How to Deconstruct Your Faith in a Few Simple Steps

At a time when trust in the authority of Scripture, the Church, and the Church’s historical teachings is near all-time lows, Peter Enns wants people to find a “bigger and better God” than the one they may have gathered from those sources.

Enns is a biblical studies professor at Eastern University who holds views on the historicity and reliability of Scripture that earned him a suspension from Westminster Theological Seminary after the publication of his book Inspiration and Incarnation in 2008. 

In his latest book, Curveball, Enns invites believers to interrogate their faith, especially when faced with life’s “curveballs,” which he coins as experiences at odds with inherited beliefs that are “so momentous we simply cannot continue living as if they hadn’t happened,” like encountering the claims of cosmology, neo-Darwinism, or historical criticism. Throughout the book, Enns proposes how these can lead to a greater faith and a “bigger God” through a process of doubt and interrogation.

Enns is right to encourage believers to examine their beliefs. Sadly, much of the deconstruction and disaffiliation associated with the “nones” and “spiritual-but-not-religious” can be blamed on the failure of people to seriously grapple with what they believe and why. However, the god they will find in Curveball is the one in the mirror, whose faith grows in its power of unaided reason—and all in just three easy steps.

Step One

Enns begins his own faith interrogation by placing the authority of personal experience and reason above Scripture and Church Tradition. This means that when “curveballs” come “and I find my understanding of God to be inadequate to meet the needs of those moments, I am not wrong to listen to my instincts and think…maybe my view of God is askew and needs to grow.” As an example for how this is supposed to work, Enns highlights the experience of former GOP senator Rob Portman.

As a legislator, Portman was opposed to same-sex marriage until his son came out as gay. Over the course of two years, Enns explains, Portman’s “love for his son led not simply to changing his views on gay marriage” but coming to believe that “a God who two years earlier was ‘clearly’ opposed to same-sex unions was now accepting of them.” 

Enns’ quotes clearly suggest that, despite numerous scriptural passages to the contrary and the fact that gay “marriage” didn’t exist until the pronouncement of five robed oracles created it in 2015, God is and always has been fine with homosexual sex. By that line of reasoning, God would be fine with nonmarital heterosexual sex, too. It is a clever “Trojan Horse” that smuggles in a conclusion in direct conflict with both the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature.  

Concluding, Enns writes, “Portman’s experience led to a change in how he understood God—which is a nice summary of what this book is about” [emphasis added]. The takeaway: if my personal experience causes me to reason that a Church teaching—say, on abortion or sexuality—is unhelpful or harmful to me or others, I don’t need to question my feelings or reasoning about that teaching; I need to trust my instincts and adjust my understanding of God.

That’s sure to play well to the “little god” inside. When one sets himself outside the counsel of Scripture, Church tradition, and even the community of faith (which Enns suggests he himself has), one has established himself Sovereign, the sole arbiter of truth and morality.

Step Two

Next, Enns takes a captious posture toward Scripture, arguing that biblical inconsistencies, contradictions, and conflicts with science and history undermine the Bible as “God’s flawless, set-in-stone, authoritative word downloaded to us.”

Enns is either unaware of or willfully ignores the fact that for over 1,800 years the Church Fathers, theologians, biblical scholars, and many laity have known about these issues and addressed them such that a minority are under competent dispute today, with vanishingly few concerning any serious Church doctrine.

Admittedly, the Bible has passages and teachings that can be a challenge to understand and apply. But instead of adjusting our concept of God when upended by a “curveball,” we should draw on the full counsel of the Church for answers that have been formulated over centuries. Will those answers satisfy everyone? No—leaving the “unsatisfied” to question whether their reasoning power, limited as it is to their own hat size, is up to interrogating the collective wisdom of the Church. The sheer thought should prompt humility.

Enns views the Bible through the interpretive lens of the historical-critical method (HCM), which can miss and even subvert the meanings of Scripture by approaching it like any other ancient work. In downplaying or ignoring the role of inspiration, the HCM tends to reduce the Bible to a work of men who were expressing their fallible understanding of existence and the world they lived in using god-talk inherited from ancient pagan cultures.

For example, gazing up from HCM Thummim, Enns claims with a certain unfeigned certainty (a “sin” he names in a previous book) that most of Israel’s history, beginning with Abraham, belongs in the myth/legend register. He bases this conclusion on the “Argument from Silence,” common in HCM, which renders biblical accounts untrustworthy for the lack of supporting archeological artifacts and extra-biblical records. Given that nearly every year the archeologist’s spade breaks the silence on some biblical fact that had been dismissed as folklore, one would think he would be more measured.

Instead, he doubles down with the assertion that since the biblical authors “had skin in the game” they were constantly “adjusting” their narrative out of self-interest, bias, or to protect the reputation of their warrior-God. In his framing, the biblical record of Israel’s defeat and captivity by the Babylonians is a story spun by the writers to make it look like the nation’s humiliation was God’s plan to chastise the Israelites for their waywardness. Enns follows up with a parade of other “adjustments” to suggest that the Bible is little more than a chain of historical accounts that were doctored by the authors to fit preferred narratives.

Step Three

Finally, the critical posture that Enns takes toward Scripture doesn’t transfer to science, a discipline that, despite its monumental contributions to technology, is marred by cases of misrepresentation, falsification, ideological bias, fraud, and a replication crisis.

To be sure, the revelations of modern science—namely, relativity, quantum physics, and cosmology—invoke awe and wonder worthy of a Creator-God. So, it is odd that Enns calls these “curveballs,” except, as he tells it, the Church got the idea of God’s omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience not from the copious biblical inferences to them but from Greek philosophy. It would seem that the biblical authors “missed” what Greeks knew 2,500 years ago.

Enns treats science so uncritically and reverentially it is surprising he didn’t capitalize it—especially when it comes to evolution, which he considers the biggest curveball for Christians. That’s because, for the neo-Darwin, faithful “mud-to-man” evolution is fact, despite facts that include:

• macroevolution, that is, abiogenesis and large-scale changes over time, remains an unproven theory;
• a fossil record that is rife with inconsistent and contradictory data, including a lack of transitional forms;
• that similarities in body plans and DNA are better explained as products of common design than common descent; and
• the modest evolution from a one-cell organism to a two-cell organism has never been demonstrated, even where it should have been if true: the microbiology lab where enormous population numbers and short turnover times mimic the evolutionary resources necessary.

These should be curveballs for anyone who takes pride in interrogating stories for inconsistencies, contraindicative evidence, and missing data; but they leave Enns untroubled.

Evolutionary materialists who have been troubled conjured up the “multiverse”—not because any empirical evidence suggested it but because evolution demanded it; otherwise, their vaunted theory would collapse like a dying star.

Which brings up Enns’ shout-out to the Woodstock generation, claiming that “we are stardust,” the fortuitous result of stellar debris that floated through the cosmos until it found conditions hospitable to life (a speculative scenario bereft of evidence—but because it’s Science, it must be true).

While materialists attempt to rescue evolution from the graveyard of failed theories with a “Materialism of the Gaps” where all impossibilities become possible, theistic evolutionists (like Enns), hoping for acceptance in the smart set, support it with a “God of the Gaps” who guides the process gently along. This has led Enns to some bizarre conclusions:

• “We [humans] are not the end of the game [for] we are evolving still” (into Muskian transhumans, Thielian post-humans, or ? One shudders to think);

• “We can no longer think of the future apart from what we are learning about God through evolution.” (What Richard Dawkins learned about God through evolution was how to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, just sayin’.)

• Death is not our enemy but our friend. After all, we owe our existence to the death of prior life forms; it is “a necessary part of the process of creation.” (Actually, we owe our existence to the Creator and created beings who lived to fulfill the Creation Mandate to fill and multiply.)

In the end, people looking to Curveball as a resource for dealing with their questions of faith will find a much smaller god and less demanding faith. And those who have deconstructed their faith, or who are in the process of doing so, will find a serviceable guide in reconstructing one more to their liking.