I grew up a Presbyterian (USA) in the Deep South—you’ve heard this from me before. It means a lot of things: that I grew up a mainline Calvinist surrounded by conservative Baptists; that I was always very close to, but just outside of, various permutations of Evangelical Christian culture. My church upbringing was clearly different from many of my friends’, though generally innocuously enough. No projectors in my sanctuary. We had an organ. We said “debts” in the Lord’s Prayer.
Also, I had no idea when I had been saved.
The problem, of course, with not knowing when I had been saved was that, as far as many were concerned, I hadn’t been. I did not quibble with this conclusion, which did not assuage anyone’s anxiety about the fate of my immortal soul, especially because I obviously did not share that anxiety.
An illustration: as an older child, I was on a swim team, with practice several times a week. A local preacher’s daughter was on the team as well. Once, we were swimming laps, when she said to me as we paused for breath at the end of the lane (I was perhaps ten, she was perhaps nine): “If you died right now, would you go to heaven?” Perhaps you recognize this opening line. I did not, so I said, very honestly, “I don’t know.” We swam another twenty-five meters. “Okay,” said my teammate. “So repeat after me—” Between laps, she had me repeat The Prayer. You know the one—where you tell Jesus that you’re a sinner and explicitly invite him into your heart to rule your life. (There’s a vampire joke to be made here, but I’ll leave that to you.) Eventually we finished, and she repeated, triumphantly, “So if you died right now, would you go to heaven?” “I don’t know,” I said again, just as honestly.
I hadn’t been taught about God’s promises, or assurance, yet, and was answering only from what I had gleaned from Sunday School stories and whatever I picked up from sermons. I didn’t know much, but I did know that getting to heaven wasn’t on me. I didn’t understand why my teammate seemed so worked up about getting me to know where I was going. What happened to me when I died, I thought, was up to God, and I trusted God to make the right decision. I didn’t know anything, but I wasn’t worried about it.
There is, of course, a raw theological difference here. Presbyterians are a Calvinist branch, and the denominations with the most presence and clout in the Bible Belt (Baptists especially, as well as Methodists) have Arminian roots. Predestination versus free will. It had never once been suggested to me that my salvation was in any way up to me—indeed, a major Calvinist thesis is that it is not —whereas my swim teammate and most of my friends at school were taught that it was the most important decision they would ever make. Without that salvation moment, the story of how you believed and Got Saved (your “testimony”), your salvation itself was in doubt.
But also at issue here is the emotional story we create about how we become, or are, members of the family of God, the body of Christ. Mainline denominations don’t talk much about getting saved. There’s a lot we avoid: emotional displays in church, for instance. Talk about the activity of the Holy Spirit. Vocal responses to good points in the sermon. Guitars. But the absence of language about a single epochal salvation experience is, in a general evangelical context, the most glaring. How do you know you’re saved means, among other things, How do you know where you belong? How do you know you believe?
Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus, literally knocked off his horse by a blinding light and the heavenly voice of Jesus, was the premier model for becoming Christian in the common understanding of culture where I grew up. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only model for coming to Christ. The pastor of my church when I was a teenager suggested another Biblical precedent: Peter.
Where Paul’s conversion was sudden, dramatic, intense, permanent, and eminently recountable—Paul’s repetition of his story to others is paradigmatic for “sharing your testimony”—Peter’s path was different. He was called and he followed, but he doesn’t always understand what is happening in front of him. It takes him a while. It would be hard to say exactly when he really believed. Called to walk on water, he takes two steps and panics. Shown a transfigured Christ with the representatives of the Law and the Prophets, he babbles so that God Almighty personally hushes him. Offered a foot-washing, he at first rejects it and then asks for a full bath. The same Peter who confesses Jesus as Christ and Son of God and is declared the rock on which the church will be built, the holder of the keys of heaven, the hotheaded would-be defender of Jesus’ person, publicly denies Jesus three times. And then, later, it is this Peter, this hot-and-cold, deeply fallible, sometimes ridiculous Peter, who preaches to the crowd at Pentecost, and to whom the vision of unclean food is given and who immediately acts to bring Gentiles into the promise of salvation.
There a good deal of comfort to be found in this alternative story, with its backsliding, its ambiguity, its insistence on the hope for and usefulness of the very imperfect. It takes Peter years of walking (literally walking) with Jesus for anything to stick. And yet he is chosen, and it does, finally, stick. So also we walk, so also our mountaintop experiences of clarity do not save us from falling into valleys that show us that we are apparently no surer or smarter about God than we ever were. A “Peter” conversion model gives us time. With Peter, and often, we feel, with us, faith is a long game.
Still and all, though. Even Peter could point to dramatic experiences of Jesus. Multiple. Even Peter made the choice to follow, and could point to a time before it.
A common experience among “cradle” Christians in mainline denominations is, to put it bluntly, no experience. Many of us—myself included—were raised in a church, and have remained in it. We grow; our theology may stretch wider or condense inward, shift left or right; but we cannot see ourselves in outright denial of Christ and then preaching before a city square covered in the Holy Spirit. This faith is harder to defend and explain than Paul’s, and in some crowds, even harder than Peter’s. On the one side, we cannot point to the defining moment in which we walked through the doorway of the room prepared for us; on the other, we cannot point to any fire we’ve walked through. Where is our story?
I suggest: Mary. Not Madgalene. Mary, Jesus’ mother.
“BUT BAILEY,” you say, “AN ANGEL CAME TO HER, HOW IS THAT NOT A BIG MOMENT?”
Read the story again. The angel tells Mary that she is favored, that God is with her. Mary is, one assumes, a good Jewish girl, raised to know God and to follow the rules by which God’s people lived. She is surprised by the announcement that she is mysteriously pregnant, but her song, called the Magnificat, echoes the prophets she would have heard read in the synagogue, with business about the mighty being brought down and the poor lifted up. Mary is a churched girl, and the new information she is given—that she is to give birth to the Son of God—is still processed within the frame in which she was raised. Her understanding of God and God’s power grows, but there is no indication that she did not know God earlier, or that the Annunciation represents a dramatic break with her past. Each time something happens, she ponders it in her heart: she is equal and oriented to the task of understanding. Mary, you might say, is a cradle believer, but the strength and integrity of her faith is not doubted on account of that. There is a precedent for those of us who seem to live in a religion like a fish in water.
The punchline, of course, is that the Bible is full of conversions and reorientations of all sorts. Think of Nicodemus and his confusing conversation with Jesus under cover of night. Think of the Ethiopian, who had studied the Hebrew scriptures and was won over by a good sermon. Think of Paul and Silas’s jailers, trembling at a miracle that was not performed for them. There is no need, here, to come down on the side of free will or of predestination; there may never be a need, and (I content) the scriptural evidence is mixed. But the need for a story about ourselves, the need to see how we fit into Christ’s body and how we come to live in God’s house is more pressing. It is, I think, a mercy that scripture teems with stories.
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