an odd death

I was looking at some old journals I wrote in a few years ago. I can’t believe how dark I was at the time. I penned some very hard words against Christianity. I also wrote this: “I don’t know if I believe in anything anymore.”

Scary but also good.

As I take a step back and look at what I was really going through, I noticed something that I use to almost mock or roll my eyes at; that being, the idea of intellectual suicide.

I know it sounds a little bit out there but I honestly think that many Christians almost go through this stage where they not only question everything about their faith but want nothing to do with it. They decide to just start all over and I’m almost certain that’s what I was going through.

At some point the kid who grew up as a Christian realizes he knows very little about his faith. He hasn’t a clue about the truth of following Jesus. But at the same time he knows deep down there’s a god and so he can’t give up on the existence of a divine being, especially because the alternative is simply unrealistic—no purpose for our existence.

So you die to statements about God you never embraced personally.You decide that church has no specific function; that it hasn’t evolved and you’ve been attending for the wrong reasons.At least that’s what I was sort of experiencing at the time.

Was I going through an identity crisis? Absolutely but I think I was dying to self. I mean I think we often limit Paul’s idea of dying to self as the physical issues which involve functional idols like money, careers, sex, relationships, etc. But we don’t talk about how our minds die as well. When we do so we literally ask the harder questions about our faith; to really assess if we’re accepting a paradigm where Jesus is the center of our own lives and the entire cosmos.

So to make sure your entire life is really devoted to God, you start all over. And when you do this there’s a sudden freedom in it. You re-read all your books on faith. You pick up your Bible for the first time and read it like it was brand new; as if you’ve never opened it before. All those stories you read in Sunday school suddenly make sense to you. You no longer read them for morality points, you discover redemption in history. You realize there’s a consistent theme of a restoration through a messiah who saves and rules. You then begin to place the Cross and the Resurrection in the context of your culture and you realize how difficult it is to explain the existence of God without Christ. Every argument that somehow raises objections against the existence of God seems answerable because of the tangible person and work of Jesus Christ. And so your death intellectually really does rebirth you. Your mind has been renewed by the Spirit; your worship is fuller. You’ve gone through a reformation; you’ve become less about the sound and look of a Sunday morning and more about the way content is symbolized and intimately expressed relationally. You long for more…

Perhaps I’m the only guy who gets this dying to my presuppositions in order to really get to the root of Christian faith. I certainly don’t think everyone has to go through this to understand their faith nor does it mean that somehow a person is weak for having doubts at times. All I know is that it humbles you. It makes  you realize how insufficient you are in trying to make sense of God. Yet I truly believe I’m better because of it; that indeed I am reborn because I wasn’t afraid to simply ask the harder questions and allow the Spirit to aid me concerning my faith in God.

Wherever man asserts his independence of God, saying in effect, that, while he will deny God, he will not deny life, nor its relationships, values, or society, its science and art, he is involved in contradiction. It is an impossibility for man to deny God and still to have law and order, justice, science, anything, apart from God.    R.J. Rushdoony