Encouraging.
ON BART EHRMAN'S AND FRANCIS CHAN'S RECENT REVELATORY MOMENTS
Recent developments in the personal journeys of both Bart Ehrman and Francis Chan brought me back to Genesis 1:2, "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters." In my context, I cite the verse in terms of the bearing it has on the issue of conversion, on gaps that are filled, frequently one step at a time.
A well-known agnostic/atheist New Testament scholar, Mr. Ehrman has just surprised myself and many others with a blog entry aptly titled "A Revelatory Moment about 'God'" (see: https://bit.ly/2sqzLv0). Though at least not yet a return to the faith of his youth, the experience - eloquently and clearly recounted in his piece - has turned him into less of a skeptic: "My revelatory moment has softened my view... I’m not at all advocating we return to the religious constructions of previous centuries and millennia. I’m just saying that the possibility that there really *might* be orders of existence higher than I can imagine strikes me just now as completely plausible." Is Ehrman on the path of converting to something like a generic, philosophical form of theism or will he remain on his newly-found spot along the journey for the rest of his life? We shall see.(*)
Mr. Chan, on the other hand, an evangelical pastor, leader and author I just learned about, seems to have had a sudden encounter with the history of Christianity prior to the Reformation (see a clip, here: https://bit.ly/3841a4V, and his entire remarks, here: https://bit.ly/2FZcH9X). With equal eloquence but also, in his case, with the charm and warmth of a preacher, he said, a few weeks ago: "I am not making any like grand statement, I'm just saying: some of this stuff I didn't know. I didn’t know that for the first 1500 years of church history, EVERYONE saw [the bread and wine] as the literal body and blood of Christ... What does this book [the Bible] tell us clearly? That He does not want any divisions in his church." Is Chan on the verge of a conversion to either Catholicism or Orthodoxy or maybe to a less evangelical, more historical and liturgical form of Protestantism? Again, we shall see.
Lots of virtual ink is already written about all this. May I recommend, in our day and age, that you simply facebook their names (in Ehrman's case, I just used the exact, short title of his entry) and read the threads under their posts about Ehrman's story in the pages of Holly Taylor Coolman and Michael Barber, and the one under the post of Steven Nemes about Chan's case. By now there are surely yet other fascinating threads, and already also links to articles or blog entries as well as short youtube videos discussing whether Chan is a heretic or a traitor, if he fell under the spell of Catholic apologists, or if he necessarily *has* to become a Catholic to be true to his new convictions, and the like.
On the thread under Dr. Coolman's post, a gentleman remarked: "Bart is a good (and smart, and honest) egg who was not given the philosophical and theological-hermeneutical equipment he would have needed to handle his disillusionment with fundamentalism differently." On the same thread, someone asked if Ehrman had not read Aquinas, to which someone else replied: "What would have led or enabled Bart to read Thomas Aquinas? Just not that obvious for someone on a Moody-Wheaton-Princeton journey," referencing the Evangelical/Protestant schools where the agnostic biblical scholar was degreed. These were both responses to the part of the thread initiated by Catholic theologian Fritz Bauerschmidt, who shrewdly had stated: "You kind of wonder what he thought Aquinas meant when he said that we cannot know what God is."
Prof. Bauerschmidt later admitted that he "was probably more mocking" the fact that it has taken Prof. Ehrman quite a long time to figure these things out. But he has a point. Lack of a proper, sound, long philosophical training - I eventually came to realize - partly threw myself into years of agnosticism/atheism, roughly between 2004 and 2010, even after years of theological training, including two years of graduate study, as a Protestant and in specifically or culturally Protestant institutions, in Cuba and the US. It was only by reaching out, totally on my own, during the years of my faith crisis, to at least a representative chunk of the appropriate philosophical and theological literature that I had never been pointed out to but knew it was out there, that, by the grace of God, I came back to faith. Most of the material I am talking about was part of the vast, rich, formidable, tragically commonly untapped Catholic intellectual tradition, and by 2011 I knew what my Church was going to be from then on, having been received into the communion of the Church during the Easter Vigil of 2013.
Earlier in my life (and I have Chan's case in mind now), during my very first weeks of seminary training as a Presbyterian, I vividly remember being assigned to read the Apostolic Fathers, that is, the Church Fathers from the period right after the so-called New Testament period, just ending the first century and during the second one. Well, reading the letters of Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch or Polycarp of Smyrna I found myself, yes, inspired, but also unable to find, as the non-specialist that I was at least, to find major doctrinal differences between what they were saying and what Paul or the other authors of the New Testament had said. I knew that the two sets of letters were separated by a few decades but saw nothing but continuity between them; clearly, it seemed to me, the same Holy Spirit had inspired both groups of authors, the biblical ones and the ones that came right after them. I also only realized about this in hindsight but it was at that moment that "sola scriptura" began to break for me.(**) I know that a version of this has happened to countless others, seemingly now to Pastor Chan, 150 years after a comparable immersion in history inspired St. Newman a famous dictum.(***)
Ehrman's unexpected openness to the plausibility of higher orders of existence than those human consciousness can know and Chan's fresh enthusiasm about areas of the comprehensive Christian faith hitherto unknown to him speak volumes about the complexities and the levels of the process of conversion, if you look at it from a mere sociological standpoint, and about how the Spirit of God stirs the depths of our still waters, if you see it in the light of faith.
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(*) A question I'd have for Mr. Ehrman: now that you have had your personal revelation and take it this seriously, to the point of adding a question mark to most of your career, will you be open to also find at least degrees of plausibility in other people's own journeys, conclusions and indeed revelations regarding the issues at hand, or *the* issue at hand? I am here mostly thinking about the philosophers, theologians and mystics of the Judeo-Christian tradition but also about comparable figures from other traditions.
(**) Mainstream Protestantism, the brand I belonged to, frequently theologically liberal, does not stress a lot the importance of the Reformation "solas," if it stresses any tenet of the faith at all. I sometimes half-jokingly say that I wish I had been a conservative evangelical instead, before swimming the Tiber, so that I knew the Bible by heart, since Catholics, we'd all agree, are also lacking in that sense. Still, I was a Protestant, and somewhat loosely had embraced the "solas," until I began to read my way out of them.
(***) I now find it ironic that a widely-used edition of the Apostolic Fathers in English, of which I have owned a copy for twenty years, was edited by Bart D. Ehrman. During my seminary years down in Cuba I had obviously read them in Spanish.
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