The God Files: Why A Noted Evangelical Theologian No Longer Believes in God

My Life In Transition

Iapproach this writing with some hesitation. There is much to be gained in such an effort but also much to be lost. This will be clear as we proceed. However, it must be forthrightly recognized that there is no heroism in such a revision of thought.

When we have to do with religious commitment it is not heroism that energizes a change in position and commitment but rather a tenacious use of reason to acquire truth. This is not to say that a departure from a faith structure to a non-God position is easy or to be taken lightly. It costs quite considerably.

But to utilize reason to seek out truth is greatly rewarding and when it has to do with the ultimate questions of life and transition from a spiritually oriented belief system to a rationally derived thought structure it is akin to a conversion event.

It is increasingly a joyful experience to accept life without a spiritual dimension. This for me has not occasioned deep despair as with Shakespeare’s Macbeth when he tragically declares life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As I try to affirm in the final essay of this collection entitled God and Enthusiasm, life can be and is extremely rich and fulfilling without a spiritual dimension.

How did this come about? How is it that one can be a committed theist of a Bible-believing sort for a great portion of one’s life [approximately forty years] and then become a non-God devotee for the next segment of life [some fifteen years]? This is really quite amazing. Even from early on in my teens, because of my intense enthusiasm for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I was not just a regular lukewarm Christian; I was the Apostle Paul "redivivus." I loved Jesus from the age of nine when I accepted Him as my Lord. When visiting Evangelists came to our evangelical Baptist church not far from Chicago I was one of the first to proceed down the aisle and invite people to accept Christ as their Lord and Savior. On one occasion I remember well, while taking an evangelist to his hotel room, he jubilantly told me that probably Christ would come and take us to heaven even before we arrived at the hotel. This kind of statement made an indelible impression on my young mind.

As a result of my firm and enthusiastic commitment to the Gospel of Christ I formed a gospel team with several other church youth and preached salvation through Jesus in many churches in the area. Then, somewhat to the chagrin of my committed Baptist parents, I transferred to the local Gospel Tabernacle Church where the Word was to my thinking even more powerfully preached. In our youth meetings, during the cold winter months, we would stoke up the old wood burning furnaces and with unabated enthusiasm and joy sing the old time gospel songs such as:

Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me,

Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me,

Do Lord, oh do Lord, oh do remember me,

Way beyond the blue.

I took Jesus as my savior, you take him too,

I took Jesus as my savior, you take him too

I took Jesus as my savior, you take him too,

Way beyond the blue.

All this took place before and while I attended high school. Then the time came to attend college. It was no surprise that I selected a staunch evangelical Christian school of really fine academic credentials: Wheaton College in Wheaton Illinois. Here I majored in history and philosophy and continued to enhance my dedication to the Christian conservative world and life view. I was elected to the chairmanship of the Spiritual Life and Standards Committee and gave periodic evaluations before the entire student body and faculty gathered for this purpose. It was a heady experience. After obtaining a BA degree with honors I spent one more year at Wheaton College pursuing studies in the Graduate School of Theology under the tutelage of the Dean and during that period was his assistant in Biblical Greek studies.

I then made the decision to attend what was at that time a relatively new theological program at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena California. After the intense and rigorous academic regimen at Wheaton College this graduate experience was not academically burdensome, but nonetheless excellent. I learned from one professor a crucial truth—a seed planted—that germinated and made up the never to be violated parameters of my philosophical-theological thinking from that time onward. I will elaborate on this later in this introduction and in the essays of this volume. With few exceptions the professors at both schools I attended were academically and personally nourishing and I greatly admired them and still hold them in the highest esteem. They were outstanding scholars and certain of them truly distinguished. The only caveat to this statement of admiration was and is that with the exception of one faculty member they were all committed foundationalists; i.e. they believed that although evidence was important, it was quite secondary to establish the truthfulness of the faith. The Holy Spirit accredited the veracity of belief.

At this time I determined to learn something of European theology. My wife and I headed for Europe by steamship in about sixth class; under the water line. This was not a celebrity Cruise but rather an arduous introduction to the rigors of extended travel by water in the late fifties We did survive; but with a newfound respect and admiration for our seafaring forebears. I had already corresponded with Professors Bo Reiche [New Testament] and the renowned Karl Barth [Dogmatic Theology], both Professors at the University of Basel, and had received an invitation to study with them for one year. Prior to our arrival at the University in Switzerland we spent two months attending German language class and lived with a German family in the little medieval fortified village of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. It was fall in Germany and the weather more than brisk. Only one or two coals were allotted to us per day so we shivered all the evenings we were there. This experience well prepared us not only to utilize the German language but also readied us for the arduous winters in Switzerland for that year and the years to come in Europe.

Finally we arrived at the University and were able to find lodging with the Mennonite congregation in Basel. Thereafter I began to attend lectures and was exhilaratingly bestirred by those of Professors Karl Barth, Bo Reicke, Karl Jaspers, Ernst Jennie and, to be sure, others. It was my privilege along with another student to be invited by Professor Barth to join him on occasion for a glass of wine and conversation in the little neighboring village of Binningen where he lived. He was the quintessential theologian and considered by many to be the most esteemed and prolific theological writer since the medieval period. To our great delight we were also invited to attend seminars in Zürich conducted by Professor Emil Brunner—the rather prominent nemesis of Professor Barth—in regard to whom Barth wrote a little book disputing Brunner’s position on natural theology entitled "Nine, Ein Antwort an Emil Brunner [No, An Answer To Emil Brunner]. Their relationship was not always the best. Quite obviously, however, these were exciting times for us theological neophytes.

At this juncture of my education I realized that in addition to my knowledge of Greek, Hebrew and Latin I needed ability in the French language. To remedy this deficiency we moved to Paris and for four months studied at the University of Paris under a very severe Professor. It was rough, but we managed to learn a considerable amount of French during that time. Upon returning to Basel to complete our year in residence, we were presented with the possibility of continuing at the university working toward a Doctorate in New Testament and Theology. This was an exciting development and after much prayer and deliberation we embraced this possibility. However, before we could actualize this and think it to be feasible we had to do something to make it financially possible. Our solution consisted of returning to the States for one year and teaching in the local high schools in my home town of Rockford, Illinois. In addition to teaching Latin, this would also be a year when I intensively studied German, the other languages and theological literature generally.

Now once again it was back to Europe and the University where I aggressively studied and began work on the Doctoral dissertation. During this time the seed mentioned above began to germinate. It now became clearer to me than ever before how utterly indispensable reason and evidences were to any theological or philosophical consideration; for that matter in regard to any human consideration. The essence of the seed was that to accept any truth claim there must be sufficiency of evidence; i.e. one should not accept any such claim unless confronted by compelling evidence [either obvious or reasoned] and be convinced thereby that the claim is in accord with reality.

Since we had only two more years at the University to finish the Doctoral work we spent as much time as possible traveling and ingesting as much of the European culture as we could. Particularly was I interested in and even fascinated by Rome and what transpired there in regard to Christianity’s interaction with the 1st century Imperial Roman Empire. The Colosseum awed me and the savagery that took place there saddened me. Brutal gladiatorial contests and slave executions of the most bloody sort were of course the usual menu in first century Rome. I mention this because in the essay entitled God and Slavery I relate the indelible impression made on me by the horrors of slavery as it related to Christianity in the first century.

After the two years of intensive study and the completion of the Doctoral dissertation I was examined by Professors Karl Barth, Bo Reicke and others of the theological faculty to determine my worthiness to graduate and with what level of honor I would receive the Doctorate in Theology. My dissertation was a study of the Heaven concept in the New Testament as it related to the apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic literature of the first and second century. This revised work was later published by the Eerdmans Publishing Company under the title The Wrath of Heaven. For these academic efforts I was awarded the Doctorate with the designated honor insigni cum laude.

With this honor in my portfolio we returned to Southern California where I was invited to become an Assistant Professor at my alma mater, Fuller Theological Seminary. I could not have hoped for more. This was exciting. However, my excitement was short lived because when I was examined theologically for this position certain very conservative members of the faculty voted against me because I could not and would not affirm my belief in the plenary [full] inspiration of the Bible. I made it quite clear that in my opinion the Biblical text did not speak with accuracy about matters that had to do with science and history. The more conservative members of the faculty considered this to be rather extreme heresy and a diminution of the authoritative text. This whole matter was documented in the published book by one of these faculty members entitled Battle for The Bible. It was finally agreed that I would be appointed Director of The Fuller Seminary Library with no teaching responsibilities whatever. A temporary peace was thereby obtained. After a few years had passed and the conservative minority had lessened in number and strength I was appointed Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies.

This was a singularly stressful time for Fuller Seminary because it had by my appointment shifted from its founding principle; namely, the total infallibility of the Biblical text, both Old Testament and New Testament. Having achieved this position I now substitute taught for a number of the regular faculty when they were on sabbatical. Way back then, in this minor academic position, I more and more became convinced through lecture preparation, discussion with other faculty members and the reading of existential philosophy and rationalism that there was only one way to establish the validity of a truth claim. This could not be achieved by a leap of faith. Competing truth claims based merely on feeling inevitably, I realized, lead to epistemological dissonance and therefore gave no assurance of truth and no real solidly based direction in life. As noted above the desired end of securing truth could only be achieved through the use of reason and dependence on verifiable evidence.

But it was at this time that the influence of a former professor and subsequently teaching colleague mentioned above prevailed upon me and convinced me that there was sufficient evidence to establish the truth claim of evangelical Biblical Christianity. This reasoning consisted of the famous conversion of the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus.

Here something extraordinary happened. According to the Bible text [Book of The Acts of the Apostles, Chap. 9] a voice from heaven spoke to Saul [the leading Jewish enemy of the Christians] and declared Saul, Saul why persecutest thou me [Acts 9:4]. There was a bright light, Saul fell to the ground and cried out who are you, Lord? He opened his eyes but could not see and was blind for three days. Subsequently this killer of Christians and devout Jew who breathed threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord [Acts 9:1] was transformed into arguably the greatest Christian advocate and missionary of that day and even to this day. Before his experience on the road to Damascus as a Kosher Jew he would of course eat no pork. Now, after his conversion [as my friend and colleague facetiously indicated], so thorough was his spiritual transformation that he could with exuberance request even a second portion of this forbidden unclean meat. Because of his conversion from Judaism it is again and again stressed in the text that this Saul [who is now Paul] suffered great physical harm consisting of stonings and severe beatings from his former co-religionists, the Pharisaic Jews—many times nearly to death. Unquestionably, Saul had become Paul a committed follower of the way; i.e. a Christian.

The above narration I believed for many years to be the one place in the Bible where sufficient historical evidence was present to establish the truthfulness of the Christian faith. The apostle Paul prior to his Damascus Road experience had so vigorously persecuted Christians that all knew of this. Therefore, it would have been impossible for him to deceive the Judaizers or anyone for that matter. He really was a killer of the members of this Christian sect. Not only was he not deceiving but in addition and equally importantly he was not deceived. This experience was so intense that according to all the narratives we have in possession he is represented as one who throughout his entire life never wavered in his commitment to the Gospel of Christ. He suffered daily and excruciatingly and was continuously in fear of torture and death, but he never relinquished his faith and trust in the Christ who miraculously appeared to him and who commissioned him to proclaim the previously hated Christian gospel. This is not the stuff out of which deliberate deception emerges. There was simply no advantage for him to make this transition.

From a historian’s perspective it does seem as though this occurrence meets the requirements to establish the realness of what is here reported. However in light of the nature of the material we are dealing with I began to question the sufficiency of the historical evidence to carry the weight of this claimed divine intrusion that so affected the apostle Paul. The narrative in the preceding chapter and in this ninth chapter of Acts is quite replete with supernatural occurrences. In the prior chapter angels [with wings I assume] are alluded to and the good disciple Philip is miraculously [like Spock in Star Trek] transported to another place after baptizing a eunuch. [And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught up Philip; and the eunuch saw him no more Acts 8:39]. This depiction of events continues in the ninth chapter with many reported visions and miraculous healings. Finally in the latter part of the chapter [Acts 9:40] a lady is mentioned who was full of good works and acts of charity. She fell sick and died. The apostle Peter was summoned. He knelt down, prayed and said Tabitha rise. She opened her eyes. To the astonishment of the saints, Peter presented her to them alive. The following material outlining the journeys of the apostle Paul as he proclaimed the truth of the resurrected Christ is similarly supernaturally oriented. I came to the conclusion that this is hardly the stuff from which reliable history can be secured.

In addition even if this were in a reliable historical context; i.e. even if the apostle Paul experienced a valid psychic transformation so that his entire life orientation was changed there are other explanations that adequately deal with this phenomenon. He apparently fell to the ground and was immobilized for a period of time. Perhaps he sustained a blow to the head that caused an interruption of his neural circuitry or a stroke. He had a vision and this had such impact on his life that he was transformed. This is not without precedent. Whatever the cause of this change so that Saul became Paul the Apostle it is difficult to affirm a divine cause when other psychological explanations are conceivable and seem more probable.

This left me in a quandary. The little bit of evidence that I had tenaciously clung to seemed now no longer to be adequate to the task. This combined with other considerations that had occupied my thinking for a number of years caused me to reconsider the validity, the truthfulness, of the entire Christian enterprise. I began to ask serious questions about simple affirmations of the theistic, primarily monotheistic, truth claims. About 15 years ago I opened a mental file [hence the title The God Files] and therein placed any concepts that were relevant to the question of truth as related to theism.

After many years at Fuller Seminary and having been promoted to Associate Professor of Biblical Interpretation I left with the intent of establishing a think tank that would explore the questions as to how truth is achieved. Since I was the only one providing financial support for this effort, and since my finances were depleted by several disastrous crop failures in the Midwest [I had invested in farmland], this attempted scholarly enterprise experienced a very short life.

However, I took this as an opportunity to do something really different, unique and in a sense life changing. I went to prison; that is, for the next seven years I taught and counseled in the juvenile prison system of Los Angeles County. Although while at Wheaton College I had worked in the slums of Chicago, I now confronted one of the most dramatic and transforming moral and ethical contexts of my life. After a short time I was assigned to the HRO [High Risk Offenders Unit ]. The title of the unit quite well describes its occupants. Some were suicidal, some were rapists and others murderers. Almost without exception they were notorious gang members. On the perimeters of the room were windows through which guards supposedly monitored what was going on. However, this did not prevent occasional riots when the entire room was enveloped in chaos and differing gangs and differing races engaged in deadly fighting to get rid of their perceived enemy. This was, to be sure, scary. I took what cover I could until the guards aggressively controlled the situation and the bedlam ceased. This experience caused me to look at life differently. Because of the environment in which they were reared, the squalid, demeaning context of family life and friends, these young men struggled for existence in a world that to them was hostile and full of threat. Here was clearly evil in every sense of the word. Evil impacted them in terms of environmental horrors and, of course, they responded with more evil.

It was during this period and subsequently that I read a great deal and intensively thought about how one could arrive at certainty in regard to the validity of any truth claim. As noted above I had already concluded that this was alone possible by relying upon the adequacy, the sufficiency of the evidence for any such claim. However, I wanted to test and test, and test some more this epistemological conviction. After all this effort I was able to reaffirm my belief that my dependence upon the sufficiency of evidence was correct. My problem had been and now was that the evidence for the theistic truth claim was, as noted above, not sufficient or adequate. Now following the same epistemological procedure I could well understand the naturalistic, non-God affirmation as being true. There clearly was an abundance of evidence to support the non-theist position. It is quite obvious that I experienced no dramatic time that I can single out as to when a definitive transition took place; no specific event caused this reversed Damascus road impulse from belief to unbelief. It’s just that finally the last remnants of emotional overload, of feeling involvement were cast aside and the massive influence of the church community was negated. I could then affirm [with all peoples formerly oppressed] the for me perhaps overly dramatic oxymoronic declaration free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last [Martin Luther King, Jr].

This may sound excessively exuberant. However the commitment to truth and reason is in and of itself a giddy experience. In the final essay on God and Enthusiasm I have attempted to delineate the power and even the joy of this non-God declaration. New avenues of research can now be traversed without fear of censure or ecclesiastical interference. Research in whatever area, [philosophical, theological, scientific] can now be true research since it seeks out truth even if this means challenging and perhaps denying long held and cherished personal and institutional or ecclesiastical beliefs. Even once one has determined that the evidence for a truth claim is sufficient to establish it as true, yet even then this claim must continually be challenged in light of the forward march of knowledge. This is so because the scientific method encourages questioning while religion does not. The Catholic church, among others, goes so far as to outright forbid investigation /understanding/ questioning.

I am aware that now and in the past there have been serious assaults against the significant place that reason plays in any effort to obtain truth as outlined above. Some of the more sophisticated and well thought out are the following.

It is maintained by some that not reason but rather emotions comprise the engine that drives human activity and aspirations and that therefore it