CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

THE GIFT OF DEAD-ENDS  [T, 2-8-22]

 

Thinking over the year just past, and its restrictions because of viruses and old age, I have realized that some of the most important roads I traveled in my life journey were the dead-ends, because they required me to turn around and go in a different direction.

I grew up with a shallow, simplistic conception of God and Christ and faith in general. The people and pastors of my childhood churches were good people, who loved God and loved me, and they had real experiences of faith, but they were not deep thinkers.

Prayer was to get what you wanted from God. God “still works miracles.” Everything that happens is part of God’s plan. Ethics is primarily about booze and cigarettes and sex. Everything in the Bible is true [factual], including the flood and the parting of the Red Sea and Noah’s ark and Jonah and the whale. Working on “the sabbath” is a sin. [Try that one these days!] You get “saved” when you have an “experience” and “accept Christ into your heart.” We are “saved by the blood,” whatever that meant.

The folks of East Park and Forsythe churches talked about all those simplisms, but I’m not sure they cared a whole lot about most of them. They were primarily into John 3:16 and The Golden Rule. But this simple faith was all they knew, and so it was all I knew.

That was my religion when I went to college. Surprisingly, at “the godless state university,” that simplistic faith was rarely challenged. If so, it was from a fellow student, and they were usually more inquisitive than confrontational or argumentative. I think there has always been some protective coating on me that says to others, “Don’t dispute with him about religion; it’s not worth the trouble.”

Until Marie. I was enthralled with the pretty Marie [not her real name]. She would make a good preacher’s wife.

She was simplistically devout, and so was I. To be able to spend time with her, and thus make time with her, I had to go to the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, because that was her “church.”

When it came to simplistic religion, and punishment for straying from it, IVCF doubled down, in spades. If it were in the Bible, it was true, regardless of how unreasonable it was or how contrary to experience. If you didn’t believe in the virgin birth, you were a sinner and bound for hell.

My protective coating didn’t work with them at all. The more they “explained” [harangued] to me that I would go to hell if I did not believe in the substitutionary atonement, the less satisfied I was with simplistic religion. I knew I had to start thinking beyond the Sunday School flannel board for my religious faith. I certainly couldn’t accept the aggressive, antagonistic shallow beliefs and practices of IVCF.

Which was a problem for my romantic hopes, for Marie was a true believer in the IVCF exclusivism that left everybody else “beyond the pale.” Life was about salvation, which depended on beliefs instead of actions, so you could go to heaven… But was that biblical? IVCF had driven me to the Bible, but what they preached didn’t seem to be in that Bible.

Eventually, Marie rejected me “because you’re too liberal for me.” It was one of the nicest things anyone ever did for me, because after that I met Helen, which is the best thing that ever happened to me.

Also important, though, was the impetus my time in IVCF gave me to seek out a wider understanding of God and religion. I did not know then, of course, of what Albert Outler, one of my professors at Perkins School of Theology at SMU, called “the Wesleyan quadrilateral.” He pointed out that John Wesley experienced and related to God by using not just the Bible, but also experience [trust of the Holy Spirit for guidance], and reason, and tradition.

Coming up against the dead-end of IVCF made me turn around and go in a different direction, so that the quadrilateral became my way to God, even though I could not yet call it that. I learned to love God with my “heart and soul and mind and strength,” as Jesus directed.

As this second year of social distancing winds down, it might be worth looking at the dead-ends that turned out to be gifts.

John Robert McFarland

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com