Coming to Faith

One of my daughters is associated with a campus group that gently presses her for her testimony of how she came to faith in Christ. This always involves a certain amount of frustration for her and those like her, who, perceiving in themselves the same faith as their once-unbelieving-but-now-believing friends, can never remember not believing. More than once I have had to assure her that there is no reason for her to seek more darkness in herself than she has already known, and that the sign of every true believer is “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”

She recently told me this, which she needs to tell her friends, especially those who are inclined to think she isn’t a genuine believer because she has never had the punctiliar conversion experience that so few Christians have had:

Yes, I think I have experienced a “personal relationship with God,” that God HAS made me understand Him and imitate Him supernaturally, but that’s because I already have faith, and I attribute any improvement in myself to his work. It hasn’t been the case that God has slowly impressed the fact of His existence on a reluctant mind. I was told that He existed, I was told what he was like, I was told that He did certain things and had a certain character—and I believed, because I trusted the people who told me.

This is really as much as she can say, but as Horace Bushnell explained at length in Christian Nurture a century and a half ago, it is the normal experience of believers raised in Christian homes.

I told her that if she wanted to sport with her friends a bit (which she won’t) she might tell them that faith doesn’t only imply knowledge of God, but ignorance of him, else it wouldn’t be faith, in which both are found together, and which shows in the humility of the witness. Profession of the knowledge of God on the part of those who would speak for him often lacks credibility because their hearers have an intuitive understanding of this. We are more inclined to believe the testimonies of people who profess faith in God rather than those that are heard to be professing knowledge of him. There are good, reasonable reasons for this.