Why I Am a Christian 
(for Willow Creek Defenders Coffeehouse)
-Paul Clayton Smith, 3/31/00

PREFACE:

Since I am an avid reader of apologetic material, and since this is an Apologetics coffeehouse, you may be expecting a piece on how apologetics won me over.  This is not that sort of piece.

But my story may help to illuminate something closely related to one's motivation for doing apologetics.  Why do so many arguments proceed with each side merely becoming more adamant and entrenched, while so few of them ever seem to result in either party changing his or her mind?  It is with that question in mind that I reflected on my own story; I hope to leave you with a picture of who I used to be, who I am now, and how I came to change from the one into the other.

WHERE DO YOU WANT TO BE BORN TODAY...?

My mother was (and is) a conservative and orthodox Catholic, and my (now late) father was a non-practicing protestant.  I was born, baptized and raised as a Catholic.

As early as age six, I could be described as a skeptical sort of kid - you might say I had an overactive baloney detector.  For instance, I have no recollection of belief in a real Santa Claus or Easter Bunny.   Once I told my parents that I was going to put a plastic tooth under my pillow to see if I could fool the Tooth Fairy.  I did, and the following morning, there was a quarter-sized washer under my pillow.  (Am I dating myself by revealing that a quarter was the going price for a tooth when I was a kid?.)   Despite an innate desire to trust people, my tendencies leaned towards skepticism - even early on.

An early memory of this skepticism in action is the Thanksgiving food drive from when I was about six years old.  I asked my mother why this only happened once a year if poor people were really hungry all year long.  She was impressed by the question, and so she had me write it down on a piece of paper, which she mailed to the church.  It got printed in the church bulletin, with a cutesy little title like "from the mouths of babes," or something like that.  Mom was proud, and I was eating up all of the attention.

Well, in my little six-year-old mind, I thought I had saved the world's poor from between-Thanksgiving starvation, and I was headed for greatness!  But the next week there was no food drive.  Ditto for the week after that and the week after that.  I privately wondered why they printed my letter and then forgot about it.  

A few weeks later, I wanted to bring a can of soup with us to church.  I was told "no," and a little bit too impatiently.  My cute little insight was no longer convenient.  I couldn't understand this at all.  Was church just about nodding convincingly with the priest on Sundays?  Was the message something you left at the door on the way out?  Didn't living it out matter?  For some reason, my six-year old eyes just couldn't see all the "adult" complications that dictated that the church couldn't really use my can of soup that week.

Another surprisingly clear memory of mine is that of the first time I heard a professing Christian adult take the Lord's name in vain - when I had just learned the Ten Commandments a week or so prior.  I couldn't make sense of this.  I probably formed my opinions based on too little evidence, but from the small slice of church-life that I perceived through a child's eyes, things just didn't add up very well for me.

Well, I went through confirmation in the seventh grade, mostly because of inertia; that's just when kids in Catholic school went through it.  I didn't know if I believed everything I was saying I did, but I didn't feel like I had the freedom to tell anybody that.  There was just this expectation that you'd do it.  Some important bishop type guy with a fancy hat came in to do the ceremony, and it would really have been rude not to answer his questions the way our little slips of paper said we were supposed to.  So confirmed I was.

High-school was theologically uneventful for me until junior year.  Then, I met this new teacher who would take his students to Christian rock concerts.  Christian rock!  ...what a strange idea, I thought.  This was new and interesting - I had very little exposure to any sort of Christianity outside of Catholicism, and the teacher seemed genuinely interested in us.  I started going, and I really enjoyed these events.  After the second one, I started going up for the "altar call" at the end.  Not just once, but at every one of them after that.   They would say things from the stage like "If you're not sure you've given your life to Christ..." and well, I wasn't sure.  I didn't really get what they were saying at the time; I was never really certain that I had jumped through whatever hoop you had to jump through to become a Christian.  I would "give Him my life," but then take it back a week later, and so I figured I had to give it to Him again at the next opportunity.  I thought that if I died after giving Him my life I would go to heaven, but if I died after I took it back and started sinning again, well then I would go to hell.  This was all very confusing.

The depth of my conversion became apparent when this teacher tried to organize a before-school Bible study.  "What's that got to do with Christian rock?" I asked.  I seriously did not see the connection.  There were these really fun, high-energy events, and then there was the Bible, which just struck me as the most boring thing someone could possibly set out to study.  I mean, the whole point of Christian rock was to be different from Catholic mass, wasn't it?  And since they read stuff out loud from the Bible at Catholic mass, wouldn't we be better off just to get our teaching from the Christian rock lyrics?  Needless to say, I didn't go to many of these studies.

PICKING A SIDE...

"He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters." Matthew 12:30 (NIV)

My atheism began in my freshman year of college.  Up until this point in my life, I had never really asked myself why to believe in something.   My worldview was just kind of thrown together; whatever worked at the time or fit into my environment was what I went with.  Well, I was making some new friends now, and the freedom of campus living really magnified my sense that for the first time in my life, I was the one in control of things.   

Then came my moment.  I had gotten involved in some pretty immoral activities, like vandalism and theft.  During one of these escapades, I had a moment of conscience.  I asked the friend I was with if he believed in God.  He replied without hesitation.  "No, do you?"  I thought for a moment about saying "yes."  Something told me that would be the right thing to do.  I didn't do it.  I rationalized instead.   I asked myself what religious convictions I had that were not simply ideas inherited from others -  I had never been given any reasons why I should believe they were true.  I said "no," and continued on.  I had made my choice.  I was an atheist.

Well, my sense of "being in control" made me want to be able to defend my new worldview.  I started taking an interest in things philosophy, and so did my friend.  We would go to philosophy class and hear one thing from the professor there, and then we'd go to religion class and hear something completely contrary from that professor.  This amused us to no end.  When we were taking different classes the next semester, we would even go to each others' religion class to help stir up arguments.  The next paper I wrote for my philosophy class was an attempt to refute the idea that suicide was immoral.  Hey, if we're all ultimately just a bunch of sub-atomic particles banging around in space, this is a no-brainer!

This "enlightenment" phase was doing wonders for my self-image.  All my life, I had been a rather introverted, melancholy sort, and most of my attempts to fit into various social groups were rather clumsily executed.  But now, I had a growing confidence in my identity as a "free thinker."  I had thrown off the shackles of organized religion.  Life felt good.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES...

'If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.' Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Well, ideas have consequences.  I consciously and actively embraced hedonism.  For me, this was simply a matter of doing the math; if there was no God, then there was no afterlife.  If there was no afterlife, there was no moral accountability.  The only thing that mattered was avoiding actions or consequences that would run contrary to my self-interest.  Some people found my views disturbing.  They would ask questions like "what if everyone adopted your philosophy?"  I usually replied "they don't and won't, in my experience."  They would try to give me reasons why I should behave this way or that way, but they didn't understand that I knew that there was no objective or ultimate reason why I had to be a moral person.  It was their word against mine, and if we're all just dust in the end anyway, then other people's opinions about my morality didn't ultimately matter.

I brought some misfortune on myself from time to time, but I never really called my worldview into question over it.  I would just blame someone else for my problems, or else I would chalk it up to having made a self-interest miscalculation.  I was satisfied that my worldview was true, and I was going to perfect my implementation of it.  "Enlightened self-interest" was my new mantra.  The idea of the finality of death haunted me, but the fact that I believed it also made me a bit smug.  University of Texas Philosophy professor J. Budziszewski describes this sort of smugness well in his own story:

"...Because I believed things that filled me with dread, I thought I was smarter and braver than the people who didn’t believe them. I thought I saw an emptiness at the heart of the universe that was hidden from their foolish eyes. Of course I was the fool."

SWEET SOPHISTICATION...

"But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:8 (NAS)

After a couple years of learning things the hard way, my "youthful exploits" started getting a bit old.  I finally got a job that seemed to have a future.  "Respectability" started seeming like a commodity worth attaining.  I started wondering about civic organizations for atheists.  The social connections that religious activity provided could be useful, but Christians annoyed me.  They would complain about things like drinking and swearing, or they would gossip behind my back over the fact that I was an atheist (and they thought I couldn't hear).  I thought that Bible-bangers were mostly just interested in not being offended... in making sure that the people around them were manicured and groomed to their liking.  

I tried an Ethical Humanist Society meeting, but was I was put off the stodgy atmosphere (you know, the suede elbow-patch crowd?)  I think I was the only non-socialist there that morning.  I asked one of them why one would want to become an ethical humanist.  He told me "because you want to be a moral person, and you don't need a deity to tell you so."  That was no answer to me.  I didn't want to be a moral person.  I just wanted to find a better strategy for pursuing self-interest.  

Eventually, I read Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged, and I was instantly infatuated with her philosophy of "Objectivism," since as luck would have it, self-interest was at its core.  Objectivism created a useful illusion for me; I had come to realize that atheism logically led to the conclusion that life was meaningless.  In Objectivism, I found a surrogate meaning that could make me forget about ultimate meaning.

A CHINK IN THE ARMOR:

"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-- his eternal power and divine nature-- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." Romans 1:20 (NIV)

Occasionally I would ponder some of the "big questions" in life like "why is there something rather than nothing?" or "where did life come from?"  Sometimes I would feel a bit of trepidation at the thought that something called "evolution" really explained all of life.  I usually repressed these sorts thoughts rather quickly.  They frightened me.  I mean, what if I was really wrong?  I couldn't spend much time entertaining that possibility without really becoming anxious, so I avoided it.

Somehow, my mother got me to read a book called Life After Life, which was about alleged cases of clinically dead people having out-of-body experiences before being resuscitated.  The book bugged me a bit, since if an afterlife - or God - existed, I was risking my eternity.  My self-talk gradually took on a slightly different tone.  "If God exists, He wouldn't punish me for not believing something there's no evidence for, right?"  "Hey, I'm a sincere person, right?  What kind of God would punish a sincere person who just couldn't swallow some hypocritical religious stuff?"  This gave way to defensiveness... "If He didn't leave us any way for me to know what's true for certain, then it's His own fault if I don't worship Him!  What kind of schizophrenic deity would plunk someone down in the middle of a world with dozens of religions and expect him to pick the right one?!"  

Just to hedge my bet, though, I flung a little "prayer" skywards:  "Alright, if You exist, then give me an out-of-body experience so I'll just know.  Short of that, I'm not believing anything."  I suppose I became more of an agnostic than an atheist, but  I still couldn't bring myself to think that Christianity was right.  It's funny, but at the time, I couldn't name a single Christian in my life that I respected intellectually or morally.   Like many, I judged God by the mistakes of people who claimed to represent Him, and I found Him wanting.

DAMASCUS ROAD RUNS THROUGH ILLINOIS...

Rom 2:4 "...Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness leads you toward repentance?" 

Earlier I read you some of J. Budziszewski's words on his own process of becoming a nihilist.  Here he talks about his escape from nihilism:

"How then did God bring me back? I came, over time, to feel a greater and greater horror about myself. Not exactly a feeling of guilt, not exactly a feeling of shame, just horror: an overpowering sense that my condition was terribly wrong. Finally it occurred to me to wonder why, if there were no difference between the wonderful and the horrible, I should feel horror. In letting that thought through, my mental censors blundered. You see, in order to take the sense of horror seriously — and by now I couldn’t help doing so — I had to admit that there was a difference between the wonderful and the horrible after all. For once my philosophical training did me some good, because I knew that if there existed a horrible, there had to exist a wonderful of which the horrible was the absence. So my walls of self- deception collapsed all at once."

If any of you have seen film The Matrix, you may remember a rather potent line where a mysterious girl named Trinity whispers to our protagonist Neo (played by Keanu Reeves):

The truth is out there, Neo. It's looking for you and it will find you, if you want it to.

Looking back on things, I wasn't a very diligent seeker of truth.  My emotions and my situations dictated what I wanted to believe, and my intellect would dutifully follow those desires.  So if truth and I were going to make acquaintances, it was going to have to find me.  Though I had softened a little bit, I was still belligerent and spiteful towards God.

Well in the midst of my spite, it was God who opened the door.  A few good things happened to me.  Not big "winning the lottery" sorts of things, but little things, like occasional solutions to problems before they happened.  I had found a good job at a printing company, and I had worked my way up to running the printing presses.  I had a new girlfriend who was very smart, very funny, and was really "in my corner."  For the first time, it looked like I might be in a relationship with potential.

During one particular week, I was in an unusually good mood.  A better mood, in fact, than I could remember being in for quite some time.  To this day I can't explain exactly how or why this happened, but I had a 30-mile drive to work, and one day on my way there every single light was green.  This was so out of the ordinary that I was really spooked by it; the whole drive just had some kind of "twilight zone" feel to it.

I went in to start running my press that morning, and I felt an emotion that I didn't know what to do with.  I felt gratitude.  Not just happiness that things were going smoothly, but a warm sense of thankfulness that I couldn't direct at anyone in particular.  Tell me, what exactly is an atheist supposed to do when he feels gratitude towards the cosmos?  Thank the stars?  It had to go somewhere, but I had nowhere to direct it.

Well it's been seven years now, and I still haven't found words to describe what happened next.  For some reason, as I stood there running my press, I said to nobody in particular, "there is a God."  In that moment, it was as if a dam that had been holding God back just crumbled into powder, and He came flooding in like a torrent.  I don't know how else to explain it.  I experienced a presence that was unlike anything I had ever heard about.  I didn't hear anything audible, but I knew that He knew my name.  I felt that He was right there - present, in the very room I was in - looking at me - and happy to see me!   I actually looked around to see if any of my coworkers sensed the same thing.  "How could I have missed this?"

Then it occurred to me how I had treated Him for the past several years - how belligerent, defiant and spiteful I had been towards Him.  He was still present, and I felt an intense level of shame over my choices, my attitude, and my realization that He had been there the whole time, seeing everything I had done and knowing every thought I thought.  I whispered "I am so, so sorry."  I sensed a reply that floored me:  "I know."  I felt a mercy so staggeringly vast that it frightened me.  It was irresistible. I did not know that I had been filled with angst for so long until I became aware of it by its sudden absence.

At this point I was in tears.  I didn't know what to do.  I had invested about as little in my prayer for evidence as a person could, and I knew that I wasn't the sort of person who deserved to have a prayer answered.  I knew nothing of substance about the God of the Bible, but that day I knew that the God who existed was a God who answered prayers for people who didn't deserve it.  I had to shut my press off and go outside, and in a gravel parking lot, I got down on my knees and said "Whoever you are, I am yours.  I am so sorry for all the things I've thought about You.  I'll do anything you ask."  I had my equivalent of an out-of-the-body experience; I had all the evidence I needed to believe there was a God.

NOT QUITE THERE YET...

I would love to be able to tell you that my journey into the Christian faith was smooth sailing from there, but that's far from the case.  But many things permanently changed inside me that morning, and so I never became able to rationalize my experience away as anything but a genuine encounter with the Creator of the universe.  Tears of joy were a foreign experience to me, not something I had been conditioned to expect.  The sense of peace that flowed through me never left.  I was able to stop abusing alcohol and restrain my previously explosive temper.  I had a sense of conscience about racist jokes that I used to laugh at, or to my shame, even tell.  I stopped.  Most notably, I had an irresistible desire to worship this God - and I didn't even know what worship was.

But my journey was far from over at this point.  My singular desire in life was - and continues to be - to know this God who reached out to me.  But what I encountered in my first five years of searching for a place to do this didn't help.  I found religion that was agenda-based, rule-based, fear-based, superstition-based and guilt-based.  I especially couldn't reconcile a lack of awe amongst worshippers with God I had encountered.  That God was awe-inspiring, and He seemed to be offering a loved-based deal.

In time I came to find a fit between the God of my encounter and the God of some faith community, and that community was what I will call Evangelical or Biblical Christianity.

A PLACE TO CALL HOME...

After about five years, I finally found Willow Creek, my current home church.  People there were responding in the manner I would expect from someone who knew the God that called me by name.  Anything less than the relentless pursuit of Him was inconceivable.  Here was a group of people who seemed to be seeking to root out hypocrisy in themselves instead of pointing it out in others; they were talking about things like restoring wounded relationships, serving the poor in radical ways, and they seemed to be worshipping with sincerity, awe, and reverence.  I don't mean to paint a picture of my church as infallible; I join most Protestants in believing that constant reform is needed in the church.  But where others approached scripture with a personal agendas to filter it through, I found an institution that seemed to take seriously the need to approach scripture with the intent of conforming their personal agendas to its agenda.

Now false or manufactured emotionalism is a dangerous thing.  I certainly hope that nobody buys into my testimony on the basis of emotions alone.  It is important to remember that simply feeling that something should be true does not make it true.  My tendency towards skepticism made apologetics - or studying the arguments for the truth of the Christian faith - the perfect next-step for me.

THE CLAIM...

"The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him." Proverbs 18:17

Apologetics started out confidently for me.  I read a few books, and found some of the arguments so persuasive that I wanted to single-handedly set out to banish atheism from the face of the earth with this superior logic I had found.

Then came hard opposition - I started reading the atheists' rebuttals to the arguments for Christianity.  Frankly, I found some of them quite convincing.  This troubled me.  I had bought into the myth of certainty - the idea that intellectual arguments could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt who was right.  I read a lot of Christian material on the internet, and as a result, I bought into some shaky and divisive ideas about what the Bible taught on certain subjects, and then I encountered evidence that the things I was supposed to believe might well be false.  

The process of reconciling the skeptic in me with the child who had found a loving Heavenly Father was no easy ride.  But I kept searching for answers, and I even began praying for wisdom and discernment.  I believe God honored those prayers.   As time went by, I began to find real answers for many of the questions that were troubling me the most.  These were not "pat" answers or platitudes.  I encountered people that devoted their lives to digging into just these sorts of questions, and as my quest progressed I started receiving help from people farther down the road than me.   Over time, I saw a pattern emerging:  Eventually, when all the data is in on a question, and all the ways of analyzing it have been compared, the preponderance of the evidence tilts heavily in favor of Christianity.

Do I have absolutely every question answered with crystal clarity?  No way.  But as C.E.M Joad said (The Recovery of Belief, 1955)... "The central core of the Christian faith is either absolute truth or it is nonsense."  I believe now more than ever that it is absolute truth.  If you have a skeptic's heart like me, I have a rather bold claim that I'd like you to put to the test:  I think that if you sincerely pursue responsible, diligent, and honest investigation, then like me, you will eventually find that belief in the claims of Jesus Christ is a rational and sound belief.

Epilogue:

17th century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote something that he carried with him at all times.  Written in 1654, it was found sewn in his jacket when he died. I could really identify with some of what he wrote in this somewhat cryptic stream of consciousness:

        The year of grace 1654.               
        From about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight.

        FIRE

        "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob," not of philosophers
        and scholars.
        Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace...
        The world forgotten, and everything except God....
        "O righteous Father, the world had not known thee, but I have known
        thee."
        Sweet and total renunciation.
        Everlasting joy in return for one day's effort on earth.