Step Five

One of my favorite teachers once taught that "you don't have to take poison to know it's bad for you. You can just read the label." She was a great teacher and her influence on me continues to this day, but that particular paradigm has given me great grief. Growing up all kinds of things were labeled poison and placed out of bounds. My textbooks at the church school were very carefully edited and even good things and good books were censored. We didn't read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. We read only excerpts from most books, and they were carefully chosen to avoid anything that might be controversial. Our studies in history were very traditional and Plato himself could not have been more careful about what viewpoint we were exposed to. Our study of the Bible was limited to memorizing facts and stories and interpreting it according to a systematic theology that was quite rigid. I've already spoken about the struggle I faced in college when the same tools we had derided as evil in Old Testament Survey were suddenly supposed to be embraced and put to use in Literary Criticism. Everywhere there were signs reading "Poison, don't taste." What they really amounted to were injunctions against thinking.
Perhaps if I had been a boy and submitted to the lengthy training process that insures that one's thinking will not be too independent I may have been allowed to speculate unhindered, but I am a woman therefore never destined to question or lead. I was not allowed to speculate or wonder. Women are to absorb and pass on the accepted viewpoint--as are most people in the fundamentalist culture I grew up in. Fundamentalism is very fragile, intellectually.
My conversion began when I ran out of things to think about. I was a master of Bible trivia. I could argue the approved theology with anyone. I had read anyone who was anyone in the world of "no books written before 1950." The Christian bookstore had ceased to be a source and become an ever more tasteless series of reruns of ideas I'd heard a million times before. I couldn't read the classics, while they weren't out and out banned, in fact to an outsider they would seem to be held in reverence, but they were dangerous. People who had read the classics tended to pay for it by being marginalized and mistrusted, unless they could robustly explain where and how the classics were wrong. Anyone could be forgiven anything if they could just make you feel good for not thinking or exploring beyond the little boundaries of our mental world. I have always feared a marginal existence, being acutely aware that my life was marginal enough as it stood, so I continued to avoid the classics. I became very, very bored. There was nothing to think about, and no hope of finding anything to think about.
In the meantime, the ideas that were all I had were proving to be deeply flawed. The more I strove to perfectly apply them, the more I discovered that they simply didn't work. In fact it many cases, they caused more harm than anything else. The experiences began to take their toll. One night I found myself in Barnes and Noble wandering the philosophical/religious sections reading anything and everything. All bets about labels and the risks of "poisoning" and marginalization were off. There had to be better answers somewhere, and I had to find something. That night I found Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey. It proved to be a great start.
Yancey is a fellow former fundamentalist. He truly felt my pain, and he was careful not to poke where it already hurt. He also wasn't afraid of thinking and questioning. I was ravenous at that point, my intellectual anorexia was over and I had a lot of weight to gain. Everything Yancey wrote I read, including Soul Survivor. Soul Survivor gave me permission to read the thirteen mentor's work, and everything happened from there. Long, long story short, Yancey led to Buechner, Buechner led to Calvin's Festival of Faith and Writing, the festival led to the discovery of faithful believers who had read all sorts of "poison" and not only lived to tell about it, but had grown and were better believers for it. All kinds of taboos were flaunted with relish. Friendly arguments between every kind of Christian, some Jews and even a flaming athiest were all welcome and helpful and good. The trap was destroyed and I am out and no amount of wishing or pretending otherwise will ever change it. I like to think. Thinking is good. I can no longer worship where they expect me to freeze my thoughts about God until judgment day. Getting to know someone is a process of discovery. I want to discover more and more about God.
This series starts Here. The series continues Here.