See! I Can Change My Mind Too
Regardless of What My Wife Thinks…
One of the blogs I wrote recently, in part, spoke of the life change that constituted my conversion to Christianity in the context of worldview. Fundamentally, that sort of conversion is a shift in a person’s worldview from an unconsciously formed one, built out of the experiences of life, education, and random thinking, to something intentionally constructed using the hard bricks of a face-to-face encounter with objective reality. In my case, as with many others, this drastic change in worldview came in the middle of trauma. Now I want to talk about another tussle I had with my worldview, coming much later in my life, embarrassingly about 20 years later, give or take. This confrontation between what were the settled bits of my assumptions I picked up along the way and that same unmovable objective reality I encountered before was, again, made possible by trauma, though self-generated this time.
If you missed the former narrative of my conversion, it was from a dissipated life full of guilt from the poor life choices I had made. You can read further details of that here. A failed marriage had left me homeless, the need for numbness left me drug-addled and alcoholic, and a dark hole in my soul left me knowing the blame was unequivocally my own. Seeking redemption through Christ was my last-ditch effort to discover where I could find my lost self-worth. As I stood at the altar of the church into whose sanctuary I had stumbled, I knew that if Jesus wasn’t real, I was done. If it were a religious scam, there would be no redemption from the awful things I had perpetrated on others and no help for my life, fractured and worthless. My mental state before the point of conversion was all that, mixed up as equal parts of confusion and depression. My unmerciful desperation consumed me. Well, it turned out that Jesus WAS real and I rode redemption into the state of being a very grateful Christian. But how permanent was it?
Twenty years later, too many questions had accumulated, unbidden, in my consciousness. They began to gang up on me, pummelling me into desperation again. I had started to see things in what the cultural Christianity around me had become, and it upset my sense of spiritual propriety; the Christianity where I had found truth. The questions were nagging little things I noticed in others around me, purporting to be leaders or “good Christians.” It wasn’t “sinful” per se. It wasn’t… wrong. There were no overt moral indiscretions in the leadership or the congregation of my local church other than what can be expected from the natural conflict between people. But there was a sense that something was off, some disagreement between my assumptions and what I knew to be true.
Twenty years later, too many questions had accumulated, unbidden, in my consciousness.
Among the things that fed my discomfort was that I noticed much of what was going on in the church appealed to the emotions of the congregation and very little appealed to their minds. The emotional appeal was the thick atmosphere of the services, and I began to feel manipulated. Manipulation, of course, is the stock in trade of the whole world. It is what one should expect in music, art, and media, both entertainment and news. I didn’t expect it in the Church, but there it was. In retrospect, I get why it was at that time. The church had gone through a season of internal troubles, and many of the leaders had left for other churches. My pastor was battered and bruised by the betrayal, and he was employing emotional manipulation in his sermons because they are easier to write than intelligently satisfying ones.
I had come to know, through my spiritual pursuits, that God is a rational Being. If Christianity is a worldview that claims to be objectively true, should not the religiousness surrounding my life also be rational? I had difficulty reconciling the emotionalism in my church to the approach I had settled into toward my sensible God. Was I supposed to check my brain at the door of the church before I entered, as my atheistic acquaintances accused me of? My Christian Worldview, built unintentionally again, though this time through living in a Christian bubble, was sown with inconsistencies, leading to discomfort. Do all Christians feel this way?
The worldview-process machine again swallowed me whole. Unintentional ideas had again slipped into my worldview and were moving toward a confrontation with what I knew to be true. Remembering what it was like to unintentionally allow poor building materials to build my worldview before my conversion and the mess they made of me, I knew I needed a better grade of building materials to be the order of the day this time.
I remember the day I sat down and had a serious conversation about what Christianity should look like. The only other participant in this exchange was the other me who had converted 20 years earlier. In that talk, I reiterated my commitment to pursuing the truth, regardless of its consequences. All things were on the table. All questions were allowable. Is Jesus real? (hmmm…that same question from 20 years earlier) Does God exist? Does he get involved in the lives of us lesser beings? Why is there evil in the world if God is so good? Is the Bible a real source of practical Truth? I am sure the reader can recognize these questions. They form in the minds of most people when we are being honest with ourselves in a place where courage is essential. It was another dark night of the soul, different from the one at my conversion, but no less significant.
The worst part of it was that I could not ask my closest friends around me. Living in a Christian bubble is a poor way to follow Christ. It may be comfortable, personally gratifying, and challenging enough to pique your interest. It just isn't the description one would find in the Bible. All my friends seemed to be under the same assumptions perpetrated by our shared bubble. Asking them my questions would give me the unsatisfying answers I already had. My Christian worldview was under pressure, and I had no resources to buttress the status quo, slowly dissolving around me.
Living in a Christian bubble is a poor way to follow Christ.
Serendipitously, a book called How Now Shall We Live fell into my lap. Written by Charles Colson, of Watergate fame, co-authored by Nancy Pearcey, an author and thinker I have come to love, it introduced me to the rational answers to my questions, using something I came to know as "apologetics," or specifically, Christian apologetics. (Apologetics, by the way, has nothing to do with being sorry for something) I was led into the illuminating writings of C.S. Lewis, Greg Koukl, J. Warner Wallace, and others who did not see any need to cede their minds in pursuit of the Truth. Looking into this new paradigm, I found the Truth included spiritual truth! (My atheist acquaintances notwithstanding)
This idea was entirely new to me. Up to the moment I read that volume, I had defined faith in a way relating to some notion of imposing acceptance on something I did not understand. I had considered Christian Faith to be a belief that is contrary to the evidence, as I had been taught by various teachers. After this revelation, I could no longer go back to being a Christian under those alien beliefs about this essential element of Christianity. If I were going to return to following the truth, regardless of the consequences, I needed to look into this.
As I began to deconstruct the existing moving parts of what I thought was Christianity, I discovered the definition of faith that had anything to do with irrational belief was one imposed from the outside. It is a strawman belief about Christianity. It has no home in a biblical worldview. It is what society outside of the Church believed it to be, imposing it upon us so we can remain at an ideological distance. While many Christians still find it easier to define it that way, too (for reasons I am unsure of), I found it to be rather unsubstantial when considered in those terms. I had no idea that the simple statement, “I have faith,” could become a deep look into theology. If I say I have faith, I must have definitions from a source other than outsiders. Christianity reserves the right, so easily granted to others, to form the definitions of our worldview.
Christians I spoke to about this usually answered that we must find our definitions in the Bible. But the Bible was the first thing on the docket. To use it to answer my questions would be circular thinking, possibly leading to error. Why should we see it as a worthy source to determine this kind of stuff? Is it true? Is it accurate? Is it able to help me in my spiritual quest? Or is it an ancient book that should have little influence today, that we can ignore with no penalty?
It is amazing how many opinions about the reliability of the Bible are out there. It included the entire spectrum from raging, angry dismissal (usually with profanity) to support for every word or phrase as untouched by metaphor (usually with a far-away look in the eye). Few there be who have carefully looked into it with critical thinking and formulated an answer beyond, "It is the Word of God!" (By the way, there is a world of difference between “critical thinking” and “critical theory”). (just sayin’) I can only say that after my investigation helped to settle this matter into an understanding of the grand narrative this volume contains.
The Bible is actually a library of books, written over 1500 years, by forty or so authors from three continents. The authors include kings and shepherds, rich and poor, major and minor prophets, historians, and visionaries. It contains prophetic visions and practical advice, poetry and history, epistles and encouragement, and much more. It is a record of the interactions, over its history, between the One Who created it all and one of the creatures, human beings, all pointing to God’s redemption of any human being who wants it.
So, this first step in my renovation took some time to accomplish. Looking at ALL the evidence that is out there, and choosing to ignore none of it, I could see the purposes and plans that God has put in place. It is as if I got the lid off the jigsaw puzzle box to see the picture of what was being built. The central point of the whole story of creation was the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. (No wonder why there is such effort to relegate the historical Jesus to mythic status or some other defanged assumption) Once that is in place, the rest of the parts become easy to interlock.
It is as if I got the lid off the jigsaw puzzle box to see the picture of what was being built.
It is still a work in progress. Some pieces of the puzzle seem to fit poorly. I can attribute much of that to a mixture of the limits of our spiritual capabilities and the fact that God has not revealed everything to us yet. He has cards he ain’t showing because, I would guess, people aren’t ready to receive them yet. No, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even believe I have all the questions. But I know Who does. And with Jesus resurrected, I am okay with the fuzzy edges, so popular with those who refuse to look at the solidly constructed centre. Having set this foundation in place, I am ready to take on all the rest of the questions. If the Bible account is true, then Jesus is alive, and I can expect His involvement in my life, even in the answering of the questions that remain. It is overtly a rationally satisfying worldview to me. It is still a rational faith.