Conversion, Conviction, And Conscience

Soon after my high school conversion experience, my born-again Christian friends began hinting that the big event may not have been the real deal. I could report no stroke-like symptoms, bright lights, or angelic choruses, not even a basso profundo voice from above the clouds. I did not need to be helped to my feet after it was all over, or anyone to tell me what had happened or what it meant. I knew all by myself what had happened: a sudden massive energy surge went all through me, accompanied by an indescribable joy. And I had no hesitation expressing what it was telling me: "There is a God," I silently said to myself.

In comparison with the Jesus knocking at the door, slain in the Spirit, and tongues-speaking experiences my friends were having at the time, my own brief encounter with the Maker of Heaven and Earth had to have lacked a lot in their eyes. For me, however, it had all the quality of a one time only watershed occurrence, which is exactly what succeeding decades have proved it to be. The feeling of divine power and love that overwhelmed me in that single, momentary experience had a completeness about it that would only have suffered in the repeating. The process of reflecting upon it, however, has been on-going.

Most Christians who claim to have had a conversion experience seem remarkably consistent in their accounts of what the experience led to: a new or deeper relationship with Jesus, an unshakeable conviction about his identity as the Son of God, and a way of life intentionally even if imperfectly patterned after his. My own experience led me to someone and to something else, to the Source of the universe's matter, energy, and order, and to a life of passionate and continuing inquiry into the relationship between this Source and the God of Jesus Christ. At the time, there were enough Christians exerting a positive influence upon me to make me yearn to accept Jesus' heavenly Father as my own. And though I gladly joined my hands with theirs, I knew that before I could ever join my heart as well, I would have to discover in my own way whether the God I genuinely believed I had experienced could possibly have been Jesus' as well.
Some of my concerns were science-and-reason based; for example, I could not see any need for a God to explain the origin of the universe as a whole. Others sprang from a sense of moral outrage over things people kept telling me that their God relished doing, such as making a sacrificial lamb of Isaac and Jesus, and taking away any chance of salvation for people unfortunate enough to have been born before the latter's coming into the world.

These days, there is another reason for my continuing to struggle with conversion experiences of every sort. It is that these experiences are claimed to have a unique, unrepeatable character about them that by definition disqualifies them as solid evidence for the existence of anything other than of their experiencers. To count as genuine evidence for anything, an experience must be accessible to everyone and not only to a specially favored few. There are enough consistent patterns and predictable sequences observable in, around, and beyond us to make it reasonable to believe in a transcendent designer in, even if not of, the universe. But there is nothing in this kind of evidence that permits inferences to the more specific things about the divine nature in which faith is especially interested, e.g., that the designer is triune, or that he rewards the righteous and punishes sinners everywhere.

These are the kinds of logical considerations that keep generating questions which my conscience will not allow me to avoid for very long. Applied specifically to the vital center of my own conversion experience --- an in-pouring of pure, unbounded, glorious energy --- they still make me wonder about my jumping so quickly to the conclusion I did about what really was in that energy cloud surrounding me at that climactic moment. I judged it to be a "who" and not merely a "what." I have never recanted this judgment, but I soon realized that nothing in the experience upon which it was based itself necessitated any mention Christianity’s God at all.

Most especially, there was nothing in the particular idea of God that I brought to mind in my exclamation that even remotely corresponded to the Cosmic Accountant, Atonement-demanding, My Son or No One kind of God that people in the church continue to talk about as the only kind of God there is. In matters of faith, conscience has its own role to play over conviction, and even over conversion. To be sure, conviction not energized by conversion reduces to dogmatism. But conversion not tempered by reason equates with fanaticism.