Cheshire Christ: Faith Reborn

Faith Reborn

In the distance, there stands a wild horse,

Proud and persistent to run his own course,

Entering through no other doors,

Than those he has made for himself.

-- "Wild Horse" by Phil Keaggy

Once upon a time there was a zealous young man at the University of Maryland who preached on the steps outside the undergraduate library. Crowds would gather and listen to him. Some were sympathetic, some heckled, but overall it was delightful lunch-time entertainment.

I thought it was complete foolishness, and I told him so. In fact, sometimes I heckled him myself: not for his improvement, or my education, but simply because it was fun. Years later he confided in me that sometimes I really stumped him.

But heckling in public was dangerous business. Lots of zealous Christians waited in the wings, watching for a heathen to pounce on, and I became a prime target.

Many of them were no more sophisticated than my high school tormentors, and I brushed them off with practiced ease. But others had done their homework. They started telling me things that I'd never heard before, like practical evidences for the resurrection, or biblical prophecy, or philosophical arguments for the existence of God.

I said I'd never heard them before, but that's probably not true. My sister claims that she'd told me the same things, years ago. She probably did, but there was a difference in me in the interim. First, my thought experiment in high school English had taken some of the arrogant certainty out of my atheist, materialistic world view. Second, I was interested in a girl who professed Christianity. Consequently, I was slightly more disposed to consider the Christian message. Perhaps, just perhaps, there was something to it, so I was willing to listen.

For the first time in my life I came face to face with some honest questions about Jesus. For example, it's all well and good to say that you don't believe He's the Son of God, but it's another thing entirely to say who you think He is. A great teacher? Pah! What great teacher says things like, "When the Son of Man sits on His glorious throne, then shall he separate the nations before him as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats," and then makes the dividing line for Heaven or Hell a matter of how people treated him, personally?! That's no great teacher. That's an egomaniac -- or the Son of God.

When Jesus accepts the worship of Thomas, who called Him "My Lord and my God," is he being a good teacher? By permitting Thomas to worship him, Jesus is claiming to be both Lord and God.

So what is it? Is he crazy? Is he a liar?

Ah, but I was too clever to fall for that line. There's another option: maybe the records aren't accurate. Maybe Jesus didn't really say these things -- they were just put in his mouth by over-zealous followers.

That's possible, of course, but where's the evidence? The New Testament is one of the best attested books in history. There are tons of extant manuscripts, some from very, very early. The best evidence says that the New Testament is a generally reliable historic document written on the basis of eyewitness testimony. If I wanted to pretend that things were otherwise, I was just ... well, pretending.

Besides, there were other lines of argument to follow. There was the empty tomb, and the conversions of Paul and James. What made these men, both of whom opposed Jesus, change their minds about him and confess Him as Lord and Christ? Were they lying too? Or deceived?

And what about the apostles, all of whom (except John) suffered martyrdom for their faith in the resurrection?

The odds were getting too long to believe that it was all a hoax. My simple, atheistic faith (recall the conversation in the living room) wasn't prepared to stand against this onslaught of evidence. It seemed to take more faith to believe that it was all false -- that Jesus was nuts, or a liar, or that the otherwise reliable accounts of his sayings and deeds were mistaken -- that James, Paul and the apostles were deceived about Jesus' resurrection and literally spent their lives preaching it .... Well, I didn't have enough faith to believe that it wasn't true.

Besides all this, there was biblical prophecy. Now on this point, I think I was a little gullible. I accepted some things then that I have doubts about today, but at the time it seemed clear to me that Daniel had predicted the very year in which the Messiah would die. (I'm not so sure that's the right interpretation of Daniel, but it was persuasive then.) Isaiah seemed to speak of Jesus in his famous passage about the suffering servant, and other tidbits here and there added up to an overall case that I was uncomfortable dismissing out of hand. (On that point I believe I had been correct.)

There was also the mysterious Shroud of Turin. I wasn't sure then, and I'm not completely sure today, what to believe about the Shroud (it's an interesting study, if you have the time and inclination), but the weight of clear and supporting testimony for Christianity was getting quite substantial.

I liked to think that I was honest with the facts, and that I'd go wherever the facts led me. Here was a test case. The evidence seemed to support the Christian faith. Except for one thing.

Evolution was still a big problem. For years, no other possibility had the slightest place in my mind, and now a bunch of religious fanatics were trying to tell me that God created the world in six days some 6,000 years ago.

I wouldn't have paid them any attention at all except that I had been so impressed with the other lines of evidence about Jesus, the resurrection and so forth. I listened, and, again, I was surprised by how compelling some of the arguments sounded.

The first piece of business was debunking the grand myth of evolution: that lots of time plus "chance" can do anything. I began to learn how incredibly complicated the simplest life forms are, and how far they are from the lifeless product of Miller's experiment. (Recent discoveries about the mind-boggling complexity of the cell have only strengthened these arguments.) The step from the mixed left- and right-handed amino acids that Miller was able to produce to even the most basic proteins of a living system (which, by the way, consist of exclusively left-handed amino acids) was far bigger than the evolutionary propaganda machine wanted me to believe.

In fact, several scientists have had the audacity to calculate the probability of life forming the way the evolutionists say it did. (The evolutionists never bothered to ask whether their theory was likely, or possible. Like me, years before, the mere fact that we exist proved that it had to happen, since no other possibility was considered.) Anyway, in the calculation I saw, the scientist seemed to bend over backwards to give evolution the benefit of the doubt. Rather than just a puddle with a few amino acids on the edge of an ocean somewhere, he assumed that the entire ocean was full of the stuff, constantly interacting for four billion years. And what did he find? That the likelihood of the evolutionists' "spontaneous generation" was essentially zero. Statistically speaking, it couldn't happen.

Evolutionists sometimes set the "time plus chance can do anything" propaganda in the following form: if you set a monkey at a typewriter, they say, eventually, by blind chance, he would type Shakespeare.

It's nice rhetoric, and a good word picture -- a "monkey" reminds us of our alleged ancestors, and Shakespeare is a convenient surrogate for the Bible -- but "eventually" is such a pliable word. It turns out that when you calculate the odds, a room full of monkeys typing nonstop for a billion years would be unlikely to produce the simple phrase, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

The staggering naiveté of evolutionary scientists seemed overwhelming. Hadn't one of them stopped to check the likelihood of their theory? Well, a few had, and they had also been convinced of the utter impossibility of the spontaneous generation of life. Some of these scientists postulated that the seeds of life had been planted by extra-terrestrials.

At this point I began to wonder about the motivations of these scientists, since it was beginning to sound like a bad case of "anything but God" -- an attitude I was not unfamiliar with. After all, for goodness' sake: aliens? (Nowadays, with the New Age hysteria, people probably like that solution, but in 1981 we still cast a skeptical eye at stories about aliens.)

In any event, although I didn't give up completely on some of the alleged facts of evolution -- like an old earth, that there were man-like creatures before us on the planet and so forth -- I was quickly liberated from evolutionary mythology. And that, in fact, is what most moderns seem to miss. Evolution is the modern creation myth for atheists. It's the attempt to explain all of life from a non-theistic perspective. If you ever doubt this, try reading up on creationism and then take a science class at the local university. Bring up some of the arguments you learned in your creationist text and watch the religious reaction from your professor. Talk about the Spanish Inquisition! All pretense of objectivity is lost. You are a heretic. The professor must, in order to show his faithfulness to doctrine, treat you worst than the pope ever considered treating Hans Kung.

But six-day creationism isn't reconcilable with an old earth, so what to do? These Fundamentalist friends of mine were telling me that the Bible is "literally" true -- the earth was only 6,000 years old, etc. (the Bible never says how old the earth is, of course), and although they had some semi-respectable arguments against an old earth, I didn't really buy it. I was a geology major, after all.

Well, okay, some of these Evangelists would concede, there are other alternatives. Some Christians believe in "theistic evolution," or the "gap theory," or the "day-age" theory, etc. etc. But these seemed like wimpy accommodations -- they wanted to believe the Bible and science, so they made up a half-baked middle road. I figured that if Darwin had never come along, they wouldn't have bothered with that wimpy "day-age" stuff, they'd just read it "literally" -- six, 24-hour days. The other ideas sounded too much like convenient justifications.

But, again, facts were against me. The other explanations of Genesis predate Darwin. St. Augustine, among others, advocated something like the "day-age" theory well before there was evidence for an old earth. This showed that these other theories were not merely accommodations to evolution but genuine options in their own right. (I have since learned that non-"literal" interpretations of Genesis were common among Jewish and Christian scholars before Darwin was a twinkle in his great-grandfather's eye.)

Realizing that other interpretations of Genesis were not just convenient justifications kept me from being too distracted from the main issue: what was I going to do about this fellow Jesus?

The more I became exposed to a Christian world view, the more I began to see holes in my own atheistic world view. It was as if a veil was being taken away from my mind. I began to see all the things in life that are scandalously non-material: morality, beauty, love. In a mechanistic universe, these things have no real meaning. So, either they are not real, or we do not live in a mechanistic universe.

Once a person sees this, it is impossible to maintain the facade of belief in materialism. Every day a man makes hundreds of value judgments relating to morality or beauty. If it is all nonsense, or an illusion, then nonsense (or illusion) is so deeply ingrained in the human mind that it is inescapable. (And in that case, how can a man trust his own judgment?) I found, in fact, that it was impossible to be human -- that is, to believe in things like "ought" and "ought not," "beautiful" and "I love you" -- and still be a materialist.

After a while, the constant barrage took its toll. My atheism was in tatters all around me. I had to admit that there was a God.

He is the God of nothing,

If that's all that you can see.

-- "My God," by Jethro Tull.

One problem with the use of evidence in Christian apologetic is that evidences don't convince you of your sin. They should. I should have seen how I had been "suppressing the truth in unrighteousness," as St. Paul says, but I did not. At this point in my life, I had no deep conviction of the sinfulness of my unbelief, and although I had my share of the sins of youth, I had no corresponding fear of judgment: I was not particularly scared of Hell. In my mind, it was simply a question of the truth or falsehood of Christianity. Does God exist? I had to admit that He did. Are Jesus' claims true? They seemed compelling to me. So, what changes did I have to make as a result of this newfound knowledge?

The Christians I had been interacting with were non-denominational Evangelicals, so it was clear to them what I needed to do: repent, accept Jesus as my personal Savior and Lord, get baptized and join their church.

I did. It's quite embarrassing to think about it now, but I didn't tell any of my family or friends that I was getting baptized. (For the second time.) I didn’t think they wouldn understand. That's the way a 17-year old thinks.

Along those lines -- as a slight aside -- in an otherwise ridiculous book, Erik Erikson describes the late teens and early twenties as "an age which can be most painfully aware of the need for decisions, most driven to choose new devotions and to discard old ones, and most susceptible to the propaganda of ideological systems which promise a new world-perspective at the price of total and cruel repudiation of an old one." (Young Man Luther, p. 41.)

A more sensible man says something similar: "The young are naturally romantic and given to moral absolutes that necessarily make the real world of compromises, half-measures, and self-seeking appear corrupt." (Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 31.)

If I had read that when I was 20, I'd have taken offense at it, or found some way to refute it. Reading it at 35 is a little different. It is, after all, 20 year olds that are stupid enough to run off and die in the jungle because some alley cat politician in the White House thinks it will help his approval ratings. There is something fundamentally wrong with boys in their late teens and early twenties.

And yet, while I have to admit that my age made me susceptible to radical decisions, facts will bear out that this was, at best, only a contributing factor. My world-view genuinely was in a crisis, and being 17 only added to the importance of doing something about it.

In any event, I was primed and ready for a shift in allegiances. The world-view that had dominated my thinking from 7th grade to college had come crashing down, and the one ready to leap in and fill the void was non-denominational, Evangelical Christianity -- with a vengeance!

And others fell upon rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of soil. (Mt. 13:5)

This was no ordinary group of Evangelicals I had fallen in with. They have been called a cult by some, and with the more mature hindsight that 17 years provides, although I can sympathize with some of the concerns of these critics, "cult" is too harsh a label. These folk were Christians, and they meant it, and the uncomfortable fact for white, middle-class American Christians is that Evangelicals like these show who really does and who really doesn't take Jesus seriously. Their commitment condemns the lazy, self-absorbed attitude of other "Christians," who have to retaliate by calling names, and "cult" has become a useful one. (It is no surprise that some of the leaders of "anti-cult" organizations are pastors in lukewarm denominations that have long since given up serious Christian discipleship.)

I stayed with this group for some three months, and in that time I had read my Bible (much of the New Testament two or three times), memorized a substantial portion of the Navigators' excellent Topical Memory System, and learned to share my faith with others. Sadly, many life-long Christians have done none of this.

There is a lot more to say about those zealous Evangelicals and my time among them, but that will have to wait because when my three-month warranty was over, I quit the church, Erik Erikson's theories notwithstanding.

It seems that the psychological disfunctionality caused by being 17 (I turned 18 during that time) wasn't sufficient to make me take up my cross. I began to waver, and then to wander, and then to reject the faith I had briefly confessed.

The reason was essentially moral. Struggling against sin is a non-issue when you're an atheist. It's merely a struggle not to get caught, and to live with your own conscience, both of which are quite easy so long as you don't do anything really stupid. But once you allow God's holy moral standard to peer into the depths of your soul, all Hell breaks loose.

My tottering, weak faith simply wasn't ready for the intense baptism I underwent in those few months. I was supposed to change from a radical, evangelistic atheist to a radical, evangelistic Christian. This meant changing the way I looked at the world, others and myself, changing my behavior, my dress and the music I listened to, and adopting a different set of values and goals for life. It was too much.

At least that's one way to look at it. The other way, and perhaps the more accurate way, is to say that I loved my sin more than I loved God, and I latched onto every convenient excuse I could find to justify myself and abandon this new faith. I pretended to care about the heathen in Africa, who hadn't heard about Christ (nowadays I think the Africans have better cause to worry about the heathen in America), and I began to come up with reasons why I didn't really believe the Bible.

This was no honest intellectual crisis. I didn't seek counsel. I didn't read any good books on the subject. I was content to rely on my own judgment because it very conveniently justified my behavior. (What a surprise, eh?)

Besides all this, there was another reason to abandon this newfound faith. Persecution.

I had thought that living as an atheist in a nominally Christian world was hard, but living as a Christian was ten times harder. During my brief career as a Christian, I had to endure the ridicule of my high school friends as well as my new, college friends. What's more, the environment on a college campus is not conducive to serious religious faith. The campus is occupied territory, and the reigning orthodoxy is incredibly hostile to Christianity. Professors think nothing of poking fun at God, the Bible and anyone foolish enough to believe. And of course I wasn't able to keep my mouth shut. I, the new convert, packed with knowledge as I thought I was (ha! -- the truth is that confidence that you know more than you really do is the first thing you learn in an Evangelical church, and I didn't need much training anyway) ... well, I had to take on these Goliaths.

Finally, and I hate to admit this since I pride myself on being an independent-minded fellow, peer pressure took its toll. Peer pressure is stronger in college than it is in high school. There are more pretty girls, and you're expected to be a grown-up.

The end result was that I quit listening to John Michael Talbot and Keith Green and started cranking up the Jethro Tull again. God just faded into the background until I didn't really think about Him anymore.

Losing My Religion

There was a time when you were so young

and walked in their way.

They made you feel they loved you all-seeing they say.

You're going wrong if their game you don't play

And that the song I sing will lead you astray.

-- "Just Trying To Be" by Jethro Tull

Despite some initial embarrassment, losing my professed Christianity did wonders for my social life. I felt a liberty I had never experienced before. I was young, unattached, healthy, had my own (albeit old) car, plenty of pocket change from my part-time job, and as a college student I had plenty of free time. Life was very, very good.

My Sunday feeling is coming on over me.

My Sunday feeling is coming on over me,

Now that the night is over.

Got to clear my head so I can see.

Till I get to put together,

that old feeling won't let me be.

Won't somebody tell me where I laid my head last night?

I really don't remember,

But with one more cigarette I think I might.

Till I get to put together,

well that old feeling can't get me right.

Need some assistance, have you listened to what I said?

Oh, I don't feel so good.

Need someone to help me to my bed.

Till I get to put together,

that old feeling is in my head.

-- "My Sunday Feeling," by Jethro Tull

No, I wasn't quite that bad. But that was a song we sang in our make-shift rock band.

I cast Christianity behind me, perhaps a little more drastically than I needed to, just to convince my friends. I didn't entirely repudiate my belief in God or in Jesus, I just made what little belief I retained accommodate my moral choices. Circumstances conspired to make this balancing act relatively easy. A few of my buddies had a kind of conversion experience back in high school, but they had fallen away as well. We were co-ex-religionists.

My experience during that time of my life shows me that unbelief is a moral thing. My difficulties with Christianity were not nearly big enough to justify my hard and fast fall away from the faith. I wanted to be free of moral constraints, free of the ridicule that comes with sincere belief in Jesus, and I wanted to do my own thing, my own way.

It's been a long time --

still shaking my wings.

Well, I'm a glad bird

I got changes to ring.

-- "To Cry You a Song," by Jethro Tull

I didn't entirely suppress my newfound knowledge about God, Jesus, the resurrection and so forth. Just as in high school I had found that atheism was unpopular, so I found among my drunken college friends that a certain level of nondescript spirituality can be popular -- at the right time, in the right doses, and provided you never tell anyone that religion should make them change their lifestyle, except, perhaps, along the lines of what is socially popular at the time. For example, nowadays a bland spirituality that encourages recycling would fit in well with the world-view of reprobate young adults who want to have a good time and feel good about themselves.

The crowd I hung around with wasn't into recycling. (This was well before that famous mismanaged barge full of New York trash created the modern recycling hysteria.) But a counter-cultural Jesus, a Jesus who rejected the prevailing views of the stuffed shirts (which included, of course, parents), a Jesus who dressed like a bum and didn't like corporate America -- now that was the kind of spirituality that fit in well with a late-night, beer drenched talk in some public park, beneath the "No alcohol" sign.

Those who think that "spirituality" is a good thing should have had a beer or two with us rapscallions.

I'm not inclined

to act refined

and that's how it goes.

-- "Hunting Girl," by Jethro Tull

It’s said that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That works two ways. The Christian who has only a little knowledge about his faith is an unarmed man behind enemy lines. But worse, a fallen away Christian who needs to justify his own apostasy, who is also armed with a little knowledge ... that man can cause trouble.

Back in 1982 I supervised a very sweet, kind, young Christian woman at my part-time job in a shoe store. This poor girl didn't know what she was getting into. Like a good Evangelical, she tried to share her faith with me, and like a good former atheist, former Evangelical (who always loved a good argument anyway), I was more than willing to talk.

I knew the Bible better than she did. Well, no, I guess that's not true. I had read more of it and had more memorized, but she knew the God of the Bible and believed in Him. So, despite my superiority in book learning, she really knew the Bible better than I did. "A good understanding have all those who do his commandments" (Ps. 111:10).

Be that as it may, my knowledge of the Bible was seasoned with unbelief and skepticism. I taunted her. I teased her. I made fun of her beliefs, which was easy to do because she was in a rather strange Pentecostal Church.

As a partial defense of my horrible behavior, I didn't realize how much I was hurting her. I had no idea that she went home and cried at night, and if I had known, I would have begged her forgiveness and never spoken against her beliefs again. But the trouble with having a thick skin and loving an argument is that you sometimes believe that other people can take it as well as you can.

Typical of my sassy comments at the time, I was teasing her about her boyfriend, and half suggesting that she go out with me instead. (I would never have done it. I hate unfaithfulness with a passion, but flirting didn't seem evil to me at the time.) One day when she seemed particularly flirty, I reminded her of the lesson of Samson: fornication is okay, breaking your vows to God and others is okay, just don't cut your hair. (At the time I had long hair and a very long beard, which she often urged me to cut.)

My life continued on a fairly consistent downward trend for several months. My hair and beard grew, as well as my casual disrespect for authority. (Only casual disrespect. My parents raised me too well to be truly disrespectful, when push came to shove.) I got an earring, against the explicit wishes of my parents, and the back seat of my car was almost continually littered with beer bottles.

And I was loving life.

But conscience is a bothersome thing. I had lots of free time, so I suppose I took a few moments during my slide into unmitigated mediocrity to sit back and think for a moment. In a moment of reflection I realized that despite my best effort to hide and repudiate the fact, I had learned some things about God, and I hadn't honestly dealt with what I knew. Back in my atheist days I was fond of believing that I would follow the truth wherever it led, but in this case I had not. Unbelief is, after all, a moral thing.

A few other very small things started to prick at my conscience. The collection of beer bottles in the back of my car was one. My mother didn't like that very much, and I had been remiss in respecting her wishes. And then one day I was visiting my brother. I was about to open a bottle of Guinness stout when something seemed odd. I checked the label and noticed that it was a non-standard bottle: 11.2 ounces, or something like that. (It comes in 12 oz. bottles nowadays.) My familiarity with the size and shape of a 12 oz. bottle convinced me that I was drinking too much.

My head hurts,

My feet stink,

And I don't love Jesus

-- "Head Hurts (etc.)" by Jimmy Buffet

On a rabble-rousing trip to Ocean City (where the first beer opened before sunrise), my lifestyle was tilting heavily to one side, but my conscience was starting to lean the other way. I recall my buddy popping a Jimmy Buffet tape into the cheap tape deck in my old car, and the lyric cited above grabbed my attention.

I ejected the tape and put something else in, saying to my friend, "My head doesn't hurt, I don’t think my feet stink, and I do love Jesus."

Being a former (but backslidden) Young Lifer himself, he was somewhat pleased. "I remember a time when you wouldn't say you loved Jesus," he said.

In fact, I don't believe I really did then. Jesus said, "He who has my commandments and keeps them, he is the one who loves me," and I certainly wasn't obeying Him. But I did have enough affection for Him that I didn't want Jimmy Buffet proclaiming the opposite from my stereo.

Fallen on hard times,

but it feels good to know,

that milk and honey's just around the bend.

-- "Fallen on Hard Times," by Jethro Tull

Jethro Tull came out with a new album that year: "Broadsword and the Beast." Ian Anderson's lyrics frequently have a religious message, and some of the words in "Fallen on Hard Times" reminded me of some of the end-of-the-world musings of my former Evangelical friends. (Mr. Anderson was singing about the phony promises of politicians, but he was using biblical imagery to paint the picture.)

My conscience tugged at me, ever-so-slightly. Was Jesus going to return some time soon? Would He be pleased with me if He did?

No, I didn't weep, wail and bemoan my sins. I'm sure I had some inane confidence that Jesus would be pleased with me -- something about sincerity, or wishing to do well, or something loose and slippery like that. I'm sure I suffered from that squishy, mealy-mouthed confidence that can't bring itself to believe that God hates sin and takes it quite seriously.

Nevertheless, it was one small thing that pushed me toward a serious contemplation of what I had done with what I knew about Jesus.

These things began to pile up, very slowly. I didn't reform my life or start going to church, but there was a slight change of attitude.

Turning Again

People what have you done?

Locked him in his golden cage.

Made him bend to your religion,

Him resurrected from the grave.

-- "My God," by Jethro Tull

Religious people are frequently superstitious, and they prefer to believe that God acts immediately -- without means -- as, for instance, causing the traffic light to change when you wish it so. Belief in God's miraculous intervention in life seems exciting. The idea that God works His will in and through His creation seems dry and uninteresting by comparison, and is likely to be criticized by some religious folk as too close to deism. But that seems to be the way God works.

When my sister called me early on a Sunday morning to invite me to church, it seemed like the oddest thing in the world to me. I should have been hung-over. (For some reason I wasn't that day.) She should have called the day before, at least, rather than at the crack of dawn, and she really had no reason to call me, in any event. Or so I thought.

Later I found out she had heard that my attitude towards God was softening. It wasn't, as I sometimes thought back then, a "divine coincidence" that she called, but it was fortuitous. It just happened to be on a day when I wasn't against the idea, so I went, and then went again that night to hear a moderately famous evangelist, who was also kind enough to go out with several of us for ice cream after his talk.

Hence conversion number two.

Or was it number one? Had I converted before and fallen away? Was I a real Christian who had “backslidden” for that year or so?

That may seem like an irrelevant question, but one of the psychoses of the Evangelical is the drive to find a fixed point in time where he was transferred from death to life, from non-Christian to Christian, from the old Adam to new life in Christ. Obviously, my experiences made that a hard call, but more importantly, they've taught me a good lesson. God isn’t interested in a one-time conversion, he's interested in a life of faith and repentance, and he works in us in many ways to accomplish that. Sometimes it's a dramatic conversion, and sometimes it's a life of steady, slow growth in understanding who God is and what He's done for sinners. Placing a big emphasis on a decision on a certain day is not wise. We should rely on Christ, not on our decisions.

But back then, as an Evangelical, I had to wonder how I would answer the classic Evangelical question: when were you saved? I wasn't sure.

This gets ahead of the story somewhat, but indulge me for a moment. That whole question about when I was really converted assumes an approach to theology that I eventually found wanting. It's too self-absorbed. It focuses on my faith rather than on God's promise.

Anyway, the issue was not entirely academic. For the Evangelical, baptism is only valid after a legitimate confession of faith, so I had to decide if I needed to be baptized yet again.

I asked one of my sister's pastors, and you can imagine what he thought. Here was this fellow with long hair, a long, not very well-trimmed beard and an earring (they weren't quite as normal back in 1982 as they are today), asking whether his first conversion really took.

Into the water I went. Well, not yet -- more on that in a minute. First, this whole exercise reminds me of Martin Luther's comments on this idea of "believer baptism."

If we were to follow their reasoning [that you must believe before baptism] we would have to be baptizing all the time. For I would take the verse, "Whoever believes," with me and whenever I find a Christian who has fallen or is without faith, I would say that this man is without faith, so his baptism is fruitless; he must be baptized again. If he falls a second time, I would again say, see, he has not faith, there must be something wrong about his first baptism. He will have to be baptized a third time, and so on and on. As often as he falls or there is doubt about his faith, I will say, he doesn't believe, his baptism is defective. (Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, P. 359)

But I hadn't the sense to read Luther back in those days.

One thing I haven't mentioned is that my sister's church believes that certain spiritual gifts are active in the church today. I had been taught, in my brief stay with the other bunch, that this wasn't so. I suppose I preferred the idea that “speaking in tongues” and all that wasn’t still around because I'd heard it done a few times and I really didn't want to have anything to do with that. It was too weird for me.

However, you don't say to God, "Lord, Lord," and then tell him what you will and won't do. If God wanted me to speak in tongues, than that's the way it's gotta be. So, when I went for my third "baptism" -- of course I was only baptized once, and that was in the Lutheran church when I was a baby: the second "baptism," in a creek in Adelphi, and the third, in the baptismal of a Baptist church borrowed for the occasion, were just aquatic adventures -- anyway, I went willing to come out of the water speaking in tongues, as my brother-in-law told me happened sometimes when this particular minister did the dunking.

I got wet all right, but the only tongue I spoke was English.

Experience is not the judge of doctrine (I knew that much even then), but I have to admit that my view of tongues was even less favorable after that experience than before. I had prayed quite seriously about the matter before I went down in the water, and nothing happened -- not that I expected it to, but I was willing, and God apparently wasn't.