ARTICLE MY TESTIMONY FROM ATHEISM TO CHRISITANITY Breaking the Threshold My Story: Its Only Anecdotal! As early as I can recall, I have had spiritual and supernatural I am using the word “supernatural” here because it generally accessible. When people hear the word, they intuitively know what it means. If I were writing more academically about religious experience, I most likely would not use the word because it bifurcates reality to distinctly into nature-supernature. I would contend that all of creation, visible and invisible, is from God’s grace, thus in a sense supernatural (Col. 1:16). More accurately, I would categorize my view as dual aspect (matter-spirit). There is an invisible and a visible world (matter and spirit) that exist together in one dual aspect reality. These two realms exist and work together in one creation. encounters, visions, dreams, revelations, inspiration, premonitions, intuitions, prophetic utterances, and transcendent experiences of the divine (specifically the God of Christianity) dispersed intermittently throughout my six decades of life. An outlandish claim for some ears. Some experiences were subtle and others not so subtle. On the other hand, my normative daily experience with God has been simply a modest, discreet awareness that God is with me. I did not receive these manifestations regularly but sufficiently as needed. My spiritual experiences were both inside and outside of the institutional church, the Roman Catholic Church. As I mentioned, I became despondent with God and stopped attending church after my parents’ bitter divorce. Not long after, I had an evangelical conversion experience and returned to God for a brief period. The only time I experienced a hiatus from “conscious” divine encounters was when I became a self-identifying atheist in my junior year of college. However, I am convinced that God was still near me and at work circumstantially even in that dark time of my life. I was consistently on the Dean’s List, while running my “businesses” out of my college dorm. I at least gave those up for the most part when my middleman sold to undercover. Nonetheless, I still wanted to be a wiseguy, somewhat. I was always more or less an underachieving gangster. Between brawling, atheism, partying, and the rest of campus life, I had enough vice in my life. Being an academic was beginning to slightly outweigh being a gangster, though I remained a wannabe. Yet, even during that time period when I was a committed, adamant atheist and did my best to buttress my mind against religion and religious arguments, I frequently backslid into a do-it-yourself romantic faith that integrated the Plotinian One, Wordsworthian, spirit-filled naturalism, and Emersonian transcendentalism. Even Milton’s Paradise Lost wrecked me for a season. Originally, I was genuinely committed to good, old, hard atheist dogma. I had my atheist card and checked every box. I tried so hard to be a faithful atheist, but I could not help myself. I must confess that I was turning into a backslidden atheist. The Divine was bleeding through my DIY spirituality, in nature’s church at dawn’s altar. I would hear the Creator speak through the morning bird’s song at Mirror Lake around 4:00 am every Saturday, after hitting clubs and parties all night. I could not resist the temptation of holy transcendence and innocence. I did not realize that I was looking for someone or something to change my life, a miracle. The subtle voice in the sky through the trees was indeed drawing me near. I was trying to find out why or whom. The progressive rock-art band the Moody Blues were extremely influential in my life, especially prior to coming to Christ and even following my conversion. These lines are reappropriated from their songs “Question” and “Tuesday Afternoon.” First Revelation: God Exists The following revelations and analysis are a retelling of my story from my book, Artificial General Intelligence and the Image of God. It was another late Saturday night. As usual, I was hanging out at a punk-gothic dance club, called Crazy Mamas. It was the outsiders club at the University. Punks, Goths, Hard Core., Teddies, Rockabillies, New Wavers, Skinheads, poets, artists, artsy posers, and other outcasts made it their home. The regulars were arrayed completely in black from head to toe, with colored, spiked hair, wearing chains, collars, safety pins, combat boots, and the whole getup. Not uncommon for today but for the 1980s, it was not the norm. The avant-garde venue was located in Columbus, Ohio near the campus of the Ohio State University, where I was attending graduate school, working on my Masters in philosophy as an atheistic existentialist. Of course, over the years there was a string of circumstances and events that led up to the night of my conversion. Although I pick up the story on that last night, it does not mean that God visited me in this dynamic way out of nowhere. As for the three revelations themselves, they seemed to have been exactly what I needed at the time to bring me to Christ, according to God’s infinite wisdom and goodness. I think I went so far astray that it took extreme measures to bring me back. Thus, the powerful encounter with God that I had was not due to my goodness or spirituality but, contrarily, because of my grave fallenness. I had a few beers that night. Nothing unusual, nothing intoxicating, except what ran over me soon after. It happened suddenly out of nowhere. I thought I was losing my mind, or someone spiked my beer. I could not shake my thoughts free from a gentle, firm, consistent nudging at the core of my being that turned into a small inner voice. This inward, seemingly metaphysical, pressure and presence would not leave me. It got ahold of me from the inside out. I could not shake it or get it out of my head. It was calling me, trying to get my inmost attention. Was I going crazy? Well, I tried to change my mind to another subject, but it kept directing my focus back to it. Whatever it was, my instincts or my gut could sense it was greater or stronger than me. It was not forceful, but it would not leave nor yield. I was becoming manifestly uneasy and anxious. Suddenly, the punk-gothic club, fully draped in black, was pierced through with golden light that was slowly descending from the ceiling and gradually filling that dark dismal cavern with a blinding brilliance that both terrified and awakened me. As the room filled with radiant dazzling golden, liquid light, I began to hear faintly in the background many choirs singing. Steadily, the voices came closer. But there were no choirs singing in the club. There was no singing, only the Sex Pistols. I scanned the bar several times for a reaction from the faces around me. Someone must have seen or heard? I turned to my friends but did not say anything. I did not want anyone to think I was losing my mind if this was all in my head. I merely looked for their reaction. Nothing. Nobody missed a beat. The loud music kept thrashing. The punkers kept slam dancing. The drinkers were drinking. The flirters were flirting. The trippers were tripping. The lonely were desiring. The artists were despairing. But the light in the bar and the voice under my skin kept piercing. Both became more intense, calling me out, to leave and to draw closer. I could not shake it. The whole tenor of the moment was telling me it was time. It was time because time was running out. Faintly curious but overwhelmingly terrified, I turned to one of my crew trembling, “I gotta get out of here!”. He abruptly turned toward me with a face and a voice I never had seen or heard from him before, in fact it wasn’t him. I led our crew. He was usually respectful of that fact. He forcefully wrapped his hand over and around my wrist, and with the most demented, demonic, insidious scowl and sinister voice he shrieked, “You aren’t going anywhere.” I had heard and seen enough. I ripped my arm out from under his clenched hand and shouted, “I’m outta here,” and I bolted for the door and never looked back. At this point, I darted to my car, thinking to myself, I just have to get home, calm down, rest, figure this thing out. “Never had any feeling like this in my entire life. What is going on with me?” I bounced from panicking that I was losing my mind to dreading that I was going to die. Was I having a panic attack? Perhaps, but why? Was I losing it? Something deeper was happening than merely panic. The voice grew clearer and more convincing. I thought to myself how could this be? How? As a committed, meticulously, legalistic atheist I had scoured and scrubbed every millimeter of my mind and memory from any vestige of religious construct, illusion, delusion, or infantile wish fulfilling Freudian fantasy. Not only was my life intentionally devoid of God, but I was also thoroughly convinced through the best arguments from philosophy, science, social science, and even the religions themselves that there unequivocally could be no God. In fact, I was so zealous, when approached by campus Christian evangelists, I would take them out to lunch or dinner and spend several hours over the table attempting to deconvert them of their faith with the ammunition I acquired that convinced me of the same. Regardless, something was emerging, and I could not suppress it or argue it away. No, as I drove closer to home, the voice would not subside or back down. And it became evident that what I was experiencing was what I had feared, God. I could not deny, try as I did, as I rehearsed at light speed every argument and shred of evidence that I could muster from my arsenal of doubt. I fought with everything I had within me to reject what this voice was conveying to me. I desperately fired back with shots of Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Voltaire, and Albert Camus. Nothing availed. Bounced right off. So did shells of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. I drew my Derridean sword of deconstruction to dismantle the oppressive binaries of religion and Christianity. I fought off faith with my Foucault, who armed me with hermeneutical suspicion to unmask every ruse of God and Christianity and reveal its fabricated nature built by regimes of truth constructed by those with power for the purpose of domination. Again, to no avail. I was shooting blanks. The light was not darkened. The gentle but firm voice was not drowned nor quenched but persisted. This was stronger than my powerlifter/boxer muscles could resist. Way over my ability to self-regulate. Truer than my truths. Finally, I got out the big guns of evolution, cosmology, causal closure, and every scientific physicalist argument I could assemble to dismantle what was coming for me, but the projectiles fell to the ground helplessly in midflight. I knew. Deconstruction, denial, and doubt were demolished before my mind’s eye. I reluctantly gave up some ground. And for some reason, I intuitively knew by the weight and authority of the voice which God was addressing me. I did not have to ask. I knew, somehow, unproven as that sounds now. This was the one true God. I was not pressed to sort out which true God - Allah, Krishna, Buddha, or Christ. No choices were given. I knew. The eternal weight of glory was pressing on my soul. There was no more metaphysical space for debate. However, it was not what I wanted to hear or see. The self-attesting veracity and power in which the revelation was presented permitted me to know without identifying or interpreting that this one true God was the Christian God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the creator and the one who sent Jesus Christ, who according to Christianity died and resurrected from the dead for our sins. I did not want it to be so. I hoped it wouldn’t be that. But revelation from God anticipated and silenced my questions with the irrefutable, self-evident truth of his aseity faster than they could be emitted from my brain. There were no cracks, hesitations, or pauses in this divine delivery that I should ask, doubt, or inquire which God? His self-attesting and self-confirming presence and truth are invincible. There is no defense against them. No fig leaf under which to hide. You are in the face of pure truth. His self-revelation made it clear without direct identification that it was the unnamable One, whose presence itself speaks I AM without need of words. Moses asked his name, and Jesus answered, “I AM.” Now, he’s speaking to me? The internal monologue went to dialogue. “So, you are telling me that you are God?” Silence. But I did not need an answer. I heard without speech. I got out of my car and hurried to my apartment door and began fiddling in my pocket for my keys. I was still sweating, panicking, and terrified, not knowing if I was losing my mind or going to die. But at this point, I was much more fearful and apprehensive about the latter rather than the former. End of the first revelation, God exists! The first of three. The Second Revelation: Evil (Satan) Exists I paraphrase as best as I can recall. “You think that you are in control of your life, like you are calling all of the shots. You have tried hard to become your own god and think you are. But you are not. You are not in control of your life, Satan is!” I pridefully chuckled inside. “I don’t believe in God, I sure don’t believe in a devil, in Satan! Horns pitchfork.” At that moment, I felt a mask being stripped off the face of my mind. I saw my whole life in a flash, as much as that is possible, and I felt a scorching inferno emerge from the center of my being and my deeds, burning and consuming me from the inside out. I did not have to ask what this fire was and from where it was coming. I knew intuitively it was hellfire. And it was my hellfire fueled by my life. It was made self-evident to me, like everything had been revealed to me at that point. Self-evident, irrefutable, incorrigible, and transcending all doubt and argumentation. I somehow knew like I knew I existed that this fire was ignited as hell’s judgment in me. At that moment of realization, I could not see. I lost sight. I could not see my keys or the apartment door. I could only see fire, but the door was not on fire. I could no longer see the door, but the door was not hot. The fire was in my mind, in my heart, and not on the door or around me, as I was constantly trying to ascertain if these happenings were external or internal. The blindness of my soul had reached my eyes. I was blinded and suffocating in hellfire. Needless to say, God seized my attention. I cried out from inside, “I believe. Help me!” The fire immediately died down and my sight restored. I do not know how long that hellish vision and my sightlessness lasted, perhaps twenty or thirty second, maybe a minute. I do not think any longer than that. I quickly unlocked the door and scurried inside. My heart was racing, and I was terrified even more following the revelation of my sin and guilt that I thought I was going to die. I paced the room back and forth but found no peace. The panic and anxiety mounted as my fear shot through the room. The reader may question why the extreme panic and fear of death. I cannot give just due to explain the rebellious, prideful selfish, lifestyle of this anti-Christian, angry, college-partying, carousing, violent, licentious, aspiring gangster atheist. I was burying and carrying a lifetime of repressed hurt, pain, and wickedness in my soul. Anxiety is an attention-getter, an alarm, a warning. It is a reactive emotion usually connected to thinking based in fear due to an existential threat. Third Revelation: Jesus Christ is Lord Searching for a way out, an answer, or some relief from my own personal apocalypse that had been caving in on my mind’s world over the last hour or two, I instinctively put a cold wet rag on my forehead and went outside for fresh air to clear my mind. As I was walking in the parking lot behind my house, the gentle but firm, consistent nudging that turned into a small inner voice returned. Now, I knew what it was. It was the presence and voice of the Almighty. I stopped and looked up, but I could not see the night sky only a tall mountain. Like the brilliant light in the club, and the hellfire before, I saw in my mind’s eye a vision that occupied and covered my senses, so that I could not see the external world just the revelation. But by the third one, I sensed the revelations were not externally, objectively observable but by me. And what was communicated to me without words was the undeniable, self-evident, divine revealing truth from the mind and will of God. Again, no scientific proof, just self-authenticating revelation that had the conviction power similar to knowing the metaphysical reality that there is something as opposed to nothing. I simply understood. This mountain was Mt. Zion, the throne of God. Even as a Catholic, I do not remember ever hearing of this mountain or that name. But I saw it in the vision and knew that it was. The mountain crowded my sight. I gazed up in amazement as it towered before me. Then I heard a booming, thunderous, echo from the top of the mountain come crashing down on me. I was paralyzed, not with fear of dying, but as one who was beholding what I would later learn as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mysterious presence of the Holy that incites trembling and fascination, a repelling and an attracting. “I AM. I AM the beginning and the end! I created all things, and all things are of me. From all eternity I have ruled over all things. I came off of this mountain and came down to earth to become a man as you are and to walk and live as you all do. I took your suffering, your sorrow, your sin, and all that you have become and took it on me. I was then crucified, died, and resurrected. I ascended to this mountain seated on this throne where I was, am and ever will be to rule in my kingdom over the heavens and the earth. I am from above, you are from below, as are all of those that you follow.” I intuitively knew he meant the atheist philosophers and scientists who influenced me to deny God. “If you refuse to believe in me and follow, you will die in your sins.” Later, I recognized that those words from my evangelical days of reading the Gospel of John were being revived by the Spirit to speak to me. Thank you, Janine! “I am the Resurrection. All else before me have died in their sins, but those who know me have found salvation. I AM the Lord. Before me there are two paths. If you continue on the one that you are on it will lead you into eternal fire, which you have witnessed. Many that you have followed have come before me to overthrow me from this place. They came to this place in their lives and refused to yield. They went down the road to everlasting destruction. The choice is yours.” I literally saw two paths before the mountain, extending on either side. I was on one of them. And as I looked into the distance in front of me and behind me there was a line full of people stretching to the horizon in both directions. The vision faded. I ran back into my apartment. “What am I going to do? What must I do?” Distressed, I stumbled over to the religion section of my private library. There on the bookshelf I flipped past the Dhammapada, the Bhagavat Gita, the Upanishads, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a book of world religions, and landed on an old King James Bible. I pulled it from out from off of the shelf. I randomly flipped open the book and dropped my eyes down onto First John 1:1. I read the entire verse, but my mind was riveted to the phrase “The Word of Life.” As a philosophy student, and one who knew world religions, I knew that word, “Word” was Logos in the Greek. I did not know what that meant to the Hebrew mind, but I knew to the Greek that the Logos was the ultimate metaphysical principle of reason and being that ordered and structured the cosmos. Logos was the ultimate principle of reason that gave form, knowledge and order to all things. My knowledge and illumination of the Logos of Life, limited to that moment, realized that Christ was all of that (the metaphysical absolute) and more, transcending life, the universe, and the created order and standing eternally as the creator, absolute authority, and savior of all. At that moment, it hit me that the Logos encapsulated everything I was attempting to construct in my academic life at that time. Presumptuously thinking I was following in Leibniz’s footsteps, I attempted to represent all of reality in one science, one formula, equation, note, syllable, or constant. Like every driven, overzealous academic, I was voraciously searching for “the theory of everything,” the Holy Grail of knowledge, a singularity, an integral, model, equation, symbol, or sequence in which everything true in religion, philosophy, sciences and all knowledge would synergize and converge, the great Faustian temptation that has snared philosophers and scientists since the beginning of time. And the fool I was thought that I had discovered it in my latest theory or model that I called, ironically, “the Matrix,” which would have been twelve years before the movie series was ever released or heard of. In that instance, reading “The Logos of Life,” the epiphany hit, and everything converged. All the truth that I thought the Matrix was and represented, the distillation of all knowledge into one irreducible, ultimate, absolute Form, in a flash, was destroyed, fulfilled, and embodied in the Logos of Life, Jesus Christ, the Lord. “The Word become flesh” displaced all empty, lifeless philosophy, science, and the like and realized, reformulated, and recapitulated their highest ideals in a person. I am thinking of the I AM statements in the gospel of John in which Christ is the real and true fulfillment of: light, bread, resurrection, vine, shepherd, door, way, truth, and life. And more so, he revealed the one true God in human terms. The Matrix was vanity and was decimated in that moment, along with all ungodly false knowledge that lingered in my heart. Yet, all that the Matrix and human wisdom claimed to be, “the way, the truth and the life,” but was not, was fulfilled in Christ in whom dwells all of the fullness of God (Col. 2:9). The ultimate truth was not a theory, construct or formula but a person. The Logos became human and lives with us (Jn. 1:14). Synergy! It all came together and hit me as suddenly as a strike of lightning. The Word of Life It clicked! Christ was it, the treasure of all wisdom and knowledge. The treasure that I was seeking was not buried in the mines of philosophy or science (Col. 2:8). Christ, the pearl of great price, was the living wisdom hid from the great minds and rulers of the age (1 Cor.2:6-8). I was altogether convicted and ready to surrender my life to Christ as Lord. At this juncture, I was already on the floor and moved to my knees. I felt inspired to vocalize what was fresh in my mind that Jesus, the Logos, not secular philosophy or science, not me, not the Matrix, and not anything else, was the Lord of life. As I opened my mouth to make my new confession, I felt a hideous cold, weighty presence of a hand tightly covering my mouth and silencing me. I could not open my mouth or talk, though I earnestly attempted. I was sealed shut! Though, I learned quickly. That malevolent presence was the Enemy to whom I was recently introduced. I cried out inside, “Lord, I am trying to confess. I need your help.” Immediately, I felt compelled that I had to confess his name out loud. “Go get a pen and paper and write.” I found a pad and a pen and began to write. That same heavy malicious presence returned. Same demonic coldness. Like the hand over my mouth, now it was over my hand clenching it. I could not move a finger. Frozen stiff. At that point, I felt the room filled with many entities with that same diabolical presence, which, again, I intuitively knew were “evil spirits.” Couldn’t talk. Couldn’t write. I looked up, and in my mind cried, “You gotta help me here. I am trying, because I can’t do any more. Save me!” Suddenly, I experienced the most explosive, powerful event of any sort in my life. I heard the wind whistle like a tornado and what felt like a tsunami of God’s holiness and power came over me in torrents, waves, a deluge of his unconditional love baptized and saturated me from the core of my soul to the uttermost extremities of my body. I felt a spiritual tidal wave wash out my soul and deliver me not only of those tormenting, antagonizing evil spirits but of every evil act and desire that was ever in my heart. I wept profusely. I could not recall the last time I had cried. I felt my entire life condensed in a moment’s flash cleansed and converted in the blink of an eye. The overwhelming love of God inundated, soothed, and fulfilled every fiber of my being, every motive of my heart, every memory of my years, all of the brokenness and pain of my past, and every existential, philosophical, and spiritual question and need. The ecstasy was overwhelming. I thought I was going to burst out of my body and explode straight into heaven and into the arms of God. What hit me most was the healing power of God’s love that coursed through my body, soul, and spirit like a holy medicine from heaven that knew exactly where to travel and what to heal. I experienced my life in one dense, concentrated singularity being touched by the finger of God, entirely delivering me of my junk (namely unbelief, anger and covetousness) and every demonic influence and filling with me unspeakable healing, holy love. I cried out, “Never have I tasted love like this. Take my life. I will follow you all of the days of my life!” This taste of his insatiable love was all I was truly searching for in all of my misguided narcissistic quests but did not know it. In that moment, I surrendered my life fully to God to the best that I knew how. I could not resist the temptation of transcendence and innocence, the attraction of the Almighty, the wooing of the Word, the gentleness of Jesus, and the lure of God’s love. God chased me down, found me, and put a submission hold of grace and truth on me that I had to tap out. The next day, while sitting in class, the Lord abruptly called me out of graduate school to follow him. No degree, no job, and no plan! I spent my life building my kingdom. Now, he was calling me to build his. Later, that week I felt led by the Spirit to field preach outdoors at the Oval (the quad) of the Ohio State University and have not looked back nearly forty years later. Since that day, I have evangelized on college campuses and in prisons. Planted, pastored, turned around, and restarted churches by the grace of God. Ministered in conferences and revivals throughout the world. Did mission work in the U.S., Europe, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Have been teaching in a seminary for the last thirteen years. Written nine books. Raised a family. Walked with my wife for the last thirty-one years, even through her stage four cancer. She is a seven-year survivor in spite of being given a 10% chance. Our adult children and granddaughter are serving God. My daughter is a pastor of a local Methodist church and is a revival speaker. All that I share is to illustrate the goodness and grace of God. We have been immensely blessed to serve God, each other, and those around us. “If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old life has passed away, and behold all things have become new.” – 2 Cor. 5:17