This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
One October night back in the 1980s, an adolescent boy walked down the road outside his home in the Woolmarket community of Biloxi, Mississippi, in anguish. He was facing all the questions anybody his age faces—What am I going to do with my life? What really matters?—but with one additional, more crushing problem. The boy loved Jesus. The boy loved his church and the people in it. At the same time, he looked at the Bible Belt religion all around him and saw that, if one looked just under the surface, one could see some awful things: bigotry, cruelty, immorality, injustice. And he started to wonder, “What if what I’ve banked my entire life on—my entire eternity ahead—just isn’t true? What then?”
But then something happened. The kid would later understand what John Wesley meant when he wrote of his heart “strangely warmed” by hearing Luther read aloud in a chapel. For this boy that night, it was the confluence of memorized Scriptures flowing through his mind while he looked up into the expanse of the stars. There were no streetlights on this stretch of road, so he could fully see the expanse in a way he would spend his entire life hoping to see again. Nothing supernatural occurred. But he went home feeling, I suppose you could say, addressed. Stopping in that moment, it seemed that, as the Scripture puts it, “deep call[ed] to deep” (Ps. 42:7).
The boy wondered if it was all in his imagination—and he knew he had an overactive one. That was especially because he was dealing with such an interior kind of subjectivity—a kind of resonance—that he couldn’t put into words, even though he tried to scribble down notes about it in a notebook that night. He was taught not to trust that kind of subjectivity; feelings were untrustworthy, after all. So he spent years pivoting to objectivity instead, studying biblical and historical and systematic theology, learning how to debate the arguments for the truthfulness of the propositions of Christian orthodoxy. He studied and even sometimes worked alongside people (by no means all of them) who were even more dismissive of subjectivity or experience than he had ever been.
What mattered was a big God with a big theology and a big worldview. The gospel was something to be defined and defended, but sometimes in a way that made it hard to see that this was news, much less good news. Sometimes it seemed easier to find people arguing about Christology than it was to find someone who’d say, “Oh, how I love Jesus”—unless directed to do so by the overhead screen in congregational singing. He started to think that maturity would mean being like that.
If asked, at any moment, on a debate stage, he could tell you exactly why he was convinced of Christianity—and he could do that by arguments about the coherence of the Christian vision of the world, the deficiencies of the alternatives, the compelling nature of what happened on that Sunday morning in Jerusalem two millennia ago. And he believed all those arguments, and all those propositions.
And he still does.
But he never talked about that night under the stars, or moments like it—never as many as he would like but enough—that were of the same sort.
He had learned to distrust anything that couldn’t be clearly expressed in words, or that could, at least in theory, be tested and falsified in a classroom or on a debate stage. He could preach about biblical inspiration or about the Resurrection, but he didn’t know how to communicate what he couldn’t stand outside of—what was too close inside of him to be pulled apart and analyzed on a dissection table of words.
He still doesn’t, and I am struggling to do so even here.
The kid, of course, was me. But I think of that time in my life often these days because the ripples from that October night have stayed with me.
I think about it all the time when people ask me, as a non-Christian friend did recently, “Why, after all that you have seen, are you still a Christian?” The implication is that because I’ve seen “how the sausage is made,” as they say in the realm of politics, that I would be disillusioned enough. And it’s surprising to some of them when I say that I am not only still a Christian but that I am a more convinced Christian than ever in my life.
Part of that is intellectual. I still think a materialist view of the cosmos cannot make sense of the mystery and awe that the cosmos itself evokes. I still think that a view of humanity as an organism in an environment cannot make sense of our dignity and our predicament. I still think the only honest conclusion I can come to is that this crucified Rabbi actually, as Luke put it, “presented himself alive” (Acts 1:3, ESV) to people who maintained that witness all the way, often, to their own torturous executions.
I still think that Irenaeus and Augustine and Maximus and Bonhoeffer and Lewis describe reality in a way that rings true in a way that the objections of their critics do not.
On all those—and countless other similar points—I am cognitively satisfied by a biblical reading of God and the world. And by making me memorize the words of the King James Bible, people in my home church gave me more than just a love for literature but also a way to know a book from the inside out in a way that made me see when it was being caricatured or dishonestly dismissed.
But there’s also that October night. Every year that I grow older, even without a single one of the objective aspects diminishing, the subjective is rushing in like a returning tide. The objective biblical literacy kindled in me causes me to notice how much Jesus is described as leading with his voice. When he speaks, spirits flee, storms still, graves open, and people—sometimes who cannot believe they are doing so—get up and walk out into a future they cannot imagine, just because he said, “Come, follow me.” Jesus describes this in agricultural terms as sheep who follow a shepherd because they recognize his voice (John 10:16).
Every morning I hear my wife call out “Good morning,” and I do not ask, “May I see some ID?” I also don’t spend a lot of time agonizing over whether I might be having a psychotic break and that I am in some alternate timeline in which “Maria Moore” never existed and I’ve dreamed her up. I hear her voice, and I know it’s her.
The sociologist Peter Berger wrote that religious institutions function by “making available [events] that first occurred long ago”—events that, without institutions, would disappear with the prophets and mystics who first experienced them. The risk, though, is that they also can routinize those events. The very account that could cause riots in first-century Ephesus can now be read while people listen and check their watch for the time.
Not everybody needs the experience I had, but I needed to see Christ within an institution and to be disillusioned and to see Christ on the other side of it. Otherwise, I would have confused the necessary institution with Jesus himself. And then when I saw the institutions fail, as they always will, I would have been left thinking that Jesus himself was dead, or worse, that he was as selfish and predatory as the worst institution I could find claiming his name. I needed some institutions to give me the landscape of the Bible—and to show me how it holds up. I also needed to learn, within that landscape, how to recognize a Galilean accent that stood outside of and over those structures.
All the propositions are still there. But I’m no longer embarrassed to articulate the feeling I get when I marvel at the night sky, longing for a universe that feels more personal and beautiful than death and entropy and dead-matter can explain. I feel I am not just discerning data but am hearing a familiar call from Someone who eerily and invisibly has been with me all of my life—almost always unnoticed, but who has given me a few unpredictable glimpses behind the veil.
Still a Christian? Oh, yes. And I’m a Christian now who is kind of back where I started on that road in Woolmarket. I can talk and write about transcendence and moral foundations and canonical coherence, but what really kept me Christian most is learning how to say, “I Love Jesus.”
Again.
