Coming To Faith (1)

My first week in Divinity School, I fell in love with its chapel-dominated residential quadrangle. On the southwestern corner of the quad sat a residential building, my own, named after the nineteenth-century American pastor and theologian, Horace Bushnell. It soon occurred to me that a proper respect for my surroundings should include gaining at least a minimal understanding of Bushnell's legacy, so I headed off to the library, picked out one of his writings pretty much at random, and started reading. It was Bushnell's classic study on Christian nurture (1847), and it affected me so much that I could not put it down until I had finished it.

The most important idea I took away from the book was that faith, developed gradually in a caring community of faith, can be just as much to God's glory as faith evoked in a single instant under the influence especially of revivalist preaching. I admit to having approached Bushnell's book with a bias already formed in his direction. Where I had come from, even though the shouting, stomping, and sweating forms of revivalism were somewhat looked down upon, the essence of revivalism still prevailed, as it does today in most forms of Christian evangelicalism: a personal, deeply affecting experience of Jesus Christ as one's personal Savior and Lord, openly acknowledged, is taken for granted as the only true entrance into the life of faith, and church folk who cannot claim such an experience are behind-in-the-race Christians whose reaching the goal line is still in doubt. As dusty as Bushnell's book was when I pulled it off its shelf, it was still like a breath of the freshest Connecticut air to me at the time.

Some of the problems I had with revivalism, and have now with evangelicalism, I know are rather petty in the grand scheme of things. Classical church music counts for little in this sphere of Christendom, but I should probably get over being such a curmudgeon about it. And as for all the uplifted hands and eyes business, I could simply stop looking when the cameras put the innocent so embarrassingly on display. But my other problems with this way of coming to faith are not so easily minimized. Appreciation of the fullness of Christian history --- especially the bad stuff that should never be repeated, but is --- counts for even less than the music I like, and serious probing of the scriptures counts for almost nothing at all. I concede that more than just lip service is paid by most evangelicals to the idea that conversion is only the beginning and not the culmination of faith. Even so, recounting, massaging, and laying on others what is in fact a very personal, private experience all too often seems the end in itself.

But Bushnell's understanding of the Christian life has its own problems --- although bad musical taste is not typically one of them --- and they are at least as serious as those with which revivalists/evangelicalists should be dealing. Properly dispensed, Bushnell argued, Christian nurture should leave people with a feeling that there has never been a time when they were not fully the Christian people they now are. Instead of being almost-Christians awaiting the next revivalist to scare them into commitments with nightmare-inducing apocalyptic fulminations, believers deserve to feel that they are always-Christians, formed in the image of their Master without ever having to think too much about it, and certainly without having to endure too many of those awful dark nights of the soul. (Actually, for nurture-ists, if I may call them that, even one such night is one too many.)

The obvious problem here is that, if Bushnell's idea is taken at face value, no Christian would ever have to decide for himself or herself to be Christian at all. Faith would become only affiliative in character, that is, a faith that "we" and "they" hold rather than a faith that "I" hold, for whatever reason "I" choose to hold it, whether on the basis of a conversion experience, thinking things out for myself, or whatever. On the matter of coming to a personally owned faith, the evangelicals are right: holding to someone else's beliefs is not enough. Beliefs must become one's own, for one's own reasons.

Where the evangelicals go wrong, though, is over their rejection of the importance of having one's own reasons for coming to faith. For them, only some reasons count --- theirs. Where, more specifically, the nurture-ists go wrong, and how proponents of both views can at last begin to get things right, is the subject of the next column.