There and back again: My spiritual journey these past ten years, part I

I noted in my first post that I plan to avoid discussing my personal life on this blog. Well, I’m going to go ahead and diverge from that principal. My next five posts will instead be a series on my spiritual journey, especially in the last ten years or so. This isn’t because I want to dwell on my personal life and turn this blog into a protracted discussion on what I ate for breakfast and what kind of gum I enjoy and some such. Rather, I think I owe the reader an explanation up front of what in the world someone with Lutheran convictions is doing as an active member of a Baptist church. It makes sense that anyone who wishes to follow this blog knows where I am coming from. And I can’t entirely separate the theological from the personal in accounting for this. My next five posts, therefore, will be devoted to this. It will be my “testimony” of sorts as some Baptists might say.

I was incredibly blessed to have been raised in a wonderful Christian home. I am still richly blessed by my family. My parents raised me and my brothers in a home full of love, humor, wisdom, and encouragement. Most importantly, I learned about Christ from my parents and came to faith in him at a very early age. In fact, I don’t ever really remember not believing in Jesus. Upon my confession that Jesus was my Lord and Savior I was baptized at age six. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church. The church youth and college groups were important part of my world as teenager and young adult. While in college I met a remarkable young lady who had also grown up Baptist. We fell in love and were later married. I’ve been blessed to have her as my wife for about ten years now.

I’ve never seriously considered any other belief system besides Christianity. And the only form of Christianity that has attracted me is basic, orthodox Christianity, “mere Christianity” as C.S. Lewis put it. See the Nicene creed if this still is unclear. “Liberal” or “progressive” Christianity seems to be a knock off of secularism, chasing whatever is currently faddish and popular on the secular left. Or, it is some form of Unitarianism that for some odd reason still wants to call itself Christian. I don’t doubt that there are earnest, orthodox Christians in mainline Protestant churches. However, I’ve never seen any particular reason to be associated with a denomination in which abandoning basic orthodox Christianity is tolerated and in many cases rampant among church leadership. Why bothering to go to church if believing in the basic doctrines of Christianity is optional in the first place? One might as well sleep in on Sundays and abandon religion altogether.

I’ve studied other world religions such as Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism. But none of them strike me as especially convincing. I went through a phase in my late teens and early twenties in which I read a good deal of atheist philosophers, especially Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre and others that are often called existentialists. Atheism, however, never appeared to me to have coherent answers to questions I had about the origins of the universe, life on earth, human consciousness, beauty, love, ethics, and so forth. I don’t have any major problems with evolution, but naturalistic atheism leaves much to be desired. I certainly view the idea that there can be such a thing as objective ethics in a world without God as absurd. I also see Positivism or Scientism as it is often called to be inherently self-refuting. The “new atheists” as they have been labeled don’t exactly have many “new” ideas, nor do they have many ideas that I find especially challenging to my faith.

In the end, I find the case for basic, orthodox Christianity compelling. If the reader would like further explanation of this, they are welcomed to consult Christian apologetics and philosophers, and especially the works of writers such as C.S. Lewis, Alvin Plantigna, Henri de Lubac, Ravi Zacharias, G.K. Chesteron, Fydor Dosteovsky, and so forth. I should note that I don’t think that anyone becomes a Christian simply because there are good arguments for Christianity, or because they are smart enough. They certainly don’t become Christians because they are good enough. Apologetics, philosophy, and theology have their places, but ultimately faith in Christ is the work of the Holy Spirit. After all, there are plenty of who people who are intelligent and aren’t Christians. There also plenty of people who aren’t all that intelligent who are Christians. The opposite is true in many cases as well. Of course, intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same thing either.

Growing up as Baptist in a middle class family in the South I knew little outside of modern American Evangelical Christianity. My church was conservative, but wasn’t by any reasonable definition a fundamentalist church. By the 1990s it was a growing church and had embraced many of the ideas of the church growth movement about things such as preaching, teaching, and especially worship. I had gone through phases growing up and as a young adult in which I was more serious about my faith and phases in which I was less serious about my faith. As is the case today, I struggled with sin at time and in some cases made progress, though of course I will continue to deal with sin until I draw my last breath.

Up until about ten years ago I was a fairly typical committed young Evangelical Christian. After attending a huge weekend event aimed at college students called “One Day” I became more earnest about my faith. My desire to know God at a deeper level, to seek a holier life, and ultimately to pursue his will for my life grew much more intense than it was before. This pulled me into a period of study and prayer that had some pretty unanticipated consequences. It also ultimately led me to where I am today.