Testify: A Personal Journey

Sadao Watanabe: Conversion of St. Paul (1967)

My spiritual journey began with years of exposure to animism, during my childhood in the Philippines, interspersed with attendance at church in backwoods Alabama every Summer. My parents were mostly indifferent to religion, except in an anthropological sense, but had us attend church while visiting family so as not to antagonize my grandmother and to perhaps inoculate us against Christianity by exposing us to quaint element of the local culture that might inoculate us against Christianity. 

During my high-school years in Colombia, my childhood animism gradually transformed into a kind of agnosticism that entertained the notion of a transcendent Spirit before hardening into a fashionable atheism that posited meaning in self-determination. This phase collapsed during a conversation with my Chemistry teacher, who pointed out that in the larger scheme of things, namely infinity and eternity, even the galaxy would be insignificant from the perspective of the universe. The next two years were very dark, though I did occasionally contemplate how the actual existence of a transcendent yet personal God might alter the equation.

I unexpectedly found myself in Baton Rouge for my senior year in high school, where absolutely no one was interested in discussing the meaning of life except my next-door neighbor, a notorious hoodlum turned outspoken theist with rather eclectic beliefs. When I repeatedly urged him to be more open minded, he countered that my denial of the existence of God was not exactly open minded and dared me to provisionally accede to the existence of God and call on him to see what would happen. I took the dare and, to my considerable chagrin, found myself unable to undo my belief in God.

This development left me deeply disoriented, and I spent most of my freshman year at Auburn University consulting teachings like the Bhagavad Gita and the Tao Te Ching, which I found inspirational but not compelling. By contrast, the Gospels struck me as inscrutable but possessed of a nagging ring of truth. The turning point came when, after struggling to understand Romans 10:9, I pledged to God to accept Jesus as Lord if he would send someone around to explain things to me.

Months later, an acquaintance noted my bafflement regarding Jesus and offered to tell me about him. There followed an involved explanation of the Fall and Salvation that spanned Genesis, Isaiah, John, and Revelation. I was shocked by the suggestion in Isaiah 9:6 that Jesus is in fact God and reduced to a blubbering mess to learn that the death of Jesus in John 19:28-37 was for my sins. I don’t remember much of what followed, but I was baptized a few days later in a campus fountain, and I utterly shed my former self as I emerged from the water.

My new focus became pouring over scripture to bask in the magnificence of God and to be sanctified by the renewal of my mind.  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 subsequently dropped out of school for a semester, to my parents’ great dismay, to process my ongoing transformation, but my father managed to convince me to return to college 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 Literature of the Golden Age, which the professor introduced by describing the 17th century as a time when the God-centered worldview that had dominated civilization for millennia was giving way to a man-centered worldview across Western Europe. This transformation coincided with the displacement of a largely analogical mode of thinking based on parallels to a largely analytical mode of thinking based on dependencies, a mode of thought now dominant worldwide. He cautioned us that we would therefore not be able to grasp the literature of this period without becoming thoroughly conversant in both scripture and analogical thinking.

To illustrate what he meant by analogical thinking, he led us through 1 Peter 3:18-22, pointing 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 to pursue doctoral studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age instead of attending seminary because I wanted to better understand the anthropology of language and literature—how they function in the world at large and what the implications might be for understanding scripture.

I have since studied all manner of technical subjects such as agriculture, trade, technology, taxation, language, and religion (particularly as relating to the ancient cultures of Ur, Canaan, Edom, Median, pre-/post-exilic Judea, and pre-classical Athens and Rome) with a view to better understanding the context of scripture for my own benefit and hopefully for that of others as well. I have subsequently found that understanding the logic of scripture regarding the mechanics of law, sin, justification, temptation, sanctification, and priesthood makes it easier to explain things simply and in ordinary language to people as conceptually removed from American Christianity as I once was.