Written by Kevin P. Emmert |
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Because we belong to the Lord Jesus and are made to be like him, we cannot find our true identity by looking inside ourselves. The Lord’s Supper subverts the notion that identity is an individualistic enterprise because in this meal we participate with Christ. “The cup of blessing that we bless,” Paul writes, “is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). Thus, many Christians rightly call this meal Communion. By it, we fellowship with Christ and remember that we are people who live in vital connection with Christ.

Identity — it is one of our society’s greatest obsessions today. Even we Christians can preoccupy ourselves with knowing who we are and what our purpose is. This pursuit is not altogether bad. The desire to understand who we are and what we are here for is natural and God-given. The problem arises when we look in the wrong places to discover our identity and purpose.
Many look to social media, self-help resources, life coaches, models of the psyche — you name it — for direction and affirmation. We may even naively accept mantras like “Be true to yourself” and “You do you,” thinking we can determine our own identities and express them however we want. But such paths lead only to more confusion and despair.
If we as Christians want to understand who we are, we must look to Jesus Christ. As the God-man, he is the true revelation of both God and of humanity. He alone can reveal to us who we are. And one concrete way he reveals our identities is through his appointed Supper.
People Who Remember
The Lord’s Supper, along with baptism, is one of the most debated Christian practices. Believers from various traditions disagree over what exactly happens during the meal; we also disagree over how frequently it should be celebrated. Despite such disagreements, all Christians agree on at least this: the Lord’s Supper is a meal whereby we remember who Christ is and what he has done for us (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25).
Many of us do not realize, however, that the Lord’s Supper is also a time when we remember who we are in Christ. In a key way, the Table strengthens our identity in him. Indeed, Christ himself forms and fortifies our identity in this meal because he is present to us and lives in us (John 14:20, 23; 17:23, 26). Just as food and drink strengthen the body, so Christ’s body and blood, received by faith, strengthen our souls in a way that helps us understand ourselves.
The Lord’s Supper shapes our identity in part because the meal is analogous to the Passover. The Passover was a ritual feast whereby the Israelites meditated on God’s saving actions and reassured themselves of who they were as God’s people. They identified themselves with the exodus generation every time they celebrated the rite.
When Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples on the night before his death, he did far more than identify with the exodus generation; he gave the meal greater significance because he was about to accomplish his mission as the true Passover Lamb. Just as the historical exodus and old covenant defined Israel’s existence, so Christ enacted a new exodus and a new covenant that now defines our existence in him — our very identity and way of life. And when Jesus commanded us to eat in remembrance of him (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25), he was not instructing us to simply ponder past events, just as he was not simply recalling the exodus when he celebrated the Passover with his disciples.
Many today think that to remember is to merely think about something from the past. But biblically, to remember involves bringing the past into the present and allowing the past to actively shape the present.
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I changed my mind about deconstruction. After researching this topic, I’ve come to see that deconstruction isn’t merely asking questions or a synonym for doubt. Rather, it’s a process with no correct destination, no ending, and no biblical authority. As a result, I don’t use words like “healthy deconstruction” or “good deconstruction” anymore. For me, that’s an oxymoron. Deconstruction is a fundamentally flawed process, and I don’t think that changes by placing a few positive adjectives in front of the word.

I changed my mind about deconstruction.
When I first began looking into deconstruction, I quickly discovered that people were using the term to mean different things. For instance, when someone says, “I’m deconstructing my faith,” they could mean anything from questioning a tertiary doctrine, like young-earth creation, to leaving the faith altogether.
Attempting to bring clarity to the conversation, I thought adding adjectives to the word deconstruction (like healthy versus unhealthy, or good versus bad) would help. So, for example, I would say that while unhealthy deconstruction rethinks faith without requiring Scripture as a standard, healthy deconstruction corrects mistaken beliefs to make them align with Scripture. Problem solved, I thought. However, this approach assumes deconstruction itself is a neutral process. I don’t believe that anymore.
While writing The Deconstruction of Christianity with Alisa Childers, we discovered some fundamental beliefs that undergird the deconstruction process. Moreover, these ideas are antithetical to the Christian worldview. This helps explain why so many who deconstruct their faith end up leaving the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). Here are three reasons why I changed my mind about deconstruction.
No Correct Destination
First, deconstruction has no correct destination.
A defining feature of deconstruction is that there’s no right way to do it and no right destination. For example, Jo Luehmann, author of Decolonizing Traditional Christianity, expounds on this idea in a video titled Our Journey of Faith Deconstruction:
This is the thing with deconstruction that I really think it’s important to understand. Everyone lands wherever they land. There is no right place to land with deconstruction. Some people land away from faith. Some people land in a different type of faith. Some people become agnostic. Some people become a different type of Christian. Some people become atheists. And all of those routes in deconstruction are valid and to be respected.
Luehmann is not alone. “NakedPastor” David Hayward, who regularly creates social media content on faith deconstruction, puts it more concisely: “There isn’t a right way to deconstruct, nor is there a right destination. You do you.”
Why isn’t there a right place to land in deconstruction? The answer is that deconstruction is a postmodern process. What I mean is, deconstruction isn’t about objective truth. It’s about personal happiness. In one sense, the destination of deconstruction is like the destination of a vacation. Whether you end up in Hawaii or Jamaica or somewhere else, it’s all personal preference. It would be silly to say Hawaii is the “right” vacation destination for everyone.
Notice how deconstruction assumes there is no objective truth when it comes to religious beliefs. That’s why it doesn’t matter how you do it or where you end up as long as you’re happy.
Now contrast this with Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.
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The sovereignty of God over us is the sovereignty of a potter over his clay. To assert ourselves as the centre of all things, and to exclude him as sovereign, we must reject his claim over us as our Potter. And of course, this is what we have done. 

I can’t remember who first taught me this axiom of Bible reading, but I have been forever grateful. When you come across a knotty passage in Scripture, don’t glide past it—untie it.
A confusing or confounding passage is an opportunity to learn. Sometimes knotty verses reveal our ignorance, or that we haven’t understood the passage—such as when we’re reading Hebrews 6 and the obscure figure of Melchizedek suddenly looms out of the mist and we wonder what’s he got to do with the price of fish.
But sometimes we come across Bible verses that are knotty and confounding not because they are obscure but because we find them objectionable. They tie us in knots. They cut across our assumptions or expectations about what God is like or we are like or the world is like. They expose our deepest, baseline attitudes and beliefs, and where they have gone astray.
We had one like this in church last Sunday. In Romans 9, after talking about how God will have mercy on some people and harden other people, and that it’s entirely up to him, Paul then asks the obvious rhetorical question:
You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” (v 18)
Fair enough question, you might think. If God calls all the shots, then why are we to blame for finding ourselves on his bad side? And then comes this:
But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is moulded say to its moulder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for dishonourable use? (vv 19-20)
Perhaps there are more objectionable verses in the Bible than these ones, but surely not by much.
Something deep within my Western soul rages against these ideas. Me, a lump of clay?! An object in the hands of a Supreme Being to do with what he wants? How utterly dehumanising and oppressive! Whatever happened to human dignity? Surely this is the poisonous spirit of primitive religion at its worst. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, They kill us for their sport” (King Lear, 4.1.36-37).
As the preacher on Sunday pointed out, these verses in Romans 9 are difficult for us because we are profoundly convinced that we are at the centre of the universe, not God. We can’t cope with the idea that we might be bit players in someone else’s drama, rather than the star of our own story.
This is old as Adam and Eve. But it’s a particularly virulent problem for modern, Western people like us. It’s part of what we used to call our ‘worldview’, and which some clever people these days call our ‘social imaginary’, and which (in the words of that philosophical treatise, The Castle) you could think of simply as ‘the Vibe’.  It’s the complex, often unstated web of beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world, which our culture constantly reinforces and transmits to us, which we absorb and come to accept, and upon which we operate day by day.
For nearly three centuries, our Western culture has been steadily constructing a Vibe in which God is excluded, and man is the centre and measure of all things. We don’t even notice or articulate this any more. We just live as if it’s the case. The debates we have with each other on any issue (political, social, ethical) proceed on this basis. The stories we tell each other—in movies and TV shows and books—assume it and reinforce it constantly.  It’s hard to imagine any Hollywood movie in which God is the potter and we are the clay, unless of course we are the plucky heroic figures of clay, who come to life, follow our hearts, destroy the evil oppressive potter, and go on to realise all our dreams.
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