My own journey went through three stages: (a) Is there a God? (b) How can I know God? and (c) How can I have communion with God? The first stage was a journey of many years through exposure to animism in the Philippines and church in backwoods Alabama. My parents were generally hostile to religion, except in an anthropological sense, but had us attend church while visiting family so as not to antagonize my grandmother and perhaps even inoculate us against Christianity by exposing us to a particularly colorful variant of the sort that might be of interest to National Geographic.
During my high-school years in Colombia, my childhood animism gradually transformed into a kind of agnosticism that contemplated the existence of a transcendent Spirit in whom I eventually placed my faith. This happened towards the end of my senior year in high school (during a sabbatical in Louisiana) on a dare by my next-door neighbor, a thorough-going theist of otherwise eclectic beliefs. This unexpected development left me disoriented, and I consulted scriptures from various traditions for guidance. I found the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching inspirational but not compelling, whereas the Gospels struck me as very direct but deeply puzzling.
Spring of my freshman year in the United States found me struggling to understand the meaning of Romans 10:9. I felt that I this must certainly be God’s own testimony of himself, but I could not understand what it meant. I nevertheless pledged myself to Jesus but asked God to send someone around to explain everything. Sometime later, I was talking with an acquaintance who observed that I didn’t seem to have any real idea who Jesus is and offered to tell me. There followed a very involved explanation of the Fall and Salvation that spanned Genesis, Isaiah, John, and Revelation. One key moment was Isaiah 9:6, which is when I first understood that Jesus is in fact God. The second key moment was the account of the death of Jesus in John 19:28-37. At that point, I was a blubbering mess and don’t really remember much of what was said afterward. I was baptized in a public fountain on campus a few days later after learning about baptism.
Now my focus was to pour over the Bible to bask in the magnificence of God as revealed in scripture and to begin to familiarize myself with the overall compendium of scripture. This was aided by spending the Summer in Austin, along with others in my house church, being intensively mentored in scripture, scripture memory, prayer, and personal evangelism. I dropped out of school for a semester—to my parents’ great dismay—to concentrate on processing all this, but my father convinced me to return to college, even if only to study Spanish Literature, so that I might at least have a decent education.
What happened next left a deep and lasting impression on me. My first real introduction to the study of literature was a class in Spanish Golden Age Literature, which the professor began by describing the era as a time when a man-centered worldview had emerged from within a God-centered worldview that it increasingly challenged for supremacy. Moreover, the largely analogical mode of the God-centered worldview was giving way to the largely analytical mode that would dominate subsequent centuries. He thus cautioned us that we would not be able to grasp the literature of this period without becoming thoroughly conversant in both scripture and analogical thinking. To explain, he led us through 1 Peter 3:18-22.
He pointed out that the image of the ark floating over the waters of the flood recalls the image of the Spirit hovering over the waters at Creation, and the ark therefore represents a promise of new creation, which corresponds to the circumcised heart of the believer buried with Christ in the waters of baptism, which symbolize death followed by resurrection in glory. There’s much more to the passage than the mere taste he gave us, but it was enough for me want to study literature instead of going to seminary because I wanted to understand the anthropology of language and literature, how they function in the world at large and what the implications might be for understanding scripture.
The major difference between studying ordinary literature and studying scripture, of course, is that the very same Spirit who spoke to the writers of scripture speaks to us as well, and he is perfectly capable of using even a bad translation of a flawed manuscript to communicate basic points, which are validated to the extent that the meaning of all scripture becomes increasingly straightforward and coherent.
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