Transformation--My Testimony

I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church during the 1940s and 50s. I cherish and honor that heritage, even though I have moved a considerable distance from it, theologically, politically (sic), and biblically. My passion for the faith and for the teachings of Jesus came from that background. I literally do not remember a time in my life that I didn’t believe and accept that “Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so.”

Undeniably, my dependence upon the Bible as the standard of measure (canon is the official word for that) for matters of faith and Christian living came also from that legacy.

Ironically, it also was the study of the Bible that began my shift away from my native church. I have an inquisitive mind. It’s in my DNA; but it proved a liability in my early years in the Southern Baptist Church. From my earliest memories I had questioned specific applications of Scripture; but those questions were discouraged. I was even told, “There are just some things we’re not supposed to know.”

I didn’t accept that then; and I don’t accept it today. During my last year in high school and through my undergraduate years, I frequently said, “I’m not fully a Southern Baptist; but, I’m closer to them than anybody else.” The truth was that I really didn’t know much about what anybody else believed.

It has been said, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” Well, I’ve never been close to being an atheist; nevertheless, when I was sent to Vietnam by the Unites States Marine Corp, my dependence upon my faith was at perhaps it’s highest level.

I took it upon myself to “be in the Word” as much as possible, and since I was assigned to headquarters company, headquarters battalion, 3^rd Marine Division, I had time and some level of security in which to do so. I decided to begin with Paul’s epistle to the Romans: you know, where Martin Luther found such discrepancies between what he had been taught and what the Bible says.

Well, I was letting the Bible speak to me because that’s what my preachers and Sunday School teachers had told me to do; but very early I began to note that what I thought was in the Bible, really wasn’t there. I even found some things that actually were counter to what I had been taught. The more I read the Bible, the less I could reconcile everything I had learned with what I found in the Bible.

At first it was a troubling experience—even frightening. After all, I was supposed to believe what I was taught, wasn’t I—not to question God or the Bible? What I came to realize was that the real message I was taught was to not question what I was being taught about God or the Bible. There is a difference.

But, in the Epistle of Romans I discovered that my relationship with God is not dependent upon believing right doctrine. It is dependent upon my accepting Jesus’ teaching that God already loves me and wants to make my life full and complete, regardless of—sometimes in spite of—what I believe at any given moment. Faith, then, is not a set of beliefs or doctrines, but is the willingness to live as if I truly believe what I say I believe.

Indeed, those moments of anxiety began to be transformed into a sense of comfort as I began to realize I had been trusting correct doctrine instead of trusting God as the basis of my relationship with God. Out of a fear of hell I had been driven to cling to doctrine—to put my faith in it rather than in the God revealed in Jesus. That realization is both freeing and motivating. In recalling that transformative time in my life, I am reminded of John Gillespie McGee’s poem, “High Flight:”

 Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

It was in reading the Bible that I slipped the surly bonds of my faith culture. And, time after time, it has been in reading the Bible that I have discovered new understandings of God’s unlimited, unmerited grace in contrast to the restrictive, legalistic, and exclusionary doctrines that are born out of human fear and lack of trust in that same grace.

That’s the way it looks through the Flawed Glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim