A review by Jessica Walters
Sometime between 2010 and 2015, I noticed that many of my friends left the church they had grown up in. After deconstructing their faith, some returned but often not to the evangelical denominations that they left. I can relate because I did the same. For several years I deconstructed my faith, unpicking the beliefs that once held fast the fabric of my life.
Even while I was mid-deconstruction, I found myself wondering, what comes next? What comes after deconstruction? I hoped that something incomparably beautiful was on the other side and occasionally, out of the periphery I caught a glimpse of it glimmering on a horizon, as of yet unexplored.
Liz Charlotte Grant’s book Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible is an example of what post-deconstruction might look like. Her book is part art, part science, part memoir, and part theopoetics, and if that sounds like too many ‘parts,’ what holds them together is Grant’s curiosity and love of biblical literature and scholarship.
Grant begins her book with “A Note to Former and Current Evangelicals,” that recalls our recent past. She writes “a 1978 conference in Chicago gathered three hundred . . . forefathers to hammer out what inerrancy meant as applied to the Bible. They pounded out several statements between then and 1986 that would define the behaviors and thinking of American Evangelicals for the next fifty years” (xiv). At the conference, some claimed that “the authority of Christ and the authority of the Bible are the same” (xv). Meaning that to question the Bible was to question God. One result of this is that it “demonized disagreement itself” (xvi). What followed was decades of certitudes built on the principle of biblical inerrancy.
Growing up in just such an evangelical church, I was taught that the bible was both inerrant and infallible and was strongly discouraged from asking probing questions about God or scripture. I had to either forget my questions or leave the church if I was to ask them. I tried both.
Yet, Grant believes (as I now do) that our faith should and can hold up to such questions. And asking questions is what she does so beautifully in Knock at the Sky. Grant abandons the notion that faith must be secured with superglue (xvii) and she allows herself to follow her free-wheeling, wild curiosities.
Each chapter of Knock at the Sky is an exploratory journey through well-known passages of Genesis. But Grant’s ambling journey takes the reader on vistas through untrod terrain. For example, when she explores Genesis 1: 2-3 Grant begins the chapter with these words: “Everything depends upon the voice of God. Still or small, the thunder in the cloud or the quiet in the center of the gale, a donkey’s haw or a finger tracing the wall: the Voice needs no invitation. God always seeks out first contact” (5). She goes on to question how God spoke without a throat, tongue, lips, how voice makes sound “apart from its container” (7). It’s an interesting question and it leads Grant to so many intriguing explorations, tying together whale song, the Septuagint, NASA’s Golden Record and so much more.
The most arresting chapter, titled “The Stranglehold of God” plumbs Genesis 32:24: “So Jacob was left alone. Then a man wrestled him until the . . . dawn.” It was while reading this chapter that I questioned whether ‘deconstruction’ is really the right word for what happens when faith is examined. The word deconstruction connotes a demolition or a “breaking down.” But need this always be the case? A richer, more imagistic word might be ‘wrestling.’ And Grant, like Jacob, has wrestled. She writes:
I have seen the Bible become a blunt weapon in the hands of American politicians, corrupt institutions, and fallen pastors. And no book has proved more potent than Genesis. Each false reading of Genesis creates a scar in the world. I am weary and angry of this misuse of this text. . . Yet what tools do I have to protest this deception? How do I deny and discredit those who make God’s name vile in the world, a means of torture rather than blessing? And if God has really created and sustained the cosmos, then God must be in part to blame for not holding God’s namesake to account. So, how do we demand a reckoning? You cannot put a cloud in a chokehold (181).
And yet, that’s precisely what Grant attempts. She wrestles with the stories in Genesis, turning them this way and that until they yield new and old insight. She continues, “But Jacob did. Jacob rolled in the dirt with God. . . Yet the fight cost Jacob in physical agony. Even protest results in pain. So, I find that neither my reality nor Jacob’s is so easily solved” (181).
Indeed, Grant poses many questions, flinging open the doors to uncertainty. On the one hand this is a welcome reprieve from decades of collective certitudes. On the other, it raises an interesting question, one I have not yet solved. Is there a downside (or even a shadow side) to uncertainty? A subtext in the book lauds uncertainty over certainty, and while our spiritual forefathers who gathered in Chicago praised certainty, Grant’s generation (and mine) value uncertainty. But is uncertainty always better? Isn’t uncertainty just a new lens, a way of perceiving the world which allows us to slip out the back door without being pinned down to our former ideas or choices? In 20 years, might our children deconstruct our uncertainty as we have deconstructed our parents’ certitudes? It seems plausible, yet perhaps it is a necessary corrective.
I want to be clear: Grant’s answer to her forefathers’ certitudes is not just that we choose to forever swim in the waters of uncertainty. Rather, she advocates for an inclusive and expansive interpretation of the Bible in which we are all participants. If we are to flourish as a Christian community, we must all bring ourselves, our lives, and our curiosities to the text. Grant writes, “Imagine a living commentary of the Christian Bible that held every reader as an essential interpreter. An interpretive culture like this would resemble a nervous system, with each nerve speaking to every other in its unique sensory language for the sake of the body’s ongoing survival” (197). In fact, what she envisions sounds a lot like the body of Christ in Ephesians 4:16, “From whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” Here, as throughout Knock at the Sky, Grant reinvigorates passages of scripture that have grown dull with overuse, and by posing difficult questions breathes new life into the text.
Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible by Liz Charlotte Grant was published by Eerdmans Publishing Company in 2025.
Jessica Walters has an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has been published in Mockingbird, Foreshadow, Ormsby Review, Still, Scintilla, Solum, and her short story “Glass Jars” was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Writing. Jessica is also the Fiction Editor for Radix Magazine.