How Did I Get to Here? – Part 1

Let’s start with some basic stuff about me and my relationship to religion – how I gained and lost my faith.

I grew up in a Christian household. Both my parents, separate, had faith, although differently. It was only while living with my Nana that I was surrounded by religion consistently. When I was 13, I made a commitment to Christianity. It seemed to have roots. I was baptised in ’84 at Long Lane Church in Liverpool. However, the onslaught of teenage years and all that that entails slowly drew me away. Perhaps interestingly, even at the most distant point of this period, I would still attest, at least notionally, to Christian belief.

In my early 20s, I found myself in Birmingham. Dislocated and disorientated I think I yearned for what had been consistent. I found myself wanting to go to church. I intermittently attended a Pentecostal church. Meanwhile, I asked Nana to send me some books to read. I asked for Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict Vols. 1 & 2, which I read thoroughly and carefully. In August ’92, I attended a Reinhart Bonnke evangelistic campaign meeting. I had something of a religious experience as I eventually went forward at the altar call. I decided that if this was what God wanted I would do it seriously. I changed my life – my life changed. I quit smoking etc., I married my girlfriend, I attended church every chance I had, I read and re-read Scripture and other Christian literature. For a couple of years my life was undoubtedly defined by my faith. In ’93, I did a short part-time course at a local ultra-evangelical Bible college. This led to my enrolling at Wolverhampton to study Theology and Philosophy.

People warned me that doing a degree in theology might impact my faith, and they were not wrong. All the same, it happened in slow motion. In the first year, I read a book on the Bible (People of the Book by John Barton) – this dented my certainty on there being one view of Scripture. I also read Systematic Theology Vol. 2 by Paul Tillich. This was to have a more profound and long lasting effect. Tillich’s first contribution was introduce the idea that there were legitimately alternative readings of primary doctrinal ideas – in this case, the fall, which Tillich viewed psychologically. These both instilled enough doubt in me that I decided, perhaps a little pretentiously, to see what else might be doubted, and what might stand up to that doubt.

Initially, I began with fairly insubstantial things; the creation story, the authorship of the pentateuch, some of the miracle accounts. But these soon crept into bigger issues. Two things were notable, I think: my feelings back then were that these things really had little bearing on my salvation – my being saved could not depend on whether I thought that Moses had written Exodus, or whether Gideon’s fleece had been damp in the morning thanks to God’s actions, or even whether Jesus had cursed a fig tree. Secondly, I sincerely felt a divine mandate to ask these questions and to honestly go where the answers led. If God had said, as I believed he had, Come now, let us reason together, how could he object to my sincerely reasoning about these things, even if I determined them unreasonable.

I turned my attention to bigger and more demanding questions. Over the course of my degree, I had begun to question: the virgin birth, most of the miracle accounts, traditional notions of the afterlife, the resurrection, traditional models of atonement, the uniqueness of Christianity, the incarnation. Ultimately, even God as usually understood needed to be deconstructed. I remember getting cranky with Bultmann – he was happy to demythologise Christ, but left God as he was. Tillich seemed a safer bet – his notion of God as the Ground of Being seemed to solve the problem, as well as offering alternative ways of navigating the symbols of the Christian faith.

I’ll pick this up with the next post. I’m keen not to bore anyone.