Last post I talked about a fellow’s story of his own ‘de-conversion’, in which he describes his experience of ‘being saved’ and then of beginning to doubt the existence of a personal God until every vestige of faith seemed to have crumbled.  He described it as a ‘graceful degradation’. One by one the components underlying his faith in God broke down under closer scrutiny.  Such things as his own testimony, answered prayer, the beauty and complexity of creation, scientific evidence, the Bible, logical arguments, and morality all fell short of being convincing reasons for him to believe.

Depending on one’s theological background, some would say he ‘lost his salvation’.  Others, that he was never ‘saved’ in the first place.  And others still that his turning his back on God, doesn’t mean God has turned His back on Him…  Time will tell.  We probably don’t see the whole picture and God is His judge (I Cor.4:4,5)

Though I do not know this young man’s destiny, I do know that we are cautioned often in Scripture to be watchful.  Sin is by nature deceitful.  Our human natures are bent to embrace it.  And we do have an enemy who is far more clever than we are!

Some verses that have come to my attention are:

“Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it….how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?” (Heb.2:1,3)

“Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called ‘knowledge’ for by professing it some have swerved from the faith.” (I Tim.6:20)

“We do not wrestle against flesh and blood…therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.” (Eph.6:11-13)

“Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” (Heb.3:12,13)

“…God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will.”
(2 Tim.2:25,26)

“Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” (I Tim.4:16)

I read somewhere lately that if you think you are above deception, (it could never happen to you) you are already deceived! That hit the mark! It’s the principle of pride coming before a fall, I suppose (Prov.16:18).  Paul had a similar warning for the Corinthians: “Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.” (I Cor. 10:12).  In the context, he was explaining to the Corinthians that the events recorded in the Old Testament about the Israelites and their relationship to God are recorded for a reason, namely for our own instruction. I can read stories of unbelief and shake my head in arrogant incredulity or… I can take heed and learn something from their example! 

So what can I learn from this fellow’s story?  Let me just lay out a few observations I’ve made…

• “Getting saved” must  entail some comprehension of what we are being saved from—not just a warm, fuzzy belief that God is there and I’m now initiated to the club. I see no acknowledgement of sin in this fellow’s story, and in fact a disconcerting sense of being a good person at heart.  Jesus came “not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”(Lk.5:32)
  
• The reality of the Holy Spirit’s presence in one’s life must consist of more than a moment-in-time experience.  The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is what sets the true believer apart from the rest of the world. (“Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him”. Romans 8:9) So it is crucial that we verify His presence by more than subjective experience.  Is there a newfound freedom, a hunger for the Word, a growing Christlikeness, a love for others….These things are effects of the life of the Spirit in our lives.  [For an excellent set of articles entitled: “The effects of the Spirit” don’t miss T.M. Moore’s series available at  www.colsoncenter.org or downloadable here: http://www.colsoncenter.org/images/content/wilberforce/ViewPoint_Studies/VP-Effects-of-the-Spirit.pdf ]
  
• The Word of God is an essential aid to growth, stability and protection from deception.   It is our guide to life and godliness.  Accept no substitutes! (II Tim.3:16)  This young man appears to have neglected study of the Word in favor of reliance on impressions and visions.
  
• Hearing from God is first and foremost a matter of listening as the Spirit brings the written Word to life in our hearts.  Overdependence on mental impressions apart from verification in the Word will leave us open to deception.  The mind is a powerful entity and we are capable of deceiving ourselves. 
  
• Beware the craving to understand everything.  The human mind must be subject to the truths that God has revealed even when they cannot be explained.  As believers, we are people of revelation–not everything we believe can be logically ‘proven’ beyond a doubt.  Paul describes our quandary excellently in I Corinthians 1. “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.”(21) Intellectual arrogance is a slippery slope to grand delusion!  By it we can profess to be single-minded searchers after truth and be in fact pursuing deception!

And that’s some of what I’ve gleaned from this fellow’s story.  We are called to greater things—to know the source of all Truth.  Interestingly, the deception already at work in the world that will culminate in Antichrist’s appearance will target those who have ‘refused to love the truth and so be saved.’(II Thess.2:7-11)  A great deception is coming and already at work but I love the way Paul braces us for it– reminding us that we are loved, chosen, and saved by the Spirit’s work and our belief in the truth…and after all is known and believed, it is God who is at work to strengthen and establish us in all we say and do.  Wow!  And that’s the drift of what I really wanted to say!

Thanks for hearing me out.

–LS

But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the firstfruits  to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. 14 To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. 15 So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter. 16 Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, 17 comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word. (II Thess.2: 13-17)

I spent an evening this week listening to a young man’s testimony, but not of the usual sort. This one was a detailed recounting of his own DE-conversion experience. He traced in detail his own descent into unbelief.

I’ve never heard anything like it. What went wrong? What were the warning signs he missed? How could this happen? I listened with rapt attention, took notes, and have been mulling his words over ever since, intent on gleaning wisdom from this tragic, but unfinished, story.

This young 20-something fellow grew up in church, a Pentecostal church. He and his family were regulars there and he was an eager beaver for boys club and all things church. By his own profession he ‘accepted’ Jesus into his heart at one such meeting. And as a young teen he experienced the requisite ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’ with the evidence of tongues (and falling to the floor). He was a well-churched lad. He towed the line. His relationship with Jesus seemed intact. He learned to hear His voice. He had visions. He had never actually read the Bible through himself, but He experienced the presence of the Holy Spirit in church, and he knew what it felt like when God was speaking to him.


He grew into a young man quite confident in his faith, or at least in his own righteousness. He was an intensely religious fellow, even thought maybe he should be a missionary, but his natural aptitudes were more along the lines of ‘techie’ stuff—maybe he could design a computer game that would win the world to Christ?! What did God want him to do with his life anyway?

He became obsessed with prayer as a means of figuring out God’s will and making his life work. Well, at first he prayed for others, but the answers seemed so hit and miss. He got burned one too many times when he really believed something was going to happen–but it didn’t. His focus turned toward himself and his own experience of God in prayer. Visual images became the most frequent way God communicated with him. He learned to trust theses images because he knew what God’s presence felt like based on his experience at church. He learned to rely on God to show him what to say, what to do. And it worked. Granted, he didn’t have many friends, and definitely no girlfriends, but he was getting good grades…
His strategy worked flawlessly, he said, until his junior year. He began to fail in a class. Re-doubling his energies and his devotion to ‘prayer’, i.e. listening for the voice and the images, made no difference. Nothing was working. Suddenly he felt lost; God’s will seemed hidden. The only time he could still hear God guiding him was in his Internet dialogs with atheists. Speaking with atheists became his obsession…. He was confident this was God’s mission for his life.


You get the drift of where this story is heading. This lost young man used the technical term “graceful degradation” to describe how one by one his reasons to believe disintegrated. Graceful degradation refers to the property that enables a system to continue operating properly despite the failure of some of its components. Even as his belief in prayer failed, other components of his belief system were being called into question.

Ethics class in college was unnerving. So, if everybody is good and wants to do what’s right, then it’s just about collectively deciding what’s best… We don’t need God for that.  Maybe morality is in fact man made.  We just need to figure out the rules for ourselves. Maybe there really is morality apart from God…
Somewhere along the line this young man found a book that was ‘clearly’ God’s way of revealing to him how science and the Bible fit together. There was no need to doubt Darwin. Other ‘problems’ too could be explained away. No one need be an atheist any longer if he could just show them that the Bible was really not at odds with evolutionary science.


And then he met ‘the professor’. It was an unlikely place to meet– over an Amazon review the young man had written for a new edition of the Bible. Hostile remarks about the Bible’s obvious ‘errors’ precipitated the meeting, and shook the young man’s beliefs like never before. And soon he and the professor were in regular dialog, for the young man said, “It was clear to me that God was bringing me knowledge through this man.” The sage old professor sized up his prey early on, for he too had once had faith, back in his happier golden twenties… He warned the young man to stop asking questions, to stop pursuing this ‘knowledge’ that would surely destroy his faith. But when the young man persisted the professor persuaded him that since there was no way he was old enough to know all the things he didn’t know, and since he most assuredly couldn’t understand God at his age, he should sit back, relax and listen to what the professor had to say, and stop trying to argue! And so he did.

The professor broke the news to him that over all the years of history, academia had yet to find any reason to believe that ‘god’ was anything more than a concept… He cited books, and psychological explanations, and obscure ‘proven’ knowledge. He appealed to the young man’s arrogance and his appetite for ‘truth’. And the young man was confident God had led him to this ‘former Christian’ to strengthen his own journey…


Meanwhile the young man had begun to read the Bible, but from a vantage point of skepticism. What he could not understand fueled his doubts, fed his unbelief and destroyed his confidence in the Bible as a trustworthy guide to truth…


The process of ‘graceful degradation’ had now reached critical mass. All the things that had once confirmed his belief in God were disintegrating. Prayer, the existence of morality, the Bible, the testimony of others, scientific credibility. This new way of seeing ‘just made too much sense’. The logic of it was irresistible. Resistance seemed futile. He knew he was at a crisis point and decided to call his parents.

“What would you do, Dad, if someone showed you that what you believed was wrong?”
His dad brushed it off with a hapless response: “I wouldn’t listen to him.”
“But Dad, what if it was true?”
Angered (and likely exasperated at his own inability to reason with his son) the Dad lashed out: “Jesus didn’t come to give us the TRUTH… He came to…”
His Dad uttered the word ‘truth’ with a contempt that stunned the faltering son, for whom ‘truth’ had become the quest of his life. As he put it: “Truth was more important to me than God” (as though the two were at odds!).

The young thinker had already concluded from his experience
—that connecting with God had required him to disconnect with the natural world around him,
–that connecting with God had led him to poor mental health,
–that connecting with God was a kind of unreality…. and so following this final clincher of conversation with his parents, he turned his back on his faith in God holding only to what he felt was his ‘unwavering commitment to find the truth’.


His story turns dark at this point. He describes his new world as ominous and dark. He becomes delusional, borderline schizophrenic for a short time, as he rearranges the perceptions his soul has held dear and makes room for deception… Pantheism becomes a prospect and he begins to ‘see how evil God was…’ By this time in his story I have listened for hours. Incredulous. Sad. Troubled. I do not wish to hear any more details. It is all beginning to sound like rubbish—fool’s gold. He has embraced a whirlwind of swirling confusion while feeling confident that he has set his sails to find ‘truth’.


He continues to go to church because that is his only social network. He doesn’t talk about his unbelief there, not much anyway. Noone would understand. No one cares to think with him about truth. He observes that noone seems to notice the change he has undergone–so much for people who claim to communicate with an omniscient God. They don’t really seem to know much… The professor has suggested he view them as ‘deluded automatons’, afraid of science, ‘more often fueled by emotion than a serious search for truth’. This appeals to the young man’s arrogance. He really must be on a different rational level than all these church folk and now he concurs with the professor: “Religion doesn’t serve people like us.”

It’s bedtime at my house by the time I hear this young man out. He’s a perfect stranger to me, but quite an articulate one. I’ve stumbled upon his story on the Internet, at a site apparently dedicated to promoting skepticism.* But the telling, and the listening have reinforced in my mind my commitment to a faith that is grounded in reality, backed by the inerrant Word of God, and not subject to change with every wind of doctrine or wave of emotion.  I am eternally grateful for such a hope.

When this young man has exhausted his intellect with the investigation of every man-made alternative to God, the question will remain:
What will you do with Jesus Christ?



“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified…to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (I Cor.1:20-25)

I must leave off without further commentary tonight; this is long enough! Perhaps next time? In the meantime I commend to you Ephesians 4 as it lays out God’s design for our maturing and protection from the wild winds and waves of deception…

“…And He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ…”  (Eph.4:11-15)


–LS


I welcome your feedback.  What is your perception of this man’s story? 


* a series of YouTube videos features this young man’s testimony, “Why I am No Longer a Christian” at: http://www.youtube.com/user/Evid3nc3


Update: 2/16/12 A well-stated blog analyzing this man’s testimony in light of the Bible is found at: http://caffeinatedtheology.com/atheist-chris-redford-i-am-smarter-than-god-and-i-have-higher-moral-standards/