Once an atheist English professor at a secular college in California, Ordway admits that she once believed that Christians were a collection of ignorant, plastic Jesus stereotypes and atheists were smarter than Christians. “It really was an inexcusable ignorance on my part, Ordway says. I bought into the whole ‘we’re more enlightened folks who’ve ‘arrived’ because we don’t believe in God – bad attitude that is often prevalent in colleges. She says that she experienced a fair amount of flack from critics after her Christian baptism in 2006 (in 2012 she became a Catholic), but not as much as she’d expected. “I think a lot of atheists perceive it as teams and feel I’m a traitor for switching teams, she explains. Others claim I was not a proper atheist to begin with if I could become a believer.” ~ Lisa Suhay, Christian Science Monitor As this former atheist professor who now teaches Christian apologetics at Houston Baptist University illustrates, we all have life stories that lead us to unexpected places. For my part, if you had told me in the mid-1980s that I would be an associate dean and assistant professor of government at the largest Christian university in the world, I would have thought you were delusional, not just because I had no aspirations toward an academic career, but also because I was not the least bit committed to my faith. Although I was raised in the church, I was not a practicing Christian for 15 years, drifting in that nebulous area between Christianity, theism and deism. It was a significant loss in my life in 1992 that led me to reexamine the faith of my parents and grandparents, and I did so with the intention of establishing where I stood once and for all on the question of God. Once my mind was persuaded of the veracity of Christianity, specifically the resurrection of Jesus Christ, everything else fell into place for me, and nothing - not the sins of other believers, the pressure to conform to society, my emotions or my own fear of rejection - will dissuade me from my lifelong journey to be more like Christ. Its been a methodical and thoughtful journey, and I will share some of my thinking someday, because I truly believe that faith and intellect are not mutually exclusive, and I want to share my thought process for the benefit of others. It is my humble opinion that a lot of people who stray from the faith as I did made the same mistake I did, which is to put more focus on other believers, and what they say or do, than remaining fixed on the One in whom we believe. I used to say, I was spending too much time looking horizontally and not enough time looking vertically. “Sometimes people approach me and say, I really struggle with this aspect of Christian teaching. I like this part of Christian belief, but I don’t think I can accept that part. I usually respond: If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead. That is how the first hearers felt who heard reports of the resurrection. They knew that if it was true it meant we can’t live our lives any way we want. It also meant we don’t have to be afraid of anything, not Roman swords, not cancer, nothing. If Jesus rose from the dead, it changes everything.” ~ Tim Keller
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:22:02 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015