Renewed Hearts and Minds

One Whom God Draws

A friend recently passed on a book by Holly Ordway [Not God's Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010)].  It is an autobiographical account of the author coming to faith out of a state of antipathy and disdain for Jesus Christ, Christendom and Christians.  It is one more compelling account of God's saving power, the truth of His electing, choosing grace, and the irresistible power of the Spirit of God, the Hound of Heaven.

We always find such accounts thrilling and humbling at the same time.  Ordway found herself a typical child of a secularist age.  She makes no mention of father, mother, siblings or the home in which she was raised.  This is somewhat curious, as doubtless her home conditioned her to Unbelief.  But she focuses instead upon the conditioning effect of her schooling:

A memory from first grade: the teacher giving us children words to spell on the chalkboard.  I was a precocious reader and writer, so I wrote the word confidently: "g o d."  But the little boy next to me who wrote "G o d" was praised for his correct spelling, not me.  I knew about Greek and Norse gods, characters in my storybooks on myths, so the capital G puzzled me.  I did not understand that God was a name, the name of the Lord.

My indifference persisted as I grew up, went through high school, and started college.  In high school, religion of any kind seemed to me an odd but harmless pursuit, one that I treated with the same incurious disdain I held for other activities that didn't interest me, like golf or chess. [Op cit., p. 13f.]

But in later, college years the conditioning to Unbelief remained subtle, but became more negatively cast.  Indifference morphed into prejudice.

In college, I absorbed the idea that Christianity was a historical curiosity, a blemish on modern civilisation, or perhaps both.  My college science classes presented Christians as illiterate anti-intellectuals, who, because they didn't embrace Darwinism, threatened the advancement of knowledge.  My history classes omitted or downplayed references to historical figures' faith: for instance, it was only much later that I learned that Florence Nightingale was a Christian. [Ibid.]

We highlight these details, not because they are in any way remarkable or unusual, but because they are  typical of the pervasive conditioning to Unbelief that occurs throughout our contemporary secularist world.  Note--this has nothing to do with truth; it has everything to do with propaganda.  Ironically, and wonderfully, it was Ordway's later search for Truth that drove her (uncomfortably) into an increasingly less prejudiced, less cant-ridden examination of reality.

Like all atheists, Ordway used "no-God" negatively--to buttress what she did not believe.  But she was, like all atheists, unable to live out atheism consistently and positively.  She writes:

What, then, did I believe?  In my worldview, I was the product of blind chance working over millions of years, a member of a species that happened to be more intelligent than other mammals but was not unique.  I thought I was a social creature because that was how humans evolved; the language that I delighted in using was just a tool that humans had developed along the way.  If I had been consistent, I would have embraced the fashionable theories of literary criticism that pronounced language itself to be self-contradictory and meaningless.  But I didn't; one of the reasons I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the little regarded genre of fantasy was so that I could avoid that kind of literary theory and stick to a more traditional, meaning-based interpretation of the books.

So even as I became more anti-Christian, and even though I was contradicting the principles that undergirded my atheism, I treated art, music and literature as if they had real meaning.  I studiously avoided thinking through why I did this.  [Ibid., p. 23f.]

As Van Til once famously wrote, the Unbeliever, in order to reject God, can proceed only by presupposing the truth that God is and that He has created and sustains all things.  The Unbeliever is like a child sitting on a father's knee to enable reaching his face in order to scratch at it.  Eventually, over long passage of months, through the help of friends who were Christians, Ordway met, believed in, and bowed in joyful submission to the Maker.

The process was long and gradual--as if often the case; more like a symphony with movement than a brief chorus.  Here is one waypoint along the journey, which we found particularly powerful:

But if this God were real . . . that this Creator could, and did, offer eternal life--what then?

It was as if I were waking from a long sleep, or emerging from numbness, and at last seeing clearly.  I looked at all the beauty around me and felt profoundly, deeply sad.  It was all so lovely, and we have it for such a little time.  Any human life is just a brief flicker in time.  My own life would end, and I would lose all that I loved so much.

A longing awoke in my heart, a longing I had never felt before, or had long forgotten.  I thought: could it be true that God really does offer life that doesn't end?  As I considered the merest chance that it could be, that it really could be so, tears filled my eyes.  The possibility of hope cut me to the heart.  I realized that now, if it turned out not to be true, I would no longer be indifferent: I would be angry.  [Ibid., p. 85f.]

 God's grace is indeed irresistible, when he sets His face upon the one to whom He will show mercy.  But so wonderful are His dealings with us mere creatures, that He draws us from the inside out.  As the Shorter Catechism puts it:

Effectual calling is the work of God's Spirit, whereby convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, he doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the Gospel.

Ordway's story is an arresting illustration of these sublime truths.