Draft

Forthcoming in Louise Antony, ed. Philosophers without Gods (Oxford)

MERE STRANGER[1]

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his ä

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

≥As Kingfishers Catch Fire≤

My story is grounded in good religious experiences as a child, for I was brought up in a strong evangelical Christian home and I loved the religion which was the center of my life until I was well into my 20s. I believed that I and all other human beings need to be saved, where salvation requires a special connection with God through faith in Christ. These beliefs gradually dissolved completely and, as I will explain, they did so because of my faith itself.

1. Heart-based experiences, reflection and faith

Let me begin with a simple song we sang in Sunday School when I was 5 or 6 years old:

Into my heart, into my heart,

come into my heart, Lord Jesusã

It made perfect sense to invite Jesus into my heart. I knew my heart was located roughly in the middle of my chest. Inviting Jesus there had palpable effects --pleasant physical sensations and emotions in that part of my body -- warm, open, and peaceful feelings.

By the time I was 8 or 9 years old, I had a sense of taking responsibility for myself when there was a message in church about sin and the need for repentence. I accepted my own sinful nature and my need to be forgiven. Sometimes there were specific sins to repent (and I would always be on the lookout for flaws in myself) but usually I was connecting more generally with whatever it may be that gives the idea of original sin its power for people. I could differentiate between the open, peaceful heart and the burdened, closed heart, the sinful heart. I was attracted to the idea of escaping the sinful nature. And so in response to the call to repentence, I would pray and express remorse for my own sins, and often I would surrender into peace, joy, lightness, relief, calm, and confidence. These were ecstatic heart-based experiences of letting go, the heart dissolving and soft, and I felt a sense of surrender to Jesus and to the whole world beyond me ≠ as if losing my life, and thereby finding it. I would emerge feeling an active energetic interest in other people.

Since these experiences were powerful and not uncommon, it was easy enough to believe that Iπd been saved. The experiences were grounded in the belief in a magnanimous, infinitely loving, and personal source of the universe. God. It is a vast thought, and yet my mind as a child encompassed that thought, at least I gestured in its direction in a liberating way. I definitely believed in God and I believed that God cared about me personally. These beliefs were grounded in the good experiences, just as those experiences were grounded in the beliefs --the beliefs and experiences were mutually supporting. Belief in God was a core belief at the center of my web of belief. The belief was abstract, similar to my beliefs about numbers, and it was as central for me as the basic truths of arithmetic. Yet it was grounded and personal because the experiences were interpreted as making for a connection with God, and given my situation I had no salient reasons to doubt any of it.

My experiences did not just appear to me out of the blue. We were Nazarenes, cousins of Methodists and followers of John Wesley. I grew up immersed in a way of life that owes a great deal to Wesley and his emphasis on experience. In his journal for May 24, 1738, he wrote about an experience in which he felt his heart ≥strangely warmed:≤

In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Lutherπs preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.[2]

I feel that I understand perfectly well what Wesley was talking about. The terms that he uses in this journal entry are familiar to me, full of life. I know the general problem of wanting to be assured about salvation as well as his resultant joy and confidence about it all. The idea of a definite experience that could be timed (≥about a quarter before nine≤), and in which the heart is strangely warmed, and which brings with itself a feeling that it is important ≠ this made complete sense to me. From the first time I heard of Wesleyπs phrase ≠ ≥.. my heart strangely warmed ..≤ -- I felt that I knew what he was talking about from the inside and I felt (somewhat presumptuously) that I had every right to assume that I knew, since I myself had had experiences that could be described that way.

The emotions gradually would fade away after a few days. A calm clean thread persisted in ordinary life but the ecstatic states themselves would disappear. So what then? Was I no longer saved? What had happened? What did it mean? It made sense to me, as my parents and others advised, that the reality of being saved persisted even after the experiences had faded. I am still saved; I can have faith in that because our faith was in God, not in the experiences themselves. So I learned early that experiences are ephemereal, they come and go, but oneπs faith could be stable and continuous. One shouldn't rely on the experiences very much. One enjoys and appreciates them but when the strong emotions disappear one still has faith that something good persists. It did not matter very much exactly how I felt on any given day. This insight was based on my ability to reflect on the religious experiences and emotions. I had to reflect on them. Without thought I easily could get stuck in a depressed state when the good feelings faded. So when I was young this sort of rational reflection supported my faith in a clear and definite way.

Belief in God was linked to actions and attitudes towards other people. My parents were generally very kind. The kindness of my parents was understood to be the kindness of Jesus, a part of the whole package that was a source of wonder and joy and it definitely was the center of our lives. My parents often showed interest in strangers; they were often helping somebody with problems, and this was interesting to me. So I was often in the presence of people who were in trouble and my folks were trying to help them (especially to help them get saved) and the motivation was a sense of profound connection with the center and source of everything that exists. Often somebody strange was sitting at the dinner table. Who is this person? It was engaging and liberating to grow up around this. I experienced the normal problems we encountered as a family in a wide context due to my participation in the generosity and kindness of my parents to other people outside of the family. (Admittedly there also was pity intermixed -- where pity, a ≥near enemy≤ of compassion -- includes subtle arrogance, a quiet sense of oneπs being superior to those being helped.)

I never developed the idea that there was an inherent conflict between our religious life and rational thought. For Wesleyans, science and philosophy are not regarded as bad (so far as I know; I am not writing here as an expert in Wesleyan theology other than the way it came to me as a young person). One should endeavor to think clearly and honestly about things. As noted, it was important for me to make sense of the ecstatic experiences after they faded and it is there Iπd begun thinking abstractly and seriously about things in my own life. John Wesley was part of the English Enlightenment and not strictly speaking a fundamentalist. I never was told that the Bible is literally true. The Bible has to be interpreted just as you have to interpret ecstatic experiences, and interpreting passages in the Bible requires thinking about them. More generally, science is one thing, salvation another, and while the Bible is a guide to salvation and it is infallible concerning questions about our salvation, it is not necessarily the final word about historical or scientific matters of fact unrelated to salvation. God created the world; science can tell us what the world is like and how the creation came about. The theory of evolution by natural selection, for example, never presented itself as a problem for me or my Christian faith. Science is about what can be observed, it is about the nature of this world, and (as it still seems to me now) there is no serious conflict between science and religion. It is not difficult to find ways to reconcile any scientific theory with speculative beliefs about what is beyond direct observation just so long as one does not claim that the religious speculation is based on the science or assume that science is the only source of knowledge or insight about things.

Thinking also was important for us in acting correctly. We internalized high standards for behavior, and going beyond mere rules, we should be kind like Jesus. My mental life included patterns of continuous self-evaluation. Are my actions right? What would Jesus do? Are my thoughts right? Consistency was an important concept because we shouldnπt be hypocrites, saying one thing while doing or thinking another. These points were part and parcel of my own Christian orientation, not foreign elements.

Reflection was especially important to help us share the good news of the gospel effectively. We need to think seriously about the situations of other people. Sharing the gospel was important to me since from day one Iπd taken seriously the idea everyone needs to be saved. We accepted the ≥exclusivist≤ idea that the Christian faith is the only way to salvation-- the only way to avoid going to hell --and so it is crucially important for the ultimate well-being of everyone. What Jesus would do is get people saved! I understood why people are motivated to become missionaries, and I always loved it when missionaries visited our church. They invariably brought photographs and slides of people from all over the world and I was aware that there is tremendous diversity among people on our planet. This diversity was shocking and delightful to me when I was young. --Some people hardly wear clothes!

But, alas, this raised a question.--Wouldnπt they go to hell for that?

A missionary named Donald Owens made a good point about this sort of question. To be effective as a missionary when going into another culture to evangelize people, Owens said, one needs to distinguish between (a) what we believe and do that is essentially Christian and genuinely necessary for salvation, and (b) what we believe and do that is only part of our own culture and not essential for salvation. What is genuinely necessary is what one really needs to be saved and what is merely superfluous is only part of our own limited culture. Clothing styles more or less fall on the superfluous side of this sensible distinction, as does also, for example, the language one speaks -- one needs to profess faith in Christ but not necessarily using English.

2. The essential and the superfluous

What then is essential for being saved? What does one need to do, regardless of oneπs particular culture and upbringing, to ensure that one would go to heaven after death and avoid hell? We believed people would end up in hell if they did not become Christians like us. But just as clothing styles and languages differ, so also do beliefs, and many people have lived and died without having Christian beliefs, and this has happened through no obvious faults of their own. They were simply living their lives in situations where they never had a fair opportunity to become Christians. Missionaries had not yet reached them yet with the good news of the gospel. Would a fair and powerful God permit even those people to suffer in hell after death?

Evangelical Christians do not take this question very seriously and I can understand from my own experience why they do not. The idea of hell for distant unbelievers was not on my mind very much as a child except as part of the imperative to go assist them. While I believed that hell is real and while this belief mixed in an element of fear, even terror, into the more positive emotions, the idea of hell was not all that salient because my good experiences had established me securely on the side of joy. I understood that the Old Testamentπs aggressive message of a wrathful and vengeful God had been superceded by the New Testamentπs message of love. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.[3] I believed this message, and so I did not worry much about myself going to hell when I was young; at least these fears were not consciously on my mind. And the satisfying aspects of the religion and my experiences obscured the implications of saying that anybody who is not a Christian would end up in hell.

I had read C. S. Lewisπ discussion of the problem in Mere Christianity. His discussion illustrates how superficial treatments of the problem can lead one to suspect there is a serious problem for evangelical Christians:

Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him?[4]

Lewis uses the phrase ≥new life≤ for the Christian life both in this world and beyond, and whatever may be the details about sin and redemption, the idea of a new life sums it up. The underlying assumption is that if you do not have this new life, you will end up in hell. Given his clear expression of the problem, one expects him to solve the puzzle concerning people who have never heard of Christ or been able to believe in him, and here is how he does it:

ä the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.[5]

Lewis asserts explicitly that nobody can be saved except through Christ, so he does not quite reject exclusivism. But his answer to the puzzle is that we don't really know what God is doing in detail. It is a mystery to us. Aspects of the story about salvation are unknown to us. So even if we assume Christ is essential for salvation, as Lewis says, we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

This means that explicit Christian belief is superfluous --at least for some people. For all we know, there are people who do not need to become Christians in this life in order to be saved. Anyone claiming that Christian faith in this life is necessary to avoid hell is going beyond what they honestly can be said to know. Indeed they display a sort of arrogance that actually must be insulting to God because it flies flat in the face of the fairness of God due to the fact that many people do not have a fair chance to develop Christian faith.[6]

The realization that explicit Christian faith has to have been superfluous to the salvation of many human beings did not by itself unravel my own Christian beliefs. But it was a first step because it defused the urgency of spreading the gospel based on the idea that people really need it in order to avoid hell. And it naturally opened other questions -- if explicit Christian faith is superfluous for some people, why isnπt it superfluous for all? If we don't really know what God is doing relative to the central issue of salvation, perhaps we should not be so confident about our other basic beliefs.

But isn't that the whole point of Christianity, that God is revealed publicly in Jesus? So this question came into focus. To clarify it, we can look at another widely quoted passage in Mere Christianity where Lewis discusses the core Christian idea that Jesus is divine:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.[7]

Does this make sense? Is it responsive to reasonable questions about special revelation through Jesus Christ?

No, it did not make sense to me. It is not an adequate reply to serious questions about what human beings can know generally about the divinity of Jesus, for what Lewis himself had said in response to the puzzle about salvation equally applied here as well --we actually don't know. We do not really know what Lewis claims to know about Jesus, about his intentions, and so forth. The past is irretrievably gone and there is much

that no one living now can ever know about what happened concerning

Jesus, especially concerning the relatively few passages in the New Testament to which Lewis is referring. We don't really know exactly what Jesus said as opposed to what was added later by people who were excited generally by his life and teachings and who read things into his life story. People debate these points in detail, but it will always remain speculative. Looking into those debates, it was clear to me that I was never going to know very much about what Jesus intended to do or imply, certainly not enough to have definitive support for what Lewis claims.

There is no reason to accept Lewis' claim that any reasonable person has to accept literal claims about Jesusπ divinity. If unbelievers really needed to be saved by accepting the gospel revealed in Jesus, then other explanations had better be available to them. The "lunatic or God or worse" premise is false. If you already believe in Jesusπ divinity, it might sound good but otherwise it just falls flat. It was clear to me that I really did not know what Lewis claimed to know about Jesus --and that Lewis did not know it either, despite his claims. Lewisπ type of argument might work to persuade some people but nonetheless it is purely rhetorical and manipulative, and it does not take seriously the epistemic situations of unbelievers. I was beginning to see how speculative were my own Christian beliefs. It was obvious that I would always remain largely ignorant about relevant details concerning the past --about what Jesus actually claimed, what he meant by his claims, and so forth--and dogmatic claims like Lewisπ definitely were not helpful.

Looking at this world as best I could, then, was it clear to me that the basic claims of revelation made within Christianity are true? No, not really. I began to realize that my own grounds for believing in the things Lewis was defending were not much better than those of people who had never even heard about it, or for whom the Gospel was not a live alternative. And such people were not only far away in the jungles of South America, they were near me, the strangers in whom my family had always shown interest. And it became clear that, given the facts of their lives, most of them had not really had anything like a fair chance to become sincere Christian believers. There wasnπt anything at all necessarily wrong with them even when they were not Christians. I was identifying with them more fully, seeing things more clearly from their perspectives, and I was not merely seeing them as beings whom I was supposed to help save. And I was seeing that what I had to say to them about my own religionãand what anybody had to say, putting the best spin on it -- was not very convincing. It certainly wasn't like lightning hitting them, and so no wonder they didnπt or couldnπt muster the faith.

3. Superfluity of core beliefs

None of this mattered at first to my own beliefs very much since I was aware that the whole thing is based on faith and, as noted, I had faith! I was looking into these issues seriously because of my faith, because I was serious about its role in human life. And I was not naÔve about how Christian faith works. Obviously it is not based on having some sort of demonstrative proof about the basic historical claims. The past is irretrievably gone, and many questions will simply remain unanswered. But God is alive now, as am I, and I am related to God now. There is not a vast separation from God. On the contrary, as Protestants we believed that there is immediacy in the relation with God, and this immediate and personal dynamic relationship could not possibly be dependent on our ability to peer with certainty into the distant past. Spiritual life was not dependent upon unknowable information and mere speculation about the past. The details about the historical Jesus were not all that relevant to my living relationship now with God.

But my access to this relationship with God was through my connection with Christianity, so what does it mean if others reasonably do not or cannot make this connection? Now this question turned out to be important to me. I was accustomed to assuming a sort of common ground between me and all other human beingsãthe need for salvation through Christ and the possibility of being saved and having the new life in Christ about which Lewis speaks. The assumption of common ground with others was a basic aspect of my faith. And I had no interest in a more private religion. I knew that other Christians, such as Calvinists, did not assume there is common ground with others on the outside ≠they believe, for example, that some people (such as themselves) are ≥chosen≤ or predestined for salvation, and others would simply be left out through no fault of their own. Salvation is an act of grace and nobody deserves it, so even those left out have no grounds for complaint. But such Calvinist views were not relevant to my own Wesleyan beliefs--I regarded such views as absurd, they are inconsistent with the New Testament conception of a fair and universally loving God[8]ãand in any case they were no more relevant to me than were the weird views of Mormons or Buddhists.

But I was aware, of course, that there existed the competing religious views and it gradually began to dawn on me that none of the religious views could be uniquely important. What I have in common with others who have never heard of or accepted Christ, or who may hold different views about the meaning of Christ, is more important to God than what makes us different. My own views may well appear absurd to other people just as their views seem absurd to me. It really could not matter much to God whether one was a Christian or what one believed about Jesus. God must want us to think about things other than specifically religious beliefs and practices, otherwise God certainly would have made it more obvious, in a general way accessible to everyone, what we all should believe and do about religion. Pay attention to this world; donπt be fixated on some other world. Even the story of the Incarnation can be seen as signifying that we should embrace our physical lives as well as the spiritual. Instead of focussing on abstract religious doctrines and personal status, we should dive into human life with all its complications and messiness and sexiness and sorrows and joys. St. Paul says that Christ, in becoming human did not consider equality with God something to be grasped![9] If equality with God is not worth grasping, what is? Certainly not my own religious ideas and preoccupations. In a similar spirit Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes from a Nazi prison in 1944:

During the last year or so, I have come to appreciate the "worldliness" of Christianity as never before. The Christian is not a homo religiosus but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus became man... It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman, a righteous man, or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one... This is what I mean by worldliness -- taking life in one's stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness... How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in this world?[10]

Whereas St. Paul describes Christ as letting go of the Godhead in order to participate in created life, Bonhoeffer describes living fully in this world as a way of participating in the suffering of God.

These sorts of thoughts began to shape my views about Godπs relationship to the world. Many of my beliefs about God began to seem superfluous from Godπs point of view, and not only those pertaining to the evangelical message about hell. God doesnπt really care what we believe -- about God! And this point don't apply merely to those who have never had the chance to hear the Christian gospel. It pertains to me as well. God couldn't possibly want me, or any of us, to spend our lives in this amazing world preoccuppied with specific abstract religious issues or clinging to our own practices that cannot be shared by all. Life is not trivial, and it is not a pointless game. We are in a startling and mysterious situation. There is a great deal of suffering in the world yet (as it seemed to me) happiness is possible. The real problems of people should be addressed ≠surely this is God's view!-- and we should not be obsessed with any of the secondary religious stuff.

It was my faith that made possible these types of thoughts; indeed they were emerging from deep within the faith. Do not make divisions between those who are saved and those who are not saved. This distinction cannot go very deep in actual practice because in acting upon beliefs based on this distinction my actions will be based upon my own limited assumptions about what is important. Just as Jesus transcended the Old Testament distinction between a specially Chosen people and those who are not specially Chosen (the Christian gospel is universal) so also the distinction that I had accepted between being saved and not being saved isnπt a propos. The difference between oneπs being inside and outside the religion is itself superficial.

My faith in God and interest in other people gave rise to these thoughts, just as the moving ecstatic experiences had led me when I was young into reflection about the role of those experiences relative to an ongoing faith in God from day to day. Without a strong faith, I might not have bothered to look into these things in the way that I did look into them. I might have remained in a sort of dull hazy state about these matters. Nonetheless at that time my faith in God was gradually eroding the conceptual framework of specifically evangelical Christian beliefs about God because that framework was too rigid and too confining for the expansive nature of the faith itself.

4. Two wagers

A new wrinkle appeared when I connected for awhile with the fear of hell myself. --But wait! --What about me? --I am not living deep in the jungles of South America. I have had many privileges, including acquaintance with the Christian gospel. Sending me to hell for not believing in the Christian religion, were I not to believe, would hardly be unfair given all the positive advantages I have had, at least compared with many other people. After all, one fact that motivated my questions was the contrast between the information I had and others lacked! So maybe I was going to end up in hell myself if I stopped professing the specific Christian beliefs, even if South American Aborigines and Muslims and my friends from non-Christian families were going to get some sort of exemption or get more chances later on in some future life to accept Christ.

The fear that engendered these types of thoughts was deep in my pysche. Lewis expresses it well when he talks about the idea that God is going to invade the world again:

Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freelyä God will invadeä It will be too late then to choose your side.[11]

True, this comment is not much in the spirit of his milder comments that we donπt really know how the mechanics of salvation is going to work out. But I certainly understand his aggressive all-or-nothing evangelical stance, for the fear of being on the wrong side -- the fear that Lewis is expressing and inciting -- was deeply engrained within me, even though for me the fear usually had been overshadowed by the message and experience of divine love.

So there was a period of time when it still seemed possible that I myself could be destined for hell, were I not to be a professing Christian in this life even if it turned out that everybody else would be getting an exemption or another chance later on. Perhaps I already had had my fair chance! But by then I was not willing to identify myself as a Christian because it seemed too trivial, it seemed false to the heart of the faith in God itself to cling to the superfluous, for the reasons I have explained. I didnπt want to have some sort of inherently private faith, since the aspirations for the faith itself were higher. And so during this period of time I was willing to risk going to hell myself for the sake of the integrity of this faith, oddly enough, and it was my faith itself that was making it possible. I was risking hell myself rather than accept a position that God surely could see is superfluous and therefore unworthy of acceptance.

I know this is an odd claim more suited to fiction than real life (von Strassburgπs Tristan is willing to go to hell for the sake of romantic love[12]) and I suppose it should be embarrassing to say so but all the same there was a period of my life when I consciously was willing to go to hell after death rather than compromise and accept a sort of private religion in this life. Consciously, even vividly, I was risking hell for myself in abandoning

specifically Christian beliefs and practices and I was doing so because it seemed with all my heart that God could not possibly value our focussing on such things in the way that I had been doing all my life until then.

My thoughts and feelings contrasted markedly with those behind Pascal's wager. Pascal reasons that even if the odds of God's existing seem very small, hell would be an infinitely horrible outcome compared with what one gives up to devote oneself to God in this life, so one should strive to believe in God just to be safe. His gamble, it seems to me, is grounded in fear and pessimism. My own gamble was grounded in joy and optimism. From within my own faith I looked with contempt upon Pascalπs ridiculous trivialization of the basis for religious life. What I got from my folks and the Nazarenes, from Wesley, from the New Testament Jesus, and from my own heart-based experiences was life-affirming, not life-denying. It was grounded in love, not fear. And it wasnπt merely an intellectual pose or exercise, for it was the central issue in my life as I conceived it. In any case, I was risking hell, and I saw vividly what was at stake, including what I was risking if God is the way Pascal assumed. But basically my faith in the infinite love of God also was optimistic enough not to settle into a sort of depressed and frightened state of mind. My roots in Wesleyanism came to the rescue. Things should make sense. God cannot be that dumb! God surely can see what my own situation is, God can see that I am sincere, that I am trying to be true to what is genuine and essential --and that I am simply letting go of the superfluous. My ability to think this way was an expression of my faith in a fair and loving God whereas Pascal's wager presupposes that God is a complete moral idiot.

5. The theistic framework unravels

And then something completely unexpected happened. I totally stopped thinking about God. Not all at once, but over a relatively brief period of time, thoughts about God stopped occurring in the normal flow of things as they had been doing ever since I could remember anything at all. I was not thinking about God at all, and not merely orienting my thoughts to other things because God wanted me to think about other things. The theistic framework simply unraveled and it completely disappeared from my mind. The concept of God became idle. It was not a live concept any longer. Questions about God or rebirth or afterlife or, generally, about the propositional content of the various religions are no longer serious questions. My faith in God led to the dissolution of the specific Christian beliefs, and then the theistic faith itself disappeared as well.

A pattern had begun when I was 8 or 9 years old. I found that rational reflection supported my faith when I needed to make sense of the fleeting nature of the good experiences. I had continued to think about things, including how to connect with people who needed to know about Jesus in order to get saved. And it was my faith that animated the entire process. I cared about strangers who would end up in hell if they did not get saved, which meant that I better think seriously about their predicament and about how to communicate with them in order to help them. And I had enough faith in God and in my relationship with God to trust the process that took place.

I realize it may seem odd to say that my faith in God led to the unravelling of my religious beliefs, for I definitely do not have any substantive beliefs now about God or rebirth or any other speculative religious issues. If the religion was so important to me, why didnπt I simply make some revisions in the framework of beliefs rather than let it dissolve? Because from the beginning my faith was conceived as part of something much vaster than me, potentially shared by all, and it was of supreme importance within this life. This reflects the evangelical side of me. It was extremely urgent to know Christ, and the need was universal. Even a revision along the lines of universal salvation would still posit a basic division in this world between (a) those with access to the special knowledge --the personal relationship with God through knowing about and accepting Christ ≠and (b) those on the outside. Even if it eventually it is universally shared in some other life (or there is at least fair access), here and now in this world the conditions are not universal, and this means the faith cannot be of utmost importance in this life. One can avoid hell even without knowing about Christ at all in this life --even Lewis has to admit it (even though, as noted, he seems to forget it soon after admitting it). The simple fact is that there is a deep incoherence in the evangelical Christian guidance for living in this world: it says its message is essential, but obvious facts about the world are such that it cannot possibly be essential. It would be easier in a way if its message were that God is cruel and unfair, in which case Pascal's wager would make more sense. But that isn't the message at all. We are talking about the God of Jesus, the God of Love.

My response was not a simple switch to the outside. The difference between inside and outside disappeared, and this came to seem the deep core of what Iπd been accepting all along. Or if there is a difference, it cannot be characterized in terms of the religious beliefs and practices that had been central to my life. It has to be common ground that is universal and shared in this life. Probably Bonhoefferπs letters from prison had (and still have) a strong influence on me. It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneselfä

Some Christian believers may want to dismiss my own interpretation of what happened as a sort of rationalization for leaving the religion. And admittedly there certainly was (and is) plenty of anger, fear, arrogance, self-absorption and greed lurking in my mind. These states tend to be deeply suppressed in me, since it was always wrong for us to be angry or greedy and so forth (and so I became pretty good at not even recognizing these states in myself so that I would be able to evaluate myself overall as good). And such states unconsciously may indeed have been at work to undercut my religious beliefs. Maybe I was just plain angry in a suppressed way about having to be good all the time (not to mention having to worry about saving people all over the world) or about having lived in a sort of deprived way sexually or in other ways compared with what was going on around me in the wider culture. Maybe my story is indeed some sort of rationalization for getting out of the narrow views. Or maybe my obsession with the abstract stuff about God and salvation just got boring compared with living more fully without the filter of the religion.

Maybe so. But none of this was what was consciously on my mind. For example, I did not (and do not) feel angry or bitter or complacent. On the contrary, there is a persistent and discernible thread of love and joy, devotion and trust, going all the way back, and this definitely is the heart of it. In any case,the story I have told here is what was consciously in mind. The conscious process for me has been one of faith. My faith was guiding me. The story of my shadow side probably would be more exciting than the conscious one, but my goal here has been to tell the story as it has unfolded so far in consciousness. Whatever unconscious forces may have been in play, they have been in complete harmony with the conscious process I have described.

6. Continuity

When the concept of God became idle, I would still sit quietly sort of praying but without trying to formulate words or thoughts, simply paying attention in silence. So I started meditating in this way on my own several years before I had any idea about what was known about the methods of meditation that have been developed in various cultures. I was in graduate school, doing work in logic and analytic philosophy. At the same time I was beginning to learn to relax and communicate in sexual relationships. A hatha yoga class opened my body to the smooth flow of pleasurable fine sensations of which we can be aware throughout our bodies. It was a natural step to become serious about body-based mindfulness meditation (vipassana). These sorts of things ≠ analytic philosophy, sexual opening, connecting with sensations in the body, intensive vipassana meditation retreats ≠ these have for me been forms of waking up, and as such they are straightforward expansions of the process that began with the heart-opening experiences as a child.

There is continuity between my life now and my earlier practices as a Christian when I engaged in daily Bible study, reflection, and prayer (Wesley encouraged use of such methods, why his followers were methodists). Having read about meditation, I found it natural and rewarding to dive in. I have explored many forms of meditation, including methods for the development of concentration, mindfulness, expansive spacious open awareness, lovingkindness, shared joy, and others.[13] There is much to explore, and there have been some initially surprising connections. For instance, I did a year long meditation retreat a few years ago and one morning was experimenting with a form of meditation Tibetans call guru yoga. [14] This was not my primary practice and I did not expect much to happen, especially since the texts invariably emphasize the importance of the role of a guru figure if you want to do it properly, whereas I was practicing in solitude and the last thing in the world I was seeking was a guru. But having read about it, I was giving it a shot and it seemed to be working pretty well. I was enjoying it --how easy and delightful it was --when it dawned on me that Iπd done it before, since the structure and felt experience were similar to what Iπd been doing and experiencing as a child in Sunday School when I was inviting Jesus into my heart.

There was something in my early religious experiences that I have not lost. Yet when I teach meditation, I have little to say about how oneπs experiences might relate to metaphysics or salvation or enlightenment or future life fantasies or any of the other usual themes. If you are interested, see for yourself! I am drawn to accounts of the Buddha that make him sound much like Bonhoeffer. Worldly and down to earth, the Buddha in speaking of the ≥sure heartπs release≤ was making his own radical break with the dogmatic other-worldly religiosity of his own situation.[15] The central insight is that the ego is constituted by ≥straining after ä good≤ and there is a significant and intrinsically valuable shift in experience when

the straining of the mind is released and the present event, whatever it may be, is regarded without the slightest attempt to get anything out of it.[16]

This sort of shift can seem profoundly counterintuitive to our western minds, religious or secular, and yet it is familiar to me because it was happening already in my own early experiences of the soft dissolving heart. This shift naturally takes one beyond a preoccupation with specific methods of practice.

I didnπt choose this sort of path any more than I chose my body. Dropping the religious beliefs probably was more or less inevitable for me from the beginning. The early ecstatic experiences drew me in deeply. They were good experiences, they grounded my faith, they led to serious

reflection about what is really going on, and they were the seeds of the liberating realization that it is much better to feel than pose -- It is only by living completely in this world ä

I cannot imagine my life as one in which I am clinging to the comforting thought that I am saved or chosen or otherwise safe as determined from some external perspective. Although the religion gave me joy and confidence, ≥good energy,≤ and even though I was content with my own Christian faith, I could never have been comfortable or complacent within it because of the overwhelming imperative to convert other people who otherwise were bound for hell. This urgency ultimately guided me out of the formal religion, as I have explained. The specifically religious concepts fell away. The release makes sense, and there is no need to reconceptualize any of it.

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[1] For comments on an early draft of this essay, I am grateful to Anne Barnhill, John Milliken, Jonathan Miller, Cameron Smietana, Eleonore Stump, William Thompson, V. Alan White, and Diana Winston.

[2] The Works of John Wesley , Vol.18 (Journals & Diaries, I) (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), pp. 249-250.

[3] I John 4:18 (New International Version).

[4] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 65.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Unbeknownst to me when I was young, Wesley felt exactly the same way. Randy Maddox has written recently that Wesley was convinced of the ≥unfailing justice and universal love of God≤ and this conviction made ≥it impossible for him to believe that people who lacked knowledge of Christ through no fault of their own ä would be automatically excluded from heavenä He argued that Scripture gave no authority for anyone to make definitive claims about them.≤ See Maddox, ≥Wesley and the Question of Truth or Salvation through other Religions,≤ Wesley Center Online (July 2004), http://wesley.nnu.edu/WesleyanTheology/theojrnl/26-30/27.1.html.

[7] Lewis, ibid., p. 56.

[8] According to Maddox, Wesley held that ≥it was more reasonable to be an atheist than to affirm a God who was capable of unconditional reprobation.≤ See Responsible Grace: John Wesleyπs Practical Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), p. 56.

[9] Philippians 2:6 (New International Version). See Joseph Campellπs discussion of this passage in The Heroπs Journey (San Francisco: Collins, 1991), p. 226.

[10] Dietrich Bonhoeffer (21 July 1944), Letters and Papers from Prison (London: Collins Fontana Books, 1953), pp. 122-123.

[11] Lewis, op. cit., pp. 65-66.

[12] Campbell, op. cit., p. 106.

[13] For good descriptions of some forms of meditation, see Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart (New York: Bantam, 1993); Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002); Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness (Boston: Shambhala, 1997).

[14] See, for example, Lama Thubten Yeshe, Introduction to Tantra (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1987), pp. 104-106; and Dalai Lama, The Union of Bliss and Emptiness (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 1988), pp. 18-19.

[15] See, for example, Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).

[16] Alan Watts, ≥The Art of Feeling≤ in Nature, Man and Woman (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 95. First published in 1958, this essay is still among the best interpretations of the challenge and significance of eastern views for westerners.