Deconstructing deconstruction: Jersak’s chronicle of spiritual detox

“The Word of God is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. And when he was about eighteen years old, he grew a beard.” 

This is one of Dr. Brad Jersak’s favourite provocative lines, which he uses to expound on a key text: “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me” (John 5:39). Put differently, the Word of God is more than a book.

Jersak is one of the key Canadian voices when it comes to the notion of deconstruction. His latest book, Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction, chronicles his spiritual journey and explores the challenges and gifts of deconstruction. 

Jersak’s theological life has been a diverse and bumpy ride. He grew up in Manitoba singing “Back to the Bible” and repeating phrases like “The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” He attended an evangelical camp where Bible sword drills were a highlight. “I loved the certitude,” he confessed to me and CC editor Angela Bick when we had the privilege of interviewing him a few months ago for our forthcoming book on deconstructing Canadians.

Jersak picked up two theology degrees at Briercrest College, Saskatchewan before scooping up an M.Div. at Trinity Western University. He then settled down in B.C. 

Beginning as a dispensationalist Baptist, he meddled with Calvinism during seminary, then sojourned as a pastor with the Mennonites while doing some dabbling in charismatic inner-healing practises, after which he led a church plant called Fresh Wind in Abbotsford, B.C. Then his world shattered, and he has been rebuilding a new life and theology ever since, now within the Eastern Orthodox tradition. 

Now in his late fifties, Jersak is currently the Dean of Theology & Culture at St. Stephen’s University, New Brunswick and teaches peace theology at the Institute for Religion, Peace, and Justice. He is editor of some journals, writes novels, has three sons and a Czech background. His wife, Eden, is pastor at The Bridge, Abbotsford and they go their separate ways Sunday mornings. “We carry the division in the body of Christ in our marriage as intercession,” he told us.

When Angela and I interviewed Jersak, he gave us a friendly, personal and at times poignant conversation about his de/reconstruction with Jesus, “history’s all-time, hinge-point proponent and practitioner of de/reconstruction.”

out of the embers: faith after the great deconstruction

Bradley Jersak
Whitaker House, 2022.

Spiritual Danger

Jersak doesn’t give a succinct definition for deconstruction, but rather emphasizes its necessity, its complexity and both its liabilities and possibilities. He isn’t stingy with his metaphors for deconstruction, and they include renovation, detox, extreme makeover, metamorphosis, enlightenment and “a prison break from religious bondage.” But all of the them, for Jersak at least, require a deep connection to God and the church.

One common term he uses to describe deconstruction is trauma, although he also writes about seeing it as a type of conversion. “Our experiences of exodus, of awakening, of letting go, of transformation, of metamorphosis, and so forth, represent a familiar path — a spiritual tradition — believe it or not — that we find at the very heart of the Christian story and echoed through the lives and testimonies of the saints.” Its symbolized in baptism — our dying to a false self and rising to a resurrected life.

One thing for sure: Jersak is not endorsing deconstruction as a sweet spiritual pastime or as cool triumphalistic revenge on the religious right. For Jersak, deconstruction is excruciating, a harrowing affair that brings one to the edge of despair and meaninglessness. It’s a journey of spiritual peril, and if endorsed to an angst-ridden Christian, must come with a stern warning label.

“As a Canadian I was watching a lot of my American friends become so disillusioned with Trumpist evangelicalism that they were part of a mass exodus from the churches,” he said in the interview. “First they left the church, then they let go of Jesus, and finally they gave up on love. They even renounced love because love doesn’t work. ‘Actually, we need justice,’ [they said] which was still quite retributive in my mind. Now they are only about justice, which marked them as having left one ideology and picked up another without changing the spirit of it.”

The hazards of deconstruction are not to be trifled with. Jersak told us: “I had friends who were influencers in the deconstruction movement and I saw them really cheering them along, those who were deconstructing and saying yeah, #emptythepews.”

Meanwhile Jersak talked about how some of these weary souls “not only lost faith but lost meaning in life and I’m talking psych wards and such. It was a false bill of goods. I’m not about herding them back into churches. But Its complex. For some it can be liberating, finding out that God does not hate you. Taking eternal conscience torment [in hell] off the table. I know, I went through that kind of theological deconstruction by heading back into the ancient faith.”

For others, Jersak warns in his book, it’s not liberating. In fact, one of his analogies explains deconstruction as a mastectomy. “That’s what it was for me,” he shared in the interview. “Like, ‘I know a cancer has to go, but I didn’t know how much of me I was going to lose in this.’”

Theological Detox

Deconstruction has been both personal and intellectual for Jersak, and Our of the Embers dances between seeing deconstruction as breaking free from a constrictive belief system and as a colossal psychic collapse. The theological reconstruction has taken years and has been liberating, while the personal deconstruction has been more acute and distressing.

His theological deconstruction has included dismantling his own previous passionate defense of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) and eternal conscious torment (ECT), both of which crumbled as he critiqued his own inheritance of a wrathful, violent and retributive God. This shift also entailed a transformation of his ego and performance-oriented, rationalistic self. As his life was “bulldozed to bedrock,” what was inscribed in the bedrock was “God is good.”

His theological work promotes a Jesus-centred hermeneutic of love and mercy, which champions a nonviolent atonement, ultimate redemption (not quite universalism), peace-building, and deconstruction. He and his wife Eden have also become affirming of same-sex marriage — as the ethical outcome of a theology of a loving and caring God who welcomes all to the banquet table.

Of late, Jersak has published a trilogy aimed at reconstructing a faith centred in merciful, forgiving deity:

• A More Christlike God (2015) – God is more like Christ than a volatile moral monster
• A More Christlike Way (2019) – Faith is more like Christ than power religion and politics)
• A More Christlike Word (2021) – God’s Word is more like Christ than an inerrant literalistic reading of a book. 

In a way, his latest book offers some of the background to this trilogy – some of the personal journey along with the philosophical framework that gives it existential depth.

The book is a collage of conversations — almost every chapter has documentation of an exchange he has had with a friend, a student, a reader, a priest or — the real core of the book — the “seven sleepers” who are his seasoned historical guides to deconstruction. The book is engaging if not a little dizzying at times, as he jumps from conversation to conversation and metaphor to metaphor, drawing from emails, church fathers, existentialists and scripture. 

Personal Meltdown

Jersak also underwent a personal deconstruction — what he calls a meltdown — about 14 years ago, and he is still in recovery. He is deliberately vague about what exactly happened here, but he says it involved being overwhelmed by other people’s tragedies as a pastor, burning out, crossing a relational boundary that caused significant hurt and shame and, ultimately, falling into a deep, dark pit of suicidal ideation. It was a kind of hell which he could not climb out of on his own.

It was in the agony of the pit, however, where God met him. In the interview, he quoted Polish poet Stanislav Jerzy Lec: “When I thought I had reached the bottom, a knock came from below.” Jersak interprets this as Christ, the wounded God, who has always gone deeper than us. This is the God who meets us in our hell — the worst of the human condition — and takes us by the hand.

The book’s title “out of the embers” is a testament to his own experience. Typically people use the term reconstruction to describe the stage after deconstruction, but this term is a misnomer for him. He does not see it as a rebuilding of the self or as a  repair. Instead, he sees it as a miraculous resurrection, phoenix-like, from the ashes.

That a profound personal crisis triggers deconstruction is not unusual. According to my and Angela’s research so far, most people who have deconstructed say that the perpetrator of their pain and trauma was some aspect of the church: a revelation of pastoral abuse, unethical actions of a church board, dogmatic insistence on something like six-day creation, the endorsement of Donald Trump or rigid traditional sexual ethics. What is exceptional about Jersak’s account of his personal deconstruction, however, is his willingness to say that he was the problem that triggered his own unravelling and spiritual vertigo. It was the church that embraced him, forgave him and helped him on his healing journey.

It is important to note that Jersak’s website names his accountability team and he makes it clear that he is not ashamed to talk about his 12-step addiction recovery, or admit that he calls his sponsor when temptation looms. It’s not that he is all better, and his journey is complete. The struggle continues.

Cultural Collapse

The book’s subtitle, “Faith After The Great Deconstruction” is a reference to what he calls in his book the “current wave of migration out of previous faith forms into new understandings of God” and/or “the great migration out of faith altogether.” This massive “upheaval of status quo belief systems” is of such magnitude that is deserves the descriptor “Great” — like the Great Reformation or the Great Awakening. In sum, deconstruction is both a “nervous breakdown” and “cultural collapse.”

“We are in an age that is undoing old constructs at breakneck speed,” he writes. But he is no enthusiastic salesman for such dismantling, even as much of it is necessary.

“I’m a deconstructionist helping deconstructionists deconstruct their deconstruction,” he told us. “I‘m saying I’m not attacking it, but saying let’s actually do this thing, work it through. My agenda being that I don’t want anyone to deconvert.”

He is even more critical in his book. In his exegesis of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed he sees modern ideological obsession as comparable to Biblical demonic possession. “Liberal and progressive idealists become so disillusioned with their failed utopian hopes and so possessed by the smell of smoke and blood that destruction becomes an end in itself,” he writes. “Deconstruction devolves into cultural arson. When protests and pamphlets and lobbying fail to bring about the justice we demanded, someone lights a fire. Liberal utopian overreach is exposed… when any social revolution realizes that its dreams are doomed but continues the revolution for its own sake… deconstruction is destruction.”

Jersak sees danger in the “burn it all down” mentality that devastated Russia for a century and the nihilism that awaits at the end of modern progress’s failed promises. 

Jersak offers this wisdom: a person cannot be saved ideology, capitalism or communism, or even deconstruction. “Wherever ordinary people — as unholy and afflicted as we are — open our hearts to see the pain beneath another’s sin and shed a tear in humble solidarity, we become participants in God’s grace, agents in their salvation and ours as well. This is what we mean by co-suffering love.”

Communion with Presence

Ultimately this co-suffering love is what met Jersak at the bottom of his pit of despair and it’s what he gleans from his tour of the “seven sleepers” — his seven prophetic guides, which are Moses, Plato, Voltaire, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Fredrich Nietzsche and Simon Weil. Notably, the philosopher who championed the term deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, is not on the list.

What is common to all these prophets is that they all chaffed against society — the dominant culture of their day, whether they called it Christendom, the establishment, the herd, the crowd, communist or capitalist ideology. Some precious and pernicious social idol became rigid, unyielding and oppressive and these figures resisted and decried their political or ecclesiastical control.

What I find remarkable is that of the seven sleepers, only Moses and Dostoevsky were married, and Dostoevsky is known to have had affairs. I wonder if this freedom from matrimony and children gave them more time to think and write, and if they were individuals who did not struggle with the faithfulness that covenant intimacy — and a brood of children — demand.

Out of the Embers relies heavily on existentialist philosophy, and we know one of its prime proponents, Jean Paul Sartre, famously said, “Hell is other people.”

Jersak’s existentialist heart is fruitful for understanding the angst of being human, the absurdity of our existence, and the many foibles of our collective life. But existentialism is a radically individualist creed, and while Jersak is aware of this weakness, he doesn’t fully elaborate on the centrality of covenant in a Jesus-centred life. Deconstruction leaves one bereft. As Jersak makes clear, many who deconstruct are not only left in loss and despair, but they are deeply lonely.

Expressivist individualism is the most prominent idolatry in the West. We worship the Big Me, as the author and New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks calls it, the sovereign self. While oppressive social structures are certainly necessary to dismantle, the freed individual is often left alone in the ruins. Jersak is right to deconstruct deconstruction. We cannot wander in the wilderness forever.

Jersak is calling for us to redeem our approach to the church, God’s covenant people. “I was not, in fact, creeping off the end of a flimsy limb,” says Jersak about his deconstruction. “I was climbing down the trunk into the very roots of the historic apostolic faith… My church didn’t abandon me, betray me, or drive me out. In fact, they blessed my adventures…”

The final quote in the book (at the very end) is this benediction from Metropolitan Archbishop Kallistos Ware: “True faith is a constant dialogue with doubt, for God is incomparably greater than all our preconceptions about him; our mental concepts are idols that need to be shattered. So as to be fully alive, our faith needs continually to die.” This quote brings to mind this assertion from C.S. Lewis’ 1961’s memoir A Grief Observed: “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself.”

Before these words of benediction, Jersak ends his own discussion by writing about the dual possibilities of human extinction on a ravaged planet or the gradual unfurling of the kingdom of God in human cooperation and conservation. Jersak’s Orthodox guides interpret the latter as “the commonwealth of presence in communion” which is manifest in such things as spiritual friendship. So while the world unravels, the kingdom simultaneously unfurls. The reality is, we desperately need to reconstruct a healthier covenant in the West. Ultimately, heaven is other people, in co-suffering love, following the cultural mandate to reweave social structures in which everyone can flourish.