Earlier in 2026, a former evangelical megachurch preacher started making videos on TikTok and YouTube. Dr. Todd Phillips, who runs “The Deconstructed Pastor” channel, had served as a bible teacher for over twenty years in high profile megachurches, such as McLean Bible Church in Northern Virginia and Lake Pointe Church in Dallas, Texas. Today, Todd runs social media platforms aimed at helping people walk through the process of spiritual deconstruction.
As Todd might put it, in a period of thirty or so years, he went from preaching about a “perfect God” with a “perfect Bible” to now saying that he no longer believes in the Christian “God.” Yikes! When a high-profile preacher like Todd Phillips does a theological backflip like this, it raises a number of questions.
On the Felt Need To “Be Certain”
Going through a period of “deconstruction” does not always lead to the type of “deconversion” from Christianity which Todd Phillips experienced. Nearly every Christian has experiences of hitting spiritual roadblocks in their Christian journey, when pat answers to difficult questions no longer work. But the particular type of faith crisis Todd Phillips went through begins to make sense once you take a closer look.
After having grown up in no more than a nominal Christian environment, Todd had a dramatic conversion experience in his mid-20s, before eventually getting involved in Christian ministry in the Austin, Texas area. Over the next several decades, Todd preached in some of the largest churches in North America, picking up advanced seminary degrees from Southwestern Baptist Seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, and Princeton Theological Seminary along the way. Todd eventually stepped down from fulltime preaching to lead a Christian nonprofit mission project to provide clean water and the Christian Gospel in Liberia, Africa.
It was during his time working in Liberia that some of the faith questions he started to ponder years earlier while in seminary began to eat away at him. But now he had the time to think, without having the pressure to preach and always “be certain” in front of crowds of people.
The Faith Deconstruction of Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow: A Comparison to Todd Phillips
Not too long after I became aware of Todd Phillips, I started to listen to the audiobook version of Jayber Crow, a novel written by the late Wendell Berry. I confess that I had known about Wendell Berry for years, but I never took the time to read anything written by him, except for a few of his essays. After his recent death in the summer of 2026, I finally decided to dive into one of Berry’s classic novels.
So, who was Wendell Berry? Wendell Berry was one of those iconoclastic Christian authors who has had an enthusiastic following in some Christian circles, while largely ignored in other Christian circles. Some even despise him.
As a farmer in rural Kentucky, Berry was an opponent of the contemporary trend of technological globalization, and our highly mobile society. Instead, Berry promoted this concept of “rootedness,” believing that putting down roots in a rural community, close to the earth and nature, gives us a better sense of what it means to be fully human, living in community with others. Berry lived this out, particularly in that he wrote all of his novels on an old 1956 Royal typewriter. Berry famously wrote an essay in 1987 entitled “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer.”
To my knowledge, Wendell Berry kept that promise his whole life, unlike me, who has had almost a life-long career as an Information Technology specialist. If you do not like the Internet, you can pretty much blame people like me. If Berry was still alive, he might be tempted to help pick up stones for you to throw at me (Ha! Ha!)…. Well, Wendell Berry might have harbored the thought. But he was a pacifist.
In Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry uses the voice of the narrator to decry the slow yet relentless destruction of rural life in the face of overwhelming globalism. The Interstate highway system tore away at close family connections, harming the environment by flattening forests and leveling mountains and hills that stood in its way. The automobile became a symbol of recklessness and rebellion. The industrialization of agriculture had left the family farm as a forgotten memory. Reading Berry is almost like a seeing the world through an early 20th century version of Amish eyes. Yet the tone of Berry’s novel is generally not one of anger (though Berry gives some voice to anger at times). Rather, it is a sigh of grief, reflecting on a sense of loss of that which is humanizing.
Jayber Crow, a story about a bachelor who settled in a small Kentucky town, Port William, and worked for decades as the town barber, is in some respects autobiographical, with some differences, of course. Berry writes through the lens of this aged fictional character, Jayber Crow, who looks back on his long life, in the year 1986.
Jayber had grown up orphaned, when his parents had died young, eventually attending a school where he got inspired to go to seminary, Pigeonville College. However, after some time in school, Jayber began to have doubts about his faith as a young seminary student.
Jayber goes to visit one of the most respected professors at his school, Dr. Admire, where he fires away at his professor a whole list of his questions. Many of these same questions sound like they come straight out of Todd Phillips’ deconstruction videos. After Jayber dumped the truck, so to speak, with all of his questions, Dr. Admire responds with, “Do you have any answers?” Jayber responds that he had no answers, but he did not feel he could preach without them. In his sense of confusion, Jayber told his professor that he also had a feeling he was “called.” What was Jayber to do without the answers he needed?
Was Jayber really being “called” to Christian ministry as he thought? Dr. Admire tells him the truth:
“And you might have been right. But not to what you thought. Not to what you think. You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out–perhaps a little at a time.”
“And how long is that going to take?”
“I don’t know. As long as you live, perhaps.”
“That could be a long time.”
“I will tell you a further mystery. It may take longer” (Jayber Crow, p. 54).
Jayber Crow then leaves seminary, going off to live in Lexington, Kentucky. He was trying to find his way, but got disillusioned with city life. He wandered aimlessly for a time, before finally settling down in this small town, Port William. Jayber had developed a crush on a young woman from his childhood, yet this woman had married another man who epitomized everything Jayber grew to hate.
Jayber grew to despise those things that tear at a sense of rootedness. He gave away a car that he once acquired, and felt a sense of sadness when the government came in to build the Interstate highway system, putting certain businesses in Port William out of business. He became the town’s grave digger, witnessing the deaths of his fellow Port William neighbors. He became the janitor at a local church. Over time, Jayber’s faith was eventually restored, but it had moved on from this need to “be certain” all of the time.
Jayber Crow’s author, Wendell Berry, was a lot like Jayber Crow. But despite being disillusioned by some of the Christianity on display around him, Berry worked through his doubts through his 1956 Royal typewriter, coming out on the other side with a more resilient faith. I am not big fan of fiction, preferring non-fiction like books on history instead. But Jayber Crow provided a nice break for me from my typical audio listening diet.
Jayber Crow, a novel by the late Wendell Berry, chronicles the life of a Kentucky rural town barber, who experiences a crisis of faith before laying down roots and slowly returning to his faith over a long lived life.
Todd Phillips’ Quest for Certainty
Unlike Jayber Crow, I get the sense from listening to and watching Todd Phillips’ videos that Todd’s felt need to “be certain” kept him feeling imprisoned all the way from his dramatic conversion in his mid-20’s, through his time in a public preaching ministry in megachurches, until he finally had an opportunity to stop and wrestle with his questions, when he was involved in his mission project in Liberia. Todd Phillips never had the space to work through his doubts as a young man, like Jayber Crow did. Instead, Todd Phillips’ “coming of age,” as he might put it, came much later.
There is one aspect of Todd Phillips’ life as a megachurch pastor which eerily demonstrates this need to “be certain,” and the problems this poses. During his career as a young pastor, Todd Phillips got connected with a guy named Bob Cornuke. Cornuke has been like a successor to Ron Wyatt, a self-styled “biblical archaeologist.”
Ron Wyatt, who died some 25 years ago, promoted himself as an archaeologist who supposedly discovered chariot wheels at the bottom of the Red Sea, demonstrating “proof” of where Moses crossed the Red Sea to get into the Sinai wilderness. Both Wyatt and later Bob Cornuke have come across as “Indiana Jones” type figures, criss-crossing the globe in search of biblical artifacts, and appearing before various church congregations to tell their tales of adventures, promoting their brand of Christian apologetics.
However, anyone who has actually any familiarity with how archaeology is done today will recognize that while the character of “Indiana Jones” makes for great movies, this does not accurately reflect the world of modern archaeology. Even groups like Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis, an Young Earth Creationist apologetics ministry, have publicly come out to criticize some of the fantastic claims made by people like Ron Wyatt, such as Wyatt’s supposed discovery of where the Ark of the Covenant is.
According to Wyatt, the Ark of the Covenant is located underneath layers of rock beneath where the cross of Christ was erected, where Jesus died, somewhere near Jerusalem. In at least one version of the story, Wyatt contended that the blood of Jesus is still dripping to this day on top of the Ark of the Covenant buried below. Wyatt also claimed that angels prevented him from removing any of these artifacts.
Now, as I am a Christian, I have no problem with the concept of the supernatural. After all, Christians of all stripes believe that Jesus actually physically rose from the dead, which at its foundation is a miraculous claim. But Wyatt’s story sounds just too crazy to believe. Sure enough, with rather fantastic claims like this, no evidence has ever been found to corroborate the claims made by Wyatt…. not even the supposed chariot wheels of Pharoah.
After Ron Wyatt died, Bob Cornuke has followed pretty much the same type of “Indiana Jones” pattern of Ron Wyatt, but perhaps not to the same extreme. While Bob Cornuke might be best characterized as an amateur archaeology enthusiast, he lacks any serious academic training in the discipline. Again, Answers in Genesis has publicly pointed out problems with Cornuke’s thesis of late that the current Temple Mount in Jerusalem is in the wrong location for the Jerusalem Temple. Nevertheless, Cornuke’s celebrity reputation was enhanced by endorsements and funding from Jim Erwin, an Apollo 15 astronaut.
The fact that Todd Phillips traveled around with Bob Cornuke in search of Noah’s Ark in an effort to “be certain” about claims in the Bible makes me wonder why such an intelligent man like Todd Phillips would bother hanging out with Bob Cornuke in his various globe-trotting adventures. While Todd was a “true believer” following this evangelical “Indiana Jones,” he has since changed his tune dramatically. As Todd himself describes it:
“[Bob Cornuke and I] went to Iran. We were there for nearly three weeks. We were on mountainsides. We were on Mount Sabalon. [Bob] didn’t believe Mount Ararat was the actual place of Noah’s Ark. It was the mountains of Ararat, plural. He took the Bible literally, and therefore it was in a different place. It was in Jebel Mosa, which was another mountaintop in Iran. So we flew into Tehran. We spent almost three weeks in Iran looking for Noah’s Ark…..
[Bob and] I went on the Exodus route, the traditional exodus route. And he actually was over in Saudi Arabia looking at where he thought the real Mount Sinai was. He looked for the shipwreck of Paul. I mean, I was in it. There are three books. He has a trilogy of books on his search for Noah’s Ark. Oh, and then we went to Ethiopia. We were in Ethiopia for three weeks. Went to. Just on the Eritrean border looking for the Ark of The Covenant went all over the world looking for all these relics….
Yeah, man. Loved the trips. They were great. And I really. I believed it. All right, so I was on a mission.”
Sure, I have an interest in these subject matters, and I love to travel to exotic places, too. I have no problem believing in the Exodus story, and no problem believing that the Apostle Paul survived a shipwreck. However, one can take the Todd Phillips quest to “be certain” like this to an extreme. A desire for having confidence in one’s faith is one thing, but to spend money on trips like this, that go outside of the parameters of how modern archaeology is practiced in the real world, just seems a bit kooky. It makes for great television but rarely passes for academic rigor.
Pulling at the Loose Strands on a Faith Sweater
Nevertheless, having wrestled with the type of questions Todd Phillips has wrestled with, and watching close friends go through the same, I have a lot of empathy for where Todd is at, even though I am not at the same place Todd is right now. I have Christian friends of mine who have attended McLean Bible in Northern Virginia, and I know of a handful who have served on staff there, so Todd’s videos hit fairly close to home (I know very little about Lake Pointe Church, in Dallas, Texas).
There are a number of “deconstruction” or “deconversion” videos on the Internet, but part of the appeal of Todd’s message is his confident ability to communicate well. If there is one skill that anyone can develop as a megachurch pastor, it is the ability to stand in front of a camera and a microphone and speak in a winsome and attractive way, with the air of competency.
There are several things I have learned from listening to Todd speak now as an atheist. A number of evangelical churches tend to encourage a culture where everyone must have a high degree of certainty about their faith, leaving little room to doubt and ask honest questions. Framed in a particular way, this is understandable, as many evangelical churches, particularly the “non-denominational” or “interdenominational” varieties, have developed as a response to the kind of “progressive Christianity” that has been propagated by the sadly dying mainline liberal Protestant tradition, which was once the Christian establishment in America. I personally do not see much of any future for “Liberal Christianity.”
Evangelicalism is surely not immune to the “cancer” of “progressive Christianity,” so one can see why the quest for certainty in evangelicalism tends to sideline those who struggle with the types of questions and issues Todd brings up in his videos. But an emphasis on “certainty” at all costs can backfire, precipitating the kind of loss of faith in God which Todd experienced.
In other words, you do not need to go to a “liberal church” or a “progressive seminary” to see your faith crumble away. Todd Phillips had some exposure to “progressive Christianity” along the way, but his crisis of faith happened while preaching for a few decades in some of the largest conservative evangelical mega-churches in the country. Attending a “Bible-believing” church does not make you immune from asking serious questions about your faith.
Deconstruction Does Not Always Lead to Deconversion: But Why Does Deconstruction Happen in the First Place?
Todd Phillips offers a good example that megachurch Christianity is not always what it is cracked up to be. Known for worship services which are often nothing more than a rock concert followed by a TED talk, with a tinge of too much politics from the pulpit, this brand of evangelicalism sometimes leaves the worshipper starved for a deeper spirituality (sometimes more than a “tinge,” to be honest!).
This is where Protestant evangelicals have something to learn from Christians in other traditions, such as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, or even neglected aspects of other Protestant traditions, which have a more profound emphasis on liturgy and a broader appreciation of church history. Such traditions place a lesser focus on the sermon as the highlight of the worship service, instead focusing more on the mystery of the Lord’s Supper, and other practices of sacramental life.
Not everyone wrestles with this quest for certainty. For one thing, not everyone has the bandwidth to handle tough questions about faith during difficult periods in their life. A lot of people are just plain too busy with raising kids, putting food on the table, making ends meet, etc. Asking deep philosophical questions about the existence of God is not something on everybody’s radar.
The challenge comes when tragedy strikes, or you experience strife in one or more key relationships. But even then, if someone is wrestling with difficulties in their marriage (for married people), or why they can not find a spouse (for single people), or what to do with unwanted same-sex attraction, or they are dealing with a health crisis, or over the long term, chronically ill health, or otherwise hard transitions, like losing a job or losing a close relationship, the last thing someone would typically want to think about are the differences between the Hebrew Masoretic text and the Greek Septuagint, and its impact on Bible translation (Okay. I get it. I confess to being a Bible nerd).
In those situations, it becomes more vitally important to hold onto your faith to get you through the crisis you are facing. It is typically only when you enter a period of relative calm later on when (and if !!) you can think back on questions of faith, which only then might precipitate a deconstruction trajectory.
True, there are cases of deconstruction which are not triggered by purely intellectual, theological doubts about the faith. Sometimes people will use their theological doubts as a cover for hiding a pattern of on-going unrepentant sin in their lives. I have known plenty of people like that. Their primary issue is not theological. Instead, their issue is indeed moral and spiritual.
But not every case of deconstruction is motivated by moral rebellion. Sometimes genuine questions prompted by doubt can enter a person’s mind, but they simply have no one to talk with in their Christian circle, whether it be in their local church or other Christian friends group. How many people face difficult personal questions in their lives, and yet such people find it hard to trust another believer in their Christian circle with whom they could express their genuine doubts?
I recently had a conversation with a couple in our church, whose son went to a prominent seminary for a year. But by the end of that year, not only did their son lose their enthusiasm for going into Christian ministry, he completely walked away from his faith. I kept thinking to myself, did their son grow up in a local church environment which might have prepared him to face some of the issues he would encounter in seminary?
Frankly, I do doubt that (Pun intended!!)
I do have a hypothesis that might explain how someone like Todd Phillips can move from being a megachurch pastor to becoming a deconstructed pastor. One of the negative consequences of celebrity culture in the megachurch world is that it is altogether too easy to uncritically trust someone standing at a pulpit with a confident speaking skill. One can then imbibe certain significant ideas, taking them to be synonymous with “Gospel truth,” only to realize years down the road that what they learned was misleading at best, or in some cases, a pure lie, at worst. Once someone hits upon a lie or half-truth like this, it can encourage that person to begin to wonder what else they might be believing that could be terribly, terribly wrong. Like pulling a loose thread in a knit sweater, one’s faith begins to unravel the more you tug at it.
“A Perfect God” and “A Perfect Bible”
For example, take Todd Phillips’ former belief in a “perfect God” which necessarily requires a “perfect Bible.” Here Todd is talking about the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, a staple of conservative evangelical Christian belief. For years, I have wrestled with the doctrine of inerrancy. Having grown up in a liberal Protestant mainline church myself, I had never heard of “biblical inerrancy” before I got involved in more conservative, evangelical churches while in my college years.
I surely got the logic behind it. After all, in the evangelical Protestant tradition, it is all about finding certain truth in Scripture, and Scripture alone. But what does one do with things like the problem of divine violence, particularly in the Old Testament, and the differences we find even in our four Gospels? Todd Phillips eventually concluded that he had to give up on that “perfect God” with a “perfect Bible” message he promoted for well over a decade as a megachurch pastor.
I have taken a different path from Todd’s. Along the way, I have learned several things in my exploration of “biblical inerrancy” that have helped me to retain a more nuanced and robust understanding of inerrancy. First, it is important to make the distinction between having confidence in the Bible as being inerrant with having confidence in a correct interpretation of Scripture. The two are not necessarily connected. One can hold to a view of inerrancy and still misinterpret an important message in the Bible.
For example, the Jehovah’s Witnesses uphold the inerrancy of the Bible, but they also have some peculiar interpretations of that Bible. If a Jehovah’s Witness denies getting a blood transfusion, which could save their life in a medical emergency, because they have been taught that the Bible teaches against getting a blood transfusion, the problem is not the inerrancy of the Bible but rather the errancy of a bad interpretation of that Bible. When the singer/songwriter Prince died about ten years ago after an accidental fentanyl overdose, his life could have been saved if he had a blood transfusion. But because Prince was a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, he was not able to obtain a life-saving blood transfusion. Belief in the inerrancy of the Bible is not enough to prevent a bad interpretation of the Bible having deadly consequences.
Secondly, close to a decade ago, I read a remarkable book entitled Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy. For years, I had been taught that there is just one view of biblical inerrancy, so it was enlightening to realize that different scholars of the Bible could define inerrancy in different ways, and still uphold their confidence in the inerrancy of Scripture (see my review on Veracity).
Towards a More Robust, Modest View of Inerrancy
Thirdly, in reading Michael Licona’s Jesus Contradicted, (my favorite book I reviewed in 2024), where a New Testament scholar takes a look at the differences we find in the Gospels, I learned that not every Christian in church history has embraced the method of harmonization of the Gospels championed by the great bishop of Hippo in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, Saint Augustine. Today, Todd Phillips looks at the discrepancies in the Gospels as contradictions which cannot be avoided, after being disillusioned by Augustinian harmonization techniques.
Augustine’s typical method, which is so common in evangelical circles today, was to say that if two different Gospels record the same event happening at two different times, then this meant that the event was repeated, even if no single Gospel tells you this. For example, John’s Gospel has the temple cleansing happening at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. The other three Gospels record the temple cleansing as happening during the last week of Jesus’ life. In his Harmony of the Gospels, Augustine then reasoned that there were two temple cleansings total, one at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry (John) and another one at the end of Jesus’ ministry (Matthew, Mark, Luke).
Earlier than Augustine, Origen of Alexandria, in the early 3rd century, believed that if you spotted a discrepancy within the gospels, that this might be a sign not to focus on trying to harmonize the text, but rather, to look for a deeper, spiritual meaning which the text seeks to convey. Despite some controversy about some of Origen’s other theological views, Origen was the first Christian to produce a lengthy systematic theology for the Christian faith. Furthermore, as Licona has shown, not even Augustine believed that harmonization of gospels was the best thing to try to do in every and all cases.
For example, while Jesus could have preached the same sermon on several occasions, as with Matthew’s “sermon on the mount” and Luke’s “sermon on the plain,” this need not require us to say that Jesus was baptized on multiple occasions simply because the different gospels writers record the words spoken by the heavenly voice differently. Even Augustine, the great champion of gospel harmonization, knew that both Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22 have the heavenly voice addressing Jesus directly: “You are my beloved Son…,” whereas Matthew 3:17 has the voice addressing the crowd “This is my beloved Son…”
Discrepancies in the accounts of Jesus’ baptism have been fodder for much speculation over the centuries. In a most “non-Augustinian” fashion, Augustine admitted that only in one version do we have an accurate transcript of what is said historically, which Augustine believed was preserved by Mark and Luke. Matthew on the other hand indicates the true purpose and message of the voice, which Matthew wanted to impress upon his readers. While the exacting wording between the different Gospel accounts are not identical, the basic message is the same: Jesus is God’s Beloved Son.
Even when one looks at the timing of the temple cleansing(s) according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Augustine recognized that Matthew and Luke actually record the temple cleansing happening on the same day as the Triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday), whereas Mark records it happening the following day. But Augustine does not suggest yet a third, different temple cleansing to account for the chronological discrepancies. Instead, Augustine believed that Mark intentionally relocated the timing of the temple cleansing in order to highlight the narrative of the fig tree cursing and withering over a two-day period.
In other words, even Augustine admitted that not everything we read in the Gospels is meant to articulate chronologically-accurate technical details about “what happened.” Rather, there are moments in the Gospels which try to summarize the theological importance of what happened in history, without getting needlessly bogged down in the minutia of technical precision.
Origen’s more flexible reading of the gospels finds some resonance with what Augustine concluded about the Gospel stories of the baptism of Jesus, as well as Mark’s flexibility in recording the temple cleansing…. and no one can doubt that Augustine held to biblical inerrancy.
Were Jesus and Paul Preaching a Different Message?
In some of his video interviews, Todd Phillips continued to lose his confidence in having a “perfect Bible” when he realized in his mind that Jesus and Paul preached different messages. According to Todd, Jesus was an upholder of the Jewish law, as he came not to abolish the Law of Moses, but rather to fulfill it. For Paul, he taught that Christ was the end of the Law of Moses, as he preached that the Gentiles no longer needed to become Jewish in order to become members of the people of God. For Todd, this contradiction between Jesus and Paul destroys the univocality of Scripture, and hence undermines the inerrancy of the Bible.
Several things need to be said in response here. First, simply because the message of Jesus differs in a certain way from what Paul’s message was does not necessarily imply a contradiction. One can still recognize the overall univocality of Scripture, because the one God of Christianity inspired the Bible, while still acknowledging that different authors and actors in the Bible can act and say different things, which all contribute to the larger story.
For example, 1st and 2nd Chronicles cover much of the same historical time period as Samuel and Kings, but they describe the events through different theological lenses. In Chronicles, King David has very few (if any) faults, whereas in the Samuel and Kings books, David’s flaws are on full display. But these different approaches to Old Testament history do not inherently conflict with a more robust view of biblical inerrancy.
Secondly, it is important to consider the context of the different audiences Jesus and Paul were trying to address. While Jesus did have some interaction with Gentiles, his primary audience was covenant-minded Jews living in first-century Palestine/Israel. Jesus explicitly tells us that his earthly ministry is directed towards the “lost sheep of Israel” (Matthew 15:24), so it only makes sense that a covenant-minded Jew would speak convincingly to a covenant-minded Jewish audience (See my review of Matthew Thiessen’s Jesus and the Forces of Death, which goes into this in some detail).
The story changes after the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension. Now that Jesus has completed his earthly mission, Paul then becomes one of the prime characters in the story of the New Testament moving forward. On the road to Damascus, Paul enters the period where he receives his commission by the Risen Jesus to be the “apostle to the Gentiles,” taking the message of Jesus to a new audience. This is progressive revelation at work, a principle we see on display throughout the multi-century history of the Bible, where new revelation supersedes and expands the message previously given up to that point. Paul is at pains to say that by lowering the bar of entry to the people of God, for the Gentiles, that this was God’s purpose all along, whereby the Jews would bring the Messiah into the world, so that good news could be announced to all of the nations.
A Christian Faith Without Having All of the Answers
I could go on in addressing some more of the questions that effectively derailed Todd Phillips’ faith. I still wrestle some of them myself.
However, what really bothers me is a lot of the bad answers that continue to be promoted in response to some of Todd’s questions. Sometimes these bad answers are made in good faith, with the best of intentions, unaware that these answers are really that bad. I know, as I have passed on such bad answers before to others, not realizing just how bad these answers were. There are a lot of “Christian Urban Legends” out there, and sadly I have heard some of these voiced from different evangelical pulpits.
For example, it does not serve people well when Christians repeat stories such as the idea that 11 of the original 12 apostles all died as martyrs. While there is indeed some good evidence that at least some of the original apostles died as martyrs, the claim that “all but the Apostle John died as martyrs” is simply overstating the evidence, a point which Todd Phillips rightly points out, even if Todd is more pessimistic about the fate of the apostles than I am.
Christians should stop overstating apologetic arguments like these. They do more harm than good. Can we please stop being so quick to share Ron Wyatt and Bob Cornuke videos to our non-believing friends?
However, I eventually must come back to that Wendell Berry novel, Jayber Crow. What if Todd Phillips had gone through a time of wrestling at a much earlier place in his Christian journey, not unlike what Jayber Crow experienced? Would Todd Phillips have still ended up becoming the “Deconstructed Pastor?” I do wonder about that.
Thankfully, there are thoughtful Christians who wrestle with the type of hard questions Todd Phillips has faced. But in some church environments, finding someone who you might trust to begin to have such conversations can often be rather difficult.
There is no doubt that the rise of deconstruction stories, like that of Dr. Todd Phillips, has increased in the age of the Internet, fueled by easy access to social media. Even fifteen years ago, I was arguing that any sermon preached today from any pulpit could be fact-checked in just a couple of minutes, from an easy reach of a cell phone. Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the lag time between a preached sermon and such fact-checking can happen in just a matter of seconds. Who knows where we will be fifteen years from now!!
Even Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow character made some popular wrong assumptions about the Bible. At one instance in Jayber Crow, Jayber says he doubts what the Gospel of Matthew says (Matthew 24:36-44 ) about two women grinding at the mill, where one is “snatched away” and the other is “left behind.” Apparently, Jayber Crow had been taught that Christians should have hope for those who are “snatched away,” and have prayerful concern for those “left behind” to face God’s judgment. As a contrarian doubter, Jayber Crow had more sympathy for the “left behind” ones that the “snatched away” ones.
Christians of good-faith indeed have different views about the “Rapture,” but whatever one thinks about that, it would be mistaken to believe that the ones “snatched away” in Matthew’s passage were the believers, whereas the ones “left behind” were the unlucky ones. Truth be told, as I wrote about several years ago, the story that Matthew tells here is about the exact opposite. Just as in the days of Noah, it was those who were “snatched away” who faced God’s judgment, whereas the ones “left behind” were the ones who were saved. The raging flood waters took out those under God’s judgment, whereas Noah and his family were “left behind’ and spared. Jayber Crow’s instincts were actually more right than he thought!
When and if our friends and family members go through period of deconstruction, or if we ourselves start to have serious questions about faith, it is important to slow down and make room for long conversations where we learn to listen more than preach away at someone. Thankfully, it is good to be reminded again that not everyone going through deconstruction goes the full deconversion route Todd Phillips ended up on. For it is important to seek a place of balance where one can ask hard questions, without necessarily finding all of the answers, and by still having a reasonable confidence in the integrity of Christian faith.
