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Loading...Some of you have probably had this same experience. Now that I’m 70, I’m thinking about my past a lot more than … in the past. The other day I was thinking about my life in high school soon after I had become a born-again Christian (an incredibly ignorant born-again Christian). One incident quickly came to mind.
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Memory of My Past: My First Girlfriend and Jesus
June 20, 2026
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Well, Professor, whatever happened to Linda?
She became a lawyer. I haven’t been in touch with her since 1975! Tried to track her down once to no avail.
The ability of humans to invert understanding over time is boundless.
Several years after I dropped out of the “pastor club” I decided most evangelistic efforts were aimed at getting people who were already Christians to switch tribes (denominations). While I was in Bible college, I persuaded a Catholic girl (not a girlfriend) to get dunked in the Colorado River. It was early spring and the snowmelt runoff had barely started so it was tough finding a spot deep enough to get her immersed. At the time I was involved in the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement that demanded correct immersion for salvation.
You frequently speak of your view that Jesus was an apocalypticist. What I find strange is why Jesus, a Galilean peasant from a very poor background and a nondescript town, should think that he was the one to become king, along with his uneducated followers, of God’s coming kingdom on earth.
Please have you any insights as to how this came about?
He believed God revealed it to him. I suppose lots of people feel that God has called them or chosen them for his purposes.
As the person who wrote the article trying to answer this very question ( you may or may not have seen/read it yet), I have a different view. But I’m very interested in what convinces you that Jesus felt God had revealed it to him. Which passages are relevant in this respect? Thank you.
The reason I’m not sure there’s a *better* alternative is because virtually everyone I know or have read about who claims they are special before God thinks God told them so. How else would they feel convinced? The Gospels, of course, repeatedly have Jesus indicate he is special because of revelatin from God (Matthew 11:27; Luke 4:10-21; 10:22; John 5:19-20, 30… and tons of other places in John)
Indeed, millions of people throughout history thought and proclaimed themselves to be special. Usually, however, that in itself doesn’t convince many others of their specialness. So it must have been Jesus’s actions (healings) rather than his mere words that convinced and attracted people.
In my opinion Jesus was a healer and a mystic. The special relationship with God he supposed (he never actually says ‘Messiah’), was an interpretation of his experiences.
Imho, ‘He was special and needed an explanation’ makes more sense than ‘He thought he was special, but was in fact delusional.’
Great story!!
This whole post is so sweet. Glad your wife is secure enough to realize folks need all the allies we can get.
“If I have God in my life, why do I need Jesus?”
I think, therefore Yahweh is what I am is what I thought when I was in high school 60 years ago.
Great story! 😊
In Japan, I am often asked, “Why do you take religion so seriously?” and I sometimes find it difficult to answer.
For many Japanese people, the idea of there being many gods feels quite natural, somewhat like the religions of ancient Canaan. In Shinto, for example, there are said to be “eight million gods.” If the gods lived in a democracy, I suspect the Christian God would almost certainly lose the vote by a landslide. Because of this, the monotheistic idea can feel rather foreign here.
People may ask, “Why do you think only one God is true, and that all other gods are false?” From their perspective, that kind of exclusivity can seem very strange.
I understand that one reason Christianity spread so widely in the West was precisely because of its exclusivity and its strong missionary impulse. But when I live in a country like Japan, I sometimes feel how foreign that way of thinking really is. It makes me ask myself why I do not think more like other Japanese people around me.
Your post about reflection as you age touched me. I just attended the 60th reunion of my St John’s Minor Seminary HS graduation. The only ordained member (1 out of 100 freshman) lived a life practicing the theology of “Love Thy Stranger!” I now am Jewish (second wife saved me) but my seminary faculty were pretty honest biblical scholars. I promoted your courses and books to my former classmates. The authoritarian San Antonio Archdiocese drove me out of practicing faith. I became agnostic and very opposed to any organized religion. My current Jewish faith community promotes the social justice and progressive philosophy I sought as an adolescent. I remain atheistic overall but based upon personal mystic experiences/events I continue to explore the potential of a realm of consciousness beyond the four dimensions of space time. The lastest findings in experimental physics about this are interesting. I believe that my rabbi including my name in the Mi Shebeirach at a holocaust memorial in Poland in 2005 had a dramatic impact on my health.(miracle???Maybe). My Vincentian seminarian faculty would have agreed with your book “Love Thy Stranger!” Unfortunately San Antonio Archdiocese banished priests who practiced that theology to actively!
You’ve had an interesting life!
Your experience highlights a couple points and a question for everyone.
I’m concluding that the people who witnessed to you and ‘led you to christ’ did not know the problems with the gospels, their historical development over time, including errors, that the authors are not known, etc.
Here is the question: If they had presented these features of the gospels, history and errors, and I’ll include OT stories as myths, would you have believed?
Perhaps an unfair question. My experience was similar and I will admit that had I known then what I now know, I would NOT have accepted christianity. I think witnessing the ‘truth’ to people should include all of the facts, which unfortunately a lot of religious studies programs and pastor training do not include.
Ah, one never knows what might have happened if things had been different! They would have used other means of persuasion probably. Would I have found it convincing? Doubt it, but there’s no way to know…
Interesting. I, too, fell in with some born-again evangelicals as a teenager and I sincerely, profoundly, fervently from the bottom of my heart, asked Jesus to “come into my heart.”
And . . . nothing happened. Not a whisper of a response, no sense of Jesus’ presence, no feeling that anything had changed. Zilch.
Over the years since, when I tell that to born-again Christians –usually when they ask “Have you ever considered asking Jesus into your heart?”–their inevitable response is “Well, then obviously you didn’t really mean it. You didn’t *really* ask Jesus to come into your heart, because if you had, he would have! Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you.”
When I say that I most certainly *did* ask, seek, and knock sincerely, their response is always, “No, obviously, you *didn’t*.”
Since their belief system requires them to think that Jesus will always respond to anyone who sincerely seeks him, their only possible reaction to someone who says “But he *didn’t* respond” is to say “Then you didn’t really ask.” But that sure shuts down the conversation, not to mention being insultingly dismissive.
Whoa. Yup, disbelief functions on numerous levels. (My current interest is in Prosperity Preachers and Faith Healers who insist to people who have given them their life’s savings that the reason they haven’t become rich or healed yet is because they don’t have enough faith. Good god.)
Bart, a follow-up question, if I may–I’m very curious to know, how would *you* have responded to my description of my experience, back when you were a born-again Christian? If someone had said to you “I asked Jesus into my heart, and there was no response; nothing at all happened”, what would you have said?
For the atheist, of course, there’s no mystery here; Jesus died around two thousand years ago, so of course he didn’t “answer” when I called to him, and it makes no more sense to try to summon him than it would to ask Socrates or Thucydides or Julius Caesar to “come into my heart.” But I do understand that for the born-again believer, my story poses a terrible dilemma. Either they have to admit that Jesus does *not* answer everyone who calls on him, or they have to say that I was/am insincere (either in the event itself or in my telling of it). So — how would the born-again Bart have responded?
I would have said the same thing your other tender-hearted believers said: Yeah, you didn’t really do it. (!) And if you were honest about it, you’d admit it and give do it for real this time… 🙂
Wonderful story, thank you. When I was attending Northern Michigan University in the late 1960s I dated a girl who was somehow affiliated with Moody Bible Institute. I think they had a radio program. At any rate I told her I was an atheist, and they told her to break up with me. She did! Looking back I believe that was a good outcome. I eventually became a Unitarian Universalist minister.
Yes, they did / do have radio station. One year I was a radio counsellor for them. Yikes!
As a (now devout atheist) Jew, I’ve always been amused and amazed by evangelistic Christians passionately and urgently arguing that I MUST welcome Christ into my heart right this second. It’s like a sales pitch to an Eskimo to buy an ice-making machine. “No, thanks, I’m good.”
This is such a great post. I have read some of your books, but just joined your blog tonight. It’s very lovely to have a sense of your personal story.
Stretching logic to justify belief rather than accept empirical evidence, I’ll mention two books, which I’ve mentioned previously but they seem thematically relevant. Scott Stripling’s ‘The Trowel and the Truth’; Richard F. Carlson and Tremper Longman III ‘Science, Creation and the Bible’.
Stripling presents archeological evidence for much of the Old Testament being literally true. He fails to omit though much archeological evidence that doesn’t support the OT, e.g. Camels not in that part of the world for @ a thousand years after Abraham. Carlson and Longman basically define their own cosmos-understanding viewpoint that – and I quote – “The book of nature (science) and the book of scripture cannot in principle contradict each other, for they both proceed from the same Author.” (And Author is capitalized I conclude as a reference to god.) Well, once the cosmos is defined in such a self-supporting way, then of course everything has to support god’s creation. However, this is simply not an empirical statement. Rather, it is a belief statement not supported by evidence.
These authors are probably great people who if I knew them personally I’d consider friends and neighbors but their views are simply self-referential. All the best.
As an agnostic for over 50 years, I recently discovered your books and have become a devout (can I say that?) reader and follower on Youtube. I was baptized in the Methodist church as a baby, joined the Catholic Church when I was 20 and lost my faith completely in my 30’s. I hesitated about breaking the news to my family, but imagine my shock when my grandmother told me she lost her faith as a child when her parents admitted to her there was no Santa Claus. She assumed they had lied about Jesus too. As the wife of a doctor in a small town in southern Missouri, she knew that church attendance was necessary for acceptance in the community. How many apparently religious people, I wonder, are just going through the motions for social, business or political advantage? Several names come to mind….