Journey from Faith

I've hinted at it a lot, but I've never really talked about why I finally lost my faith. I don't know that it's a particularly interesting story, but I've been talking more to people who were like me and have gone through similar things. I've also been reading over at Godless in Dixie, which you should definitely check out. Then yesterday morning, I received a very troubling message from a close friend. It wasn't about my faith, exactly, but it was about the type of person I am. It makes me want to write about this part of my life. If you've read my writing before, you may notice that what follows will lack a little bit of my normal snark and "cleverness." I can't seem to muster it when re-telling this story.

I guess I should start at the beginning.

I grew up in a typical southern West Virginia home in a lot of ways. My mother was deeply religious. She'd grown up Methodist but began going to an independent Baptist church when they moved to our little town. My father was irreligious, though I wouldn't call him an atheist. He was "godless" in the traditional sense — he had grown up in church but liked drinking and smoking and cursing too much to be a regular churchgoer.

The rest of us attended an independent Baptist church of the more fundamentalist variety. There were sermons against drinking and smoking and rock-and-roll music. We attended the weekly Awana meetings and memorized scripture. My mom took a lot of it with a grain of salt, but there was one thing we did not take casually: the Bible. The Bible was the literal word of God — inspired (literally, "God-breathed") and "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness" we were told. There were no errors in the Bible and it was the final authority on all matters. We didn't believe in evolution: the Bible told us the world was created in six days. We didn't believe in homosexuality, because the Bible called it "an abomination."

Like most small independent churches, ours was riddled with in-fighting. We eventually left and bounced around a couple more, but they all had common characteristics. They all believed that the Bible was the inerrant word of God and the final word on anything. They all believed that Jesus Christ represented the sole hope for fallen man to escape eternal punishment in hell and enjoy a blessed eternity in the presence of God. And they all taught that Christians were in the minority and were under constant assault from the prevailing culture. They were also all very heavily influenced by the local Bible college, whose students attended each of these churches.

In college, I attended a broadly evangelical church that was of the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination. They were more charitable to non-Christians, to be sure, and supported a more nuanced understanding of scriptural authority, probably because most of the parishioners were involved in university life. They held that the scripture was infallible in matters of faith and inerrant where it was meant literally. This meant that there were some instances of scripture that were to be understood metaphorically, though we might disagree about which these were. Yet we still clung tightly to the concept of supernaturalism. Jesus was born of a virgin. Moses parted the Red Sea. Jonah was swallowed by a big fish.

I returned to my home town after school and began attending an American Baptist church, the big church in the center of town and the one where I was married. American Baptist churches are typically more liberal than their Southern Baptist brethren, but through a fluke of history (i.e., the American Civil War), Southern Baptists have had relatively little inroads in the state and American Baptists have remained a very conservative denomination. Our church was one of those that a lot of the "important" people in my small town attended. That church had a sort of "convenient evangelicalism," that is, they believed the Bible completely, unless it interfered with their social or political aspirations. There was the sort of anti-intellectualism that accompanies life in most evangelical churches, too, and I was put off by that.

Sometime shortly after I began attending there, I began reading Reformed and Calvinist theology. I was troubled by passages in the Bible that seemed to clearly say that God predestined all that happened, and most contemporary evangelical authors shied away from the subject. I dove headfirst into it and was soon a closet Calvinist. I say "closet Calvinist," but I wasn't really able to disguise that for very long. I was a deacon and a Sunday School teacher in the church. I would frequently bring up the topic of historical Baptists who were well-known Calvinists.

I should mention here that there was a lot more going on my life. I was married, working, playing music sometimes, and I had a lot of other interests. But theology was a special passion and it took up a lot of my time. I read the Bible, prayed, went to church two or three times a week, and even hosted Bible studies in my home.

Like a lot of Christians, I worried if I was really saved. I worried that my professions of faith — there were many — were sincere. And then there was sin. Sin was a big problem in my life. The Bible said that if any man is in Christ he is a new creature, but in many ways I felt like I had the same problems with sin that non-Christians did.

Another aspect of my experience was being in a semi-leadership position. As I said, I was active. I was a Sunday School teacher, a deacon, I sang in the choir and played other "special music" occasionally. There is an aspect of this that is a bit of "seeing the sausage made," if you take my meaning. I will relate one story in particular.

There was a couple my age attending the church that I knew pretty well; I had gone to high school with both of them. The woman's family had been active in the church for years. The man had grown up Roman Catholic.

Now, to many Baptists, Roman Catholics may as well be Sikhs or Shintoists. They are not Christians. (I'm not going to go into the why of it. I get bored even thinking about it now.) So while we all hoped that this man believed in his heart and had gotten saved, he had made no public profession of his faith. He had not been baptized as an adult.

The pastor came to me, as a deacon and this man's Sunday School teacher, and made a special request. "Jack," he said, "I believe the Lord is leading **** to be baptized. I want you to pray that he will come forward this Sunday morning for baptism."

My heart was very heavy with this request. I prayed diligently for it all week. "Lord, if it be Your will and if Your name would be glorified, I pray that **** will come forward for baptism. Give comfort to his friends and family that You have saved him, and raise up Your name among our community. I ask these things in the name of Jesus and for His glory, Amen."

That Sunday morning came and as is customary in most evangelical churches, a time of "invitation" was given at the close of service. Imagine my joy when this man stepped forward immediately, walked to the front of the sanctuary, and requested that he be baptized. My heart was so full of love and faith at that moment. I remember the tears in his family's eyes and the pastor looking at me. "Prayer really does work!" he said.

There was a baptismal service sometime later and I continued to interact with the couple. After a few months, I believe, I was having a conversation with the man and we began discussing his decision to be baptized. "What made you decide that morning to come forward for baptism?"

"Well, I'd discussed it with the pastor a couple of weeks before that and he said I should come down on that particular morning."

I was stunned. The pastor had orchestrated the whole thing, and for reasons I cannot imagine, gave me this behind-the-scenes role. But it was a ruse.

Incidents like these strangely did not shake my faith. I mean, I lost a great deal of respect for the pastor, but not for God. Man was totally depraved, I was learning in my Calvinist studies, and we should never be shocked at wickedness in human beings. But God is good and faithful and just.

By the summer of 2002, I had grown cold toward that particular church. Besides that, I wanted to go somewhere that taught the things I was coming to believe.

After an internet search, I discovered a Reformed Baptist church an hour away from where we lived. Just on a lark one Sunday, I suggested to my wife that we drive down and see what it was like. We made the trek, but due to a misunderstanding about the address, we didn't make it in time for the service. The group met in a community building. We arrived just as they were dismissing.

The pastor met us and invited us to come to his house for dinner. We accepted and spent the afternoon with he and his wife, learning about the church and sharing our Christian experiences. This was the beginning of a seven-year tenure at the church.

We drove an hour every week for seven years. We usually stayed the afternoon, sometimes having a monthly church dinner, other times going home with families who graciously fed us and got to know us.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Reformed faith (including the various Reformed, Reformed Presbyterian, and Reformed Baptist denominations), it is an "all in" sort of theology. We believed in an austere worship, with only the elements prescribed by the Bible. This meant a preeminence of preaching God's word, and a typical sermon would last between an hour and hour-and-a-half. There was no choir, no "special music," no elaborate holiday programs. We were sabbatarian, so no one worked on Sundays. We believed in the ten commandments. Everyone read theology. Men were expected to lead their families in daily family worship times. Most of the families home-schooled their children, though that was not mandated. There were conferences — for men, for women, for teens, for entire families even — where one could spend your vacation and listen to preaching all day long.

I would add that there was real love. As far as I am from that life now, I can say that I have never known a more sincere and loving group of Christians. They were human, to be sure, but they truly believed the Bible was God's word, that He had chosen them for salvation for which they were in no way worthy, and that the world was a sad place where millions perished without the saving knowledge of Christ.

Reformed theology is tight, too. If you want to meet a Christian who has an answer for everything, talk to a Reformed pastor. All the conundrums of scripture have been meticulously worked out for generations: the unpardonable sin, Jepthah's daughter, how many times the cock crowed when Peter denounced Jesus, multiple marriages, are all dealt with systematically and thoroughly. They do not blink at the more difficult parts of scripture that the broad evangelical church shied away from, and that is to their credit.

But it may also be why I am no longer a Christian today.

It was expected that all church members read the entire Bible. We believed in the unity of scripture and came to it with a sense of wonder and awe. I've written about it before, but it is a really wonderful thing to believe the world works the way it is described in the Bible. We believed in a God who could speak galaxies into being; who delivered his people with plagues of locusts and flies; who fed His prophet for years during a famine (together with a widow and her son) from a small jug of oil and a jar of flour; and who commanded the crippled to walk.

But the most wondrous thing of all was that the Lord of glory condescended to save His people from their sins, giving them eternity and freedom from sin. It was a small wonder that He could raise the dead; it was a very great wonder that He could bring life to spiritually dead men and women. I was deeply grateful that He saved a wretch like me.

And I knew I was a wretch. I had the witness of my own heart against me — a heart that was depraved as any, but which still spoke judgment in my spirit. I was a sinner, saved solely by the grace of God. As a Christian, I also had the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who witnessed to my spirit that I was saved, but still convicted me.

Yet, I still had remaining sin.

Reformed theologians — especially the Puritans — had written a great deal about this subject. They even had a term — "besetting sin," as in, "the sin that so easily besets us." I had my besetting sin and it was a problem. For both the sake of brevity and discretion and I won't go into detail here, but it's something many (most?) Christians struggle with to a greater or lesser degree.

Then there was the fact that we worshiped an omniscient God. Where could I hide from God? If I ascended to heaven, He was there. If I made my bed in Sheol, He was there. When He comes in judgment, men will cry out for the rocks to hide from the Almighty, but He knows the wickedness of our hearts. Our thoughts, which Jesus taught were as wicked as deeds, were not hidden from the Creator of man.

I turned to the Bible for help with this and I learned that I was not alone in this struggle. The Apostle Paul, in fact, the first great Christian theologian, had struggled with this. In his letter to the church at Rome, he writes about it.

For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.

That is some truly tortured prose, but clearly the apostle was tortured in his heart and mind as well. And this captured how I felt. I wanted to do good, but I could not. The evil I did not want to do was right there with me.

I kept returning to this passage. I read the words over and over: "If I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me." Hmmm. "It is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me." So, Paul wasn't committing the sin? It was sin itself? But how could that be? Sin has no will. It is just a thing. And he told the Corinthians that they were new creatures in Christ and old things had passed away. And what about John writing that we know that we love Jesus if we keep His commandments? What does that mean if we don't keep them?

"If I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me."

At some point, my head kind of exploded at this logic. "Bullshit, Paul. It's not 'sin in you.' It's you." And it was me, not "sin living in me." I wished it weren't me, but it was.

I came to the conclusion then that only a Calvinist could. I decided that the words of the Bible were indeed true, that God was loving and gracious, that all I had known and believed were still true, only I was not among the elect. I was a goat, not a sheep. I was condemned and would one day bow the knee and confess that Jesus was Lord before being cast into a lake that burns with eternal fire.

It's really difficult to explain how this feels to someone who has never believed any of it. I woke up every morning believing the God of the universe had His face and His strong arm set against me. Any foul providence that crossed me was evidence of His judgment. Any good thing that happened to me was simply common grace (the rain that falls on the just and the unjust) and not to be taken as a good sign. Any Calvinist will tell you it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God.

Yet it did not drive me to Christ. Instead, I was in a very dark place for awhile. I drank a lot. I even planned on killing myself a couple of times and suppose I might have, except that it would have hastened my eternal punishment.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that if I were reprobate, I might as well not concern myself too much with Christianity. I decided to indulge in things I would not as a Christian.

Now by that, I don't mean sin. I had indulged in sin as a Christian and continued to do so. No, I meant something much more dangerous: critical thinking.

I started looking more closely at everything I believed, both in regards to religion and everything else. I freed myself to read more about science, a subject I steered clear of for most of my life. I tried to think about more diverse viewpoints without jumping to conclusions about those who held them.

Then a funny thing happened along the way: I started not believing everything I once did. Once I started looking critically at the Bible, evaluating it the way I would another book, certain things became obvious. The first was that it didn't always agree with itself. The unity of scripture was critical. We believed that all of scripture was about the revelation of Jesus Christ as the savior of the human race. But when I read it with a more critical mind, it seemed obvious that this was not true. In fact, there was very little in the Old Testament about a messiah, and it was obvious that the messiah was to come to the nation of Israel. All the tortured readings of Jewish custom (which begin with the writers of the New Testament) seemed an incredible stretch.

There was also the fact that we really had no idea who wrote the Bible. While certain books claimed particular authorship, there was no corroborating evidence that this was valid. And some (such as the letter to the Hebrews) we simply had no idea at all. And who decided all of these books were the ones included in the first place? James and Paul seem to disagree about key matters of regarding faith, Paul almost never quotes Jesus or refers to anything he did while on earth, and even by its own testimony, the early church did not take all apostolic authority as seriously as we did.

Finally, I started thinking about the science behind what I was reading. Obviously, if you accept supernaturalism, then anything is possible. But some of it didn't make any sense. There are stars in the sky that are millions of light years away. How has their light already reached us if the universe is just a few thousand years old? And why doesn't the Bible talk about dinosaurs? I mean, some theologians say that there are a few mentions, but these things were huge and we find their bones everywhere. How is it that no one wrote, "Also, there are these ginormous lizards running all over the place!" I mean, not just in the Bible, but in any other ancient literature from the same time. Don't get me started on Noah's ark.

When I finally had worked up the nerve to question foundational assumptions, I could see the outcome ahead of time. If there is a God, then why don't we hear from him now, the way the prophets did? If what the Bible said was true, then why did he create a world that didn't seem to support that? Why did everyone assume that the version of God they worshiped in their tradition was the one, true God? How could you tell without being inside each particular tradition?

I mean, if God, who is the very ground of being for everything that has ever existed and whose name means "I am" is really there, then why is he the most difficult thing in the world to prove? Shouldn't his existence be something easily proved without having to resort to faith? I understood that faith was the "evidence of things not seen," but what sort of sense does it make to command belief and then hide from humanity for thousands of years?

Finally one day, I realized that I didn't believe in God anymore.

It was some time before I ever called myself an agnostic, and I've only recently begun referring to myself as an atheist. I still prefer telling people I am "post-Christian," meaning that I am still firmly rooted in habits of mind and the stories of the Christian Bible.

A lot of other stuff happened to me during this same time, and it would be fair to say I had what was called a "mid-life crisis." It would not be fair to then assume that my loss of faith was simply a product of that process. In fact, I think that losing my faith drove that train rather than the other way around.

I could write a lot about how my life and thinking have changed because of my loss of faith, but that's best for another time perhaps. I will say that I occasionally have a type of nostalgia for Christianity, though I do not wish to return to the life I had.

The 2nd and 3rd chapters of Genesis tell us about the fall of man. They tell us that Adam ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After he does, God says, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil." Right there, at the very start of the book, is a hint that "god" is not so very different from us, if we eat fully of the tree of knowledge. It is a tacit admission by the author that knowledge is the true path to transcendence and that our gods will be humbled as we grow in understanding. Jesus told his disciples that they would know the truth and it would set them free, though they could not even imagine what it was that enslaved their minds.

My path has been very different than most and I have been a late learner. I hope my own children's minds will not be enslaved to ideas that have outlived their usefulness. That is my hope for all of us.