From Atheism to Truth

Holly Ordway was an English professor, a competitive fencer – and an atheist. She writes:

Life inside the fortress of atheism was good. I thought I could make sense of the world just as well as, or much better than, the people who claimed to have faith. I didn’t believe in God, but I had a worldview that felt perfectly satisfactory. It wasn’t a particularly cheery view, but I preferred truth over comfort any day. . . .

Some fools couldn’t face the darkness, but as for me, I could savor the idea of standing on my lonely precipice, able to recognize my identity as a meaningless speck in an uncaring universe and go on living without the artificial comforts of religion.

Over time, her atheism “gradually hardened into strident hostility.” Christians were fools, satisfying their longings with a made-up God. She dismissed any arguments for Christianity; “I had locked myself into my fortress and flung away the key.”

Yet, even in her fortress, Holly occasionally recognized that the world – and she herself – was stained:

All I had to do was look at myself and the people around me to recognize that anger, jealousy, insecurity, envy, contempt, selfishness, fear, and greed were deeply rooted in the soil of being human.

But she saw no solution to these problems with humanity in what she experienced of Christianity:

The bumper-sticker expressions of Christian affirmation—“I’m not perfect, just forgiven!” “God is my co-pilot!”—and the kitsch art that I saw—a blue-eyed Jesus in drapey robes (polyester?) comforting some repentant hipster, or cuddling impossibly adorable children (none crying or distracted), presented faith as a kind of pious flag-waving. “Look, I’m Christian! I know Jesus!” Well, thanks, but no thanks; this Jesus doesn’t look like he could handle anything worse than a skinned knee. I didn’t know then how to say it, but I was looking for the cosmic Christ, the one by whom all things were made, the risen and glorified Jesus at the right hand of the Father.

From high school, Holly was moved by poetry and loved fantasy literature. Indeed, an analysis of The Lord of the Rings figured prominently in her doctoral dissertation. When she began to teach poetry in her classes, she found herself moved by the faith-filled lines of John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14 inspired a deep longing in her:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Then Hopkins. He “blazed with intensity, illuminating a dimension to the world that I had not believed existed. I had so carefully honed my defenses of denial, individualism, and rebellion, and here was Hopkins slipping past my guard.” These lines from his poem “Carrion Comfort” hit her hard:

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can:
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

She writes:

Hadn’t I been feasting on Despair for years? And I was starving. I read and reread “Carrion Comfort”. Hopkins spoke what I had never shared with anyone, what I had scarcely dared to admit. He had been where I was—and had not stayed there. Hope, wish day come. . . . Was there such a thing as day for me to hope for?

Holly was surprised to find that her fencing coach of almost a year, Josh, was a Christian. He fit none of her stereotypes.

He was a caring and gentle person—though not a pushover—and there was something different about him, something I had never seen before: a kind of peace. His wife, Heidi, . . . had that same underlying joyfulness. . . . [Josh] cared about me, not as a potential convert, but as me, a unique individual, and he always, always treated me with respect.

One night after a disastrous fencing competition, Holly and Josh talk late into the night. She asks question after question. Her last question was key: “When I die, what do you think is going to happen to me?” Josh initially demurs: “I’d rather not answer that question.” But when Holly explains that she genuinely wants to know his thoughts, he replies:

“I believe that we will come before God in judgment, and he will give each person either perfect justice or perfect mercy.”

I sat in silence thinking about this for a moment. Slowly, I said, “And you believe that it would be better for me to know enough, beforehand, to ask for perfect mercy?”

“Yes, I do.”

And that was all he said. Perfect justice or perfect mercy. At that dim morning hour, and again as I thought about it later, I recognized something important: I didn’t want justice. I considered myself a ‘good person’, but in my heart I was afraid to be judged on the real self behind my outward image. Perfect justice was terrifying.

Following Josh’s suggestions, Holly then begins reading on apologetics. She comes to believe that arguments for the existence of God are more powerful than those against. But eventually she recognizes that, if God is Who Scriptures claims He is, He cannot be analyzed as an object. He is a Person. One day, “without my asking, I encountered the Other, God the Holy Spirit, in a way profoundly different from evaluating him as an idea.”

But she has still not reckoned with Jesus:

Was Jesus who he said he was? There were many miracles that I could think about, but they all paled into insignificance next to the singular miracle of the Resurrection. Had it really happened? Because if it had, then Christianity was true.

Two books were especially helpful to Holly at this point: Gary Habermas’ The Risen Jesus and Future Hope and N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Eventually convinced that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead physically, in a glorified body, she had a choice:

I could choose to turn my back, to reject Jesus, and in so doing reject utterly God himself. Pride urged me to do it. This was the voice that whispered: “If you surrender, you lose. Be your own self, no one else’s. Be a rebel.” Or I could accept defeat, lay down my arms and acknowledge Jesus as Lord. . . whatever that entailed.

She did indeed lay down her arms. She ended her rebellion. She submitted to her rightful king.

Holly’s journey to faith in Christ is her own. Her fencing coach Josh showed great discernment and wisdom in the way he gently led her to faith; but that way is not a model for all. Some will follow similar paths; many follow completely different paths.

And her book describes her continuing journey, to Anglicanism and then Roman Catholicism. (With her penchant for considering serious arguments, it would have been helpful had her coach Josh suggested she read Book 4 of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion).

But praise God for His grace and mercy exhibited in the new life of Holly Ordway. Praise God that she is a recipient of perfect mercy. Praise God that He did batter the heart of this rebel against Him, that He did indeed bend His force to break, blow, burn, and make her new. May He work similarly in our friends, our families – and in our own hearts.

Holly Ordway, Not God’s Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms, (Ignatius Press, 2014).

 

When Do You Give Up on Someone?

When do you give up on someone?

Think of someone you have prayed for time and again, someone who has heard the Gospel and rejected it for years. Should you conclude, “It’s hopeless – this person will never come to faith.”

We considered Jesus’ story about two sons last Sunday:

“What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went. And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, “The first.” (Matthew 21:28-31)

The sermon emphasized the second son; consider now the first. He initially refuses to obey his father. Later, however, he regrets that decision and fulfills the command.

Any follower of Christ who speaks the Gospel regularly has heard such refusals. God makes His appeal through us: “Be reconciled to God through Jesus Christ!” (2 Corinthians 5:17-21). Yet as we make this appeal, many reject the command. Like the first son, they answer, “I will not.” Even after multiple appeals, many continue to say no.

But gloriously, many also, after decades of refusal, change their minds, come to faith in Christ, and are reconciled to God. We could tell of those among our own church family, but instead hear of “Staffordshire Bill,” who came to faith in a poor town in Wales around 1930, under the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Bill was near 70 years old at this time. He drove a fish-cart around town, pulled by a pony, selling fish door to door – and it was not uncommon for the pony to pull the driverless cart back home after Bill, drunk, fell back, asleep, into the rear with the fish. One evening Bill was drinking in a club:

There he was, drinking himself into his usual sodden condition, and as he afterwards confessed, feeling low, hopeless, and depressed, trusting to the drink to drown those inward pangs and fears which sometimes disturbed him.  There were several men in little groups of twos and threes in the Club room, drinking and talking, and suddenly he found himself listening, at first involuntarily but then anxiously, to a conversation between two men at the table next to his [discussing Lloyd-Jones’ preaching]. . . . ‘Yes,’ said the one man to the other, ‘I was there last Sunday night and that preacher said nobody was hopeless – he said there was hope for everybody.’  Of the rest of the conversation he heard nothing, but, arrested and now completely sobered, he said to himself, ‘If there’s hope for everybody, there’s hope for me – I’ll go to that chapel myself and see what that man says.’ . . .

[He aborted his first two attempts to attend, as his nerves failed him.] The third Sunday evening he was again at the gate, ‘wondering nervously what he should do next’, when one of the congregation welcomed him with the words, ‘Are you coming in, Bill?  Come and sit with me.’

That same night ‘Staffordshire Bill’ passed from condemnation to life.  ‘He found,’ Mrs, Lloyd-Jones tells us, ‘that he could understand the things that were being said, he believed the gospel and his heart was flooded with a great peace.  Old things had passed away, all things had become new. The transformation in his face was remarkable, it had the radiance of a saint.  As he walked out that night, [a church member introduced him and said], “Mrs. Jones, this is Staffordshire Bill.” I shall never forget the agonized look on his face, for he flinched as though he had been struck a sudden blow.  “Oh no, oh no,” he said, “that’s a bad old name for a bad old man; I am William Thomas now.”‘

William Thomas was a new creation. He died at peace with God three years later.

How many times had Staffordshire Bill heard something of the Gospel? How many times had he refused to obey the call? How many times had he cursed those who spoke to him of Jesus?

The power of God can transform the greatest drunk and the most arrogant intellectual, the vilest criminal and the most upstanding citizen. God commands all: “Be reconciled to Me!” There are many “first sons” who have responded, “I will not!” But, like Staffordshire Bill, God may not be done with them.

So be His mouthpiece. No matter how many rejections you have heard, no one is hopeless. “In Christ God [is] reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). So don’t give up. Be His ambassador. And may God be pleased to bring many who have rebelled for decades into His family.

[The story of Staffordshire Bill is taken from Iain Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years (Banner of Truth Trust, 1982), 222-223.]