Introduction

The Cheshire Christ is the account of my journey from childhood faith to youthful atheism to young-adult Evangelicalism, and from there into Presbyterianism, a near-miss with Roman Catholicism (landing uncomfortably in the Lutheran Church), and finally crossing the dreadful Tiber into the clutches of the Roman Catholic Church.

This rather long-winded essay is nothing more than my story. I do not claim to be an authority on Evangelicalism, or the Reformed faith, or Lutheranism, or Roman Catholicism, or anything else. I do not pretend that I have examined everything thoroughly, or that my views are the only possible interpretation of the data. And I certainly don't pretend to be a scholar.

This is just my opinion, which I am entitled to, thank you very much, and you are free to agree or disagree with it as you please.

I wrote this story for a few reasons. First, a friend asked me to write my testimony, and I got carried away because, Second, writing is like therapy for me when I’m thinking through serious issues. Third, many people have read early drafts of this story and found it helpful, or at least thought-provoking, so I offer it here for one and all.

While I believe I've discovered some important things, the goal of this manuscript is to encourage people to ask the right questions and try to look at the issues from another point of view. If it accomplishes that goal, I'm happy, whether you end up agreeing with all my conclusions or not.

Although I will be presenting a case for the insufficiency of the notion of "church" in the Evangelical community, let me state from the start that I have great admiration for Evangelicals. I cut my Christian teeth among them, so to speak, and there is a lot to be admired about the devotion of the Evangelical. Evangelical Christians try to obey what God has revealed in Scripture. They tithe their income. They know their Bibles. They read devotional books about how to live in a way that pleases God. In short, they take their faith very seriously and act on what they know. (Of course I'm talking about the serious Evangelicals.)

That is the good word about contemporary Evangelicalism, and it's especially good because it's true. Unfortunately, there is more to say about the contemporary Evangelical Church than that. Even though they want to obey, and sometimes even want to dig into the deep things of the faith and wrestle with the intellectual content of Christianity, there are certain fundamental problems in the Evangelical approach to Christianity that interfere with that process. It's as if the Evangelical wants to climb higher, but someone has sawed off the upper branches of the tree. Or, as if the Evangelical is Alice, and God is the cat: she can see the head, but no body.

But I'm getting ahead of the story. First, I need to illustrate the problem, and I'd like to do that by chronicling my journey from atheism to faith and, once converted, my search for a form of Christianity that really works, and seriously addresses all the Scriptural teachings about our Savior, who, although He sometimes fulfills the prophet's description of a God who hides Himself, nevertheless appeared as a child in a stable in Bethlehem so that He might bring us to Himself and make us a part of His very body.