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(Belief and Conversion continued)
My own conversion
at age 19 was practically devoid of intellectual content. It was a person I perceived, not an idea, not a teaching. The
only ideas that emerged immediately from the encounter were: “Here is a person preeminent, and the world must acknowledge
his preeminence.” No other ideas or teachings came immediately out of that first exposure, but in desperation I quickly clothed
the experience with the Bible. The Bible was the word that belonged with this person, and no other word would do. I rejected
every other teaching.
The conversion experience itself was extremely simple and plain. Too simple and too plain.
I could not deal with the naked experience, so I had to clothe it. The Bible was the obvious choice, partly because I had
been reading it when the person exposed himself to me but also for another, more instructive reason: My childhood culture
steeped me in convictions that the Bible was the thing on Earth closest to God.
A lesson, trite but true, is that
one’s culture before conversion colors one’s response to and interpretation of the conversion experience itself. People are
not converted in a vacuum, and the beliefs they hold before conversion influence their beliefs after conversion.
Within
a few years of my conversion my beliefs were possibly as strange and bizarre as those of the Israelites in the time of Joshua
and the judges. If I had succeeded in converting people during those early years, possibly I would have produced yet another
strange offshoot of Christianity. Fortunately, almost no one at that time met my rigid standards, and I went off to seek
God on my own. Fortunately I had an opportunity to mature before making my message public.
Now I have had forty-some
years to put my intellect to work refining my beliefs. Because God has only very rarely taught me with explicit words, I
have had to arrive at understanding by testing ideas against his presence. The matured ideas are still strange and bizarre
by standards of the homogeneous secular culture, but for me, at least, they have become compelling. They have taken on a
life of their own. Now they are ready for exposure to the world.
It is not as though they have now reached perfection.
No, they are still growing and maturing and subtly changing as they do. Some Christians criticize science as a weak staff
to lean on because the conclusions and principles are always subject to change, and they do change. When religious teaching
comes, it comes into a specific cultural environment. When the cultural environment changes, the teaching must change to
address new needs. Science changes, but true religion must change also. The New Testament message was quite different from
the Old Testament message.
In order to remain true religion the teaching must change. But the changes must originate
not in human logic and not in order to accommodate human values but exclusively in response to the work of God’s Spirit in
the new environment.
When I came to know God, I first adhered rigidly to the letter of the Bible and then gradually
adopted the scientific myth of origins. Does this change in beliefs about origins mean that I underwent a second conversion,
from the Bible to science? Not really. My conversion was a conversion to a person, not to an idea or a book. The book was
a crutch that served well for a time and remains a most valued treasure. But in the end I came to the realization that the
scientific myth was more compatible with the person than was the account of origins in the book. The person dominated. Myths
of origins were secondary.
The thing that compels rigidity, the uncompromising doctrinal position, in religious teaching
is not love but fear. Insecurity and fear make people hold on for their very lives to specific doctrinal formulations. When
people come into a deep knowledge and love of God, they can step out of their intellectual straitjackets and open themselves
to new interpretations. Thereby they become not less faithful to God the person but more faithful, because they let him come
into a fuller portion of their experience.
There are doctrinal limits, of course. There are still important differences
between acceptable and unacceptable teachings. If we are honest with ourselves, however, we acknowledge that we do not know
exactly what they are in fine detail. In any given environment it requires a gift of God to differentiate teachings of God
from teachings of evil.
Ultimately we hope to have teachings uncolored by culture, teachings that are complete and
absolute. They would be for religion what the hoped for “theory of everything” would be for physicists. When such teachings
come, then intellect will have completed its job of providing a rationale for faith. The root of faith will still be the
person, the Spirit of God, but the rationale for faith will be the word of God at the second coming of Jesus.
So
the culture that converted me, the one I found new, different and superior to the old, was not a culture but a person. I
refer to him as a culture for this discussion: His very existence implies the need for a new culture. Just as the man Jesus
was the pre-existing embodiment of the Christian culture and compelled its eventual emergence, so the person who showed himself
to me was a proto-culture in that his existence compels the creation of a new culture. A new culture is necessary because
no existing culture does him justice.
Only a culture that honors God openly and acknowledges openly that he is above
all will do him justice. This is the kind of culture that the Christian Coalition and other right-wing Christian political
groups indeed claim they are trying to establish. I empathize strongly with them in some of their goals. To a degree they
are my own goals. But neither their methods nor some elements of their message can I accept. Until Jesus comes again, the
Christian message and method need to be of a sort that can win over, not crush, the opposition.
The right-wing Christian
political groups are not by any stretch close to winning over their opponents but instead are stimulating opponents to hone
their defenses. Rather than offering a culture that is recognizably superior to that of the homogeneous secular culture,
they are making themselves and hence Christianity itself offensive to many who are not already members of their organization.
To win by political methods what one cannot win by the power of the Spirit is not the way of Christ.
The political
Christians fear losing their children to evil. But children will learn evil no matter what the culture. Parents must work
instead to give children the resources to pull themselves out once they have slipped. But parents must also provide environments
that enable children to see the sacred and not just the secular. Where Christians have control of their environment, they
have an obligation to make it witness to God.
Though I object strongly to physical, political or even intellectual
coercion, I look with longing for the day when the culture will be truly worthy of God. At that time all who learn of it
will acknowledge its superiority, and those who belong to God will be converted.
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The Next Step
From the time God first touched me
I wanted to proclaim him, but aside from a few abortive attempts, until now I could not see how to begin. There was a fundamental
mismatch between the world and me. My experience of God was in the context of Jewish and Christian religious traditions but
in some respects was so different, I thought, that there was no basis for communication. What I have to say contains elements
that are new to Jewish and Christian traditions but not foreign to them. What I have to say helps bring on the next step
in the evolution of Christianity. Briefly, what I have to say is that people can have intimate and enduring knowledge of
God without ignoring or rejecting science.
When I first came to know God, I could not lay hold of him. I could never
catch more than fleeting glimpses. To know him intimately and well I ultimately had to give up everything, to the point of
surrendering life itself. Knowledge of the world was among the valued possessions I had to abandon. No matter what scientists
had discovered, and no matter where human reason might lead, the Bible became the only useful source of information. God
had become the only value, and in order to hold him I had to be militantly ignorant.
Many Christians today remain
in a similar state: They can hold God, but only by ignoring fairly obvious facts and shifting their capacity for reasoning
into neutral. There is no question that many of these people are true Christians. Vibrantly alive Christianity has rarely
if ever put high value on powers of intellect or sophisticated understanding of the world. Jesus thanked God for revealing
the truth to children and hiding it from the wise and intelligent (Matthew 11:25). The apostle Paul said his message was
foolishness to those who were perishing, the wise of the world (1 Corinthians 1). So being deliberately ignorant by choosing
to reject important findings of science, while not exactly a badge of honor for Christians, is not necessarily a liability.
Christians who are wise in the ways of the world and knowledgeable about it often find themselves hedging their beliefs and
losing their fervor. Religion loses its power and becomes a formality for them, while the ignorant remain fervent.
As
the most ignorant of them all I put God first, and nothing in those early years could have made me accept a single established
scientific fact that so much as appeared to challenge a word of the Bible. But after coming into an intimate and enduring
personal relationship with God, I began to loosen up. While in the army in Germany I began to realize that God did not really
require my kind of rigidity. Upon returning to college I eagerly devoured a course in historical geology that spelled out
details of organic evolution through Earth’s history. I found I could still know God as well as ever when I accepted teachings
that conflicted with the teachings of origins in the first chapters of Genesis.
The next step was even more significant.
I began to understand that scientific discoveries were more compatible with God as I had come to know him than were the Genesis
stories. Over a period of years I came to see how God’s characteristics and behavior were much more rational in a vast, ancient,
evolving world than in a small, young and arbitrarily manufactured world. Among other things, the perennial problem of evil
evaporated.
I knew from God that his relationship to his creation was more that of husband to wife than that of father
to child, and the scientific myth of gradual evolution fit well the concept of marriage. We need God, but God needs us as
well. He needs a wife who can respond to him as a person, a wife who grew up independently of himself, someone who can appraise
him, as it were, from a distance.
God’s purpose is to fill with himself those who accept him and in that way give
them his identity. He is working towards a fulfillment of himself in the creation, and his fulfillment is our fulfillment.
If he succeeds, Jesus will return and bring to life all those who loved him, and he will lead the world to his perfection.
By saying “if he succeeds” I am making myself an even worse heretic to many Christians than before, because they know
that God can do anything, he knows everything and is present everywhere: Omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent is he, they
say.
But those are ideas and words brought in by philosophers who saw God as a concept and not as the person. Everyone
who knows God knows he is preeminent and worthy, and he is fully committed to our ultimate well-being. We want fulfillment
in him, and he wants fulfillment in us. We know that he will do whatever he can to bring it about, but success is not a foregone
conclusion. The important thing always, now as then, is to know God. That is my message. If God fails, then we can die
happy knowing that he did all he could but that success was not possible. For us to have known him for as long as we did
will have been reward enough.
But please don’t misunderstand. Heaven to us as God’s wife is every bit as important
as it has been to God’s children and to God himself. Without the promise of ultimate fulfillment religion goes from being
godly to being demonic. Earlier we noted that God in contrast to demons generates feelings in those he loves of permanent
commitment and of a unity that pervades all of existence. Such an ability to love is consistent only with one who has or
seeks concrete fulfillment. So the promise of fulfillment is essential.
Fulfillment is not the current reality,
but it is the goal towards which we strive. If fulfillment were not the goal, our striving would become meaningless. So
when I say that we can die happy if God fails, I speak as the wife and not as the child. The wife’s trust is never as absolute
and unquestioning as the child’s. The wife acknowledges God’s competence and supports his goals, but she is not as confident
as the child that he will reach his goals.
God cannot be the true God unless he works towards fulfillment, and we
do not love him properly unless we share and support his goals. But from the wife’s point of view his success is not a foregone
conclusion. I do not believe that God will fail, and I sense that he knows he will not fail. That is, if he had an inkling
that he was about to fail or even that failure was a possibility for him, I think I would sense some hint of discomfort or
panic in his presence; but in him there is instead profound peace and confidence about the future.
Nevertheless,
the appropriate posture for the wife is to support him as fully as she can whether or not he fails. In no event should her
support be contingent on his success. So even if he should eventually fail, we still support him as much as we can, and he
will still have been deserving of our support.
We believe that God will succeed for two reasons: He has sent Jesus,
and he has filled us with himself. Anyone who can do those things can do the rest also, we believe. But believing is not
knowing, and the remaining obstacles are formidable. In any case the important thing is not to live in or for some unknown
future but to live in and for God now.
This way of regarding God is superficially less trusting than the way of traditional
Christianity. But the traditional way was the way of the child and was based on unconditional acceptance of words of revelation.
The wife’s trust is not so unconditional. Certain discoveries of science now compel us to regard some of those words of
revelation as true only in a restricted sense. Our knowledge of the world indeed has damaged our ability to trust a literal
interpretation of the words. But the person himself is accessible. The purpose of the words in any case was to lead us to
the person. To have the person in any case is better than to have an abstract trust in the words no matter how unconditional.
Hence the essence of my message: If you cannot accept all the words, then cling to the person. If you can accept
the words unconditionally, do not stop there but go from trusting the words to trusting the person. But what about salvation
and eternal life in heaven? If you hold God in the present age, he certainly will not abandon you in any age to come. No
assurance of his love can be firmer than the assurance that comes from his presence.
Can God do anything? No. There
are many things he cannot do. For example, he cannot willingly abandon those he loves. Neither can he restore to himself
the spirits who rebelled.
Does God know everything? The succession of life forms on Earth indicates that God is
an experimenter: He explores lots of options, sometimes in rather circuitous ways. But he is strongly goal driven. He has
a good feel for where he is going and where he intends ultimately to wind up. But I am not convinced that he has known every
detail in advance. In any case the important thing for us is not to know even one detail of the future but to participate
with him in person as he proceeds towards his goals.
Is God everywhere? God as a spirit is not constrained by physical
space and is wherever a spiritual being calls upon him to be. The important thing for us is to know him where we are and
to live in him wherever we go. All we need to know is that he will do his best to be with us. By demanding him to be with
us we help him to fulfill himself and ourselves in the world.
The reason that what I say helps to bring on the next
step in the evolution of Christianity is that inspiration from God is shaped by the worldview of those who are inspired.
Formerly those inspired by God believed that the world was small and young. Now we know that the world is vast and old.
What God told them cannot be exactly the same as what he tells us. To them God was a king or father. To us God is a husband.
Some scholars think that the old version of origins came from beliefs prevalent in the ancient Near East. In this
view the Genesis account is simply the God-inspired interpretation of contemporary beliefs that appeared in Babylonia, for
example, as the Creation Epic and the Gilgamesh Epic. If so, then the stories of origins did not originate with God, but
people inspired by God appropriated them and made them compatible with God. In modern times our myths of origins come from
scientific investigations, and through inspiration from God we appropriate these for ourselves.
To adopt new myths
of origins affects many other beliefs, but for the most part it causes changes in emphasis more than changes of substance.
For example, many Christians hold strongly to a teaching of original sin: The first man Adam was perfect, but when he sinned
he tainted all his descendants. With our current understanding of origins, we are compelled to hold as strongly as ever to
a teaching of original sin, except that “original” for us goes back much farther in time than any Adam. We come from below,
and all our thoughts and actions are tainted by the struggles and violence of our ancestors. We need to be rescued by one
from above every bit as much as any descendant of Adam.
The most significant effects from changes in beliefs about
origins are in beliefs about fulfillment. If the creation is the wife of God, would it not be disrespectful of him to vaporize
her and create her wholly anew? Could she then still be a wife, or would she become a toy? It is more appropriate for God
rather to reshape her through those who are hers, through creatures themselves who have become his, through us—through, most
importantly, Jesus. While this belief may be a significant departure from traditional Christian belief, the end result is
the same, and it is no less an accomplishment of God.
We are animals with education and money. We have come from
below, our thoughts and actions impure. Left to ourselves we struggle, try to gain an advantage over fellow beasts, try to
accumulate more than our share of possessions, and then we die. Jesus was an animal like us, but his soul was from above.
He proved that God could fill animals like us and thereby gave substance to God’s promise to fulfill himself in us. Jesus
proved that we vessels of clay could be made worthy of God. Now God has come into us also, and he has proved to us by his
presence within that we can be worthy vessels. He comes into many others as well, and by winning over enough of us, he will
find fulfillment in his creation.
All who love God seek fulfillment in him. We invite him in, and whenever we do
we take another step towards fulfillment. My purpose in writing is to hasten fulfillment. I am not writing to inform intellects,
and in particular I am not writing to foretell the future. The goal instead is to help knowledgeable people know God. Those
who reject scientific knowledge have had an advantage long enough. It is not that I despise them, because I certainly do
not. They belong in God as much as I. But the knowledgeable need to come in as well.
•
Can knowledgeable
people possibly accept a model of the world as bizarre as this, where a spiritual God has sexual relations with matter? I
cannot speak for all knowledgeable people, but physicists in particular relish bizarre models of the world. They willingly
accept the unusual and strange, but they lose patience with models that do not faithfully fit the facts of the world.
In
its ability to accommodate discoveries of science in a natural way the model presented here is better than traditional models,
so yes, just as many have been able to accept the traditional model, some knowledgeable people should be able to accept this
model. If anyone does accept, however, it will not be because of compelling arguments but because of an emotional assent
to the superiority of this God-inspired culture. And that assent can come only from the conviction that the Spirit of God
can generate.
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“What must I do to be saved?”
When the jailer
at Phillippi asked Paul and Silas what he had to do in order to be saved (Acts 16:30), his words flowed from relief at the
resolution of extreme personal crisis. Moments before he was sure he had to kill himself; now he knew he could live after
all. But he owed his good fortune to his prisoners, Paul and Silas, who earlier had been proclaiming the “way of salvation”
in the city. The jailer now had to find out for himself what this “way” was. He owed it to himself as much as to Paul and
Silas.
Many since have asked the jailer’s question but in quite a different tone of voice. Often people want to
know what the minimum is. In order to lay claim to rewards magnificent beyond imagining in the life to come, what is the
minimum they must do now? This question is like the questions asked of Jesus by the law expert (Luke 10) and the rich young
man (Matthew 19), who sought to justify themselves.
This book does not address such questions. Just as God’s forgiveness
has never been a major concern for me, neither has personal salvation. My concerns, once I came to know God, were and remain
who he is and how to improve my relationship with him. The way to life and peace for me is in the answers to these latter
questions.
If this book diminishes the secular and enhances the sacred in the world, it will have succeeded. For
readers, if it diminishes the secular and enhances the sacred in individual lives, it will have succeeded. The book has served
this purpose already for me, so for me it is already a success. But what about others?
This book may cause a problem
where it should not. In it I talk a great deal about personal, conscious knowledge of God. Committed Christians who are
not sure they have any such knowledge might go away anxious and concerned about their lack.
If Christians are stimulated
to seek God more fervently, fine. If they are stimulated to self-doubt and anxiety of a sort that generates a downward spiral
into more self-doubt and more anxiety, not fine.
Paul’s answer to the jailer was as simple as could be: “Believe
in the Lord Jesus.” I would not make the answer more complicated. Anyone who is attentive to the words of Jesus and has
affection for the person of Jesus knows God already, whether the knowledge is explicit and conscious or not.
Because
God is a spirit, personal knowledge of him is not always easy to recognize in oneself. For people to explore different feelings
and try to pick out a feeling that is the same as God is as futile as it is dangerous. God is not a feeling but a person.
Yet it is possible to feel close to him even as it is possible to feel separated from him. The Psalms of the Old Testament
witness to both kinds of feeling in great profusion.
If what I have written causes committed Christians to begin
the downward spiral into anxiety, then let them return to their foundation, their acceptance of Jesus and his words. Build
upwards from there. This book has several purposes, but to accuse or burden the committed is not one of them.
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