, and I almost didn’t go through the program. But I did, and so I went, and one of the teachers that people feel like created program got up and he said, on the very first day, he said, we do theology and the light so we could stand on it in the dark. And I will never forget that, because I remember thinking in that moment two things kind of at the same time. The first was, well, that would have been really good a long time ago, before I was in this because I’m in the darkest time of my life right now. But the second was, okay, well, let’s see. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see what this is, you know. And so it was the complete opposite of my church experience up to that point. I mean, we were sitting a circle table, and I just came honest. I came broken. I came with all of my doubts, all my questions, all my fears, I didn’t hide anything, and I was accepted and engaged with in conversation and taken seriously. And you know, of course, there’s the secondary and tertiary issues that were talked about, but what was really introduced was just, here’s the core of the faith that Christians have always believed in all of its richness and all of its beauty. And Jesus has this line in Matthew where he says that every teacher of the law who’s a disciple of Mine is like a someone who goes into the storehouse and brings out treasures new and old. That’s exactly what it felt like. Where has this been all my life? There are resources there. There is truth here, and goodness and beauty that I was never made aware of. And so I left that program not having all of my questions answered, not agreeing with everything, you know, whatever, but I had a foundation. For the first time in my life. I thought I could build on this. I could build my life on. This is the rock, you know, and and so that’s, I guess you could say that was maybe the beginning of, or, you know, when my quote, unquote reconstruction became serious up to that point, there was other things going on, change in media diet and, you know, different things like that, but that was really a pivotal point for me.

Collin Hansen

I know there’s a tendency for some critics of deconstruction to be dismissive of the stories. And I think one thing that stands out about your story is it’s impossible to dismiss just in terms of how many bad things would naturally lead a lot of people to question, question God, and at least begin to ask those questions about the problem of problem of evil, and the hope that we would be able to create better church environments for people to work through that and to grieve that process they don’t feel as though they have to go outside the church to do that. Now, what is this deconstruction? Is it a new phenomenon? Is it a growing movement? Is it just a new label on an old practice? Is it something that only happens when you’re young? There’s a lot of questions there. But help us walk through those, those weeds.

Ian Harber

You know, there’s a there’s a lot there. And I think those are, there’s maybe different answers to all of those things. And a lot of new phenomena just start there. Yes, it’s a new phenomenon. Again, in some way, I think in some ways, yes, in some ways No. You know, when I’m reading through Augustine’s confessions and I and I find out that the time that he walked away from his faith and pursued manicheism was when he was 18 years old, the year after his dad died, and his dad didn’t even, you know, he has very negative things to say about his father in terms of his care for him. So he’s he’s growing up in a family that he’s not receiving love from his father, and his father dies at a young age, and he spends the next day. Decade walking away from the faith, and it takes him about that 1012, years before he starts coming back to Christianity. That to me, when I read that story, I’m like, Man, that sounds like deconstruction. Of course, he never had that word. He does talk about in confessions. He says, you know, he he’s reflecting back on his mom, Monica’s reaction to it, and she said that, he says that, He said she always knew he had to go through what doctors called the crisis in order to get to the other side. And I was like, That’s exactly it. So in some ways, it’s a very old thing. You know, the church has had language for this, whether they called it, you know, the dark night of the soul, or the long dark corridor, or some people have called it the wall, and I write about that in the book, and the wall is sort of the summary of these experiences. And for whatever reason, I think evangelicalism has largely lost that kind of language. We talk about backsliding and different things like that. I don’t want to pretend that’s not real, but I don’t think that’s what deconstruction is. I think that’s a different thing. Deconstruction really is more of a crisis,

Collin Hansen

more like a spiritual depression. Then, yeah,

Ian Harber

yeah. This is what you see in the Psalms all the time where God sort of disappears, and you say, God, where are you? And that’s not something that’s in your control. And there are reasons for that. There are that are sort of inside of us and outside of us, but it is a real experience. I think people who have that, God’s people have always experienced now, I will say this is it new? I think there are cultural things in this moment that make this experience potentially more prevalent for a couple reasons. And you know, maybe we’ll get into some of these. But some of that is the the what I just talked about, the storehouse riches, with riches, new and old, treasures, new and old not being passed on in the church, and maybe ways that it has before, and there are other cultural pressures going on. And then, of course, I think our access to everything bad in the world through social media compounds that as well,

Collin Hansen

right? Okay, so let’s follow up on a couple of those points, because those were questions I was planning to ask. So I think you’ve already answered the question then of what’s the difference between deconstruction and apostasy? So this is we’re not just talking about walking away from the faith. We’re talking about this, the spiritual depression, this dark night of the soul, this place of and I think it is important, I’ve seen you talk about this in other venues, that this is an involuntary process from the experience of the person undergoing it. Is that right? Yeah,

Ian Harber

this is maybe a simplistic way of putting it, but I think a helpful way of saying is that deconstruction is a process, whereas apostasy is a result. So I’m not going to deny that people deconstructed, that apostatized. Yes, that happens all the time, clearly. But what I want to push back against is that that is an inevitable outcome. I don’t think it is. I think deconstruction is a much more normal, spiritual process that people go through, and a lot of people don’t even have a language. For it. One of the interesting things that has happened since the book has come out a few months ago is that I’ve had a number of people read it and write to me and tell me, Oh, that is what happened to me 20 years ago. I didn’t even know that was what I was going through. I didn’t have the language for it, but now that you’ve described it, I understand what was going on. And there’s something I think powerful to that of you know, people feel people feel crazy. That’s the whole point. You know, why I wanted to write this book is it’s a very scary process, and I think the five stages of grief are a helpful way of thinking about it. And some people move inward and don’t even really know what to do with it and keep it in. And other people sort of explode outward, and I think we see a lot of that on social media, which contributes to much of the perception of what deconstruction is and how it’s experienced. But people experience it different ways of being able to kind of separate those things out of deconstruction as a natural, spiritual process that happens. It just happens, versus apostasy, not that they’re completely separate and one doesn’t lead to the other, but that they are not inherently tied together.

Collin Hansen

Got it so, one of the things that I do, and we’ve published at the gospel coalition, and when I’m teaching in cultural apologetics about doubt, is I do commend people through the process of disenculturation, the process of separating between those inherited beliefs and practice from their culture, from the essence of Christianity. It sounds like your deconstruction. Part of what helped you out of it was undergoing a process of disenculturation through that theological training program. Would that be an accurate description? Yeah,

Ian Harber

that would be an accurate description. What I would like to say is that disenculturation is maybe a sometimes separate, sometimes included under the umbrella of deconstruction. Deconstruction and this, again, this is part of the point of the book. Is I’m really trying to move deconstruction out of a purely intellectual register. Into an existential, spiritual, psychological I think that’s one psychological register, because I think that’s where it belongs. This acculturation, I think is a little more of an intellectual process of you’re sorting through these things, and that is part of it. That’s why, in my definition, I include untangling cultural ideologies. There’s your disenculturation right there. So it’s under the umbrella as part of the process, but it’s, I don’t think it’s experienced the same way. Going back to what you’re calling, you know, spiritual depression, this more involuntary process, a lot of this depends on the again, going back to what I talked about before, the how anxious is the environment that you’re in? There are places that can hold space for this sort of process to undergo and not feel threatened by it, and not feel bad by it, and sort of what you’re talking about, even encourage it. Say, Hey, this is a good thing. Let’s sort through these things. And there’s other places where you know you have a question about a pretty minor issue, your entire salvation is in question, and that creates an anxiety that is not the same thing as let me untangle a few things that you know don’t look like they fit with the biblical witness. Yeah. Well,

Collin Hansen

I think the primary way that I commend disenculturation is for somebody who says I’m deconstructing, when what they mean is I’m just learning to sift through these different things. And I want to say, don’t put the title of deconstruction on that, because that is an entire media complex out there deconstruction, where a lot of it ends in heterodoxy, heresy, apostasy, and that’s not what the people are talking about in there. So that’s one reason why I think this book is really helpful, is because, and I started with the definition, because it is important to define, because people are mixing up all these definitions, but those definitions can lead you down a really unhelpful path, especially with social media. So let’s talk about the role of social media in deconstruction. You mentioned one of those narratives, early ones on YouTube. It sure seems popular and pretty profitable, especially on Tiktok. What’s going on there? What’s the element of social media here, when

Ian Harber

you’re when you’re deconstructing? I mean, a lot of this is coming out of hurt from the church, right? And so much of it is, I would say, warranted or legitimate. Now, you know, we can even draw maybe a distinction between things that have directly happened to an individual or a group of individuals in a particular church, versus people extrapolating narratives from something they see in a church far away. I think those are not the same things. And right there, we’re already talking about the dynamics of social media involved in all of this, but if you just go to the fact that a lot of this is coming out of church institutional church hurt, then there’s going to be an inherent distrust of churches and institutions going through this process. And so that’s why, one of the reasons that it’s hard to talk about, say, Good deconstruction versus bad deconstruction, where good, you know, you said good deconstruction is, you know, stay in the church, read your Bible. It’s like, I agree with those things, but when you’ve been hurt by those things, or those things have been weaponized against you, that’s a hard ask, you know? And so social media is, by its very nature, bypasses these institutions. And so what you have is a community of people who have experienced similar things and are having similar thoughts and feelings and what else, trying to find each other. I think that’s the most charitable read on what’s going on in terms of deconstruction on social media and online. I think that’s a real dynamic. The problem is the incentive structures, because social media incentivizes outrage. The way you the most effective way to grow a platform on social media is outrage. And so if you think about deconstruction, through those five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, somebody who’s angry at the institutions that have hurt them and wants to expose, bring justice, get back at them. You know, take your range of charitable, uncharitable interpretations of that they get on the internet, and they talk about it, and they build a platform which actually incentivizes them to stay angry. And so now they have people coming to them for thoughts, for exposing, they begin to be formed by that perception there’s demand being built up. Classic law of demand, supply and demand kicks in. And next thing you know, you have a big podcast with big sponsors or online courses selling for over $100 trying to help people deconstruct or different things like that, and you’ve built an industry off the back of outrage, and not that there’s not things to be angry at in the church, there are, and we should do that. But, you know, I have a friend who, a pastor friend who, he has a book coming out, Brad Edwards, he says you can’t reform something that you haven’t forgiven and you don’t love, and I think he’s entirely right about that, and that’s the missing. Piece of all these things I want to there’s things about the church I want to look at too and say, Yes, this is bad. We need to change this. We need to reform it. But you can’t reform out of hate. You can only reform out of love. And that is what I think this to your point online deconstruction industry misses, and why it’s ultimately, at the day not helpful, even if it’s putting common language and name and experience that people have that needs to be named, it’s ultimately destructive instead of constructive.

Collin Hansen

Is there a difference in between how you react to somebody who says I have some questions or maybe even doubts, versus somebody who tells you it feels like my faith is falling apart?

Ian Harber

Well, at the outset, I would say, yes, you know, if somebody is saying I feel like my faith is falling apart, then we have a triage situation where they’re they’re being honest with you. And I mean, I want to just commend that person for being open and honest with where they’re at in in asking for help in that way, and coming forward and yeah, so, I mean, I think that would what that would signal to me is that we have a person going through this emotional, existential, spiritual crisis that, yes, they have questions that need to be answered, but honestly, they Just need to be cared for and loved and loved and shepherd and walked with through that. If somebody just said, I have questions or I’m having doubts, then I have more questions that I want to respond with, what do you mean? What are we talking about? But I would include in their emotional questions. How are you how are you feeling about like when you question XYZ, are you just wrestling with intellectually, or is there some fear of authorization, or losing your faith, or different things like that, and mix in here and trying to get to the thing that’s under the thing?

Collin Hansen

Well, let’s dive in just a little bit more than on the doubt, doubt part of this. How do you even just commend church leaders to engage with this more more broadly, in addition to what you’ve said there? Do we encourage doubt or at least tolerate it? Because we recognize, in a secular age, this is inevitable. Is this something we should act actively discourage? Tell people, no, no, you do not want to you don’t want to doubt. That’s a bad thing. I mean, if we have the kind of church where Christians aren’t supposed to ever doubt, does that make it more likely that we’re going to actually encourage deconstruction?

Ian Harber

So similar to the last question, I think doubt to me signals almost an emotional process, like I would still want to get to what is the anxiety under that that’s fueling some of those doubts? Almost always, there’s, there’s some situational anxiety that’s that’s fueling doubts and someone’s life and what that’s what I call my book, cumulative anxieties, these anxieties that these these hard knocks of life that just build up. And some of them are small, some are big, but they just they just build up, and then we finally just feel crushed under the weight of them, and we don’t have those resources. But doubt is going to be expressed in the form of questioning. And questioning can be very just intellectually honest, and I think a lot of times it is. And for me, I want to encourage questioning, because what we do want in our church is for people to have first hand knowledge of Scripture, to have a first hand encounter with the Lord, to have a first hand understanding of their faith and ownership of their faith, to where it’s real to them. And that’s not going to happen by just checking off boxes on a scantron and putting it through the feeder and hoping all the right things come out on the other side. You have to, you have to wrestle with those things yourself. And so it can feel scary to the person who’s walking through them when they start kind of going through, you know, Gavin Orland has this idea of theological triage. There’s the core doctrines, urgent doctrines, important doctrines, important doctrines, and then, you know, kind of mostly unimportant doctrines. And it can feel scary when people start getting into those kind of more urgent, or even core doctrines. But we should hope people are wrestling with those things, not to cast them out, but to really wrap their minds around them and understand them and for themselves. I’ll never forget. I mean, the classic example, this is the Trinity, right? When I was growing up, the closest that we got to talking about the Trinity was, you know, examples that are actually heresies. So, you know, water and eggs and three leaf clover, Clovers, or whatever else you know, and or you just sort of threw your hands and gave up and said, Oh, just boggles my mind. Whatever you know, that this just blows my mind. I can’t even think about it. Which, hey, this truth to that I there are mysteries we will never understand, right? And yet, God has revealed certain aspects of Himself to us in the scriptures, and we can understand different parts of who he is and his character and and who God is, and this includes the Trinity. And so when you when. Actually look at that. And my favorite example is when Jesus is talking in the high priestly prayer, and he prays that the Father would love us, the church, the way that he loved him from the foundation of the world, from before the foundation of the world. And I was like, Okay, so before there was anything, there was God who is a father loving his son and a son who is loving his father. That’s at the heart of everything that changes a lot about how you view God, about how you view the world, how you view yourself, and that in that is one aspect of the doctrine of the Trinity that has already completely changed the way you see everything. The only way we can say God is Love is if God has been eternally loving and being loved, and only the Trinity gives you that you have just taken every other religion, every other spirituality, every other belief system, off the table. If you want to say God is love, you have to have a Trinitarian God. And so that is one of those, one example of this storehouse of treasures, new and old, that has been brought out that actually is there for you if you go in on those core doctrines. And so we should want that. I think that’s good. And if our churches can actually foster environments that takes people through that process of discovery, instead of just force feeding answers or ignoring those types of things, then I think we’re setting people up to have a stronger faith.

Collin Hansen

Yeah. Well, thank you. Also answered there my next question I was going to ask you to expand upon this point, this quote from the book, quote, When doctrines are mere accessories to a faith that is ultimately centered around the individual, and something from outside of that system smashes through and contradicts or undermines a held belief and seems to provide a better path to be a happy moral life than the belief the path to a happy moral life than the belief they hold. Everything comes apart, anything not deemed necessary or contrary to the moralistic, therapeutic deistic project is cast aside. So I was going to ask, what does the church do to avoid this problem? Sounds like your reference here a few times, to the storehouse of belief, things like the Trinity, where we are not the center of that story, decentering the self is one important thing that we can do in the church.

Ian Harber

Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly right. I think so much of this comes back to, and this what I get into the book, what is the role of doctrine in the Christian life? And I think a lot of times, what’s at least presented, it’s caught, if not explicitly taught, is that doctrine is basically the, you know here are the right beliefs for you to get right on the test so that you can go to heaven when you die and that’s it. They don’t actually have any bearing on your life, on the world, on the community around you. Whereas, when you understand doctrine is the script of the story of reality, the script of the true story that God is writing and assenting to these doctrines is not just you trying to believe the right things, it’s you actually trying to align your life with reality as God has made it, and to live your life in light of it, to play your part in that story. Then those doctrines take on an entire, entirely different flavor, and what that does is exactly to your point. It decenters you from the story. You just centered your your story around God. You just centered your story around the people of God and the world. That’s, I mean, this is what Jesus is getting at in the the greatest commandment, to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. He gives it to you right there. There’s his Theory of Everything. Is that commandment, you’re actually decentering yourself from your story, from the story. It’s entering God and others and living your life in light of that, and that’s what doctrine does for you.

Collin Hansen

Let’s switch to an uncomfortable question for a couple of guys on a podcast right now. Let’s try another quote from your book, you say, quote, we trust therapists with our problems more than friends and family. We believe YouTubers, podcasters and influencers more than we believe our pastors, professors and other experts. We issue marriage and family for life free from inhibition, so we can express our true selves to the world where performers our identity is the script, and the whole world is our stage. Well, Ian, I think you summarized in there a lot of really important points that I try to convey in my different classes and writings and and, of course, this podcast, and in my most recent class on cultural apologetics, I really focused on this point, and I couldn’t get an answer, not for myself, not for my students, of what it is that makes us trust podcasters so much more than when pastors, of course, we’re on a podcast now, and I cannot figure this out. What is it that conveys some measure of trust through these media voices? I. See that person, that deconstructing voice that we see on Tiktok, that testimony of deconstruction that you saw on on YouTube, that that podcast you mentioned, the liturgist, is one of those in there. What is it that makes us feel as though these environments are where we can trust is it just the fact that we’re so anti institutional as a culture right now? Is it that we think institutionally, well, those people must be saying what they what they’re saying, because they’re just part of the system and they’re getting paid for it. Do we not put two and two together that these podcasters are getting paid to? And in fact, it’s exactly what you said right there. They get paid by being anti institutional and by raging against the institutions and traditions and family and things like that. Help me put this together? I I cannot figure it out.

Ian Harber

Yeah, and there’s, there’s probably not one answer to it. It’s, it’s, I’m sure we’ll be asking this question for a very long time. But, you know, there is definitely an aspect to the way that social media and podcast, you know, lump social media, YouTube and podcasts and with social media just liquidates trust out of institutions. Something makes it feel like unmediated access to information, there’s something intimate about it. I mean, even us right here, like I’m listening to you through my AirPods, you’re listening to me through your headphones, and everybody listening to this is doing the same. This is very intimate in terms of our voices with each other and into our audience. And so there’s that aspect of it as well that I think imbues a sense of authority, whether it’s there or not. But also, and you know, this is something that I talk about in the book that I borrowed from Andy Crouch, because he is wonderful in terms of technology, and I think it does have explanatory power. He talks about the difference between instruments and devices, and it’s more of a gradient than a hard black and white thing. But you know, instruments require something of you. You can’t just sit down at the piano and play Beethoven like you have to practice and become like Beethoven. In order to play Beethoven, you have to do something. And the farther you get away from those responsibilities, the more into device territory you get. And so he talks about how there’s these sort of four promises, four trade offs that devices give us. And I found this really helpful. So he says, you know, there’s, there’s first two really good things. So devices promise you now you’ll be able to you’ll be able to do things you’ve never done before, and you’ll no longer have to do things that you had to do before. That could be really good. And I think that’s why I’m not anti technology, anti Luddite. Those are good things, but there’s subtly, two trade offs. And you’ll also no longer be able to, it’s going to take things away from you that you did not know were going to be taken away. And it says Now you’ll have to, it’s going to force you to do things before that you didn’t know. You’re going to be forced to do. So if you run this sort of through the grid of deconstruction in this whole media complex and podcasts and everything, it could sound something along these lines. It could say, now you’ll no longer sorry. Now you’ll be able to access spiritual content from anywhere for free, like this podcast, we both agree this is good, like the gospel coalition of your orthodoxy. We love this. Now you’ll no longer have to pay for an expensive seminary education or rely solely on your local pastor for good teaching and instruction in the faith. Again, there’s pros and cons to this, but sometimes pastors don’t have or local churches don’t have the resources they need. Again, that’s really good. That’s why organizations like ours exist. But then the trade offs are you’ll no longer be able to easily discern the difference between trusted, incredible voices and those who are either ill informed at best or malicious at worst, and now you’ll have to, and here’s the choice. You have to choose who you trust more, your local church or the content you consume. And that, to me, I think explains a lot of this, because what the when you start to live a very online life, like we sometimes talk capital V, capital O, very online life, it sort of raptures you out of your local community, and collapses distinctions between your real life and what’s going on in cyberspace. And you actually have to make a choice on how you define reality, and most people don’t make that choice consciously. It happens subconsciously, and it sort of defaults a lot of times to what they see digitally. And so I think there has to be this conscious choice of not saying what you see online is not real, not doing, not saying any that, but actually coming back to your real life, embodied in relationship, in institutions life, and saying, I am choosing to define that the most real thing is what’s happening right in front of me. Instead of the things that are happening online, there are things that I choose not to wade into online more often than not, not because I don’t think it’s not real, not because I don’t think it’s not important. And it’s because it’s not that big of an issue in my immediate community, whereas other things are. And so those are the things that I think about. Those are the things I want to talk about more than the latest outrage thing on the internet today, because it’s not that I don’t have an opinion, it’s that maybe I do, maybe I don’t, maybe I just feel like I’m learning. But that’s not the thing that’s happening right in front of me. And even though, because of my job, I have to be online a lot, I’m trying to make what is in front of me the most real thing.

Collin Hansen

Yeah. Oh, that’s good stuff. That’s really good stuff. I’m gonna just clip that and share that with my students in the future. That’s what I strongly encourage them to do. A couple of quicker questions, because I think we’ve covered some of this ground, but they’re related. One is directly connected to apologetics. Once again, one thing that I give a lot of close attention to in my my teaching in seminary, but then also in my leadership with the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics. And I think you’re you’re channeling and a lot of the things you’re commending here, some good Jonathan Hite here on perspective, on the intuitions versus the reason. And I think what you seem to be commending so much with deconstruction is attention toward the intuitions, the feelings, the experiences, the desires, the tribal dynamics, as opposed to merely addressing the rational answers. Because I think that’s how evangelicals tend to respond to these situations, and say, Oh, well, we just need to correct your thinking. And so we need to teach you the right thing and warn you against the wrong things. And I think they miss the intuitive dimension and the emotional connection to that. And so let’s try to link these two together. I think that. I think they are linked. But here’s what you say about apologetics. You’re right. If we enter these relationships with all the answers, but full of fear, anxiety and control, it doesn’t matter how good our apologetics are. You can’t change someone’s mind if their heart hasn’t been won. So the question is, how do we win the hearts of people who are deconstructing but it may be related to my next question, which is, what role does non anxious presence play in being a good companion to a friend or family member in a crisis of faith?

Ian Harber

Yeah, no, that’s great question. And, you know, I think I’ve always had kind of a tenuous relationship with apologetics, because, you know, especially growing up, it was this very argumentative, combative thing, at least. That’s how I received at minimum. But I think that there’s something to that, and there’s a reason. There are lots of reasons, but you know, there I was intentional when I asked Gavin ortland To write the forward to it. Of course, you know, a fellow at the Keller center. Because I really people will read the book, maybe trying to, thinking they’re going to find an apologetics book, and then realizing I do almost no apologetics in the book, because that’s not what I’m trying to do. But I do find that valuable. And there’s a way that I think Gavin does more of the rational apologetics, first of all, in a way that I can never do. He’s brilliant, that I hope, if you know, more people know Gavin than me. But if somebody comes to my book first, I hope they make their way to Gavin’s YouTube channel and books and kind of go down that rabbit hole as well, because he’s excellent. The point that I wanted to make was that you can have those apologetic arguments again, this Gavin’s a perfect example of this, and if you don’t have the character to back it up, those arguments are going to fall flat. What makes someone like Gavin so great is that he has the intellectual firepower to stand toe to toe with anybody in any conversation, and yet he has a character where you believe that he doesn’t just think it’s true. It is real to him on a spiritual, existential level. And I think regardless of our ability to do apologetics at every different level that is that has to be true of us. We have to be people who are not just trying to defend an intellectual stronghold, but we live in the stronghold ourselves. We are embodying those things ourselves. We believe them. And by belief, I don’t just mean intellectually sin, but they are real to us, and they affect how we live, how we move and have our being and, you know, and how we process emotions and relationships and all kinds of different things. And so it’s, it’s much more important, in my mind, for the everyday person who’s walking through people through this process, to have the kind of faith that is real to them. You know, go, I draw on Edwin Freeman a lot, and the in the book, because I think he’s very helpful in helping understanding some of these, some of these things. And one of the things he talked about is he says, You can’t ever you.

Ian Harber

To the practices that the church has passed down to us. And really just, I don’t know, I don’t know Colin. I just, I’m tired of us trying to to innovate and do something new. I want us to, I want us to be connected to the thing that’s always been here, you know. And because I think there’s something good and true and beautiful in that, and people can tell when they are a marketing avatar profile that’s being sold religious good and services to and we can’t keep doing that.

Collin Hansen

I think there’s a couple other related diagnostic questions that are unfortunately necessary today. If you have the kind of church where you think people have a really clear idea of everything that they think about politics, including the latest developments week to week, but they can’t muster a Trinitarian argument other than the clover leaf. That’s probably a bad sign in terms of the potential for deconstruction, if people are commonly discussing ephemeral and aren’t they all social media controversies, but they can’t identify somebody like Irenaeus or origin or Athanasius, or any of these absolutely pivotal early leaders in the church, then maybe we’ve gotten away from those core things that are with the Word of God, that we can stand on through those storms of deconstruction, like you said that great quote of what we can stand on in the dark. So maybe those are a couple diagnostic questions to ask there as well. But I think, you know, I love so many things about this book, but I love that you are so carefully attuned to different dimensions of this, from the psychological to the sociological to the technological but fundamentally, it’s a book that commends the gospel, and it’s book that commends good, Orthodox biblical theology. What could be better than that? So encourage everybody to check that out walking through deconstruction how to be a companion in a crisis of faith. In harbor is the author and been to my guest here on gospel bound. The book is new from IVP. Before we go, give a quick shout out. Tell me about the new job at mirror orthodoxy. Yeah,

Ian Harber

that happened pretty recently. You know, I’ve been working for a different organization that we’ve been partnering with mirror orthodoxy for a little bit, and I’ve been helping behind the scenes. And then the opportunity came up for me to come on board full time with them, and so that’s what I’m doing now, and I’m very excited. I’ve been a big fan of mirror orthodoxy for many years, and that writing has been very formative on me, so to be able to help build it up as a media institution, I’m just very excited to be

Collin Hansen

part of that easily, one of the more helpful internet corners of Christianity. So love our friends at more orthodoxy and glad that you’re there. Ian, thanks for joining us today.

Ian Harber

Thank you too. Collin.