Even as a child I was never able to believe in the myths or rituals associated with organized religions but one question always remains. There cannot be a “better” squirrel, or cat or raccoon etc. but people can become “better” people, less selfish with more empathy and compassion for the environment and other creatures experiencing the same reality. The question is why is that? Why are we capable of being aware?
This article names the problem clearly, but I think it stops one step short of the practical answer.
Deconstruction fails when it is mistaken for liberation itself. It is not liberation. It is only the first movement of forgiveness.
That distinction matters because forgiveness is not mainly a philosophical idea. Forgiveness is a cognitive exercise. It is something the mind must actually learn how to do.
This has long been one of my deepest complaints about the church. The church requires forgiveness, praises forgiveness, preaches forgiveness, and makes forgiveness central to the Christian life. But it rarely tells people what forgiveness is or how to do it. So people are left trying to perform a spiritual obligation without a workable method.
At its simplest, forgiveness begins with **recognition and release**.
We recognize what is false, harmful, coercive, immature, distorted, or no longer adequate. Then we release it. We stop protecting what is false. We stop defending what no longer deserves defense. We stop calling fear obedience, conformity faithfulness, and certainty maturity.
That is the deconstructive movement.
But recognition and release are not enough.
If nothing truer replaces the old structure, the mind will often recreate another rigid structure somewhere else. That is why people can leave one closed religious system only to join a closed political system, a closed therapeutic system, a closed ideological system, or a closed anti-religious system. The vocabulary changes, but the cognitive pattern remains.
They did not complete forgiveness.
They recognized and released the content.
They did not reconstruct the structure.
That is where my own work enters. I use what I think of as an integral lensing strategy. It gives the mind a way to include earlier beliefs without being trapped inside them. It does not require people to despise or negate the beliefs that once carried them. It asks them to see those beliefs within a larger frame.
A childhood faith may be too small to govern adult life, but that does not mean it was worthless. A traditional symbol may be inadequate when taken literally, but powerful when understood developmentally, psychologically, mythologically, or spiritually. A doctrine may fail as a final answer while still serving as a partial window.
The point is not to humiliate the past.
The point is to locate it.
That is why reconstruction has to be fitted to the individual. People do not all need the same next step. Some need permission to question. Some need help grieving what they lost. Some need a way to reinterpret symbols they cannot simply discard. Some need a structure for moral responsibility after external authority collapses. Some need to learn how to remain in relationship with reality without grabbing for a new certainty.
This does not require a high-powered philosopher to solve. It requires a practical map of how human beings actually revise meaning.
Forgiveness, understood cognitively, does not merely say, “That was false.” It asks, “What more adequate understanding can now take its place?”
For me, the answer is love.
Not love as sentiment. Not love as niceness. Not love as emotional frosting on private spirituality. Love is the structure that allows reality to move safely between people. Love is what makes truth bearable, responsibility possible, and belonging mature.
So yes, the post-deconstruction crisis is real. People are stranded because deconstruction cleared the room but did not build the house. The answer is not to restore the old house. The answer is to help people construct a livable path forward, one that includes what was true before, releases what was false, and integrates reality at a higher level.
That is forgiveness completed.
Recognition sees what is false.
Release stops protecting it.
Reconstruction replaces it with a more adequate way of seeing.
Love gives the process its direction.
The real question after deconstruction is not merely, “What do I no longer believe?”
The real question is, “What larger truth can now hold what I used to believe, what I now see, and what love requires of me next?”
The following is a brief summary of my personal interpretive rendering of existential philosopher, Lutheran Protestant theologian Paul Tillich's analysis of the primary problem besetting modern man
The source of today's crisis is the mass failure of the Content of modern man's Ultimate Concern. Today’s worldview has shifted from one that made room for Faith in a traditional religious sense to one in which that is no longer the case, and Faith is but an interesting artifact from a bygone era. In short, with the predominance of the Materialist worldview, Faith is no longer necessary and, in many ways, may be thought of as a hindrance to the functioning of our modern world.
After centuries of religious practice, humanity has mistakenly identified the Symbols of Faith as its Ultimate Concern. The theistic God and its traditional Judeo-Christian theology have been taken too seriously. The age of science has repeatedly shown that the absolutism of traditional theism is false and therefore cannot be ultimate. When one's Ultimate Concern is shown to be less than ultimate, meaning in one's life is lost. This is followed, either consciously or unconsciously, by a search for a replacement to regain one's personal or spiritual center.
Modern man's attempts to "regain his personal center," to adopt a new Ultimate Concern, cannot succeed because the Symbols necessary cannot be intentionally created. This loss of center leads to what Tillich calls: "facing the God who really is God," which goes hand in hand for him with facing what he calls: "the absolute threat of non-being." He puts it another way when he speaks of the "Anxiety of Meaninglessness." It is this Meaninglessness that he sees as the real crisis of modern man. According to Tillich, ours is the age of "Anxiety, Doubt, and Meaninglessness."
Not to be one of doom and gloom alone, Tillich proposes a solution to our problem. It’s gets pretty woo-wooie for this layman, but it goes something like this,
Tillich sees Meaninglessness as "the Actualization of man's Estrangement." Reaching a state of being where we belong to that from which we are estranged. Our “Estrangement” has cut us off from God ("the Ground of Being"), from other beings, and from our "True Being." Estrangement is our universal destiny.
But how can modern man, wallowing in a quagmire of Meaninglessness, even consider resolving his Estrangement through Faith when it was the failure of Faith in the first place that has left him in this state of Meaninglessness? At this juncture, Tillich says an individual must draw oneself up into a condition where one is possessed by the "courage to accept Meaninglessness." To, in effect, have what he calls Absolute Faith or "the state of being grasped by the God above God."
Absolute Faith is the Faith that accepts Meaninglessness and Despair. It exists on the edge of "the Courage to Be." It is, in fact, "the boundary of man's possibilities." When "the meaning of life is reduced to despair about the meaning of life . . . the act of despair is an act of life . . . a positive in its negativity." In other words, the very "act of accepting Meaninglessness" becomes "a meaningful act."
Absolute Faith has no "special Content," and therefore its Content is the "God above the God of theism." "The Courage to Be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the Anxiety of Doubt." Like the absence that the author of the Cloud of Unknowing experienced. Where all expectations of and about God are shredded, and one simply is open to the God "I AM."
So, the solution to the problem of Meaninglessness is to accept it, or as Tillich puts it, "To have the Courage to Be in the Face of Despair." The amazing thing about this is that once this is accomplished, an individual possessing Absolute Faith becomes rooted in The God Above God. This, Tillich infers, is a very good place to be indeed.
The God Above God is that God which transcends any or all conceptions of God. The God Above God cannot be described as the traditional theistic God is, but Tillich makes a few noteworthy pronouncements anyway.
According to him, the God Above God is the reality to which "fundamental Symbols of ultimate concern point." In a sense, The God Above God is the "fundamental and universal Content of Faith" across all Faiths. The God Above God is the "source of The Courage to Be" and "the object of all mystical longings." Finally, acceptance of the "God above the God of theism" makes one "part of that which is not a part but Is the ground of the whole.”
Thus, the ultimate flaw in the Materialist worldview is something tucked away in the consciousness of us all, waiting to reveal our connection to "the Ground of Being." On the other hand, to be honest, all this is going to be a hard sell to Main Street America or anywhere.
You have already convinced me that "capacity" must increase. "Existential health asks what forms of development allow us to require those protections less. Žižek reveals the architecture. Existential health investigates the capacities necessary to live beyond it." I am on the edge of my chair for the answer. Respect your work. Feel it has zero'd in on the central question for our time and laid the foundation for working our way through it as a people.
Žižek's concept of "fetishistic disavowal" goes a long way to describe the means to escape a threatening reality. The denial of fifty years of climate science is a pertinent example.
My ability to live securely in the question, to live independently of reality while related to it, was developed through participation in est, the programs created by Werner Erhard. est became Landmark Worldwide. There were a series of distinctions that provided access to breakthroughs and, ultimately, personal responsibility for all of life. A world that works for everyone with nothing and no one left out. I live freely within a shared reality. Which doesn’t mean I’m done living and learning, except contextually. Contextually, I am whole and complete.
Human beings were given the opportunity eons ago, to become caretakers of this world. They refused.
Great article. Of course, as in all great articles, raises questions.
Freedom requires a price no one wants to pay. Complaining about a system, is far easier than living free from one. It would mean that the individual would need to ‘gasp’, become self sustaining!
I study Torah. Not because I’m Christian or Jewish, but because I believe it has answers to these very questions.
Even as a child I was never able to believe in the myths or rituals associated with organized religions but one question always remains. There cannot be a “better” squirrel, or cat or raccoon etc. but people can become “better” people, less selfish with more empathy and compassion for the environment and other creatures experiencing the same reality. The question is why is that? Why are we capable of being aware?
Jim,
This article names the problem clearly, but I think it stops one step short of the practical answer.
Deconstruction fails when it is mistaken for liberation itself. It is not liberation. It is only the first movement of forgiveness.
That distinction matters because forgiveness is not mainly a philosophical idea. Forgiveness is a cognitive exercise. It is something the mind must actually learn how to do.
This has long been one of my deepest complaints about the church. The church requires forgiveness, praises forgiveness, preaches forgiveness, and makes forgiveness central to the Christian life. But it rarely tells people what forgiveness is or how to do it. So people are left trying to perform a spiritual obligation without a workable method.
At its simplest, forgiveness begins with **recognition and release**.
We recognize what is false, harmful, coercive, immature, distorted, or no longer adequate. Then we release it. We stop protecting what is false. We stop defending what no longer deserves defense. We stop calling fear obedience, conformity faithfulness, and certainty maturity.
That is the deconstructive movement.
But recognition and release are not enough.
If nothing truer replaces the old structure, the mind will often recreate another rigid structure somewhere else. That is why people can leave one closed religious system only to join a closed political system, a closed therapeutic system, a closed ideological system, or a closed anti-religious system. The vocabulary changes, but the cognitive pattern remains.
They did not complete forgiveness.
They recognized and released the content.
They did not reconstruct the structure.
That is where my own work enters. I use what I think of as an integral lensing strategy. It gives the mind a way to include earlier beliefs without being trapped inside them. It does not require people to despise or negate the beliefs that once carried them. It asks them to see those beliefs within a larger frame.
A childhood faith may be too small to govern adult life, but that does not mean it was worthless. A traditional symbol may be inadequate when taken literally, but powerful when understood developmentally, psychologically, mythologically, or spiritually. A doctrine may fail as a final answer while still serving as a partial window.
The point is not to humiliate the past.
The point is to locate it.
That is why reconstruction has to be fitted to the individual. People do not all need the same next step. Some need permission to question. Some need help grieving what they lost. Some need a way to reinterpret symbols they cannot simply discard. Some need a structure for moral responsibility after external authority collapses. Some need to learn how to remain in relationship with reality without grabbing for a new certainty.
This does not require a high-powered philosopher to solve. It requires a practical map of how human beings actually revise meaning.
Forgiveness, understood cognitively, does not merely say, “That was false.” It asks, “What more adequate understanding can now take its place?”
For me, the answer is love.
Not love as sentiment. Not love as niceness. Not love as emotional frosting on private spirituality. Love is the structure that allows reality to move safely between people. Love is what makes truth bearable, responsibility possible, and belonging mature.
So yes, the post-deconstruction crisis is real. People are stranded because deconstruction cleared the room but did not build the house. The answer is not to restore the old house. The answer is to help people construct a livable path forward, one that includes what was true before, releases what was false, and integrates reality at a higher level.
That is forgiveness completed.
Recognition sees what is false.
Release stops protecting it.
Reconstruction replaces it with a more adequate way of seeing.
Love gives the process its direction.
The real question after deconstruction is not merely, “What do I no longer believe?”
The real question is, “What larger truth can now hold what I used to believe, what I now see, and what love requires of me next?”
Jay Thomas Williams
The following is a brief summary of my personal interpretive rendering of existential philosopher, Lutheran Protestant theologian Paul Tillich's analysis of the primary problem besetting modern man
The source of today's crisis is the mass failure of the Content of modern man's Ultimate Concern. Today’s worldview has shifted from one that made room for Faith in a traditional religious sense to one in which that is no longer the case, and Faith is but an interesting artifact from a bygone era. In short, with the predominance of the Materialist worldview, Faith is no longer necessary and, in many ways, may be thought of as a hindrance to the functioning of our modern world.
After centuries of religious practice, humanity has mistakenly identified the Symbols of Faith as its Ultimate Concern. The theistic God and its traditional Judeo-Christian theology have been taken too seriously. The age of science has repeatedly shown that the absolutism of traditional theism is false and therefore cannot be ultimate. When one's Ultimate Concern is shown to be less than ultimate, meaning in one's life is lost. This is followed, either consciously or unconsciously, by a search for a replacement to regain one's personal or spiritual center.
Modern man's attempts to "regain his personal center," to adopt a new Ultimate Concern, cannot succeed because the Symbols necessary cannot be intentionally created. This loss of center leads to what Tillich calls: "facing the God who really is God," which goes hand in hand for him with facing what he calls: "the absolute threat of non-being." He puts it another way when he speaks of the "Anxiety of Meaninglessness." It is this Meaninglessness that he sees as the real crisis of modern man. According to Tillich, ours is the age of "Anxiety, Doubt, and Meaninglessness."
Not to be one of doom and gloom alone, Tillich proposes a solution to our problem. It’s gets pretty woo-wooie for this layman, but it goes something like this,
Tillich sees Meaninglessness as "the Actualization of man's Estrangement." Reaching a state of being where we belong to that from which we are estranged. Our “Estrangement” has cut us off from God ("the Ground of Being"), from other beings, and from our "True Being." Estrangement is our universal destiny.
But how can modern man, wallowing in a quagmire of Meaninglessness, even consider resolving his Estrangement through Faith when it was the failure of Faith in the first place that has left him in this state of Meaninglessness? At this juncture, Tillich says an individual must draw oneself up into a condition where one is possessed by the "courage to accept Meaninglessness." To, in effect, have what he calls Absolute Faith or "the state of being grasped by the God above God."
Absolute Faith is the Faith that accepts Meaninglessness and Despair. It exists on the edge of "the Courage to Be." It is, in fact, "the boundary of man's possibilities." When "the meaning of life is reduced to despair about the meaning of life . . . the act of despair is an act of life . . . a positive in its negativity." In other words, the very "act of accepting Meaninglessness" becomes "a meaningful act."
Absolute Faith has no "special Content," and therefore its Content is the "God above the God of theism." "The Courage to Be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the Anxiety of Doubt." Like the absence that the author of the Cloud of Unknowing experienced. Where all expectations of and about God are shredded, and one simply is open to the God "I AM."
So, the solution to the problem of Meaninglessness is to accept it, or as Tillich puts it, "To have the Courage to Be in the Face of Despair." The amazing thing about this is that once this is accomplished, an individual possessing Absolute Faith becomes rooted in The God Above God. This, Tillich infers, is a very good place to be indeed.
The God Above God is that God which transcends any or all conceptions of God. The God Above God cannot be described as the traditional theistic God is, but Tillich makes a few noteworthy pronouncements anyway.
According to him, the God Above God is the reality to which "fundamental Symbols of ultimate concern point." In a sense, The God Above God is the "fundamental and universal Content of Faith" across all Faiths. The God Above God is the "source of The Courage to Be" and "the object of all mystical longings." Finally, acceptance of the "God above the God of theism" makes one "part of that which is not a part but Is the ground of the whole.”
Thus, the ultimate flaw in the Materialist worldview is something tucked away in the consciousness of us all, waiting to reveal our connection to "the Ground of Being." On the other hand, to be honest, all this is going to be a hard sell to Main Street America or anywhere.
You have already convinced me that "capacity" must increase. "Existential health asks what forms of development allow us to require those protections less. Žižek reveals the architecture. Existential health investigates the capacities necessary to live beyond it." I am on the edge of my chair for the answer. Respect your work. Feel it has zero'd in on the central question for our time and laid the foundation for working our way through it as a people.
Žižek's concept of "fetishistic disavowal" goes a long way to describe the means to escape a threatening reality. The denial of fifty years of climate science is a pertinent example.
My ability to live securely in the question, to live independently of reality while related to it, was developed through participation in est, the programs created by Werner Erhard. est became Landmark Worldwide. There were a series of distinctions that provided access to breakthroughs and, ultimately, personal responsibility for all of life. A world that works for everyone with nothing and no one left out. I live freely within a shared reality. Which doesn’t mean I’m done living and learning, except contextually. Contextually, I am whole and complete.
Human beings were given the opportunity eons ago, to become caretakers of this world. They refused.
Great article. Of course, as in all great articles, raises questions.
Freedom requires a price no one wants to pay. Complaining about a system, is far easier than living free from one. It would mean that the individual would need to ‘gasp’, become self sustaining!
I study Torah. Not because I’m Christian or Jewish, but because I believe it has answers to these very questions.
I enjoy your work, Jim. Appreciated.
I don't understand what you mean by reality. Do you mean reality itself or our mental interpretations or something else.