Preview Chapters

. . . the most splendid line [of a poem] becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it. . .

– C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

This book sets out to do what might seem to be a straightforward task: to recount the experiences of a few months in my life in which I walked away from atheism and entered into Christian faith.

Nothing is ever as simple as that.

It is no light matter to meet God after having denied Him all one’s life. I have turned often in thought and prayer to the events of that spring and summer, trying to understand something of who God is and what He is doing in my life. Coming to Him was only the beginning. I can point to a day and time and place of my conversion, and yet since then I have come to understand that He calls me to a fresh conversion every day.

I came to Him more broken than I realized. In the months that followed, I recognized the disorder in my life and learned that I must give every relationship, every desire, indeed everything in my heart, into God’s hands. I learned that obedience also meant trust: that His will was best, whether I understood it or not, and that the One who had made Himself known to me would not ever forsake or betray me.

Over the course of my conversion, I had my intellectual pride broken, to be given in return the Truth I sought; over the succeeding months I had my spiritual and emotional pride broken as I confronted my own sinfulness, past and present. I am not trying to be dramatic in speaking of sin. By the world’s standards I was a nice person, even a good person. But when I came to know God as the source of all good, I understood that my ideas of “nice” and “good” fell infinitely short of His perfection. Since then, I have begun to recognize the essential ugliness of all sin, even the seemingly ordinary or trivial. Seeing myself, a sinner, in the light of God’s goodness has been humbling, but it has also formed in me the desire for a stronger and deeper relationship with my Savior, and for His help to become the person He made me to be. As I have experienced conviction, repentance, and confession, so also I have experienced grace; and I have been blessed as He has done, and continues to do, His healing and sanctifying work in me.

This account cannot be a narrative photograph. I make no pretense to be able to depict exactly how things were, for I am not the person I was then, though I am close enough to remember how I felt and thought. Even so, this account is not less than, but rather more than, a snapshot of my journey. In reflection and prayer over the past three years, I have come to see dimensions of my experience that I did not and indeed could not notice at the time. God willing, in years to come I will have an ever-richer perspective on the way He came into my life.

So then: The following pages are the account of how I turned from death to life – from denying God to committing myself to Christ, my Lord and Savior. It is not the account of how I came to love Him: that came later, and, like the gift of knowing Him, came without my asking.

Above all, this is not, at the heart of it, my story at all. It is the account of God’s work, a celebration of His mercy; it is the story of grace, acting in and through human beings but always coming from Him and leading to Him.

Chapter 2: Faithless

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering, What with my search drawn out through years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope With that obstreperous joy success would bring, I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

– Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

The word “atheist” comes from the Greek a theos; literally, “without God.” That was my experience: faith of any kind had been alien to me since as far back as I can recall. I had never in my life said a prayer, never been to a church service. Christmas meant presents and Easter meant chocolate bunnies – nothing more.

A memory from first grade: the teacher giving us children words to spell on the chalkboard. I was a precocious reader and writer, so I wrote my word confidently: “g o d.” But the little boy next to me who wrote “G o d” was praised for his correct spelling, not me. I knew about Greek and Norse gods, characters in my storybooks on myths, and so the capital G puzzled me. I did not understand that God was a name, the name of the Lord.

My indifference persisted as I grew up, went through high school, started college. In high school, religion of any kind seemed to me an odd but harmless pursuit, one which I treated with the same incurious disdain I held for other activities that didn’t interest me, like golf or playing chess. In college, I absorbed the idea that Christianity was a historical curiosity, or a blemish on modern civilization, or both. My college science classes presented Christians as illiterate anti-intellectuals who, because they didn’t embrace Darwinism, threatened the advancement of knowledge. My history classes omitted or downplayed references to historical figures’ faith: as one example, it was only much later that I learned that Florence Nightingale was a Christian.

I remember an upper-division English literature class on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. We discussed the book’s criticism of corruption and hypocrisy in the  medieval church, without considering the faith that would move people to go on a pilgrimage in the first place; I was left with the impression that Chaucer was a forward-thinking atheist, not a believing Christian who directed his readers to give thanks for anything good in the book to “Our Lord Jesus Christ. . .  from whom proceeds all understanding and goodness.”

I suppose I must have had classmates or professors who were Christians, but if so, I didn’t know about it. Nobody talked about faith or Christianity on campus. I remember one particular girl in my dorm, first semester freshman year, who (in retrospect) was probably a Christian; she objected to the fact that the resident assistants distributed free condoms and had mandatory dorm meetings in which we were instructed on how to safely do things that I, at least, had never even imagined that people did. The objecting girl was nice, but I didn’t understand why she was making such a big deal about all this; then she moved off-campus, and I forgot about her.

I’d seen people handing out pamphlets and telling people “Jesus loves you!” or holding up signs at football games that said “John 3:16,” which baffled me entirely (I thought it must be some sort of weird code). I only knew the word “evangelist” in the form of “televangelist,” which I heard about on TV when one or another of them got into some pathetic scandal. I didn’t know anything about Christianity, but why bother learning?

In my twenties, that unreflective atheism gradually hardened into strident hostility. I spent two years of my graduate education in the South, where I was unhappy, in part because of culture shock: as a born and bred Yankee, I felt uncomfortable with the food, the weather, the unintelligible accents of the locals. My exposure to Christianity did increase, but in forms that repelled me. A preacher would regularly come into the student quad during the lunch hour and rant about hellfire and damnation – at which point I would flee and eat my sandwich in depressed solitude in my library carrel. One time I was accosted on the way to class by an earnest hander-out of tracts: “Are y’all saved?” “No, and I don’t want to be!” I shouted, half ashamed and half proud of being rude. Perhaps I could have met people of faith, but I was isolated and alienated, and I made no friends there.

I went back north for my doctorate, back to a safe and comfortable place. My dreadlocked, Birkenstock-wearing neighbors might smoke pot, burn incense, and enthuse about crystal vibrations, but I could be assured that nobody took faith, you know, seriously. Though I still knew next to nothing about Christianity, and cared less, I began to mock Christians and belittle their faith, their intelligence, their character.

At 31 years old, I was an atheist college professor – and I delighted in thinking of myself that way. I got a kick out of being an unbeliever; it was fun to consider myself superior to the unenlightened, superstitious masses, and to make snide comments about Christians.

What does it mean to arrive at that point in life totally without faith? Above all, it meant that I was not interested in searching for God. Consider this analogy: imagine that tomorrow you become colorblind. Even if you decided not to seek help to regain your color vision, you would be aware that such a thing as “color” existed. Now consider me as one born colorblind. Never having seen color, I wouldn’t know what I was missing.

Such was my life as an atheist. When I look back now on my life before I knew Christ, I see it in shades of gray. At the time, never having experienced anything more, I thought that my emptiness was fullness, that my shadows were light. I desperately needed God’s presence in my life, but I would have flatly denied any such need.

My problem could not be solved by hearing a preacher asserting that Jesus loved me and wanted to save me. I didn’t believe in God to begin with, and I thought the Bible was a collection of folktales and myths, just like the stories I’d read of Zeus and Thor, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Why should I bother to read the Bible, much less take seriously what it said about this Jesus? I certainly didn’t think an imaginary God could have a real Son. And since I didn’t believe that I had an immortal soul, I wasn’t in the least interested in its purported destination after I died. No God, no afterlife, no hell. . . no reason to discuss the matter further.

The difficulty was not a lack of opportunity to hear about God. The problem lay deeper: in my very concept of what faith was. I thought faith was by definition irrational, that it meant believing some assertion to be true for no reason. It had never occurred to me that there could be a path to faith through reason, that there were arguments for the existence of God, and evidence for the claims of Christianity. I thought you had to just “have faith” – and the very idea of faith baffled and horrified me.

And yet, there was something about the idea of faith that made it stick with me. I didn’t have faith, I didn’t want faith, but I felt compelled to have a good reason why not. I constructed an elaborate analogy for myself, one that I felt gave a satisfying explanation of why “faith” was impossible.

I set it up like this: imagine that you tell me, “If you believe that there’s an invisible pink unicorn in the sky, I’ll give you a new BMW.” I see the car in the parking lot; you jingle the keys in your hands. If I can believe what you want me to believe, the new car is mine. Cool! But it’s a waste of time: I know there’s no unicorn. No matter how much I want that car, I am incapable of believing something contrary to reason in order to get it.

Believing something irrational on demand to get a prize: that is what the evangelical invitation to “come to Jesus and get eternal life!” sounded like to me.

Sure, if I thought I could benefit by it, I could pretend to believe, and say so: “Oh yes, I believe in Jesus!” But I’d know I was lying, which would make this so-called “faith” into deliberate, repellent falsehood.

The only other option for faith, as I understood it, would be to try to convince myself that I believed. Indeed I might be able to work myself up into such a pitch of desire for the product on offer that I could, for a time, believe that I believed. But it wouldn’t be the same thing as really believing – and the idea that I ought to make the effort seemed disgusting and immoral. As I understood it, then, faith was at best a delusion and at worst total hypocrisy.

To me, this was the decisive argument against faith. I could not believe, no matter how much I might want to; if God did exist and would punish me for not believing, I was stuck with being punished. I thought “faith” was a meaningless word, that so-called “believers” were either hypocrites or self-deluded fools, and that it was a waste of time to even consider any claim a Christian made about the truth.

If I had inquired, I would have found the Bible was nothing like I thought it was. I would have found St Paul’s forthright declaration that Christianity is based on the historical, witnessed events of Christ’s death and resurrection. I would have found that theology and philosophy offered real answers to my questions, not an appeal to blind faith. I would have found that the history of the Church did not conform to my image of the Christian faith as a self-serving, politically useful fiction. But I thought I knew exactly what faith was, and so I declined to look further. Or perhaps I was afraid that there was more to it than I was willing to credit – but I didn’t want to deal with that. Easier by far to read only books by atheists that told me what I wanted to hear – that I was much smarter and intellectually honest and morally superior than the poor, deluded Christians.

I had built myself a fortress of atheism, secure against any attack by irrational faith. And I lived in it, alone.