Hello, and welcome to my blog. I’d like to begin with a few words about who I am, why I felt compelled to produce a blog in the first place, and what the purpose of this blog is. This post was first written in 2009, and this is a redaction of my original effort at that time, crafted for the relaunch of the website with its new template because my neglect of the tech side of things for years made automatic migration of the old material impossible, affording me the opportunity to inspect and update the old posts as needed. As I do so, I find myself cautiously pleased that my old thoughts have weathered the years relatively well from my current perspective.
First of all, I am an adult convert to the Christian faith; a convert from atheism and secular humanism. My conversion came not through attending an evangelical rally, not by having Jesus touch my heart, not by having the sky open and the light of the Holy Spirit come pouring out upon me or hearing a friend tell me the story of what their faith means to them. No, once I became open to the existence of God at all through an unlikely book in a freshman English seminar, my conversion came about through the hard work of reading and comparing the truth claims of many religions, a few of modern origin like Christian Science and Scientology, most of more ancient lineage, both East and West. Though the personal appeal of Buddhism was tremendous—and it is a religious tradition for which I retain a high esteem in its robust, undiluted Eastern form—once I became convinced of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth through an examination of the historical and archaeological evidence both for and against it, I knew in spite of my every desire or wish, I had to become some sort of Christian. As I would later discover, many “reluctant converts” had tread this path before me.
Still, what sort of Christian? Christians seemed to come in every flavor and variety. After more study and through the influence of my wife, I settled on the Lutheran tradition as my home. Because the purpose of this blog is not to focus on the denominational or confessional distinctives between Christians but rather on building up all the baptized into the fullness of what the Bible calls ‘the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints,’” I will not dwell upon my reasons for doing so. However, I do think that my Lutheran identity helps me address the issues facing this generation in our calling to contend for the historic Christian faith in a way that can be useful to all Christians—that is, all Christians who desire to be Christian not only by association with institutions or congregations that have a history both proud and shameful, but who desire to be Christians in the sense of having active in their hearts and minds the actual faith of the people who built those congregations and institutions. This series is not intended for knee-jerk conservatives, but rather people who desire to the degree possible, to have coursing through their hearts and minds the faith of the Apostles and their faithful successors in the Church throughout the ages.
Sad to say, many modern people believe there never was such a faith, such a unity of conviction amongst Christ’s early followers. Firstly, they mistake diversity in non-essentials with a lack of unity in general. While it is certainly true that there are differences of emphasis apparent between the Gospels as well as the letters of Paul, James, John, and Peter in the New Testament, they also cross-reference one another, and the great swaths of text where they univocally testify to the same divine event in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth are even more apparent; only ideological predisposition could possibly lead one to strain at such gnats whilst swallowing such camels.[i] Such people also typically view in a very modern way the disputes between doctrinal innovators (heretics) and their orthodox brethren as conflicts between equal contenders for the crown of valid Christian teaching. When the core Christian teachings were promulgated by actual Apostles within decades (living memory) rather than centuries and the cultural impulse common to all traditional cultures was to preserve rather than innovate, as in the modern world, this is an erroneous view.
Secondly, under the unexamined influence of the anti-supernatural assumptions of modern Bible reading (or exegetical) methods and literary theories shaped by forces inherently hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (post-structuralism), they read the Bible and other early Church literature with an attitude of hostility, what scholars call a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” This is not only a shame, but it is when you think about it, ridiculous. That a secular scholar—a person who does not count themselves a follower of Christ and may even be hostile to some or all of the Christian gospel—would approach these texts in this way makes sense. That someone who calls themselves a Christian—whose very identity is the fruit of the faithful work of thousands of named and unnamed people passing on faithfully to the next generation what they had first received through the very sorts of sermons, explanations, and tracts of which the New Testament and other early Church documents are composed—that a Christian should receive these documents with suspicion rather than as a treasured inheritance is ludicrous. What is the point of counting yourself a member of the Church if you largely despise your patrimony?
This brings me to another reason why I have felt compelled to add bogging to my already busy schedule as a parish pastor. Sad to say, there are many Christians in our churches today who explicitly do not desire to possess the faith of their ancestors. I had not been a Christian long when I discovered that many of the people who attended my church on Sunday morning were uncomfortable with or ashamed of the particular assertions of the Christian faith. I do not mean they were ashamed of specific episodes or abuses in Church history, which any Christian serious about the moral teachings of Jesus and failings of human beings must be. Rather, they were ashamed of or embarrassed about the actual doctrinal claims of Christianity.
Some were embarrassed in a general way—that the faith proclaimed by the Church declared itself to be true not in a conditional way for some people, but in an unconditional way for all people. These folk often harbored no resentment toward any of the particular doctrinal or moral teachings of historic Christianity as applied to themselves, but they felt an undefined sense of uneasiness at the scope of the Christian worldview, an uneasiness crafted perhaps in large part by the American cultural milieu of “can’t-we-all-just-get-along-ism.” They were uncomfortable at Christianity’s scope—its inclusivity, in a sense—uncomfortable that it claimed to be not merely a spiritual system but an account of reality, for the Scriptures speak to creation as well as salvation, and the quite literally crowning climax of the Scritpures is the establishment of Christ as “King of kings and Lord of lords”–Lord of all. Moreover, they were uncomfortable with Christianity’s consequent claim of relevance for all people because it is an account of the way things actually are and because Christ has jurisdiction over all people, regardless of their personal beliefs. Even though their eternal hope was tied to the moment when, as Paul says in Philippians, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father,” they were squeamish at the proclamation of that reality, even within the narrow confines of the gathered community of Christian disciples at worship.
Such people were also embarrassed by Christianity’s exclusivity, intuiting that the claim to speak objective truths meant that accounts of reality that disagreed with the Christian narrative must necessarily be false. Just as the claim that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom means that any other account of water’s elemental composition is inaccurate, so these people understood clearly that if Christ was Lord, it meant that Allah, Shiva, and Odin were not. They knew this to be true and in a sense did not hide from it, but thinking of friends and family whom they loved and who espoused very different beliefs, they were embarrassed by it. These emotional reactions were rooted not only their cultural conditioning, but in their love for the people around them who did not share their Christian convictions, and so is not only understandable but in some ways laudable. Though concern for other people’s feelings should never ultimately keep us from speaking a truth they might find unpleasant, it should tailor our way of speaking to them, and too often throughout Christian history, Christians have used the truth of the gospel as a bludgeon to beat people about intellectually and emotionally, making ourselves feel good at others’ expense. Such self-righteous behavior is not worthy of the Lord Jesus Christ, who enjoined us through the Scriptures to “speak the truth in love” and in our interactions with the world to be “as wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
But I also realized early on that there was another type of person gathering on Sunday mornings in the churches I attended, a type of person whose discomfort with the Christian gospel was far deeper and of a more fundamental sort. I will speak more about these people in part two of this post.
[i] For an excellent introduction to this topic, please see Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts by Lydia McGrew.