A Christian response to deconstruction

Deconstruction is corrosive. It sees attacking truth claims as an ethical duty. It is anti-truth, in theory and in practice. In fairness we should note that if you don't believe in God then there is no reason not to be a deconstructionist, but the end result of deconstruction even makes some card carrying Postmodernists uneasy... 

Deconstruction itself can be a power game

While some groups may indeed have been disenfranchised in the past, deconstruction finds in minority groups, a useful starting point. It works best when it is championing a cause. It often presupposes that such a cause must exist - there must be groups who will benefit from its services. It is virtually guaranteed to find them. Deconstruction sees itself, then, as a tool for liberation. This liberation comes from rebelling against existing power structures, especially Christianity. Where such structures are hard to find, they are frequently imagined. For example, it is almost impossible to argue sensibly about liberation from a loving Creator God, but it you dress him in the garb of oppressive Western colonialism, the he becomes an easy target.

Deconstruction depends on taking things out of context 

Deconstruction depends on finding minute points in a text that seem to say the opposite to the main message. This almost invariably means taking small portions, even words or syllables, out of context. But this is simply not the way we read texts. Deconstruction has a warped way of reading. To say that real meaning must flow from a divorce between a text and its context, or that real meaning is apparent only at a minute deconstructive level, or that real meaning must be the opposite to what a text ostensibly says, is not only anti-knowledge, but arrogant in the extreme. Deconstruction effectively claims that its followers are the only ones with the new tools who can creatively approach a text to discover its real value.

Moreover, deconstructionists are not necessarily coherent in their application of the principle. It is quite possible to produce 'Christian readings' of texts in conflict with anti-Christian ones. Anyone can take something out of context and make it say what we want. There is nothing to say that we shouldn't. Most deconstructionists, however, would roundly disclaim such 'absolutist readings' but, by their own admission, have no grounds for doing so. 

Taken from Meltdown, making sense of a culture in crisis, by Marcus Honeysett, pp.43-44