eX-skeptic

Former skeptic Craig thought he was too intelligent to believe in God, but after a series of sobering events, he was shocked to find himself affirming the truth of Christ.

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life, more specifically where an atheist unexpected becomes a Christian. There’s something fascinating about dramatic life change, when someone becomes entirely different than they were before, in the way they think and act, in the way they see and live life, their perspectives and purposes completely changed. This kind of life transformation not only surprises the people around them, but it often stuns even the one who was changed, for they never saw it coming. Most atheists never consider even a remote possibility of believing in God, much less becoming a passionate follower of Jesus Christ, and yet, it actually can and does happen.

But that kind of radical change takes everyone off guard and raises a sense of curiosity. It causes everyone to wonder how someone could shift their understanding of themselves and the world in such a striking and powerful way. What happened? More importantly, why did it happen? In our story today, Craig Northwood found himself on the other side of a tremendous paradigm shift ten years ago, moving from a self-described atheist, alcoholic, drug user, and fairly unpleasant character, to someone who now passionately proclaims his Christian faith as both real and true. In fact, he has made this his life’s mission as a Christian pastor and apologist, now running an apologetics organization, and we’ll let him tell us about all of that. But that’s quite a change. Let’s take a listen to see what prompted this startling transformation, why it happened, and how his life has changed?

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Craig. It’s so great to have you.

It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Yes, absolutely! Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, where we can locate that wonderful dialect of yours?

My Welsh accent, which I try to cover up. Yes. My name’s Craig, as you know, Craig Northwood. I live in South Wales. I live in a little town at the moment called Ystrad Mynach, which almost sounds like you’re trying to clear your throat or something. I didn’t grow up here. I grew up in a slightly larger town in South Wales. I’ve been a Christian for… I actually realized this today. I’ve been a Christian for… I was actually saved ten years ago this week, but I only realized that earlier today, which was a nice way to spend my anniversary, I suppose.

Yes, it is! I’m looking forward to really unraveling that story and what happened prior to your conversion because obviously I think there’s a lot to it, and I’m just excited to know your story. So why don’t we start back in your childhood, really. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about where you grew up, your family, and whether or not religion was on the radar or in the picture at all in your culture and in your family?

Okay. I did grow up in South Wales. I’m from a fairly large family. I have two brothers and two sisters. And religion wasn’t really a large part of when I was growing up. My parents did occasionally take us to church when I was quite young. I’ve got a vague recollection that my mother was hurt by somebody in the church, but I think I was about ten when we stopped going, if that, so it’s all quite a distant memory, really. My mother continued to believe. My father kind of continued to believe, I think, in some sense, but they were never active in the church. They never really went on a regular basis. We certainly never went on a regular basis, and as I was growing up, I didn’t really have anything to do with Christianity.

My elder brother and sister did for a short time. They went to Christian youth groups, but they kind of drifted away, and I didn’t really have any interest in Christianity, and then, as I was growing up, I kind of got to my teenage years, and I was sort of cursed with this idea that I was very clever, and I now know that I wasn’t particularly clever. I was just interested in things that clever people do and clever people write about, but I thought I was very clever, so that kind of made me extremely arrogant, unfortunately, so as far as I was concerned, I was very much thinking along the same sort of lines as New Atheism, where if you can’t prove it scientifically to me, then it’s obviously rubbish, so I didn’t have any time for Christianity, and as I got older, that became more and more pronounced, so I wasn’t very pleasant towards anyone with any sort of religious belief, really.

Okay. Would you consider South Wales and where you grew up… Was it nominally Christian? Would you say that there was very much of a Christian influence? Were there friends in your culture that had what you would consider any kind of real faith at all?

No. No, not really at all. I think, South Wales in particular now, it’s very secular. I knew very few people who were Christians as I was growing up. I don’t know if that was just because we weren’t plugged into that bit of the culture, but very, very rarely would I meet anybody who would identify as a Christian. The UK is not a particularly Christian country, I think. I think we’re seeing a bit of a resurgence in big cities now, but you tend to find the older generation, especially where I’ve lived, the older generation would be more inclined towards going to church but certainly not in my age group, so I wasn’t really exposed to a great deal of Christianity.

And when your brother and sister went to youth group, was it just more of an activity, you think? There was no real connection with it there, either?

I’m not really sure. I think because I wasn’t interested in it, I never really took in whether or not they were that serious about it. I know that I used to play role-playing games… You know Dungeons & Dragons and all of that kind of thing? When I was a teenager, I used to play those quite a lot, and my sister was convinced that this was basically the work of the Antichrist invading my life, and Satan was going to come and take me away because I was interested in these games, and she used to give me these dreadful pamphlets about how evil role-playing games were and things. In a sense, looking back on them now, some of it can be a little bit dark, I suppose, but that was my only experience of it, was my sister giving me, as a teenager, these dreadful pamphlets, and me just thinking, “You must be kidding. You don’t really believe this, do you?” So that, in a sense, probably drove me a little bit further away.

Yeah. So it probably put you off towards the moralism of religion and that sort of thing. So when you were embracing atheistic thought, you were reading? Were you reading some atheistic literature or listening to some of the New Atheists?

I think a little bit. I mean, when I was a teenager, you know, the internet wasn’t really a thing. I think it was just kind of getting up and running, so I wasn’t really exposed to any kind of atheist social media or anything like that. And I was a big fiction reader, but I wasn’t much of a reader of anything along those… I was kind of aware of Richard Dawkins, and I think I might have had one of his books which I kind of flipped through a bit, but the little bits that I looked at, I just… It kind of resonated with me, and I thought, “Yes, yes, this is all….” I was still in my extremely arrogant phase, and I was like, “Yes, yes. I know all of this. Yes, the God of the Bible is really, really bad and horrible,” and I didn’t actually know anything about it. Looking back on it now, I didn’t really know anything about Christianity, but I kind of made all these assumptions and had all these ideas about, you know, the crusades and hypocrisy and the Catholic Church covering up all these things, and all kind of business. And I just kind of removed myself from it in that way, really. So it wasn’t so much a case of studying it and coming to that conclusion. I just kind of was very unpleasant, as I said.

So yes. There’s sometimes just a general presumption about Christians and Christianity, whether it be institutional or just the church or the people associated with it. You had mentioned a lot of negative attributes that you attributed to people who believed in religion and faith and I guess particularly coming from a place of being clever or one of the brights or however you wanted to see yourself. It was probably a relatively easy place to be. When you’re in a position of presuming one position and then there’s someone else over there that you’re presuming who they are, would you say that there are a lot of… Like you said, you hadn’t really investigated it. It was just something you presumed. Kind of a default position, if you will, because it served your purposes in a sense, would you say?

Yeah, yeah. Very much. I think I was just more comfortable with the idea of thinking that I knew better than people and thinking that I understood things better than they did. And in my mind, it was probably more trouble than it was worth investigating it because, as far as I was concerned, I’d made up my mind, anyway, that they were wrong and I was right. So I would just kind of distance myself from anything like that, really.

Yeah. Sometimes I’m very interested in the idea of dismissing or dismissing Christianity, and that’s one thing, but sometimes it seems that, among those who dismiss it, are also a bit contemptuous of it, I guess you could say.

Yes.

What do you suppose fuels a contemptuousness for faith and religion and Christianity?

That’s a very good question. I mean I think that could go any number of ways. From my personal perspective, at the risk of sort of repeating myself, because I was under this impression that I was very clever, because I was very arrogant and very full of myself, people who believed something that I thought I understood better than… I thought I understood things better than them, so to me they were just ignorant and just blind and just… I used to think anybody that was religious was really stupid, which is a horrible thing to think, really. But yeah, yeah. I think it was just kind of a self superiority from my perspective. I know obviously that wouldn’t be the case for everybody.

So there was a sense of rational superiority in a sense.

Yeah.

So this was in, you said, your teenage years, in high school.

Yes.

Did you have friends that believed similarly to you? Or was this kind of something that you just decided, and in an independent way, just forged through and decided you were an atheist?

I can remember one specific conversation, actually. A few of us were sitting around one morning just before school, waiting for the register to be taken, and one guy in my group started saying something about how he had been told or he had read somewhere or something that the idea of the devil was made up in the Middle Ages and it was just Old English for evil, and God was basically just Old English for good and just coming out with this absolute nonsense, but because I was coming to a point in my life where I wanted to believe this kind of thing, I seized on this, and I think, in a strange way, this accelerated the speed at which I distanced myself from Christianity, and I looked down more and more on people who were Christians, because I seized on this idea that it had all been made up in the Middle Ages as some sort of control or something like that. And I just kind of ran with that. And it didn’t occur to me to investigate it or to ask anybody about it or to wonder whether or not wherever he got this information from was reliable. It was basically just feeding my prejudice.

It fed into my biases, and I think that can be a case with a lot of people, Christian and non-Christian. I wouldn’t want to pigeonhole anybody. I think that it’s very easy to be given something that confirms what we already think and just run with it and have no regard whatsoever for the possibility that it might not be correct. But yeah, I was especially prone to that when I was younger, so that probably sped me along somewhat.

Yeah, I think we’re all guilty of confirmation bias-

Confirmation bias. That was what I was trying to think of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In many regards, we oftentimes live in an echo chamber of hearing the things we want to hear. I heard you say, “I wanted to believe it.”

I did.

So it’s easy to grab onto something that seems to confirm your perspective, and it really takes a lot, I think, to get beyond your bubble, in a sense, and to really see reality and be willing to investigate and hear both sides of the story. So I think we’re all guilty of that in certain ways at different times in our lives. So you wanted to believe atheism, and you grabbed hold of it, and you ran with it, and so this was when you were still in high school. So walk us along from here.

From there, then, I went on to college and surrounded myself probably with quite similar people. I’m not sure how familiar you are with sort of how our education system plays out. So our high school finishes sort of at 16 and then you do something called A levels, which is like pre-university education, so I did an A level, then, in philosophy, and that… You would’ve thought that that would have opened my mind up a little bit, and you would’ve hoped that I would have sort of gathered a little bit more critical thinking skills and started to question things and my own beliefs properly, but all I really did was… Any element of religious philosophy that was included in that… I mean it wasn’t in any way particularly an in-depth course. I was 17, 18 years old, and it was just kind of a… I’d never really looked at philosophy before.

But again, feeding into my own kind of arrogance, I thought, “Well, this will make me sound clever to people, if I’m doing this A level in philosophy.” So any religious philosophy element that was there, I would just sort of look at the traditional arguments for God, and then I’d be far more interested in the ways they could be refuted. and I’d be far more interested in the counter arguments than I was in the arguments for. So I finished that. I then went to university very briefly, then. I think I was there for three or four months, and I was doing a joint degree in English and philosophy, literature and philosophy. I left there then. I decided after a few months I didn’t want to do humanities. I wanted to do a science. So I wanted to do a physics degree. That’s what I really wanted.

But some circumstances, through a number of circumstances, really, I then didn’t end up going back to university. So I got a not particularly fulfilling job. I kind of drifted about a bit. I wandered from this thing to that thing. And I was drinking more and more heavily at this point. I think, you know, the majority of teenagers experiment with alcohol, and I was kind of the one in the group who people would occasionally say, “Oh, you’re a bit fond of your drink, aren’t you?” And sort of hint in that kind of direction. But I obviously didn’t take any notice of that. But as I was reaching my early twenties, I was just drinking more and more. I started playing in bands. I was more and more involved in the drinking kind of culture. And through my twenties, then, I became more unpleasant. I became more arrogant. I became more contemptuous of people who had any sort of religious belief.

I became more convinced of my own superiority, and then, as I got towards sort of my thirties, it sort of turned from being somebody who drinks too much and people occasionally pointing it out to occasionally needing a drink first thing in the morning to kind of steady myself a little bit, you know? To try and sort of feel a bit better from the night before, so that I could go into work. My parents then divorced when I was in my early thirties, and about the same time, I had a blood clot on my brain.

Oh, my!

And we only discovered this when I started having seizures, so I developed epilepsy. They sent me for MRI scan, which discovered the clot on my brain. This made me, as you’d imagine, particularly ill. Foolishly, I started… I was then off work sick for some months before I had an operation to remove it, and when I had the operation, they said to me, “You need to stay off work now for at least…” I think it was six months they gave me, so I was in the position where I was sitting around the house. I was still being paid for period… I was still being fully paid for a period of my sick leave, so I was sitting around the house on my own, very full of myself, with a gradually accelerating drink problem, and with money coming in, so from there on, it was just rapidly downhill, and I then got to the stage where I was… It got to the point where I would literally lose a week to two weeks at a time, and I wouldn’t know where I’d been or what I’d done. I was living with my mother by this point. I was sort of a thirty-something-year-old guy living with my mother, sitting in the spare room all day, drinking cheap vodka. I’d lost my job. I was living on benefits. My poor mother doing her best to just basically try and get me to see that I needed help.

And at this point, because I was drinking so much, this point is a little bit hazy in my memory, but I’ll do my best to piece it together. So at this point two people… I can’t remember how the meeting came about, but a couple dear friends of mine, a couple by the name of Faye and Kenny Brandy. They were from Scotland originally. They came around to my house, and they came around to tell me about how Jesus had freed them both from a life of crime and heroin addiction. And I was a little bit full of myself during this meeting, sitting there with a large vodka in my hand, listening to them talk, and I would sort of give them difficult questions, and they were so loving and so gracious, and they did their best, and they were there for a long time, and eventually they left, and before they left, they gave me a number, and they said, “We work for a Christian rehabilitation unit,” and they said, “If you need help, we will help you.”

And, to me, that just absolutely… and I never would have admitted it at the time, and I wouldn’t have admitted it for a long time after, but to me, that was just the most unbelievable thing, that these people who I had never met before had come to my house and dealt with me sitting there being extremely rude and extremely arrogant, to their faces, while they were trying to tell me about how Jesus had changed their lives and offering to help me, and… There was a bit of me that wanted them to just get fed up with me and leave and never come back, but to close out our meeting with, “If you want help, we will help you,” that really struck a chord with me.

And it was some weeks before I eventually phoned them, and I just said, “I do need help. Please help me.” So I went into the rehab, but I still went in with this idea, “You’re all deluded. You’re all idiots. I know better than you. I’m going to go into this rehab for a few weeks and get myself off the drink, and then I’m going to go, and I don’t want any of your Bible stuff, and I don’t want any of your Jesus nonsense, and I don’t want any of you preaching at me or anything like that.”

Wow! Craig, when you were in this place, obviously you knew you needed help physically, and you were willing to submit, even in a Christian environment, to whatever nonsense they had if they could help you with your addiction, withdrawal, or you know. I wonder, in those months and those weeks where you were isolated, sitting by yourself, and I know you had said you hadn’t really known or investigated much about Christianity. You just had kind of an animus towards it. Had you really thought about—especially through your blood clot on your brain, that surgery, and all of that—did you really confront what death was or meaning in life as you were sitting there within an atheist worldview? Did you contemplate your own naturalistic atheism and what that meant for your life at all?

Honestly, no. And you would think that I would. You would think that something like that would cause somebody to sit back and take notice, but I think I’d been drinking so much by this point… At this point in my life, probably partly due to the amount that I was drinking, but I was just ridiculously depressed. By the time I went for the operation, I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether or not I would survive it, which is awful, looking back on it, but I was just very disinterested in anything, so I think the neurosurgeon… I went to meet him before the operation, and he sort of laid out everything, and he explained the risks and everything like that, and he said, “Do you have any questions?” And I just said, “No, not really,” and I think that surprised him because I think the majority of people probably would have had something they wanted to talk about, some questions that they wanted to know about possibly their chances of coming out of this unscathed or something, but I didn’t really care, and I continued to not care after I came out. I didn’t really care when I lost my job. I didn’t really care when all of my friends just kind of gradually gave up on me. I didn’t really care about anything. So I wasn’t really questioning anything. I was just kind of sitting there and drinking, and I wasn’t really thinking anything past my next bottle of cheap vodka, to be honest. Quite bleak, really.

Yes. Yeah. Very, very bleak. So all the more reason why it would be really extraordinary for someone to come in and say, “We’ll help you,” even at the point when you really didn’t care. But there must have been something there or some reason to live or some desire for your life to be better than it was that made decide, “Okay, I’ll submit myself to whatever this is.” It’s got to be better than what you were experiencing at the time, I would imagine.

Just thinking back on it now, I think the only thing really that sort of led me to finally go and get the help that they were offering was my mother. And it wasn’t through her sort of begging me to go or anything like that. Somehow after that meeting, I gradually became aware, finally, of the sheer misery that I must be putting her through and how dreadfully I’d treated her and what an awful son and an awful human being I was for basically living in her house. I wasn’t giving her any money towards bills. She was working. She was basically keeping a roof over my head when I was… I was roundabout a 30-year-old man at that point, and she’d come home, and she’d find me passed out drunk on the floor, and I think I gradually came to realize how badly I treated her, and I just thought, “Well, I don’t care what happens to my life, but she shouldn’t have to put up with this.” And I think that’s all that really finally broke through my skull, really, was realizing that I couldn’t do that to my mother anymore. And that was it. It wasn’t any sense of self preservation or anything.

There’s something beautiful, though, about at least there was a selflessness on some level, to care about your mother, who had cared so much for you. So you went into this facility, whatever it was. Why don’t you talk to us about that?

So I went in there thinking, “I don’t want any of your Jesus nonsense or your Bible rubbish,” and fortunately really but from my perspective then unfortunately, it was very, very much, as you’d imagine, focused on Jesus and focused on the Bible. It was kind of a rehab home, really. There were ten men living there, and it was a very structured day, and I wasn’t, obviously, used to structure. Most of the people in there had come from heroin or cocaine addiction. There were one or two others there that had come from a drink background.

Almost everybody in there, the day that I arrived, there were ten of us in total. I think nine of them were from Scotland, and the Scottish accent is… It can be quite impenetrable when you’ve got two Scotsmen talking to each other, and their accent sort of… They kind of tone their accent down, I think, a little bit. When you’re from the far north of Scotland, they tone their accent down a little bit when they’re talking to somebody who isn’t from Scotland. Well, I was just withdrawing from the drink, so my brain was completely gone. I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t concentrate. And I was surrounded by all these men who were talking, and I couldn’t understand anything they were saying.

The program there, the structure really was they would give us… You had a half hour meeting every morning, which was pray and reading the Bible and a very brief message, very brief word from the guy who was running the house, and then we would have a work program, which usually involved us going and… There was a church attached to the rehab. Or should I say the rehab was attached to a church. And it was quite a large church by the standards of South Wales, probably quite small compared to most American churches, but it was a fairly large building, and we used to go there every day, and we would be in charge of cleaning it, the maintenance. They had a little cafe and coffee shop there that we would be in charge of cleaning and running, and then we’d have to go home, and we’d have to sort of clean the house, and we’d have to do any repairs on the house and things like that, and then in the evening, there’d be another Bible study, another devotional. We had to go to church on Saturday night and on Sunday morning and on Sunday evening every weekend.

So to my mind it was quite intense. It was a lot of this God stuff. And I stayed there, thinking, “I’ll just be here for a couple of weeks, and then I’m going,” and all of the people there, and all of the people that were involved, the staff, the different people that were coming in out of the home, they were just so gracious and so loving, and all of the people were at various stages in their walk. Some of them had been saved. Some of them, like me, had no real interest in it. And I continued to try to be… I wasn’t deliberately being extremely difficult then because I was off the drink and I had at least some sort of sense of propriety.

I thought, “Well, these people are helping me. I can’t be rude to them all the time,” but I used to delight in asking them all the difficult questions that I could get my hands on, and as we were looking in the Bible, I thought, “Oh, well I’ll ask them about this bit where it says He hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Does that mean we’ve got no free will?” And all of the kind of typical questions that people will try and trip people up with the Bible. And they continued to be loving and gracious and kind, and they would try to answer my questions, and they would be helpful as they could, and for a long time, I kind of resisted, and I didn’t want to know. But there were a lot of books in the house that had been donated. It was quite an impressive library that they had that had been donated. Some very old books and some very expensive-looking books, and I gradually started tentatively looking at one or two of them, and I didn’t read a great deal when I was there, but I read just some bits and pieces offering some kind of basic apologetic argument. And for the first time, I started thinking, “There is a slight possibility that there might be a little bit of truth to some of this.” And that was the little crack in my armor.

And that was all that happened for quite a long time, and I was there for almost four months, and I’ll never forget the day… Obviously, I’ll never forget the day that I was saved. Because we were in a church service which I had to go to, and it was a Saturday night meeting, and the gentleman who’d actually come to my house, Kenny. The one that had come to me, and I’d been extremely rude to him, he was preaching there. He was one of the preachers, and he was preaching on Matthew 11. “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” And I remember, at the end of the service… and I’d walked into the service with the same mindset: “There is a very slight possibility there might be a little bit of truth to some of this, but I still don’t want your Christian nonsense.” And I listened to everything he said, and at the end of the service, they said, “We’ll bow our heads to pray now,” and I put my head down to pray, and I can’t really describe… The best way I can describe what happened is it was almost as if somebody told me something that I’d never heard before, and I instantly believed them.

All of a sudden, I knew that it was all true. And there was no sort of massive choir of angels. There was no enormous religious experience. There was no dramatic event going on in my head or anything like that. It was almost like somebody just flicked a little switch, and I knew in some way that I can’t possibly describe that, without doubt, it is all absolutely true. And I can’t describe the shock that went through me. I just thought, “How did I not believe this before?” And it just kind of… It was almost like a very, very small firework going off in my head, and I just knew. And at the same moment, I thought, “Jesus really did die for me, and I really do owe everything to Him, and He can release me from everything, and He will save me if repent and if I turn to Him,” and all this stuff just went through in a fraction of a second, and at that point, I was saved, and I think I was more surprised than anybody, although a lot of people were very surprised.

Wow. So you had this sudden, kind of intuitive knowledge that it was all true. Like a switch. That’s so interesting. Like a sudden paradigm shift. It wasn’t as if you had this prolonged intellectual struggle. It was like you were introduced to the truth by the book or maybe something you read, that somehow infiltrated your mind and your heart, and then I guess, at some point, being exposed to what you were exposed to… You spoke about the possibility or the presence and the person of Jesus and who He was and that He could save you. In certain Christian terms, it’s called the gospel. There was something true about that for you. Can you… For those who really may not know what that realization was, or what the gospel is, could you explain that just briefly?

Yes, absolutely. I mean I sort of heard, in plenty of meetings, whether in church meetings or meetings in the house, that everyone, every man, every woman, every child, is essentially sinful. Every one of us is a sinner. Every one of us is imperfect. Nobody, no matter how hard they try, can possibly live a perfect life, and yet God’s perfect law requires that of us. And yet at the same time, because He’s so loving and because He’s so just and merciful, He understands that we can’t live up to that. He understands that we can’t live up to that law. And rather than insisting that we do, rather than insisting that we pay the price for our sins, He sent Jesus Christ. He sent His only Son. God in the flesh came, and He died, and He sacrificed himself, and He allowed himself to absorb the full weight of my sin and the full punishment for my sin, and rather than me trying to earn my way into God’s good books, all that was required of me was to completely put my faith in Jesus Christ and the work that He did and the sacrifice that He made and to repent of my sins, to acknowledge my sin and acknowledge that I need him and I can’t earn my salvation and I can’t earn His love, and to just completely surrender myself to Him and give myself to Him and know that every sin that I have committed and every sin that I will commit has been paid for by His blood, just because I put my faith in Him.

That must have been really, like you say, a relief of burden. Like the passage that was read that evening, that you give your burden over to Christ, and that He carries it for you.

Yeah.

And these really a beautiful thing. Once you surrendered to that reality and surrendered to the person of Jesus. I love what you said, that you were surprised just as much as everyone around you. I can’t imagine, really. I mean, you put your head down for a prayer, and there was obviously some willingness to participate in the prayer. Then, you raise your head really with a whole new world and a whole new worldview, it sounds like. Why don’t you describe what happened after that point?

I was always slightly jealous, and I realize jealousy isn’t a very Christian thing to feel. But I have to confess, I’m occasionally when jealous when I hear of other’s people’s conversion experiences, the moments when other people sort of come to this knowledge, come to this understanding of Jesus and His grace, and some people have this very dramatic encounter with the Lord. They’ll have a… Very occasionally, I think some people will have a vision, or some people will have this enormous kind of physical feeling, or something huge will happen to them. To me, I was just kind of wandering about in a state almost of shock for a few days, and I wanted there to be some enormous transformation in my life, but the reality was, although I knew and I understood that I was saved, as the sort of shock gradually moved away, I hoped that I’d be a much, much better person straightaway, and of course, the sad reality is that it doesn’t always work like that.

The one thing that definitely did happen right at that moment was, up until that point, I’d been in the rehab for a few months, I kind of knew that, although I hadn’t drunk anything for a few months, I knew that I still was at a stage where, if I left, it wouldn’t be long before I fell down the hole again. I knew that I was kind of drifting through on willpower. I knew that it was only because I was there, surrounded by support, surrounded by people who cared, surrounded by rules and structure, that I hadn’t drunk. And I knew that if I left I would. And I was kind of waiting for that to go away. And then, from that day until this, so 10 years ago this week, I have never, for even the slightest moment, had any inclination whatsoever to drink again, and I am constantly baffled that I ever wanted to. And I’m not judgmental towards people who do like a drink or even people who struggle with drink, but I’ll walk past a bar or something, and I’ll see people drinking, and it just seems an alien thing to me. I think, “Well, why did I want to do that?” And that was the biggest transformation that happened immediately.

But then, sort of gradually, I came to realize that I didn’t want to leave the rehab yet because I was surrounded by all these people who suddenly were my brothers in Christ. And I was going to a church with all these people who were essentially like my family, my adoptive family, you know? And gradually I began to change. And gradually I became very sorrowful about the dreadful person that I’d been and, at the same time, thankful to Jesus that He was beginning to change me, and it was at this point that I realized that I’d spent all my life thinking I was very clever and then, all of a sudden, I realized that I wasn’t, which I think was His way of kindly showing me, “You’ve got no place being arrogant and looking down on people.”

Yes, and then I stayed in the rehab then for… I stayed on for quite some time, and I eventually became staff there, and I volunteered as a staff member, and I lived in the home, and I helped with new people coming in and mentoring people, and I also was then involved with the worship at the church, so I then used to lead worship. I played guitar and sang, and I became very active in the church, actually. I was helping with discipleship. I was helping out with the youth groups. I was still going up every day and cleaning and doing maintenance and things like that, and all of a sudden, this whole new world opened up to me, and instead of being in this rehab, desperately hoping that I wouldn’t start drinking again, all of a sudden it wasn’t a rehab to me. It was home to me, and the church became my life, and my fellow Christians became my life, and I wanted to do things to help, and I wanted to sort of pour myself into the church community, really, so it was a pretty dramatic change gradually.

Yes, it sounds amazing, and I first want to say congratulations on your sobriety, but I totally appreciate the fact here that you’re really… What I hear you saying is that this is part of the transformation that God made in your heart, this sudden disinclination to drink. That’s just an amazing, amazing thing, that you lost the desire totally.

Absolutely. When I tell people that I used to be an alcoholic and I was terrible, a really, really awful alcoholic. Like I said earlier, I would lose weeks at a time. Weeks at a time would just disappear, and I wouldn’t have the faintest idea, and sometimes I’d wake up in the street at 3:00 in the morning, sleeping behind a bin or something. I had no idea where I’d been. I’d wake up with bruises. I think I used to get into fights and things I don’t remember. And I would tell people about these things, and they’d say, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Well done, you,” and I always try and explain to them it’s nothing to do with me, and I try not to come across with this sort of false modesty and things, but I say it’s genuinely nothing to do with me. It would be almost like congratulating me for having the blood clot on my brain removed, and I’d have to go, “Look, I didn’t do anything. They just gave me anesthetic, and the surgeon took it.”

You can’t congratulate me on getting rid of my blood clot, and in the same way, I don’t want people to congratulate me for being sober for a little over 10 years now. Jesus Christ took out… As it says in the Bible, “I will take out your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” He took out those dreadful things in me, and He put better things in me, and the ways that I’ve hopefully changed now and become something of a better person, and I definitely have my flaws and my faults, but the good things about me now are entirely because of Jesus and the change that He’s worked in my life, and the bad things about me now are just the things that I’m foolishly hanging on to and I need to get rid of. So yes, I’ve changed so much that I definitely don’t want to drink again, but it’s entirely Jesus that’s done it.

Wow. That’s really amazing and an amazing testimony, really, of the power of Christ in someone’s life once they surrender. And surrender’s a very, very difficult thing, but your putting hands in the One who wants what’s best for you and that you can find an abundant life, it sounds like you have found.

And I do have a question: When you came to a place of surrender, you said that you had come also to a place of understanding a bit of a knowledge of God and who Christ was and what He did and that you accepted that, and you moved into where church is your adopted family, which, again, is a beautiful picture of what the church should be. But I’m curious, though, in terms of… What about? Remember when you were an atheist, and you were raising all those difficult questions and hard places in scripture, and what about this and what about that? What about all those things, those intellectual issues that you once raised? As a Christian who was coming to know more about God and about Christ and the Bible and someone who’s naturally clever, I would say, again by the grace of God, you have probably a very decent intellect, and I’m sure you’re a curious person and want to resolve some of those issues that are often posed against Christianity. In the last ten years, have you addressed some of those issues? Have you taken an intellectual kind of path in your faith as well?

Yes. I’ve definitely tried to. I find, as time goes by, I’m more and more interested. I think initially I kind of had to tuck those questions away, and I hated the idea of switching my brain off. I didn’t necessarily just decide that I wasn’t going to try and answer those, but initially, I just kind of thought… I realized in some strange way, on some level, that Jesus had a lot of work to do in me, and I kind of saw him doing it gradually, so I tucked those things away for some time. Some of the difficult questions, then, I started to resolve just by reading the Bible more. And then, as time went by then, I became more and more interested in them, and I’ve almost erred more towards the intellectual side of reading around Christianity, I think, because that’s kind of how God wired me, and then I became fairly interested in apologetics some years ago, and I started buying more books, and I started attending seminars and conferences and things like that, and all of a sudden, now, I’ve got several hundred books that I desperately want to read that I think would resolve a lot of questions, but I also have two small children, so I find that, as my desire for more understanding and more knowledge grows, the amount of time that I have has shrunk rapidly, but what I am hoping is that, as time goes by, I will be able to sort of do more reading and more studying things. But I did start… I think I mentioned to you previously. I started my own apologetics organization, and I’m by no means particularly knowledgeable about apologetics, but my interest was I want to try and find answers, and I think other people want answers as well, so let’s look at them together. So I wanted to sort of aim for that kind of aspect of Christianity, because I know very well that there are answers out there, and I think that there are answers that… Christianity hasn’t just popped up. It’s been around for 2,000 years. I would be foolish to think that I was the first person that had these questions, so yes, I have erred towards the sort of more intellectual side, and some of the questions I’ve answered, but a lot of them are still to be answered, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m just looking forward to finding the answers really.

First of all, I want to affirm that I love that you’ve started some kind of an apologetics organization and your posture towards it, that we’re learning together. I think that’s an amazing reflection of your humility but also your intellectual curiosity and your openness to go wherever the evidence leads, which is where we should all be. I do wonder. I can hear the skeptic scratching his head. Going back earlier in your conversation, where you were drawn towards atheism because you wanted it to be true, in a sense, and so you were looking towards that and looking for things that affirmed that and statements and things. I can just hear, in the back of my head, a skeptic saying, “Well, you just want Christianity to be true, and so you’re going to look for answers that confirm your perspective.” How would you speak to someone who raised that objection?

Probably in a few ways, really. To begin with, I desperately wanted Christianity to not be true, right up to the moment when I suddenly realized it was. And it’s difficult to intellectualize what I suppose we’d call a religious experience, whatever that religious experience might be, whether it’s extremely dramatic or whether it’s quite understated, as mine was. So I had that moment, I had that experience, and I knew it was true, and you know, all of the epistemologists out there will be sort of ready to pounce on me or disregard that, I suppose. And yet I desperately wanted atheism to be true, so I decided that it was and didn’t really do a great deal of investigation into it either way, whereas with Christianity, I didn’t want it to be true, and I suddenly realized that it was in a way that I can’t put into words how certain I am.

There must have been something. Something outside of me put that into me because I wasn’t looking for it, and I didn’t want it, and it suddenly popped up with a conviction that I couldn’t possibly overturn. And since then, I have investigated it, and I have looked at the questions, and I have sort of thought about some of the evidence, and I have thought about things like the historicity of the resurrection, the reliability of the Bible, the transmission of Bible documents, some of the philosophical arguments regarding… the argument for moral knowledge and cosmological arguments and all this kind of thing. And it’s very difficult to deny that there is something about Christianity that has withstood the intellectual assault of 2000 years and has stood extremely strongly, and there are aspects of Christianity that are accepted even by the most hostile opponents, really.

You get… People like Bart Ehrman will defend to the hilt the fact that somebody called Jesus really walked around the earth. He’ll defend the transmission of the Bible documents to some extent. And atheist philosophers of religion will say theism is an intellectually credible position if you really look at the arguments. Now, they won’t accept those arguments, but even people who are extremely intelligent, extremely well read, and extremely knowledgeable about all of the facts will say there is some nugget of possible truth that they don’t accept themselves.

So all that’s just kind of a roundabout way of saying I didn’t want Christianity to be true, and now that I’ve looked at it after having my experience, I can say, if you look at the evidence it is genuinely overwhelming. And if anybody is listening and they have considered the possibility of looking at the evidence, start with the evidence for the resurrection and the historicity of Jesus and go from there. Because it’s genuinely just enormously overwhelming.

That’s good advice, especially for someone who might actually be open enough to consider looking at what is out there to be seen and to be read and to be considered. Is there anything else that you would like to advise perhaps someone who might be listening who is a curious skeptic? Who might be open to consider or think about the things of God?

I think one of the most popular ways to attack Christianity in general is to point out the ways that Christians have failed and then use that to try and undermine the truths of Christianity, whereby the Bible is very clear, and any thinking Christian will be very up front about saying, “We are all fallible. We are all sinful. We all make mistakes,” so you can’t judge Christianity by the actions of Christians because we make a lot of mistakes, and goodness knows I make enough mistakes, but just look at Christ and don’t, for now, worry about Christians.

And obviously that’s not saying that Christians should have license to act however they want. We should be held to a higher standard. But yeah. Focus on Christ, rather than on us.

I think that’s great advice. And to those Christians who are listening who, probably very compelled by your story, especially by those who entered into your life, Kenny and Faye. And the example that they provided. And those in the rehab, just continually loving, kind, patient, serving you, just listening and waiting in the face of your, I guess, lack of gracious response. I’m very impressed by that. How would you advice Christians best to engage with those who are resistant or not interested or not willing, kind of like what you were?

First of all, I think probably one of the most important rules of any kind of personal evangelism or anything like that is to treat every individual as an individual, because I think it can be very easy to get into a conversation with a nonbeliever, whether they’re hostile or open or neutral to the whole idea of Christianity, it’s so easy to approach the conversation with a kind of preconceived idea of, “Well, you know, you’re an atheist, so you believe in Darwinian evolution and you believe that science has all of the answers to everything and you believe that Jesus was a myth,” and I think that your preconceptions can distort the way that you have a conversation with them. But they’re all individuals, and whether they’re hostile or open, they have a reason for that.

I remember I went to an apologetics training weekend, and I went there still a little bit full of myself, thinking, “Yeah, I’ll learn all these apologetics arguments, and I’ll be able to convince somebody into Christianity,” and I was still thinking that way then. And the first session that we actually had, the lecturer stood up, and he said, “If you’ve come here thinking that you’re going to learn five irrefutable logical arguments for Christianity and you’ll be some kind of apologetics ninja and you’ll convince somebody into Christianity,” he said, “you’re starting with the wrong mindset. We’re about talking to people, and we’re about engaging with people, and you can’t treat a person as an argument.” Sorry, I got rather long-winded then, but yes, in a nutshell, just approach them as an individual and a person and ask them why they believe or don’t believe whatever it is they believe or disbelieve, and think properly and deeply about their reasons for it.

Well, Craig, I do appreciate your story, your transparency. You have lived a beautiful and tragic life, or a tragic and a beautiful life. However that works and whatever it is, in whatever form, I’m sure you’re very grateful for everything that’s happened in your life because it has brought you to the person that you are now, to the faith that you have now, and the purposes you have now, and obviously, you have a beautiful family-

I do, yes.

… and a lot… Just a dramatic transformation in your life. Just so much to celebrate!

Yes, absolutely.

And we’re privileged to be a part of listening to your story, so thank you for coming on today-

It’s really my pleasure.

… and sharing it all. Yeah. And I hope that… What is the name of your apologetics organization and contact, so that, if people are interested in more about what that is, could you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes. It’s 136 Apologetics. I wanted to sort of always be aware that evangelism and apologetics really have to be driven by Jesus, so it’s named after 1 Corinthians 3:6, where Paul wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase,” so yes, 136 Apologetics. My main personal interest is outreach to Jehovah’s Witnesses, which a whole different story again, but that’s what I tend to personally focus on a lot, but we do organize seminars and things that like for general apologetics as well. You can find us on Facebook. We’re on Twitter. We’re on YouTube. And we’re hoping, obviously, to, once COVID is all over and all of the lock downs stop and everything, we’re hoping to have a lot more general training and outreach to people and just learning more and more about all the difficult questions together. And yeah. And hopefully taking the gospel to the world.

That’s terrific. I’ll include information about your organization in the episode notes for anybody, again, who wants to learn more about it or perhaps reach out to you.

Thank you.

Thanks again, Craig, for coming onboard, and we are just leaving encouraged by your story. So thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast today to hear Craig’s story. You can find out more about 136 Apologetics and how to connect with Craig in the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll see how someone else flips the record of their life.

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone who once did not believe in God but who, against all odds, became a Christian.

Today, we’ll be talking with Julie Hanna. She was once a skeptical agnostic with a passionate interest in the human condition who spent many years exploring a very fundamental question: Do our lives have any meaning? Or are they just random events that end with death? She searched for answers in a wide range of sciences, philosophies, and faiths and was prepared to reach any reasonable conclusion from the evidence. No philosophy or faith system seemed ultimately convincing, at least at first. Her desire to ignore Christianity as implausible was challenged in her attempt to disprove it, but she ultimately became convinced by it. She has written about her journey towards Christianity in her book entitled A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus, where she methodically looks at the facts regarding science, the biblical texts, the historical person of Jesus, the issue of suffering, and many others. I hope you’ll come and listen to her story today, as she tells how she moved from agnostic skepticism to ardent Christian.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Julie. It’s great to have you.

Thanks so much, Jana, for the opportunity to share my thoughts with your listeners. Thank you.

We’re so glad to have you on today. As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about you, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I live in South Africa, in Johannesburg, although I was born in Zambia, but I’ve lived here most of my adult life, and I’m a mathematics lecturer. That’s what I’ve done all of my life, really, is taught at high schools and then at university, so I have a passion for mathematics and The Bush. I have a passion for the African Bush. And I’m a mother of two grown-up boys, and I’m recently retired, so I had time to put down my thoughts and actually get my thoughts published, which is part of what our discussion is about.

Yes. So tell me about your book? What is the name of it? And where can it be found?

It’s called A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus, because that’s literally what it was. It was my exploration as an agnostic, almost atheist skeptic, and it is available on Amazon. It’s published by Wipf and Stock.

That’s good, and I will include that information also in the episode notes of the podcast for anybody who wants to look into that. So as we’re getting started with your story, I love what you say about that you love the African Bush. I had a brief experience in The Bush about three years ago. It was the most amazing place I think I have ever seen, to be honest. Really one of the highlights of my life. I presume that you have — when you say you grew up in Zambia and you have a love for the African Bush, what does that look like growing up in that area of the world.

And we never saw wild animals there, apart from baboon, but it was a very natural way. We never wore shoes unless we went to school, and it was a very free and kind of open to exploration. That’s what we loved. It was a very privileged upbringing.

Well, that sounds pretty wonderful, really idyllic for any child to have that sense of freedom and exploration. I can’t imagine. That really sounds wonderful. What was the religious climate in that area? I know probably in South Africa, from my very, very limited experience, there are all kinds of thoughts about religion and God. Why don’t you tell us about that?

Yeah. I had minimal religious influence in my upbringing. None of my family or friends were religious. We were nominally Anglican, so we went to Sunday school because that’s just what good parents were supposed to do with their children, but my mother admitted she didn’t believe in God, and yeah, there was really — I can’t speak for Zambia for a whole or even South Africa as a whole, but by the time I was a teenager, I rejected belief in God and the afterlife, based, unfortunately, on really minimal exposure to Christian thinking.

So the nominal experience that you did have as a child — did you have any even basic childlike believe in God? Did you ever pray? Or was it just going through the motions of an Anglican service or that sort of thing?

Yeah. There was never really a sense that it was anything more than a societal thing that people did. And really, as I say, as a teenager, I decided that Christians probably didn’t think much about their beliefs. Based on really nothing more than a few Sunday school lessons and being bored in church, which also fell away by the time I was about 12. I think we stopped even going to those ceremonies. But it seemed to me, I’d have to say almost from the outside of Christianity, that it seemed to be a narrow and simplistic worldview, and looking back, I seem to have judged what Christianity was in the same that you would judge the culture of a country from someone’s holiday photographs.

Yes.

Because I knew almost nothing. I’d never read any scripture. Never read anything myself. I just knew vague stories about floods and arks and people walking on water, and none of it jelled with me. Because it had never been really presented to me as an adult. I only had a child’s exposure, which I actually am starting to think is not an unusual case. Some of the atheistic people I’ve been speaking to since my conversion are very proud that they rejected Christianity when they were young, as if that’s something to be proud of. But when I look back, it’s something to be embarrassed about. Because I hadn’t explored it as an adult, which is a huge weakness, of course. So it was really arrogant of me to be so confidently atheistic on the basis of such little knowledge.

So as a teenager, you started in some ways to reject this childlike understanding, I suppose, of Christianity, thinking that it was just merely a social construction perhaps. Maybe a social cultural activity.

Correct. And it was based on some rather strange myths of miraculous things. So it seemed to be an obvious thing to reject it, which I did at the time.

There was just no credibility. No real substance to it. And so obviously you were intellectual and interested in academics, so you were moving in . . . as a teenager I presume . . . . How old were you when you really took on that label of atheist? Was that something that you strongly identified with? Or it was just that you knew you didn’t believe in God?

I’d say by the time I was about 17, 18, and I was reading French existentialism, and I thought, “Now, here is a brave and courageous, thoughtful way of looking at a meaningless world.” I think at about that stage, I thought, “Okay, that’s it. I’m not going the God route. This makes more sense, so let’s just put that all aside.”

This brave, courageous way of looking at the world through an existentialist worldview, it is, in a sense, a very brave way to look at life if you look at it through to its logical ends in existentialism. Did you go that far in viewing your worldview? That essentially you were brave if you were able to face the world starkly with regard to loss of meaning and those kinds of things?

I thought that I had to critique that as well because, although I wasn’t religious, I was very interested in the human condition and in questions like, “What does it mean to be human?” as opposed to just a cat or a dog. “Does our life have significance?” “Is there a correct worldview?” “Is there a particular way we should be living?” So although existentialism suggested that we must make our own moral decisions and there’s nothing transcendent to that, I wanted to critique that as well. I wanted to read more broadly about what possibilities there might be. So I actually started an investigation that would stretch over the next few decades, and it was in two main directions: One direction was into science, and in particular what the new physics had to say about the universe, and the other direction was an exploration into various belief systems.

So how did that play out? Did you start this active investigation as an 18-year-old or in university or just beyond? You said it took a few years, actually, to do this, so what did that look like?

It was probably in my mid twenties that it started becoming less of an “I should do this” and more of an “I’m going to do this.” So then I was sidetracked by having children, so towards my late twenties, it really started in earnest, where I started a sort of twenty- or thirty-year investigation.

So you were in your mid twenties. I’m really impressed—first of all, I must say—that you were thoughtful enough about your own existence and your own worldview that you wanted to think about it more deeply. Because oftentimes, it’s just too easy to avoid. But you were obviously an introspective, again thoughtful person about your life, and you wanted to understand it. So you said you started in two directions, one through science and one into various worldviews. So can you talk with us perhaps about one of those? Did you go down the scientific road first? Or did you go towards more of the humanities and religions?

They were almost in parallel, and I thought I’d share a few results from science first that strongly influenced my thinking.

Yes, yes.

Okay. The first resulted from cosmology. As Brian Greene admits, the physicist, there’s still a continuing ignorance on the fundamental origin of the universe. That interested me, that science has not been able to account for the arising of the universe. We simply don’t know how it came about. And this issue of the physical constraints that happened—there were physical constants that have to be constrained within extremely narrow margins for carbon-based life to develop. It’s the very well-known fine-tuning argument. The fact is that our universe is phenomenally improbable. That is something that has been arguable. The only way to account for the statistic of improbability is to suggest that perhaps there’s an infinite number of universes, so that this particular one at least becomes possible to have arrived, but there are major flaws and problems with this hypothesis, and there are quite a few scientists who speak very strongly against the suggestion that there must be an infinite number of universes. So that was important to me. I don’t think I’ll go into the critiques of that theory at the moment because of time.

I guess you were coming to a conclusion, it sounds like, that there had to be some kind of transcendent source outside of the universe in order for the universe to have been caused in the beginning and that we live in kind of a Goldilocks universe that requires some kind of powerful or infinite kind of source in order for this fine tuning to be as it is. So were you coming to those conclusions that perhaps there had to be this kind of transcendent source beyond the universe in order for these things to be a reality as we see them?

Yes. I was agreeing with people like the scientist Paul Davies, who says the impression of design is overwhelming. He’s not a theist, but full stop, the impression of design is overwhelming. There’s no getting around it. And cosmologist Allan Sandage, who became a Christian, largely because of this evidence of design. So, although I didn’t immediately join them, as it were, it did open my eyes to the strong possibility that there might well be a transcendent designer. That was a very interesting finding for me, yes.

So then, from that perspective, I guess then, it would be more interesting or I could see where you would be driven towards, okay, if there is a designer for this design, an originator for the origin of the universe, that perhaps then maybe religion . . . or there may be a god who is causing this, so I would imagine, then, your approach towards the human condition and how religion answered those questions would be a little bit more diligent, with the understanding that perhaps there really is a god, or gods at that point, who could exist.

Yeah. Absolutely. It opened my eyes to the possibility that it was worth exploring in a way. If I’d gone into physics and then said, “Well, we know how it all happened. It’s A, B, C. There’s no need to go beyond our naturalist interpretations and our physical laws of phenomenon.” If I’d encountered that, that would probably have been the end of the story for me. So this was a big thing, saying it’s worth delving deeper. Plus the fact that we don’t even know what matter is. I found that intriguing. That the things that look like ordinary physical objects are really just probability waves and waves of potentiality, rather than objects, and that probably our four-dimensional spacetime is undoubtedly embedded in a higher dimensional reality. That was very important for me. Because how could we know how a higher dimensional being could interact with our limited spacetime continuum, and I found that very challenging. So it wasn’t simple enough to say we can have a naturalist, determinist, materialist view of the world. Scientists were saying, “No, you can’t.” Our reality is far more complex than it might seem to us.

There had to be a hypothesis, as it were, that there had to be something outside the natural world in order for what we know and experience within the natural world.

Yeah. The higher dimensional idea points to something transcendent. And the fact that nature itself behaves in such counterintiuitive ways and that it’s not good enough simply to say, for example, there’s stuff, and there’s human consciousness, even, which seems to be quite an easy way to see the world. “There’s a chair, there’s a table, there’s me, and then there’s my consciousness as something separate.” The new physics is countering that. The new physics says no, that the unfolding of reality is impacted upon directly by human consciousness. That’s in essence what quantum mechanics is saying. So again I thought, “Well, if we don’t really understand the nature of material substance itself and how our consciousness might be impacting on it and affecting it, and there are higher dimensions, what about a higher dimensional consciousness, then? How might that be impacting on our reality?” So there were so many ways in which science was saying, “You’ve got to think beyond what you think you understand.”

So your eyes were really being opened to possibilities, and you were pursuing this information and knowledge. . . I guess in a sense it sounds like with some degree of openness and willingness to go wherever the evidence led.

Tell me more about . . . so science was kind of opening the door for you to possibilities. Tell me about your exploration into worldviews, then, and religions, towards the human condition.

Right. So at this stage, I was really only feeling that we should be at least humble enough to accept the possibility of some guiding form of transcendent intelligence in the universe. That’s the point to which science took me. But I was still thinking this transcendent principle could be completely impersonal. So, in my explorations, I was looking at the natural order of Dao and Daoism or the absolute reality of Brahman or some form of cosmic energy in Kashmir Shaivism, where energy becomes manifest, which is very close to what physics is saying, that matter is a form of energy, and I was reading also about Jewish Kabbalah and the Hindu scriptures, the Hare Krishna movement, various forms of Buddhism, but none of those, although they sort of hinted at truths and they were quite exciting, especially where they did fit in with the new physics, nothing made me feel, “Oh, this is the path,” or, “Here is an explanation about the human condition and our purpose and the nature of the universe,” and so on. They were all just very interesting, rather than anything I felt I could commit to.

Then, something very interesting happened which really took me in a completely unexpected direction, and that is that I kept encountering references to the cosmic Christ in non-Christian places, like the Guru Paramahansa Yogananda, for example, and that’s when I thought, “Oh, here comes this Christ story again.”

Yes.

Yes. I thought, “Oh, I thought I’d gotten rid of this.” I mean, in my head, anything to do with a miracle with a God man must be nonsense. I did not want to get involved with Christianity, but as you say, it’s always been important for me to base opinion on evidence. So I felt if I was to be objective I’d have to investigate Christian scripture, even if it was just so that I could explain why I rejected it. Because when I thought to myself, “Why am I against this Christ idea? Why am I against anything to do with Christianity? What is my basis? What is my evidence?” I realized I actually had no basis because I’d only encountered it as a child. So I decided, “Okay, here is my aim. I’m going to discredit Christianity.”

So what did you find as you started into the investigation of Christianity?

Yeah. Needless to say, it was a total surprise. It was a total surprise. I expected that I would hear some sophistic moral teachings and some bizarre miracle stories, and instead I was struck by this consistent voice of authority and authenticity in the gospels. This consistent voice that I just could not ignore. I was interested much later to learn that, although Albert Einstein rejected the Judeo-Christian God absolutely, he did say this in an interview, and I’d love to quote him here if I may. I’m sure a lot of people have heard this, but when I read it, it gelled with me. I thought, “Oh, yes! This is the way I felt when I first read the gospels.” Einstein said this in his interview: “No one can read the gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.” Quite powerful words.

Yes.

Yeah. And that is how I felt. As I read it, I thought, “But this is not a Robin Hood exaggerated legend kind of figure I’m encountering here. This is a consistent voice of authority.” I just couldn’t believe that a range of writers could have fabricated Jesus’s teachings and His distinct personality with the consistency that I was encountering, and that’s when I thought, “Uh oh. I think I’d better investigate this a bit deeper before I just toss it aside as a superficial response.” So I started a specific and deliberate investigation into Christianity and its roots in Judaism.

So what did that deliberate investigation look like?

Well, first I read and re-read the New Testament, because I wanted to see how all the pieces of these different stories fit together to try to make a whole out of all these puzzle pieces. So I read it and re-read it and Paul’s letters and John’s revelation and so on, to get a sense of what the central message was. And then I read the Old Testament. Then I researched Rabbinic texts about the Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. I read theological commentaries. My favorite was Karl Barth. I read scholarly papers on the resurrection and church and the transmission of scripture in those times, oral and written, especially in the early Jewish communities, and I read atheist critiques of all of these aspects. I was trying to still keep an open mind. I mean I was probably even keen, at that stage, to find out that Jesus’s followers had exaggerated His nature and His worth.

But although I was happy to find many contradictions and flaws and arguments against the veracity and the authenticity of the gospels, I discovered something completely different. I discovered that there are links and consistencies between the Old and New Testaments that are truly astounding, and Jesus’s work not only fulfilled Old Testament prophecy. They also provide—together with His promised return, they provide a physical enactment of the seven feasts of Judaism. There’s a whole structural parallel. The datings, the symbolism, they’re remarkable. If Jesus did or said the bulk of what you read about in the New Testament, then those writers would have had to invent a whole amazing realm of detail about His fact, his claims, his teachings, death, resurrection, to tie in very closely with numerous ancient images and prophecies and festivals and dates and rituals. It’s just impossible for that all to have been invented. So it was the consistency and the parallels and the tie in with the whole of the Old Testament traditions and prophecies that made me decide nobody could have just come up and invented all of the stuff that we find about Jesus in the New Testament.

Yes, it is quite amazing when you sit back and look at the whole of the narrative from Old Testament to New Testament, considering it was written over a process of 1400 years, around 40 authors, several continents, and then you look at the cohesiveness of the narrative, and that alone is just incredibly astounding, much less what you talk about in terms of just the integration of the story, the prophecies, the fulfillments, the symbolism, and how it all points to the person of Christ and His being really the center of all history. It really is overwhelming when you start to step back and look how all the—as you said before—how all the puzzle pieces start to be placed together into some kind of coherent whole. And I wonder, since you had a concern about the human condition and really looking into that, of course you were coming to an intellectual understanding of how all of these things came together and the ring of truth and the person of Christ. I also wonder how it answered those questions for you about the human condition, who we are, how we determine right and wrong, where does our sense of consciousness and even dignity and value or purpose play as you were reading and putting together these pieces with regard to Christianity and the person of Christ.

In terms of the meaning, the human meaning?

Yes. Who we are in our humanness and in our brokenness. Our beauty and our brokenness and how that relates to scripture and those very deep questions you were searching for with regard to the human condition.

Yeah. I think, strangely enough, it was a deep question, and Christ has provided a deep answer, and for me, I can only give what might seem almost shallow in its simplicity, but it just brought me peace. From the Old Testament through to Revelation, from the broken promises in the Garden of Eden and then the promises of God throughout the Old Testament: “I will provide a new creation.” “I will provide atonement.” “I will wipe away all tears.” And then Christ coming and saying, “I’m here to complete the Father’s work. My meat is to do the work of the Father,” until He said, on the cross, “It is done.” “Tetelestai.” “It is finished.” Through to John’s Revelation where there is a new heaven and earth and there is restoration with Christ and all tears are wiped away and we have access to the tree of life, that huge beginning-to-end vast cosmic picture just gave me one very simplistic response, “Yay!”

Well, yeah!

It’s all planned.” God has it all from beginning to end, even through our suffering and our problems. We just have to rest. “I have brought you rest,” was the final sense of how I responded to my investigation.

That’s amazing! It seems to me that this cosmic Christ, who is the One, like you say, over all, in control of all in this extraordinary cosmic way is also incredibly very personal. It sounds like what He brings, not only overall cosmos, He also brings into your life this sense of movement from chaos to shalom. You keep speaking of rest and peace, and that was your response. And that’s really a beautiful kind of response because you can see how the pieces are placed together, and there must be some kind of rest in that, to have these grand questions answered in a way that you were intently seeking.

Very much so. In terms of that resting, I’ve just remembered something that happened to me which I’d like to share?

Yes, yes, certainly.

I was busy with studying Sufism at the time, and it’s an esoteric aspect within Islam. It’s a truly beautiful spiritual path in terms of trying to perfect yourself and to work on your forgiveness and your grace, and I was working very hard at that. I did tend to judge other people, and I was wrestling with myself. I was trying to force myself through meditation and so on. I was trying to force myself into a state of loving patience, which is very important in Sufism. And I was aspiring to this goal. I was focusing. I was meditating. And then one day my neighbor’s kids drove me nuts, really nuts. Because they had regular long screaming matches, so I stormed outside, and I had a confrontation with the caretaker, and I came back in my house and I . . . Really. I threw up my hands, and I said aloud, “I give up! I’m done with all of this! I cannot do it!” And then a quiet voice in my mind, but I promise it was not my thought. A quiet voice just said, “Of course you can’t.”

Yes. Of course.

“Of course you can’t.” I was trying to perfect myself, make myself some kind of superhuman, wonderfully blissful, kind, gracious, calm person, and I was trying to master my emotions. I was trying to force myself to be what I wasn’t, which is quite an explosive personality, and this voice just said, “Of course you can’t.” I can’t tell you what relief I felt! I felt as though I’d been trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Or as if I was traveling in a train and I’d been carrying a huge burden, and someone just said, “Why don’t you put that down? The train will take you.” I laughed. I cannot tell you the sense of relief I felt. There was such a pressure and a burden that just left me. I felt light. I felt liberated. I felt set free. And for some reason I thought, “I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to do it. There’s nothing I have to do. I can just rest, and it’s going to be okay.” Now at that stage I was still into many, many other . . . I hadn’t even started exploring Christianity, so I didn’t even know what this peace was about or where it was going to lead me or where it would come from or what it meant, but I’ll never forget that sense of, “It’s not my fight. I don’t have to wrestle. I can rest!” And I cannot help feeling that, in those early days, the Holy Spirit was somehow trying to tell me, “Don’t worry.”

Yes. I would imagine so. There really is something so relieving when you come to the realization that it really isn’t all about you. And what you can do. It’s about what Christ has already done for you on the cross. I imagine, when you reading through the New Testament then after that, when you came to Jesus’s words, where he says, “Those of you who are heavily ladened or burdened, come to Me, and I will give you rest,” that must have resonated when you ran across that passage.

It absolutely did. I thought, “This is what I sensed a long time ago, without even realizing what the source was.”

So all of the pieces then came together, and you came to a place obviously of belief that it made sense, not only of the cosmos but of the world and made sense of your world in a sense.

It did absolutely. When I realized that, if people had created or invented, fabricated, all of these details that I’m speaking about that fit in, it would have been a spectacularly, impossibly well-structured exaggeration”Go away and make up some stories and talk about him amongst yourselves.” It would be impossible for that to happen in such a coherent way, for such a voice to come through, and then, as you said, for it to all fit in with the Old Testament. Or it would have been a sophisticated and uniquely brilliant fraud, but why would people do that? Why would they go back . . . because people often say, “Well, it’s easy for the guys who wrote the New Testament to copy stuff from the Old Testament and to make it look as though there’s a connection,” but why would they even do that? There’s no motivation to make up a whole lot of details, and of course, they couldn’t have created all of the details around Jesus dying on Passover and rising on the day of Firstfruits Festival and so on. But there would be no reason for them to do it. There wasn’t even an expectation that the Messiah would die and rise, so why would they create that strange thing?

So yeah, it was the way everything fitted in together, and then, as you say, the sense that, “Okay. Although we might rail against it, this idea of the original fall and rebellion and God’s long-term plan does make sense in terms of our world experience. Why are we suffering like this? What does it mean? Does it mean that life is completely meaningless? Should we just give up and look to our own humanist selves for our morals and our ethos and our ethics? It did, as we say, answer the questions about how do we live life and what is the purpose of life. Nothing, no other belief system, had answered those questions with such clarity and intellectual satisfaction.

So you know I constantly hear this sense that there is a presumption about who Jesus is, what the Bible is, what Christianity is, who Christians are, and somehow, when someone actually gets close enough—perhaps not to some Christians, I guess—but they see something so totally other than what they expected. And you used the word surprised earlier. It was a total surprise. I would imagine that, in a way, you’re still somewhat surprised, as someone who was seeking to disprove Christianity, now to find yourself now a strong advocate for it.

What I thought once I got to this point was, “I would like to have known this stuff when I was asking questions decades ago.” I would have liked to have found a book that said, “Look at these connections. The stuff you can’t make up. And look at the coherence of the whole picture, from Genesis through to Revelation. Who would have made all of that up? And look at science. has science answered all the big questions? Or are they also still seeking?” These are the things that weren’t easily accessible to me in my search, so then I thought, “Well, I’d like people to know this, because I think it’s useful stuff. Whatever they decided, I would like people to have this interesting information to work from.”

So that’s what drove you write. So that others could have what you didn’t? Yes. That’s really wonderful. So considering you as a former skeptic, if you were to speak to those who are currently skeptics, or perhaps listening, even interested and looking into Christianity, what would you advise them in terms of a search?

Well, firstly, I’d like to encourage an open-minded approach because reality is so much more complex and mysterious than it appears to us, and there are some very good science books written about this that are accessible. Paul Davies particularly writes very accessible science that opens one’s mind. And I would also encourage people who are either seeking or not believing to be very skeptical when they hear confident assertions that natural processes have explained everything about how the universe arose and how intelligent life developed on earth, because that’s simply not true. There are highly respected scientists that are saying exactly the opposite, and many are concluding that an intelligent creator makes more logical sense from scientific evidence than simply random development. So you often hear people out there saying, “Oh, yeah, but they’ve created life in the laboratory. They know how the universe arose from quantum fluctuations,” and so on. Those are simplistic statements that are not supported by the science.

And Marcos Eberlin . . . he’s an award-winning chemist. He published in just 2019? He summarized a whole lot of scientific findings regarding the development of life on earth, and his book is endorsed by Nobel prize winners, and this is the title of his book, because it says everything—his book is called Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. That’s a Nobel winning—well, he didn’t win the Nobel prize, but the guys who endorsed his book did, and he says there is definite evidence of foresight. So don’t be cut off or overwhelmed or convinced by superficial statements out there that science has explained it all, because that’s just not true.

So, Julie, for those Christians who are listening who want to engage more thoughtfully not only with their own worldview but also engaging, helping others to see that perhaps Christianity isn’t as simplistic as they think it is, how would you encourage Christians to engage with those who are skeptical?

Yeah. I think it’s really important for Christians to be well informed because there’s so much vociferous and intense attack almost on Christian belief, that it has to be anti-rationalist, that it’s in conflict with science, that it is simplistic and narrow and stupid. There’s so much of that out there, and increasingly so with the proponents of new atheism, that I think Christians could only benefit from knowing what science says, which is not in conflict with scripture, to my way of thinking, anyway. I’m not talking about necessarily the six-day argument that becomes quite complicated in itself, but just the overall sense of a Creator God who’s in control, He sent His Son, the work that Jesus has done. There’s nothing here that conflicts with science, and there are so many scientists who have been brought to Christ through their scientific work, brought to faith, brought to belief in God, and I think Christians can only benefit from knowing this, so that they don’t have to be defensive or try to block discussion with people because they feel that they don’t have a strong position.

And all these accusations about Jesus as composite myth, the early deification of Jesus, paganizing influences in the church, the corruption of scripture, a lot of the arguments that are out there, they are weak arguments, and they have been disproven again and again, so it’s useful to know that and to hear the argument that refutes these skeptical atheist challenges. So if people are interested in strengthening their faith, then well that’s what the book’s for.

Yes. Yes. I think there’s something to be said for just not ignoring the difficult questions and difficult issues but actually—when you dig in and dive in, you actually see the profundity of the Christian worldview and how it makes sense of reality, it makes sense of science, it makes sense of what we see and experience and know in our world and in ourselves, and it always serves to strengthen your faith and your witness for Christianity. I think that that’s a good word. Is there anything else you’d like to add, Julie? Before we wrap up? Any other thoughts?

I think just thank you for inviting a share, and I do hope that others out there who haven’t come to faith might consider at least exploring the possibility and that others stand strong in their faith, because we’re going to need to.

Yes, yes. You have an extraordinary story, Julie. I again am so impressed with the intentionality and the diligence, the pursuit to really look for truth, truth and you found Truth with a capital T and not only truth intellectually, but you found truth in the person of Jesus. As not only a compelling figure for all of history but also for your life. That’s a really beautiful thing. It’s obvious. Your passion is obvious. And I do hope that those who are listening will take a closer look at her story and the way she methodically courses through all these difficult questions, through her book, and I do hope that you’ll take a look. And I again will—the name of it is?

A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus.

A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus, and we will put a link on our episode notes for anyone who’s looking for that. Thank you again, Julie. It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you for telling your story.

Thank you, Jana, and to anyone who listens. Thank you. Bless you.

Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Julie’s story. You can find out more about her book, A Skeptic’s Investigation into Jesus, by looking at the episode notes. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be seeing how someone else flips the record of their life.

Raised in a godless communistic world, former KGB agent and undercover spy Jack Barsky found God when he was least expecting it.

To learn more about Jack and his story, visit: www.jackbarsky.com Or read Jack’s book Deep Undercover: My Secret Life and Tangled Allegiances as a KGB Spy in America

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. No matter who you are, if there’s something common to all of us, it’s that we want to be fully known and fully loved. We long for meaningful relationships. We want our life to have significance and deep meaning, but sometimes what we long for seems quite elusive. Despite outward appearances and even worldly success, we can find ourselves deeply lonely and empty. What happens then? What do you do? Where do you go?

Our podcast guest today had a life with all the thrill and adventure of a spy novel. That’s because he was a spy, a genuine spy. Raised in Communist Germany, he worked for the KGB as an undercover agent literally. Yet with all of the trappings of worldly excitement and success, something was desperately missing. He didn’t know how or where to find it. As a Communist, religion and God were not an option. That was only for the undereducated masses. Jack Barsky’s story is one filled with dramatic twists and turns and transparency as he confronts his own dark night of the soul. He knew he was looking for something more than his own seemingly exciting yet shallow, empty life. Even though he may not have been looking for God, God was looking for him. Jack came not only to know about God, he came to know and be known, love and be loved by God himself. He came to find a life of satisfaction, fullness, and peace that had eluded him for so long. Come join me as Jack tells his journey from atheism to belief.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jack. It’s wonderful to have you today.

I’m delighted to be here.

As we’re getting started, just so the listeners can get to know a little bit about who you are, even just right now, can you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are?

Well, my name is Jack Barsky. I currently reside in the beautiful state of Georgia, in the suburbs, southeastern suburbs of Atlanta, with my wife, Shawna, and my soon-to-be 10-year-old daughter, Trinity. I retired from corporate life about 4 years ago, I spent some 35 years having a career in information technology, including executive-type management. But four years ago, I became a public figure, and at that point, it was time to say goodbye to corporate because my life story does not sit very well with a lot of companies. I did some things that are a little bit out of the ordinary. And I described all of this in my memoir, Deep Undercover, which was released three years ago. And so what I’m doing now, I’m engaged in public speaking. I do interviews such as this one. I write blogs, and I’m working on some other things that are not very much related to my career in corporate but are more in the creative sector.

Wonderful. Wow. That sounds exciting. And for anyone who’s listening, I will definitely put the name of your book and your blog and where we can follow you in the episode notes, so you can find out more information about Jack there. So I’m so excited to get into your life. You obviously, like you said, have become a public figure because of the extraordinary life that you’ve lived. Let’s take it back to set the context for this extraordinary by talking about where you grew up, your understanding of God, your family, your culture. What was that world like?

Well, it started very ordinary, to put it mildly. I was born in 1949 in the easternmost part of what was, at the time, the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. That place became eventually the German Democratic Republic, a strong ally and pretty much dominated ally to the Soviet Union and very much dominated by Soviet influence. I was born into a small village. My parents were both teachers. And my first home was on the third floor of an elementary school building. That was pretty good because this was—World War II, particularly in the east, did a lot of damage to the country. Massive destruction—apartment buildings, cities, factories. I mean it was a wasteland, and probably the best thing was to be able to grow up in the country because we had the ability to scrounge up some food here and there that was outside of the assigned ration. The assigned ration for an adult for about ten years, still ten years after the end of the war, was about 1500 calories. That’s below a subsistence level. But it was like a place where you cannot imagine to get out of there and go out in the world and make a way and have an interesting life.

What did it for me was God gave me a pretty decent intellect, so I did well in elementary and middle school, which allowed me to go on to gymnasium, which then allowed me to go on, and I aced high school, and then that got me into a good university. I studied chemistry, and I pretty much aced that as well. I’m going to stop right there and talk about God.

Okay. Before we go there, let’s . . . So you grew up in, like you said, a Soviet-occupied section of Germany. It was communistic. So I presume, with that, then there was little to know reference of God.

Exactly.

So what did that look like? What was the belief? Or what was the religion, I guess you could say, in a secularized sense. What did that look like?

It’s very interesting. My mother came from what I truly believe a Christian household, but my mother actually, for a little while, sang in a church choir, and she would talk about it, but then she had to stop because my father was a party member and he wanted to have a career, and it was suggested that she separate from the church. God was never mentioned in our house. I never saw a Bible. There was the ability to get religious education on a voluntary basis for a little while in elementary school, but my father did not allow me to attend. So fundamentally I grew up without God in my life.

What we were fed from kindergarten on was Communist ideology, Marxism, Leninism. As it is fit to teach your children at a young age and then as they grow older and so forth, and it became so dominant—to me, Marxism Leninism was the only valid approach to life and interpretation of what life was all about, and there was no doubt. In school, we didn’t even have an academic subject that you could call religions of the world. No. We had Scientific Marxism and Leninism as a subject to study. So that does become a religion because this belief does not hold up to intellectual critique, but we didn’t even think about critiquing it. It was all we ever heard. So yeah, there was no God in my life. And one other thing: We did celebrate some Christian holidays. We had Christmas, and it was a pagan holiday. For us, the main figure at Christmas was Santa Claus. I had no idea that most of the world was celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. We had Easter, and there was no cross in Easter. It was just about the Easter Bunny, and really, the worst corruption of a holiday that I can think of was the Day of Ascenscion. In Germany, it’s called Himmelfahrt, and I remember this was a day when young men, my father being one of them, would go out on a hike, either with bicycles or just on foot, with enough beer in tow to come back drunk. That was the Day of Ascension.

Kind of an interesting interpretation there, yes.

Indeed. One other thing: The first time I opened a Bible, I was about maybe 12 years old. I found one in the home of my other set of grandparents, and curious as I was, I started reading it, from page one, and as I’m progressing, I hit this section where you have about a page and a half of genealogy and who begat whom, and that brought me to pieces, and I thought, “Well, that’s not the kind of book I want to read.” Of course, if you want to introduce somebody to faith, you start with the gospel, not with a few pages into Genesis.

So it just was not anything interesting. You put it away when you were 12. You went on with this godless kind of mindset into university. You were obviously very bright. You said you studied chemistry. And then you got out of university, and I presume the same kind of, in a sense, Communistic dogma was prevalent there at university?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I joined the Communist Party in my first year as a student, and we continued to study. That was part of our curriculum, Marxist philosophy, economic theory, and so forth. And to me, when I thought about churchgoing Christians, I thought they were all the stupid people and the weak people who needed religion as a crutch, and there was a level of disdain that we were above all of that, us the elite, because clearly I was on a path to joining the ruling elite in East Germany. That’s not an exaggeration.

Wow. So you had your path set out before you. You were very bright, obviously very ambitious, and you were noticed in some way, I’m sure, as someone who stood out among your peers as being perhaps special in some way. Why don’t you walk us through the next part of your journey?

Yeah. I was particularly because I received a scholarship that was a national scholarship that was handed out to very few students. The chance of getting that was one in 3,000. And, as you may imagine, in Communist countries, the secret service, the internal police, kept records on everybody. There was a file for every single individual, with minor exceptions. But anyway, the East German intelligence service, which was called the Stasi, as well as the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service, would periodically look into these records to find people that they might want to recruit. And so, that way, the KGB found me. And introduced themselves, and it became a rather lengthy process of recruitment. I had an informal relationship with a KGB agent while I was still at university, and actually for one of those years—the informal relationship was almost two years—for one of those years, I already was employed by the university as an assistant professor. Anyway, that informal relationship was a mutual feeling out because what I guessed but didn’t know for sure is that they were looking at me for one of the most difficult jobs in terms of espionage, and that is becoming an illegal. In other words, get to a target country and live as an illegal with an assumed identity, rather than going someplace as a diplomat or a student but still under your own name, and so I actually signed up. I was 24 years old when I left university and joined the KGB full time.

I can’t imagine what that might have been like. Were you daunted by what was put before you and the responsibility upon you? Or did it seem exciting?

There was a mix of emotions. The decision wasn’t super easy because, as you can imagine, becoming an illegal undercover agent would require you to become somebody else, deny everything that happened to you in your life up to that point, and separate from everybody you knew, including your own culture, but from everybody you knew. That includes parents, siblings, friends, and for me, probably the worst part was that I had to leave my beloved basketball team. I was a basketball maniac in those days. And I had a career. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that I was going to wind up a tenured professor at that university, and that was my dream job, but then there was the flattery that went with the fact that you were recruited by the most powerful organization on the planet to do some really, really special work in service of the only cause that I knew was worth sacrificing for. You add to this the sense of adventure, the ability to travel, and the allure of sort of living outside of legality. Because I knew that as a secret agent you would live pretty much very often outside of the law. So that eventually won in terms of that tug of war, whether I should stay or I should go.

And so I signed up and got two years’ worth of training in Berlin and another two years’ worth of training in Moscow. I studied English. Initially, I was directed towards West Germany but because of my talent to acquire another language, I became a dream candidate because I got to a point where I was able to imitate the American idiom of English well enough to pretend to have been born in the United States, with the explanation of the residual German accent that my mother was German and I grew up bilingual, and that worked really well.

So in 1978 I showed up in the United States, entered the United States with a false passport which I destroyed on my second day, and pulled out of a secret compartment a certified copy of a birth certificate with the name of Jack Barsky, so Jack Barsky had arrived in the United States. The real, the original Jack Barsky had passed away at the age of eleven. The KGB stole that identity and managed to acquire a genuine copy of a birth certificate, and that was not unusual. The KGB has done this many, many times, and in those days, it was okay to operate. If you had enough cash, you didn’t need ID. You could get on a plane without showing ID, and so I wound up in New York City and slowly, methodically, carefully acquired two key documents that would allow me to operate as a regular member of American society, and that was a driver’s licence and Social Security card. And that took me about a year. And my first job, by the way—I had to find something where they wouldn’t do a lot of background checks and you wouldn’t need a resume, so I decided to try my luck as a bike messenger in Manhattan. And that worked out pretty well. I worked for 2-1/2 years as a bike messenger and became a real street urchin. I got to know the city very well, and in New York, it’s catch as catch can and it’s survival of the fittest, so as a bicycle rider, you’re the most vulnerable in traffic, and sometimes the worst offenders were the pedestrians, who would totally ignore you, and I held my own. Let’s put it this way. And I became a real New Yorker, you know, quite aggressive. And then we decided, the KGB decided to send me to university again, to college, and I studied information technology.

From the moment I entered the US till the moment I quote-unquote quit, and I did quit service for the KGB, was about 10 years. I quit in 1988, and now, of course, the question is, “How did you get away with quitting?”

Exactly. How could you leave such a strong, strong, powerful-

Yeah. I have a really good story, and I think it must have been, in some way, the Holy Spirit, because I quit for a very good reason. Not because I liked life in the United States that well. I liked the material comfort and all that. I was not yet materially so comfortable, as a matter of fact. This is what happened: In ’88, the KGB wanted me to return back home because they were concerned. There was some indication that the FBI was investigating me. And so, for me, from a selfish perspective, it would have been, “Yeah! I finally get to go home.” I had a lot of dollar savings on account which, in East Germany, was worth a fortune, and the Russians also promised to let me have a house. I mean I would have returned a hero, well respected. I had received the second-highest decoration of the Soviet Union the year before, but there’s one thing that kept me here, and this is when I think—when God really started tugging at my heart and sort of softening the hard-core egomanical individual that I was. I had, at the time, an 18-month-old child, a daughter, and I had fallen in love with that girl. And that was totally unexpected. When I tell people, I call this an unexpected assault of unconditional love. I don’t know where that came from, and I can only think that God started moving in my life.

I had no idea that He was doing that, but it was a really tough decision because, by defying the KGB, I risked a lot, possibly life. And there was also the chance that the FBI actually was on my tail. But love won, and I told the KGB that I had contracted HIV/AIDS, which in those days was clearly a death sentence. There was no cure. And they bought this, and as a matter of fact, they informed my family that I had died from AIDS. And there’s an entry in the Social Security register in East Germany that says—Albrecht Dittrich was my birth name in Germany—died in 1988. So that the end of that, and I became . . . . I disappeared into the crowd. I became a regular middle-class American citizen. Pretty soon, I forgot that I ever spied for the KGB. I had a good career in corporate America. The mother of this young child, who I had married . . . . This is an interesting wrinkle here. I met her. She was originally from South America, from Guyana, and she confided me that she was in the country illegally, so I married her to allow her to get a green card, which is really odd because here’s the illegal spy making another illegal legal.

Yes! That’s ironic.

But, you know, the decision was made. I’m staying with our daughter. I had moved in with the wife that I married, and when the coast was clear and I was pretty safe that the KGB wasn’t chasing after me, one day I went to my wife, and I said, “Hey, why don’t we buy a house?” And that was pretty much the turning point. We bought a house. We had another child. House in the suburbs. Moved to another house. And everything was fine until, nine years after I quit, the FBI introduced themselves.

Ah.

And that was a good thing. The story of my life has a lot of dots that you would not expect to be connected. The probability of things happening that way is very, very low, and when I put this all together—there are many, many other situations that I’m going to mention here, but here’s one: In 1992, a Russian national defected to the West, and he was a retired archivist at the KGB who, at one point, was really ticked off at the KGB and the Russian system, and he started copying files by hand. Smuggling out files. And he had three suitcases full of typed up notes that he took with him that were . . . . No, he didn’t take them with him. The British intelligence actually extracted this from his dacha. And amongst those copious notes was my name. Not much else. But Jack Barskys, there aren’t too many, so when the FBI got that name, they said, “We’re going to find him,” and they found me. They found the one Jack Barsky that acquired a Social Security card at the ripe old age of 35. And that’s what led them to me.

And so they introduced themselves. Their idea was that they wanted me to cooperate. Now, there were some folks within the FBI who just wanted to put me in jail, but here’s another lucky circumstance, so to speak: The fellow who was the lead investigator had studied me very carefully, and he insisted that I would cooperate, and so they took that risk, and he turned out to be right. And he is now a good friend of mine. As a matter of fact, he is godfather to my daughter Trinity, so you see all these connections? It’s phenomenal.

It is. It is.

But at this point I still don’t have God in my life. At least I’m not aware that He is doing stuff behind the scenes to eventually . . . to set me up. Because I’d compare the situation like when a fisherman goes out and throws out the bait and is very careful, and he’s looking for a nibble and maybe a bite, and then he reels in the catch very slowly until they finally land the catch, and I think I was nibbling. I just didn’t know yet.

You just didn’t know. The Lord was working behind the scenes, but you were being drawn, I guess like you say . . . . The first hint of that was that unexpected unconditional love that you had for your daughter. And you were wondering where that came from. But then obviously your steps are being ordered. You left the KGB. You connected with the FBI. You cooperated with them I guess, since you were essentially dead to the KGB at that point. You know, I’m curious. The life of an undercover agent, KGB. I mean, we’ve all seen the movies and the films and the excitement and the thrill that’s associated with that. In your life, with all of those kind of trappings of excitement and adventure, were you feeling fulfilled as a person? I mean, I know you were very bright, and you were very driven and passionate about your mission. How were you feeling just personally during that time? Was it fulfilling for you?

Okay. First of all, the excitement was only in spurts. The life of an agent can be rather boring. There’s a lot of waiting. But to answer the question as to whether I was fulfilled or not, emotionally I was not, but I did not allow myself to probe too much into it. So I lived a rather shallow life in that respect. I had no deep relationships at all. The woman I was married to . . . . It was a marriage of convenience. She was very pretty, the mother of Chelsea, the 18-month-old I was talking about. Very pretty. And I did everything to make a good life for us, but I didn’t have any close friends. You can’t while you’re undercover. While you’re living a life in secrecy. Neither male friends nor did the female relationship yield anything. I never got depressed, so I was just emotionally so hardened, based on my upbringing and some things that happened during my childhood and as an adolescent, that I was able to just exist that way. Fulfillment you can’t know . . . . You’re absolutely right. That hole that people are talking about was in me that was not . . . it wasn’t filled. But I didn’t realize that I had it until there was a crisis, a real bad crisis in my life.

Up until that point, everything worked. I quit the KGB, and I was caught by the FBI, and they said, “Okay, you can stay here.” Good. Fine. I was untouchable in that respect, but at one point, my marriage started falling apart, and my kids were old enough to move out, and that was exactly the very time when Shawna, the administrative assistant, entered my life. I was in a deep emotional crisis where I became aware of that hole, and it was painful. It was really painful. And the lengthy divorce proceedings were . . . . That was the first time that I actually cried in solitude, by myself, secretly.

So wow. It’s not surprising, I guess, having grown up in Germany and having build almost an armor, this fortitude that you have not only externally in terms of your tough persona but internally in your emotional sense of self, to be so guarded but yet you were vulnerable to your daughter’s love, and then you were vulnerable again in a broken marriage. And that’s only human, right? It’s just human.

You said the key word. Armor. And the first time that armor was pierced was by an 18-month-old girl.

So then what happened next? What the next turn in your journey?

When I was done with the debriefing by the FBI, which took several weeks, and I passed a lie detector test, I was told that I would be allowed to stay in the country. I would even be allowed to keep the stolen name. So if I had to change that name, it would have been very disruptive to my life and my family, because we were so much integrated into US society, so it sort of became normal life. I focused on the career. I climbed the corporate ladder. And then I got my dream job at the same time—which is like the timing was incredible—the same time my daughter Chelsea, the one for whom I stayed behind, was highly recruited and eventually was hired to play division one basketball at a college out of Pennsylvania, so at the very same time I got this job offer for the Chief Information Officer at a sizable company, and the job was phenomenal. I could use all the talents and everything that I had accumulated up to that point. And here comes the next connection. And that’s another—it works better if my wife talks about it because this is the way she saw it, but I’m going to tell you what she would contribute to this.

So I was an executive, and I lost my administrative assistant, and I needed a new one. So HR sent me the resumes for three candidates, and I phone screened them, and so one of them really did something very odd. This was in Princeton, New Jersey, and while we were talking on the phone—and I still remember where I was. I was driving on the highway, going west towards my home—and she volunteered . . . . She says, “Oh, by the way, I’m attending a Bible college.” And it was quite aggressive, and she said, “You know, if that doesn’t work for you, we might as well just stop talking right now and not waste our time.” Now, I don’t know. I had a real good feel about the conversation up to that point, and I had lost my anti-Christian bias because I had hired a bunch of people who were open Christians, and I found out that they were actually pretty smart, not the dumb ones that I thought they might be, and also the most reliable workers. So I had no reason to disqualify the lady, and we brought her in for an interview, and it was just an incredible experience.

First of all, she passed the interview. She interviewed with human resources and with a colleague of mine, and I was the last one to talk to her. She was sitting in a small conference room. I opened the door, and I looked at her face, and it hit me. There was something in that face—and she still has it—that’s shining. It’s an aura that is very, very rare. And in a sense, for me, it was love at first sight. I didn’t know what I was falling in love with. She was quote-unquote not my type, and I had no business—you know, I’m 20 years older than she is, and I was going to hire somebody, but she was just so attractive. Not in a sexual sort of way. But the aura around her. And so we hired her.

And this is her part of the story. She, at the time, was looking for a job. She was in a personal crisis. The man she was married to turned out to be a con man who had stolen a lot of money from her. So she picked herself up and says—you know, for a while she was out of work. “I’ve got to go find another job.” She got, at the same time, three job offers from three companies, and I’m not surprised why. And then she prayed to God and asked for guidance, which one to take, and she determined that it would have to be a company that would give her a sign-on bonus. Now at her level, sign-on bonuses are not normal. Administrative assistants typically don’t get sign-on bonuses, but we had a bit of a mismatch. HR maxed me out as far as how much I could offer, and I said, “Well, how about if we close the gap between the offer and what she would like to make and give her a sign-on bonus?” So she got a sign-on bonus.

And she will also tell people that God told her that there was a task for her at that place. She didn’t know what it was and who it was all about. She, for a while, thought it was a young lady who was misbehaving in some ways, that she had to just help her to straighten out her ways. So we started working together. Now the seating arrangements in that company were all open floor. I didn’t have an office, so my assistant was just diagonally opposite from me, and we were pretty much in each other’s space. Whatever she said out loud, I would hear, and vice versa. So we got to know each other pretty well. And one time I asked her. I said, “You know, you have this glow on your face and this aura. Where does it come from?” And she blurted out, and this is absolutely true, she blurted out, “It must be Jesus!” So it was my time to roll my eyes, not physically but sort of-

In your mind. Yes.

In my mind. Because I could not understand how somebody would have that much of an impact, somebody who I at the time knew she doesn’t talk to and who most likely does not exist, so that’s where I was at the time. I was an agnostic, and I denied the existence of God or even Christ and never mind Christ as God. But this is when the Lord started reeling me in very, very carefully.

So you were going through a difficult time but you met someone who came into your life who had a glow about them, Shawna obviously. And she attributed it to Jesus, of all people. So I’m sure that took you aback. So how did your story then progress?

Well, as I indicated, it looks like God was starting to reel me in very carefully. I had an established pattern to help people in my organization to achieve as much as they can achieve based on their potential, and so I would sit down with—and I had, at one point, 200 people in my organization—and I actually sat down with each one of them, one on one, to try to figure out, who are you? And where can you go? Where do you want to go? And I did the same thing with my new administrative assistant, and I remember that she was going part time to a Bible college, and I said, “Why don’t you give me an essay that you wrote? I want to know how well you write.” So she gave me an essay about the book of Ruth. That was an interesting pick. Because the book of Ruth—when you talk about this, you can take it as straight literature. That would be the farthest away from somebody saying she’s trying to evangelize me. I read it as a story.

Right.

And she said that was Holy Spirit inspired. She said that was the only essay she got a B for, but she picked that instead of giving me one where she got an A to impress the boss. So I read it, and I tell her, “You write well. I guess I have to, in order to really get a good idea how good it is, I have to read the original,” but she was prepared. She has a Bible in her desk. And she gave me that Bible, so this was the first time in my entire life that I opened the Bible, other than this failed attempt as a child, and read something in there on purpose. We’re now looking at another turn of that reel to get that fish a little closer. I had this brainstorm. Holy Spirit inspired, I’m guessing. Because it just occurred to me that I had just read a book that is by far the most read book in the history of man with no close second, and I always was really proud of my wide and deep learning, education about the world, and here’s this one book that I never read.

So I asked Shawna if I could keep the book, and she said, “No. I think I can do something better.” She gave me a set of CDs, so I had a one-hour commute to work, so that gave me two hours listening to the Bible, from Genesis all the way to Revelation. And so now—it got quite interesting, particularly since I had an expert on the Bible right in my office. And when I had questions I would ask her. And we obviously didn’t do this on the open floor. This was Princeton, New Jersey. So we, at one point, made arrangements on our respective calendars, to meet a half hour before the actual work day started to go over some of my questions. And we’re now calling that, jokingly, undercover Bible study.

That makes sense.

Which it was.

Yes.

It was sort of on company time in a very secular place in a very secular company, talking about the Bible. And here comes the next pull to get that fish really close to land, when Shawna told me, “You’ve got to listen to this radio program. I think you’re going to like it.” And I said, “What’s the radio program?” “Let My People Think. There’s this man who—I know you’re going to love him.” So I turned this on on a—I don’t know. It was on my way to work one morning. It was a recording. And there’s Ravi Zacharias. And one of his favorite subjects was morality. And morality was something I had been struggling with because I had considered myself, throughout my life, even as a boy starting out, to be a good person. I never really harmed somebody on purpose, and yet I had served, which I knew at that time very clearly I had done immoral things and I had served a significantly immoral cause, so that’s why I really listened very closely, and so the case that Dr. Zacharias made there was that morality cannot come from the inside, which I have to agree with, because my morality—my internals were totally messed up. So there had to be somehow a moral law that is given from the outside. And the next step is—and this is Ravi’s logic—and this is why I really love Ravi Zacharias’ writing and his teachings. He said, “Where there is a law, there has to be a lawgiver.”

At that point, I very quickly became a deist. I had to agree with them that there has to be a God in some way because that lawgiver couldn’t have been another person because I already knew about all the evil that had happened in history and the evil caused by men. So now I was a deist. I wasn’t a Christian yet. But, you know, Shawna took care of that. She constantly—on Monday, she would tell me what church was like and they have this great music and . . . and one day I said—and I said it. She didn’t invite me. I said, “Why don’t you take me one day?” Now you have to understand, for background, I had never set foot into a church other than Catholic, a church where there’s a service going on, and the Catholic service that I attended with my ex-wife really did nothing for me. It was just too ritualistic, and I just sat there and let it pass. So here I am, for the first time, going into a church where there was some strong faith displayed. This is what I sort of determined based on what Shawna told me. And so, as a matter of fact, I was concerned. Literally I was afraid to go in there by myself. That was a Saturday afternoon service. We were supposed to meet in the parking lot, and Shawna was late. I waited and I waited, and when she finally showed up, I made her go in front of me because I was afraid that I would be intercepted at the door as the new guy and maybe just evangelized right then and there. Not even close.

That’s not what happened?

Not at all. You know, I walk in there. The music was really good. It was modern Christian music. Very well played. And then in comes the pastor for his sermon, and would you believe this fellow had the same kind of glow on his face as I originally saw Shawna display? And of course, as it happens to a lot of believers and happened to me, that the sermon that he preached was meant for me.

Right. It’s funny how that happens. Yeah.

And God speaks to all of us and somehow it’s just amazing how we can individualize the message, and this one was about God’s love, and I didn’t count how many times the pastor used the word love, but it was exactly what I needed to hear, because I was in this crisis, and I was actually hungry for love. Well, that’s not unusual, but I was in a state where I couldn’t deny it anymore. I had to admit it to myself, and that made it rather painful, and here I’m hearing the pastor talk about the love of Christ, the love of God, and I did something that was, at the time, for me, totally atypical. At the end of the service, I walked up to the pulpit and approached the pastor. I don’t know what possessed me. And I told him, I said, “You have a phenomenal delivery.” This is what I said, rather than, “I really like your message.” You know, a passive-aggressive kind of approach. And obviously he knew I was a new guy, and we talked a little bit, and he found out that I’m not a Christian, and he called up his assistant pastor, and he asked me, “Is it okay if we lay hands on you?” And I said, “Okay.” Now, gee, if somebody had told me before I entered the church that the pastor would want to lay hands on me, I would not have entered. But at that moment, at that point in time, it was logical. And I had no problem with it.

So, yeah, for those who are listening, when you say, “lay hands on you,” what did you mean by that? To pray for you?

Yeah. They touched me on my back and bowed their heads and said a prayer over me.

And how did that make you feel?

Loved. By strangers who represented God. Now that didn’t make me a Christian at that point. It doesn’t work that way. But I went back to that church because I liked it, and the message was always good. The music was good. And it sort of became part of my life.

You had listened to the Bible all the way through. You were listening to Ravi Zacharias, so your head—it sounds like your head and your heart were both being drawn in some way towards God, in terms of both truth and love.

Correct, and the head actually was leading that move towards God. Because I’m wired to be a thinker, and Dr. Zacharias really—I listened to more of his talks. His logic could not be defeated by anything that I could come up with, but my heart hadn’t really followed, and this just happened at an odd place, at a moment where I really . . . . You wouldn’t expect it. I was playing golf with a friend of mine, and as he was looking for his ball and I was waiting, standing around, it was a nice bright summer day with some clouds up in the sky, and I was looking around and was looking at the sky, and it all of a sudden hit me, and I said to myself—and I may have said it out loud—”I know you’re God. I believe you’re God.”

So that was my moment when I became internally a Christian, and within a couple of weeks, I actually went to the altar, and here’s another interesting tidbit. That church didn’t have an altar call. Never did. But one time at the end of service I had this pull, and I just had to go up there, and the pastor asked, “Can I help you?” And I said, “I would like to give my life to Jesus Christ,” and the next 15 minutes are a blank in my memory. Shawna remembers because she was there. The pastor actually . . . . People were really moving out. The pastor actually went on the PA system and told the congregation a little bit about me. He knew about my background. And then there was applause, and everybody rejoiced, and I don’t remember any of that. So I was, and still am, a Christian.

And I’ve got to just finish up with that church. Six months later, pastor asked me to testify on Easter. I testified three times, three services. He never asked me to tell him what I was going to say, and the interesting thing is also that this was a church—the three services were attended by about 1,000 people. And this was in the place where I lived, where I worked, and nothing ever left the church. In other words, the fact that here is an ex-Communist agent who became a Christian, it didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t make the media. It didn’t get to my company. And I think God just put a mantle over this because I wasn’t ready to be a public figure. I wasn’t mature enough.

So you were protected in a way.

I believe so. It was just . . . . If you think about it, I didn’t think about this whole thing, but after the fact, there are a thousand people that live in my neighborhood and some of whom could have been coworkers, and it just did not trickle out. It doesn’t make any sense. There was not a single journalist in that audience or historian or teacher. Nobody even came up to me and . . . . I just disappeared back into the crowd.

Wow. Wow. So yes, the Lord knows what you need and what you could handle at the time, so there was a way of protecting you, I suppose. I do wonder . . . you spoke about the glow of Shawna when you met her and then you spoke of the same kind of glow of the pastor, that there seemed to be something about them, and I wonder, in your journey, at the end of the day, have you found that internal peace or found that glow that seems to be common among some Christians that you know?

I only can tell you what my experience is when I speak with others who don’t know me. More often than not, particularly here in the South—as I told you, I live in Georgia now. People guess that I’m a Christian. I don’t think I have a glow. I can’t see it in the mirror. But I think there is something about the certainty that comes from our faith that changes us and the presence of the Holy Spirit clearly is manifested in Shawna’s face, who is, by the way, now my wife and the mother of my 9-year-old Trinity. I think that change is externalized to some extent. Have I found peace? You know, we struggle sometimes. We’re going through hard times, but I have learned to trust that God knows what he’s doing, and in the end, it’s His plan, and His plan has been excellent for me, and so why should that change? So my favorite Bible verse is Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know that I’m God,” because being still has not been part of my mental and emotional makeup, but I’ve learned to be patient, and I’ve learned to trust.

Wow. That’s wonderful! Well, as we’re kind of concluding here, before we do that, I would love to hear your thoughts and your wisdom. You have so beautifully pictured God as the great fisherman reeling you in through your journey and that you started at a very skeptical atheistic place, very skeptical of God, and I wondered if you could speak to someone who might be in that place right now, who for some reason is listening and is curious, what you might say to that curious skeptic if you had a moment.

Well, it depends upon where they are, and I think the appeal that I can make that is the most convincing would be to the skeptical intellectual who just hasn’t gotten very deeply into the Bible or into our faith. Just do a little more research. Read some of the good writing that C.S. Lewis published, Ravi Zacharias, and others. Acquaint yourself with the thought behind our faith and understand that God has given us a brain, a heart, and a soul, and He wants all three, and the only thing I can say, what becoming a Christian has done to me, has given me a lot more peace than I had before. And that’s good, because I actually—for the first time in my life, I actually like myself. And a lot of people don’t. But if God loves you, why can’t you like yourself? And it makes life so much easier, particularly to deal with circumstances that are not always favorable. That’s pretty much what I can say here.

That’s pretty powerful. Especially that last part you said about, that you like yourself for the first time. There’s something very wonderful about not only liking yourself because then that reflects onto others in the way that, not only you treat yourself, but the way that you treat others, and there’s such a . . . almost a domino effect with that, when you’re grounded in the love of God. It’s easier to give that love to others.

You’re so right. You’re so right. And it’s hard to describe, but every day I walk around and I have no more fear of strangers. I love people. I love interacting with people. And I know that I am—because of the Holy Spirit, I do well with people. And I’m not a street evangelist, not by a long shot, but I think I evangelize by example, by being kind, by being helpful, and showing the example the way I live.

And I think that’s probably a good word for the Christians who might be listening. If you were to speak with them, I think that that’s very powerful as well, in terms of how you display Christianity as just by being grounded in the love of God and who you are and then giving that love away, it sounds like.

I must mention this one instance. Because you mentioned the word love again, so because it really hit me one time that—and it was spontaneous—that love is the one quality that makes us human, and that’s the quality that we get from God, so here’s this instance. I gave a presentation at Microsoft, and at the end, one of the members of the audience asked me, “So with all the stuff that you did and the crazy life that you lived, what is the one lesson that you could share with us?” And I didn’t hesitate, and I said, “Oh. Three words. Love conquers all.” It turns out the questioner was a Christian and is a good friend of mine now.

Oh. That really does sum it up, doesn’t it? I mean love is that thing that sometimes seems so elusive. It’s the thing that we all want and desire, and it’s there waiting for you.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Well, thank you so very much, Jack, for coming on board and telling us your amazing journey from the other side of the world and the other side of your view of reality to one that is beautifully grounded in the love of God and the peace of God and the truth of God, that you demonstrate a life and a faith that’s all encompassing—head, heart, and life. And that’s an incredible story for us all to take inspiration from, really. So thank you so much for coming on today to tell your story.

You are very welcome.

Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Jack’s story. You can find out more about Jack by visiting his website at jackbarsky.com. That’s B-A-R-S-K-Y. Or for his full story, you can read his book, Deep Undercover, which you can find at Amazon and other great places. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. I hope you enjoyed it. Subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and network if you wouldn’t mind. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where will be listening to the other side.

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Each episode, we listen to the story of someone who has lived as a nonbeliever and then became a Christian, someone who understands from the inside what each of those worlds are like.

One of the most fascinating discoveries in my research with over 50 former atheists was the role that some kind of religious or mystical experience played in their conversion to Christianity. Dreams, visions, encounters with Jesus Christ, encounters with Satan and dark spirituality, extraordinary providential circumstances—these all reshaped their understanding of the possible reality that there was something more, something real, beyond this universe. Some of these experiences were invited in a way, after someone had opened themselves up, had prayed or challenged God or even Satan to show up. Some of these otherworldly experiences were not invited but palpably encountered nonetheless. So sobering were they that it caused them to change their minds and even their lives, dramatically reorienting themselves to a new understanding of reality as something more than they once thought possible. That is the story that we will hear today from our guest.

As a rational intellectual university professor, she didn’t know what she was looking for. As someone who was spiritual but not religious, she definitely wasn’t looking for the Judeo-Christian God. But she experienced an unexpected, powerful, and vivid dream and suddenly found herself profoundly believing in Jesus Christ. She came to see that reality was much more than she realized, much more than merely grounded in this world. Forgiveness and peace were found in the real person of Jesus Christ. It changed everything for her. Dr. Mary Poplin is now a university professor and strong advocate of the Christian worldview. I hope you’ll listen in to hear her compelling journey from nonbelief to belief.

Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mary. It’s so great to have you.

It’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Maybe your academic background and perhaps where you live?

Okay. Well, I started as a schoolteacher, and I taught for a few years, and then I went to the University of Texas to graduate school and then I became a professor. I spent three years at the University of Kansas a long time ago, but I’ve been at Claremont Graduate University as a professor since 1981, I think. A long time. I’m old.

Oh, no!

And that’s in Claremont, California. It’s in the Los Angeles area, where I live. And then I occasionally come back to my hometown, where my sisters live, and that’s where I am right now because of the virus, so we’re all teaching online anyway, and so I’m teaching from here in Texas.

What is your focus of study or your specialty?

I started out in special education, and then I went to teacher education largely, and now I would say my research is on teacher. Actually, I love to study highly effective teachers in the most troubled schools, so that’s what I study, and I’ve worked with my students. We’ve done a piece of research and a book on that. And my second thing is that I love to study Judeo-Christian thought and how it impacts different fields, and so I did a book on the four major worldviews, trying to explain what secular humanism and materialism and pantheism were as related to Christianity.

And what is the name of that book?

Oh. That’s a good question.

I believe it is Is Reality Secular?

Is Reality Secular? Yes.

I took that line from a Dallas Willard book, actually.

Okay.

He let me steal it. He said I could have anything.

Oh! Wonderful, wonderful. Yeah, Dallas Willard was a pretty extraordinary man.

A very amazing man. Yeah.

So you’re someone who obviously is a thinker, someone who’s thought deeply about issues of worldview, of life, of perspective, but the Christian worldview and thinking about your life in those terms certainly wasn’t where you started. So let’s back up now and let’s go early in your life. Tell me about where you grew up. Was there any concept of God in your home, your family, your friends, among your friends or community?

I grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, and my dad was—I mean, my mother was too, but my dad very specifically was a Christian. And so he took us to Sunday school every Sunday, and we usually went to church. We went to Methodist church. I would say that I came away from that church not exactly knowing. I think I had one Sunday school teacher who was pretty on target about who Jesus was, but a Methodist church was already kind of leaning towards secular humanism, really, and so when I left that experience, and when I got into graduate school, I really did leave Christianity for a long time.

So, when you grew up, you had I guess you could say a tacit knowledge of God? You went to church. It was in your culture, so to speak, but I take it from what you’re saying that you didn’t really take on a belief personally that God exists or that Jesus is real or—well, he may have been historically real, but there really wasn’t much to it for you in your life. Does that-

I don’t even know if I thought that deeply. I wasn’t thinking about rejecting it or thinking about accepting it. It just seemed like it was part of the culture in a way, and I had done that by going to Sunday school and church. I did know my dad was different. My dad—we all remember, all four girls. We remember seeing him read the Bible at night before he went to bed. You know, just on the side of his bed. He always had his Bible open before he’d go to sleep, before he’d go in to bed. So I knew that, all of that. And I guess I thought Christians were people who tried to live better maybe.

This is something that provided a good moral construct for the family, for their way of life, their living, that sort of thing?

Kind of. Yes.

Yeah. It sounds like it just wasn’t particularly relevant to you.

No. I didn’t dislike it, nor did I adopt it. I remember a couple of times feeling close to God in church as a child but not very many.

Okay. So obviously it sounds like there was somewhat of a change when you went to university. Your way of thinking about God or Christianity or religion generally? Why don’t you talk about that?

Well, when I got to graduate school, I pretty much rejected it. I knew enough to know that the kinds of things I wanted to do would not be validated by a Christian worldview or Christian beliefs, and so I rejected it really out of desire, other desires. So other desires kind of replaced any interest I had in Christianity. And I didn’t actually become what . . . . I mean some people become atheists, right? But they’re more thoughtful about it, I think. I think I became what I’d call “spiritual but not religious,” and there’s a large group of people in America and around the world, especially in the Western world, who believe that they’re spiritual, which is the way that I wanted to say—and I think they also—wanted to say, “I’m a good person, but I’m not religious. I can be good without God.” And so that’s what I became. So I was vaguely spiritual, which meant that I would sometimes . . . . I’d go to things that were more like pantheist things. Sessions on being spiritual. I tried a couple of different sort of pantheistic things. For a while, I went with a friend to some Buddhist—no, actually it was Hindu—meditation practice. So New Age kinds of things. That’s really what I was doing.

So why were you pursuing those kind of spiritual pursuits? Was there something in your life that you just wanted more? Why that?

I think because I wanted to, in some ways, suggest that I was a good person, right? Even though I was doing things that, for a good Christian, it would not have been okay. Does that make sense?

So it gave you religion without the moral requirements associated with a Judeo-Christian God?

Right. No moral requirements. Right.

So that was a comfortable place to be I guess, for a while.

So this was in graduate school and beyond, maybe, into young adulthood?

Yes. When I went to California, I would get involved in sort of spiritual activities that were not Christian. Feminist spirituality, those kind of things.

Did you find that intellectually satisfying? Or existentially satisfying? Or?

I don’t know if it was satisfying. There was something, I guess, in me that I wanted to say I was spiritual.

Right, right. So walk us farther along your journey. What started happening in your life next? Or what started causing you to question that or change that?

Well, to tell the truth, I didn’t really question it until I had a particular dream. When I say I didn’t question it, I don’t mean that I knew it was working, right? In retrospect, I thought I was as good as anybody else, right? Even though I was doing things that everybody else was doing and so I kept trying to call myself good, right? But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that wasn’t working because I had also experienced a lot of depression. So I was on antidepressants a lot. After I got to my job, I was using antidepressants a great deal, and so something was wrong. I don’t know that I worded it that way. I might’ve thought, “Well, I just have this little chemical imbalance, and so these drugs help me.”

So then I got tenure. I think it was 1991 or ’92, and that happened in probably May? May, that’s usually when you find out those things. And then, in November—okay, so I was married at the time. My husband was into even weirder things, really, and he and a friend had gone for Thanksgiving to Hawaii, I think, or somewhere, I don’t know. And things were not going that well in our marriage, either. I think I knew he was with other people. And so I spent Thanksgiving alone, and then I had a dream at Thanksgiving, and that dream was really the turning point. So it was the only time I . . . . You know, I have dreams all the time, but they don’t usually make sense, right? You know how they are. There’s bubble gum and something else in there or something.

But this dream, I remembered every single detail, and in the dream, there was a part of the dream in color, but I was not in the part that was in color, and I had never dreamed in color, so I was in a long line of people, and we were all dressed in kind of gray robes, to our feet, to our fingertips, so we’re kind of Buddhist looking. And we’re in a line, and we’re not breaking line, we’re not talking to each other, we’re just marching straight ahead. But the odd thing is that we were not on a plane that you could see. It was like we were suspended in a night sky. So here we are, walking towards something. No one knew what it was. And I didn’t know where I was going, and so I kind of leaned out to my left and looked, and it looked like the line sort of snaked around and disappeared. And then I thought, “Well, I must be at the back of the line,” so I looked around to my right, and it looked as though that line didn’t end, either. And then all of a sudden I noticed that we were going to pass by something on the right, and there was a kind of yellowish tinted light coming out from where we were going, on the right of us. And when I got to it, it was a live version . . . . The best way to describe it is it was a live version of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper. So there’s these disciples sitting in disciple-like robes, and they’re in color. And they’re eating. They’re at this table, and they’re eating, and they’re talking to each other, and they’re not paying really us any attention whatsoever, and then all of a sudden I realized that, even those this looked a lot like the Last Supper, Jesus was not there.

So there was a seat kind of in the middle that was empty. And then I looked up ahead, and this was a reception line, and we were all going to pass by Jesus, and when I got to Jesus, and I looked at Him, I knew who He was, and all of a sudden, I also knew who I was. And I was deeply embarrassed. I mean, I felt like I was just filled with sin and rottenness and all that, and so I couldn’t look at Jesus any more, and I fell down at His feet, and I started to cry, and in the dream, then, Jesus leans over and puts His hands on my shoulders, and when He touched me, I felt perfect peace. I mean I don’t know how to describe this except that you feel so peaceful you feel almost like you’re not . . . like you don’t have a heavy body attached to you. I don’t know how to describe it other than that. And then I woke up.

And when I woke up, the dream was so well connected—that is there weren’t any holes in it. It wasn’t a mishmash of different things like most dreams are. It was very clear, and when I woke up, I knew something had changed and I needed to do something. And so . . . . What did I do after that? Oh. Then, I had a sabbatical coming up, and I’d moved from California to Austin. At that time, I had a little house there, where I had gone to graduate school, and I began to stay there, and I began to pursue people who were in churches. And I told someone who was probably . . . I think they were involved in Campus Crusade. They knew about my conversion. And they started telling people, and then other people would come to me, and that’s how I kind of began to know what Christianity was.

So, just to be clear, you just characterized that dream as a moment of conversion. Is that what I’m hearing from you?

Yes, I think that’s what I would say. Because it was not something that could be shaken off, right? It was there in me now. And I had always wanted to be spiritual, right? But it became overarching. Now I didn’t know anything really about Jesus, right? I mean I really didn’t know, even though I’d gone to church and stuff. I really didn’t know much. So I started pursuing people, and they started pursuing me in Austin. And they were Christians. They would take me to places. One woman I had met, and within a couple of hours, she invited me to room with her at a woman’s retreat. I mean, that’s pretty radical. She didn’t know me at all. But I went to the retreat, and the first thing I started to notice that was so obvious. These were not professors or particularly in my field. In fact, none of them, I think, were in my field. But the first thing I began to notice is that they lived their life differently. They lived their life differently. They looked healthier. They looked happier. They were clear minded. I think they weren’t confused. They weren’t searching for something that they didn’t have. They were still pursuing growing in Christ, but they weren’t like I had been.

There was a contentment associated with what they had found, I guess.

Right.

And we’re just growing in that, yeah. Did you start reading the Bible to become informed about the person of Jesus?

The Bible was really key for me. As an academic, right? You look for the book. Not only did I read the Bible, I ended up reading it over and over, and I would go to these retreats. There were some retreats at monasteries. So one of the kind of unique features of my conversion is that Catholics helped me, Protestants helped me. Even a couple of Orthodox people helped me. And they were Protestants of every kind, from charismatic Protestants to very serious Baptist Protestants. So I did begin to read the Bible, and I began to love the New Testament. In fact, someone had advised me to do this.

But when I started reading it, I read the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the New Testament first. And this person asked me once—this guy asked me, “Well, what do you think of your reading? How’s the reading going?” And I said, “Well, I love the Proverbs, I like the New Testament, and the Psalms, they’re okay.” And he said, “So you don’t particularly like the Psalms.” And I said, “Yeah, I don’t particularly like the Psalms,” and then he said to me a very important question, especially the way he phrased it. He said to me, “Do you know why you dislike the Psalms?” And I said, immediately I think, “Yeah, because in the Psalms there’s that one where it says, ‘dash their children on rocks,’ right? There’s a lot of violence in the Psalms,” and he just nodded. He didn’t say a single word other than that.

But it really opened up to me, “Okay, so why do I hate the Psalms writer? Why do I not like the Psalms.” And all of a sudden, I think it was that very night after I had had dinner with this person, who was significant in San Diego in helping me, and I was reading the Psalms that night, and I got to 137, the psalm that dashes children on rocks. And when I read it this time, I saw that the Psalms were about good and evil, and those instances were instances of evil, and evil was clearly still in charge of my life, and so that’s how I broke through that barrier. And then I began reading everything, the Old Testament all the way through. I just kept re-reading. And then I decided that . . . . I went to a monastery for a retreat that I think was about a week long. And the abbot who was in charge of it would tell us every night what scriptures he was going to use the next morning, and so he told us, and I went to my room, and I was looking up the scripture, and I was so tired. I couldn’t concentrate. So I thought, “Okay, I’ll write them in my little notebook. I’ll write them, copy them in my notebook, and then in the morning I’ll look at them, at breakfast.” And so, as I copied them, though, I saw how much more I saw in the scriptures when I was writing it, when I was just copying it, so that led me to copy the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the New Testament ultimately during that time.

Wow, so you were really getting into the Bible, the scripture, what it meant for you. I’m curious—as you were reading the Bible, particularly the gospels and the stories of Christ and learning who He was, did reading the Bible and Jesus and the gospels help give you an understanding of what had happened to you in your dream? Like Jesus the One who forgives those who are seemingly or feel unforgivable, the One who is the Author of peace? Those things that you experienced, did they come to reality in scripture for you?

Well, yes. I don’t think I was thinking about it consciously like you just stated it. I think it was happening. And it’s one thing to know what the scripture says. It’s another thing to then begin to try to live it. Okay, so November was the dream, and then I had a couple of other experiences later in January. So in January, my mother, who grew up in North Carolina—I grew up in Texas—wanted to go back and visit her family, what was left of her family and to visit friends there. And so I took her back, and my mother had grown up in a very tiny Methodist church that was probably about as nominally teaching as the one I was in, and she wanted to go to church, I think largely because she knew that’s where she’d see her friends, and so I took her there, and I remember sitting through the sermon, and there was an older country preacher, and I was thinking, “Well, you know, it’s okay because now I study the Bible, and I had this dream, so this is all right,” and I didn’t pay much attention to his sermon, but it happened it was the first Sunday in January, which means they were going to have Communion.

So I’m at the back of this church. It couldn’t have held more than 100 people, I’m sure, but they were going to go up one row at a time, so they’d go up and fill up the area around the altar, and they’d receive Communion and they’d come back to their chairs, and then the next group would go, right? Well, we were in the back, and I thought it would never happen, because when he talked about taking the bread, taking Christ into your body and giving your life to Him, it just came over me that I had to have that Communion, and it was like, it felt like it was forever before I got there. But I finally got there, and I knelt down, and I took the Communion elements, and I didn’t listen to a thing he said. I just looked at them, and I said, “If you are real, please come and get me.” I didn’t say this out loud. And I said it, like, three times, “If you’re real, please come and get me. Please come and get me,” and when I took the elements, I felt the same peace I had felt in that dream, when Jesus had touched me, exactly the same peace, so much so that I thought maybe if I stood up I wouldn’t stay on the ground. That’s how light I felt. But I did stay on the ground, thank goodness!

So I got back to my pew, and that, I think is the moment that I really had what you might call a conversion moment. Because now I’m making that commitment.

Yes. It was a conscious decision and somehow it wasn’t just made for you, in a sense. It was just something where you actually gave your life in return. Yes. Sounds very, very powerful, like a very powerful moment.

Yeah, it was. It was.

Now how long ago was that?

A long time ago. Because that would’ve been the January of I think ’93 maybe. Or ’92.

Okay. So it sounds like you’re . . . . I think the dream is extraordinary, that it would be so powerful that you would come out changed. And then you read the scripture, you were surrounded by Christians, you had that moment of conversion. I can imagine someone listening who may be rather skeptical, thinking, “But she’s an intellectual. How does she know it’s true? I know we can know things are experientally true, but how does she know it’s intellectually true? How does she know she’s not just convincing herself of something?” And I know, as an academic, that’s not the way you roll, in the sense that things have to be, in a sense, intellectually credible or viable before you’ll fully embrace it, I would imagine, on some level. Can you explain how that became a holistic part of your journey, the intellectual aspect of everything else that you were experiencing and learning?

Well, to be honest, I think that’s still my calling, right? To continue to understand that and to be able to relate it to intellectuals. So the intellectual piece is, if you really begin to study scripture, you will see that there’s not a single issue we argue about today that’s not in scripture, for example. And this is way jumping ahead to where I am now, okay? I just want to make that clear. I didn’t know this back then. But I did have this draw to scripture.

So, for example, when we talk about race. Well, race is talked about all the time in the Bible, right? All of these things. Justice is always talked about in the Bible. The word social justice never appears, and the word justice is the same word in the Bible, in the Hebrew, as righteousness, so there is a clear message in the Bible that justice and righteousness have to be together. You don’t have justice without righteousness, and you don’t have righteousness without justice. And there’s lots of . . . . People talk about women. In the Bible, I mean, you look at any other religion. There’s no religion that has as many women in it. I mean, there’s tons of women, right? And Jesus’ genealogy, which is very unusual, because it lists five women—most genealogies do not list any women. And out of those five women, four of them are actually not Jewish, so we have the issue of culture and race. They’re not Jewish at all. Bathsheba’s not Jewish. Tamar’s not Jewish.

So there are these intellectual principles that are embedded in the Bible. And we just haven’t paid much attention to them. You know, Martin Luther King was one of the best at that, especially in terms of race and justice and things like that, so when he says . . . he basically does 1 Corinthians 12 by saying . . . . He says the strange thing is that, for me to be I have to be, you have to be who you have to be, and for you to be fully who you’re supposed to be, I have to be who I’m supposed to be. Then he says that’s the strange way that God’s world is made. And that’s just a summary of 1 Corinthians 12, about the body. The part of the body that you actually think is least useful is actually the most important one.

So now, when I look at it intellectually, I have to find ways to insert Christian wisdom into what we’re teaching, which is not Christian wisdom at all. So we usually end up teaching left and right. So we either go too far to the left or too far to the right. When you lose something as large and as monumental and important and true as Christianity in the intellectual world, you lose the moral plumbline. So though a moral plumbline in Christianity. Left and right is talked about all the time in the Bible. I forget how many times. It seems like it’s, I don’t know, 24 or 45 times. And what it says is, “Do not turn to your left or to your right.” Over and over, it says that in the Bible. That’s all we do in the university almost, you know? Right now, it’s left. It used to be right. But all universities came out of Christendom. They started out in monasteries to begin with. There wasn’t even a university in the United States until Johns Hopkins in 1899 that did not claim itself to be Christian. And many, many universities still have that claim even though they don’t particularly use Christian doctrine in their teaching. Because I think now people have just lost track of it.

But the scripture still has all this wisdom in it, for all these different issues. But we’re not using them. So that’s where my conversion took me. That’s why I believe I spent so much time in the Bible.

Yes. And I suppose that there was something in you, again, in your intellectual curiosity and drive in your work that compares different worldviews, that you wanted to perhaps . . . . I mean, why did you do that kind of comparative study, even after you became a Christian?

I think because, when I see Christians in the university, I see that they are like I was. How do you relate this? I still remember, when I came back from Calcutta, speaking at a women’s retreat about Mother Teresa. It was not a retreat. It was a woman’s education leadership conference. It was a breakfast at a leadership conference, which was not just all women, but they wanted me to tell something about Mother Teresa, so I told them small stories, and at the end, a woman in the back stood up, and she said, “Have you had any trouble coming back from Mother Teresa’s?” And when she said that—I obviously had had trouble—I just broke out in tears in front of this audience of 250 school administrator women. And I had been asking the Lord, “What is this? What is this going on with me that I start crying before I go to class?” And I just blurted out—all of a sudden, I guess that’s when the Holy Spirit decided to give me the answer. So I remember I even did this with my hands, I said, you know, “Obviously, I’ve had some trouble.” And then they kind of calmed down, too.

And I said, “Okay, so I went to Mother Teresa’s, and I saw Christianity really lived. I know. We’re not all called to that, but I saw it lived. And I came back to teach, and I’m still teaching exactly what I’ve always taught. And I don’t know how to get from here to here, and I feel like a liar.” When I said that, a lot of the women in the audience started to cry. Because we all feel that way, I think. If you’re a strong Christian, you feel like, “Why can’t I take this into my world?” “Why can’t we talk about this in whatever place I’m living in or working in?” So that’s one of my callings.

So I do now teach a class called Judeo-Christian Thought Across the Disciplines, and it is a class that anybody from any field can take. We have these classes called trans-disciplinary classes. And so sometimes Christians take it. I mean, there’s always Christians in the class, but sometimes an atheist might take it or somebody who’s just not religious, never really thought of it. Maybe it just fits their schedule that semester, right? But it’s a lovely class because the students have a lot of flexibility on what they can read, and I guide them in Christian reading in their discipline, and then they present it to each other, so it’s kind of like a little intellectual feast in a way. And Christianity is the core of it.

It sounds wonderful. It sounds like you have, in a sense, integrated your Christianity into every walk or part of your life, and I’m sure you’ve hopefully found, as when you first had your dream and you encountered these Christians who had this sensibility of peace and joy and purpose, perhaps contentment, that you obviously have found that sort of thing in your life.

Yeah. I mean I’m still a sinner.

We all are. We all are.

Right.

So for those who might be listening, if there’s someone who is perhaps spiritual, not religious. Maybe they don’t know what they think about Christianity or where they should look. If they’re curious or wanting to think about things further, what would you say to the skeptic who might be listening to you today?

Well, I think we try to push them too fast. I think we try to get them to the time where you say the right thing. And in fact, for a while, someone kept telling me . . . she kept asking me, like, “What did you say when you think you became a Christian?” And I would say, “I said, ‘Please come and get me.'” That just wasn’t good enough for her.

Okay. You didn’t say the magic words on the magic formula?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would avoid that. I would just talk to them about their life. I’d maybe show them people who are Christian who they don’t know are Christian, for example. You know, there are Christians in every field that people don’t know are Christian, right? I think they should just watch, and then somebody that they trust, they could talk to, and then I would say . . . mostly get to know them, and then when they start asking you, us, questions, then we answer honestly, but we don’t begin to push them. I think that that’s—especially for a person who’s an intellectual, like in the university. It’s never going to work that way. And the other thing is to tell them times when you’ve been changed—I mean, I always like to say not just . . . Christianity is mostly presented socially or personally, not necessarily intellectually, right? In fact, usually not intellectually. But there are things everybody is concerned about. Everybody has sinned. There’s not a single person probably even who gets to five years old who doesn’t have something that they know they shouldn’t have done, for example.

And so I might share a time when I’ve used 1 John 1:9, which I think is the most underrated scripture in the universe, where it says, “If I confess my sin,” and that word always people stumble on, but the word sin just means—it’s an archery term. It means you missed the mark. You didn’t hit the center, right? You may have missed it a little. You may have missed it a lot. So in 1 John 1:9, he says, “If I confess my sin, He’s faithful and just to forgive me and to cleanse from all unrighteousness,” and that’s the part no one pays any attention to. Okay?

So I just sinned, and I can give you an example. So I had, with my partners before all this, watched pornographic movies, for example. We had watched those. Even at the University of Texas, there was something called, I think, Friday night movies or something. And so, when I came to Christ, I never had a desire to see that again, but I could be driving down the Los Angeles freeway, where you have a lot of time, and suddenly something would start flashing in my mind from one of those films unconsciously called up by me. I wasn’t calling it up. And that disturbed me. So I would say out loud in my car—usually I was alone. “Okay, Lord, You saw that and I saw it, and I confess that that’s a sin, and I ask you to forgive me, but not just to forgive me, I ask you to cleanse me from this.” And I did that for about a year, and it just totally went away. I don’t ever have those flashbacks, nothing. But we forget to ask to be cleansed. Getting rid of a sin that has become a habit is not an easy thing to do, but it’s certainly not going to be done by secular psychology, because first they’re going to rationalize that it’s not really a sin. Everybody does it, right?

So Christian psychology. Real Christian psychology, biblical psychology, is as far from secular psychology as anything. I mean, I can’t even imagine a field that’s more disparate than the way we teach psychology. You know, there was a book that was famous when I was young and you probably were, too, and it was the book that everybody read about psychology, and it said, I’m okay, you’re okay. Two lies. I’m not okay, and neither are you!

That is very true.

If you want to believe it, go right ahead, but it was exactly the opposite, and we grew up on that. And we taught our children that and their grandchildren that. And now we have what we have.

Yes.

We have exactly what has been planted.

Yes.

It’s just like there’s no clear line between evil and good.

Or evil is called good and good evil.

Exactly. That’s exactly the scripture, right? Calling good evil and evil good, and that is where we are.

Yes. Wow, Mary, you have had quite a life, really, it sounds like. Just full of experience and moving from Texas to California—living spirituality in California, I can’t even imagine what that might be. And then really coming to Christ in the midst of, I would say, a very, very unlikely culture and time. And I think that that’s very encouraging for us. Even, like you say, if you look at the culture now, it seems like a very unlikely place where people can find Christ, but Christ is right in the middle, waiting. So I really am so grateful for you coming and telling your story, especially I love the dream aspect. Because dreams are incredibly real and powerful when they’re more than just the ordinary. They are the extraordinary dream that you know is from God, and there’s no question.

I think that the reason that God used dreams with me is that there was no other way to reach me. There really wasn’t. I mean, I had students who were praying for me, who would try to talk to me, and I wasn’t listening. And, you know, I’d be nice just because they were students, but there was no other way to reach me, I think. And that’s why the dream. I think a lot of people who are very strong atheists have had very strong experiences and rejected them.

That’s probably true, based upon the research that I’ve done, even the stories that I’ve heard. Sometimes I think we think, “Oh, people in the third world countries, or maybe the Middle East, that they will experience dreams,” but the Lord provides dreams to un-reached peoples everywhere around the globe, and I was amazed. I think that was probably one of the most surprising things or parts of the research was the presence of dreams, unexpected dreams and encounters and providential circumstances, and things that were so personal and so powerful. That couldn’t be explained any other way. That are life changing in that way, too. It certainly was for you. You had a sudden pivot.

For years, you know, when you first become a Christian, you are really constantly off center. Do you know what I mean? You’re searching. You kind of know that this is wrong but you don’t really know . . . . It’s hard. The Bible’s very good. I would recommend people read it and copy it or whatever, and I think especially the New Testament or the Psalms or Proverbs. Because I think we read it casually, or we read it like Bible studies. Honestly, maybe I shouldn’t say this, I’ve never really taken to most Bible studies. Because it’s like you’re working on one book for a long time, and that’s interesting. It’s intellectually interesting but not life changing. I think when you’re alone with the scripture and you’re copying it or whatever, your only partner in that is God. It’s not other people saying, “Oh, well when I read this, I thought . . . .”

Yes. I’ve heard it somewhat summarized like, “You can read for information or you can read towards transformation.”

Yeah. So I think that’s where you live. Like you say, you’re alone with God, and transformation happens in your heart and your mind when you open yourself up to the truths of scripture, and it’s just you and Him and there’s nowhere to hide. But that’s an attitude, too, in which you approach the word of God. What wisdom coming from you!

I just want to say one other thing about . . . . Let’s say I have a friend who’s a skeptic or have a friend who’s like I was or whatever. We can’t discount just prayer that people don’t even know you’re praying for them, right? So before I had this dream, I found out later that there was a woman in the neighborhood who would go around all the time in the houses in this little block area, block and a half or something, and she would pray in front of the house. And when I got to know her later, she said, “When I got to your house one day, my feet were stuck to the ground. I could not move. I prayed the prayer, and I tried to leave, and I couldn’t leave.” And then she went into, I guess tongues or something? Anyway, she had stood there. She didn’t know how long. It was probably a half an hour or more, and she was not allowed to move. She couldn’t actually physically move.

So then you find out all these people—like I found out students of mine had been praying for me for years, former students. So that can’t be ignored. Can’t be ignored.

It’s extremely powerful.

It is. And we don’t know how much. Sometimes you see somebody in a store, and you just think, “Lord, really help them. I don’t know what’s going on in their life, but help them.” You don’t know! But what we do know is that God answers prayers.

Yes, yes. Well, that’s probably a fantastic way to end our conversation. Thank you so, so very much for sharing, not only your story but incredible insight and wisdom with us today, Mary. We really appreciate it.

Thank you. It was great talking to you, Jana.

Great talking to you.

God bless you in your work.

Thank you!

Thanks for tuning into the Side B Podcast to hear Mary’s story. You can find out more about her and her book on worldviews, Is Reality Secular?, in the episode notes on this podcast. For questions and feedback about this episode, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and social network. I would really appreciate it. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll be listening to the other side.

Many people presume there is no God because that’s all they’ve known. The question of God seemed irrelevant. In today’s episode Daniel Rodger tells his story of moving from a culturally-informed atheism to an unwavering belief in God who completely transformed his life.

Learn more about Daniel and Critical Witness: Critical Witness link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QksajfJj_o

Episode Transcript

Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. We try to understand why and how people either move away from or move towards God and Christianity. We want to listen to the lesser-heard B side of either nonbelief or belief, depending on what side you’re coming from. Each podcast, we’ll listen to a story from a former atheist who changed their mind and came to belief in God. They know both sides of the story. These stories might look a bit different from different parts of the world, from different parts of western culture.

Today, we’ll be talking with Daniel Rodger, who lives in London, England. He’s a former atheist who came to the Christian faith against the grain of his culture. Welcome to the podcast, Daniel, it’s great to have you on the show.

Thank you very much for inviting me on.

Oh, good, good. As we’re getting started, can you tell me a little bit about who you are? What you do? Your life?

Yeah, sure. So I have a background as a registered healthcare professional that specialized in working in the operating theatres, and for the last nearly four years, I’ve been working as an academic at a university in London, where I teach, and it also gives me the time and flexibility to research and do research into areas I’m interested in, usually related to things in bioethics, so abortion, artificial womb technology, and then some other areas kind of related to my more professional area.

That sounds really quite interesting, and with the nature of culture these days, probably quite exciting at times. And that makes me think about just the context of where you are. I know, in the US, we’ve been sensing a push back against Christianity in the last few years, but in England, it’s been going on for quite a long time. Just to give me a context to your story, can you tell me a little bit about what it feels like in England in terms of Christianity and religion and those kinds of things?

Sure. Yeah. I’d say, in England, it varies in different parts of the UK, I guess a little bit like the US. I’m in London, so it’s the southern part of England. And that’s kind of known—I mean, it’s not really the Bible belt, but it’d be a much smaller equivalent, more like just the buckle, and that’s sort of in the south/southeast of England. There’s more Christians than there is probably in the midlands and the north, so in my own context, there are more Christians than there are probably in other parts of the country.

You wouldn’t necessarily know that, and that’s for a number of reasons. One is, I think, we learn from quite a young age that there are certain things you sort of keep to yourself, and I think people who have religious beliefs kind of know that it’s something they can talk about at home and pray and read their Bibles, but they kind of leave it at home, and they bring it with them to work or to school or wherever they find themselves. And I’d say generally the culture is apathetic, really, to religious belief. I think probably if we go back 10 years ago, a sort of high point of new atheism, it was a lot easier to have discussions about religious belief, often hostile, but it was at least easier to have those, whereas now I find, at least in my own circles, that it’s very difficult to have fruitful discussion about religion, God, Christianity more specifically. And if you do, often it doesn’t last very long because people are very uncomfortable talking about those things, really. I think that’s it, the general summary.

So when you were growing up as a child, was it different than it is now? Did you have much exposure to Christianity as a child? Was your family Christian? Did you go to church? Were you exposed to it in school? What’s that like as a child?

Yeah. I’d say, in terms of a sort of demographic, I come from a sort of white working class/benefits class, and the think about white working class culture is that religion plays a very, very minute part of life. You tend to find very few churches, or at least very few active churches, and where you find the most active Christian faith is in the middle class. So in my own sort of context growing up, I remember having very, very, very few discussions probably in the first 16 years of my life in regards to religion. I don’t remember ever really having any very long, serious conversations about God and none really regarding Christianity.

I remember a few things. I remember being in a biology class at high school and a friend asking me if I believed in God, and I said, “I like the idea of God, but there’s no evidence of such a being,” so I didn’t have any belief. And within my own home, so single-parent household. My mother didn’t have any religious belief I was aware of. It was never discussed at home. Actually, it’s quite good to talk about things. It kind of reminds me. It triggers things. So I did have a neighbor upstairs who, at least for some period of my early childhood, would read me Bible stories, so I actually remember one. I actually remember it was a gold children’s Bible that she would bring down, and I remember one of the stories about King Solomon and the baby and threatening to tear it in two to try and identify the true mother, who the mom was. And I remember that story quite vividly, but other than that, I can’t really remember having any Christian discussion or input at all.

And I think I’ve always been relatively honest. I think there could be a tendency sometimes for some Christians to look back at their own views and start seeing themselves as sort of a Christopher-Hitchens-type figure, perhaps being more hostile to it. But I was never like that. I was a hopeful atheist, you know? I would have liked the idea of there being a God. I just didn’t have any reason to think someone like that existed or that it had any relevance to my life, really.

Yeah, so that’s interesting. So you had a lack of exposure, really, in your world. You had bits and pieces, I guess, just dots from your neighbor, maybe a little bit of religious education at school or something-

Yeah. We had religious education as part of the curriculum. I think that’s an agreement going back over 100 years when the churches were running the schools, and so when they took that over, they’ve always had religious education in the schools in England. But I just used those classes for messing about. I don’t remember ever really listening or taking that seriously. We used to hide under the tables. I didn’t do well at school. Again, being white working class, we’re actually, in terms of educational attainment, we’re the lowest demographic in the UK. Actually, no that’s not true. There’s only one group below us, which is the Romani Travelers, but other than that, we are the lowest attaining demographic in the UK, the least likely to get the minimum 5 A to C GCSEs at school. And I didn’t attain that. I didn’t get even 5 A to C GCSEs. And my mom never finished school. She got expelled from school.

Wow. And just considering what we know about you so far, that you work as an academic in a university, that makes me very curious about how you got from A to Z, but I’m sure we’ll get there. But backing up, here, when you said that you didn’t think that there was any evidence for religion or Christianity or anything like that, evidently there was something about it that seemed attractive, that you wanted to believe. You just couldn’t.

Yeah. I don’t know. I failed to take too many atheists—agnostics, obviously, not so much, but atheists who don’t even want there to be a God. It just think that’s . . . I find that very difficult to believe. But I can understand not believing in God, but I find it hard to believe not wanting to believe in God. Because it changes the whole nature of existence that there is a purpose behind the universe, that there’s a purpose behind why there’s something rather than nothing, that life might have some sort of meaning that’s discoverable to make a life more satisfying to live. And that especially offers hope for people who have very little. I think it’s easy to think like that sometimes. If you have everything you need, but for the vast majority of human beings now and in the time past, that hasn’t been the case.

Right. There are such huge implications for life without God, but so many seem to think that they’re perfectly content without God, and perhaps they haven’t thought through those implications that you just expressed. Again, just trying to get into your mindset, if you didn’t believe God existed, that it wasn’t viable enough for belief, what was Christianity or belief in God to you? Was it some kind of wishful thinking? Was it a fairy tale? Myth? Was it something man made up to soothe those needs that they have inside? What did you perceive it to be?

Yeah. I don’t even know if I can give an answer to that, because I just didn’t give it that much thought. It was literally just very rarely entered my consciousness. I had interest. There was no one to talk to, no one talking to me about it. And so I just lived. Without really giving it much thought. And I think there’s a benefit and there’s a downside to that because I didn’t have any . . . . The criticism I had of belief in God, I just kind of absorbed from culture, through things about the degree of suffering, especially human suffering, and natural evil and things like that, so I could come up with objections, but I wasn’t really heavily invested in them in any sort of meaningful way. I would have enough to say if someone brought it up, but as I said, I think I just didn’t really care, to be honest.

Yeah. I know that, as you expressed in your current context there in England, just not caring about these bigger questions. There seems to be a bit of an apathy about it. I think that’s very, very common.

Yeah. It is. And it makes it difficult as a Christian now to have those conversations, because I think people do view it as a kind of . . . . It’s just not something that’s taken seriously. I think there are so many other views and perspectives that more currency and validity, and religious belief is sort of at the end of the line, really, I’d say.

Right. So you didn’t care that much but you just knew it was not that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t have any good reasons to take it seriously and to see that it made any difference to anyone’s life, really. So I didn’t have any strong reasons for it, but I didn’t have anything against it as well, so it wasn’t like I was reading Nietzsche and then Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russell and things like that. I didn’t really care enough to read things like that. I wasn’t even aware of them, so it wasn’t like I was . . . . I didn’t give it any sort of intelligent thought, really, in a way, either for or against it. I wasn’t bothered. I wasn’t interested. So it’s not like. . . . As I said, going back, I wasn’t a Christopher-Hitchens-type person. I was just a normal person who didn’t care about God and had some reasons to kind of back that up but wasn’t really that invested in it. I wasn’t really invested in arguing about it for or against.

I think I probably subconsciously accepted some of the conclusions that kind of follow from that, perhaps, in that I just did what I wanted to do. Captain of my own ship. And just wanted to have fun and be a bit lazy and just normal things. I don’t know. It seemed normal at the time.

Sure, sure. So it was a bit of a default atheism in a way.

Definitely, yeah. So I wasn’t agnostic because I could give you reasons. I didn’t think God existed. I didn’t think there were good reasons to believe in God, certainly not any persuasive ones. And no one had ever told me otherwise.

Right. So you weren’t around any good reasons, any good exposure to an embodied Christianity except perhaps for that neighbor who might have introduced a moment of it, but other than that, it seems like it just wasn’t in your world.

Yeah, I guess I just viewed them as stories. Even when I was being read Bible stories, they’re just. . . like finding out about the Greek myths. They’re just stories that you’re told, and I wasn’t led to believe they were historical or anything like that. They were just stories. I read my children stories at bedtime. It’s just a story at bedtime. I didn’t really give it any greater thought than that, really. They were just some interesting stories.

Right. And this was a bit of your attitude until . . . . How old were you when you began to turn the page or come to a place where you were questioning your beliefs? Or what happened that made you turn the corner and become open towards God?

Yeah. So when I was 19, my grandparents had become Christians about maybe five years earlier to that, and so at the time, I think I was working in a frozen warehouse at the time. And also would so some sort of gardening work for my grandparents sometimes, and so when I went ’round their house, they would often talk to me about God, especially Jesus. And we would just talk, and if I’m honest, I thought they were in a cult. I thought they were mad. And often expressed that in sort of choice, coarse language and tell them just to shut up because I just didn’t want . . . . I was just sick of every time I go in ’round there, it was like, “Oh, just stop talking about Jesus for a while. It’s doing my head in.” So that would carry on for a while.

But what kind of started it. I wasn’t taking them seriously. And I would ask lots of questions, and I think, at that point, kind of looking back, it was interesting now to look back and look at some of the questions I remember asking, you know, what about different religions. “If you speak to a Muslim, they’ll feel just as strongly as you do about how right their beliefs are. They might have had religious experiences. You say you’ve had a religious experience.” So I remember asking those types of questions, and I think, going back to what we were saying earlier about rethinking about it, but looking back, I must have given it some thought in a way because I did have objections and questions, that I wasn’t ready to embrace something unless my questions had reasonable answers I think. But I definitely remember asking questions about evil in the world and suffering and different religious experiences, about the existence of different religions and they couldn’t all be true. So those types of things. So I remember asking those types of questions and thinks about sex and, well, you know, “How can God want you to be with one person forever? That sounds like madness.” All sorts of things like that, I guess, were just coming into my head at the time.

And so they would try their best to kind of give me answers. Some were satisfying. Some, probably most, were not. But what it did is it sort of stoked an interest to maybe think about some of these things a little bit more. I didn’t do very well at school. I was never in a context in my home life that allowed . . . would encourage me to see any value in education, in learning, in reading. I hardly ever read books. I don’t remember having any books growing up, like reading really. So I wasn’t really in an environment where I was kind of intellectually nurtured, but I also wasn’t stupid, and so I thought that, if he’s going to keep talking about this stuff all the time, I should at least have a more informed criticism, and so it’s really at that point when I started taking those questions a bit more seriously, thinking about those bigger sort of questions, and doing a little bit of reading here and there, looking at stuff online, going to the library.

So that’s interesting. You were, at first, asking questions back to your grandparents, it seems like in an objectionable way, like trying to disprove it or push back against it because they were bothering you and so you wanted to bother them back with some hard questions, but then somewhere along the way, that push back turned into interest, and then you began a more genuine pursuit of the answers. Would you say that that shift in attitude or willingness to actually investigate-

I think part of it was I wanted to prove them wrong, and I think part of it was wanting to be more informed about it as well. I didn’t really have . . . my questions were valid. They’re valid questions. They’re important questions that anyone should ask. It’s not like I’d read books about that. They were just sort of things that, as I said, I’d either absorbed or was kind of thinking of objections at the time, and I think, yeah, at some point that shift kind of . . . . My approach shifted at some point from just wanting to show them wrong, to show them that they’re wrong, to thinking more openly about it. And again, I’ve never been a close-minded person. Even before I knew of G.K. Chesterton, you know, he says the purpose of an open mouth is to clamp down on something solid, just like an open mind.

And so it came to a point where I actually stumbled upon a book in a library, which a lot of people I’m sure will be aware of, is The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel. And I stumbled across that book. And, let’s say you’re not being in England, how unlikely that is to happen. To come across a good Christian book in a council library is highly unlikely. I’m not saying it’s miraculous, but it’s close to being, because there are so few good Christian books around, especially in libraries. But I came across that, and I think it was at that point, I thought, “All right, well, let’s see what they’ve good,” and having a read of that. And that book was a real turning point because, although there’s valid criticism of that book and those kinds of books, it led me to Christian thinkers, which I didn’t realize was a category. It led me to read what they were saying and have people I could actually read and listen to and get a pretty comprehensive understanding of Christianity, of engaging with sort of objections that I have had, and just sort of led me to thinking about Christianity a bit more seriously. I think it was kind of after that that I realized, whether it’s weeks or months, coming to a kind of point where I sort of crossed a threshold where I think . . . I always explained it as knowing a bit too much to sweep it under the carpet.

So when you were investigating . . . or you saw this book by Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith. That’s definitely Christian oriented. Did you take a look at other world religions? Did you compare them? Did you want to see if Christianity held a candle to any of these other world religions, like Muslims, like you said, that they’re very strong in their belief, or others? How did you narrow it down to Christianity as the one that you were willing to pursue?

Yeah. That’s a good question. I remember thinking at the time that I could probably rule out quite a significant number of them, especially those like Hinduism, where reincarnation suggests I would get another chance, exploring in the future, so I kind of focused on the Abrahamic faiths because these seemed like the ones that, although the Jewish faith is quite small, at least Islam and Christianity have a significant proportion of the population as their alleged adherence, and so Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, especially those faiths, come with a sort of finality after death. They seemed like the ones that should be taken most seriously, so I specifically focused on thinking about and reading about the three different Abrahamic faiths.

And then, once I guess you settled in on monotheism and then you looked at those side by side, and what made Christianity more persuasive as an ideology or a worldview or that you came to a place where you settled on that?

Yeah. I think, in terms of reading The Case for Faith and reading some other books and reading some things online. I’d say the point in which I guess it took a foothold is when I starting reading the Bible. It was the person of Jesus, reading the gospels, and God, looking back, speak to me through the gospels, and so I’d say that was the thing that really . . . the distinguishing factor between the three was Jesus, I would say.

In terms of what He had to offer with grace and salvation? Or did it have anything to do with his resurrection or the viability of that? Or a combination of everything?

Yeah. I mean it’s what he said. It spoke to me. The resurrection, I think, especially after reading The Case for Faith and reading stuff around . . . William Lane Craig and other scholars. The resurrection I found incredibly persuasive, and I didn’t know . . . . It was much stronger. Like I kind of thought the resurrection would have, in terms of historicity and stuff, the strength for those claims would be relatively weak, and they were much stronger than I anticipated. So I think the resurrection has been a great source of hope and strength, and it’s sort of helped me to continue on that path for the last decade. So yeah, I think the resurrection was really key in that.

So, at the end of the day, you came to a place where you were able to realize or appreciate the fact that Christianity is more than just a story, more than just a Bible story, that there’s some kind of historical grounding to these events that are in the Bible?

Yeah, yeah. I think the more I read . . . . It was a combination of things. I think first I had to . . . kind of looking back on my journey. First, I had to see that it was perfectly reasonable to believe that God existed. So that was the first stumbling block. I remember thinking, “Okay, well maybe you don’t have to be such a dummy to think that God exists,” as a first stumbling block. I’d sort of got over that. And then it was looking more at the specific claims of the main religions, and I think the one that speak most persuasively to me, especially at the time, was the gospel. How it considered the human condition, my own experience of the impact of sin and hope and love and resurrection. Those sort of biblical themes spoke so persuasively to me compared to the alternate claims of other religions of just where Moses left off and the claims made by Mohammad in the Koran. And so it was a mixture, I’d say, of the rational but also the experience as well. I did have later a religious experience of sorts that I think probably pushed me over the line.

So, Daniel, what you’re telling me is that I hear that it seemed to be a rationally historically based kind of religion that seemed to really speak existentially also to your human condition. There was something in it that drew you. You could see yourself in it with sin, yet hope and love and grace and renewal through the resurrection. But you also speak of a spiritual experience. Can you tell me about that?

Sure. This is why, I think, the gospel is such good news and so transformative, especially to people who feel that they are insignificant, that they feel they have nothing really to offer, that no one really cares about them beyond sort of immediate family. What the gospel is saying is that, insignificant as we are, as small as we are in the universe, that someone created the whole universe and loved you enough to enter it. To live among you, to enter into the world, the human world. And there’s something beautiful about that to people who feel like they’re insignificant, and I think that spoke to me in a way as well, sort of existentially. But it was also the rational aspect as well, especially in regard to the resurrection, and I think the final part of that journey was . . . . I remember just reading the gospels and just feeling utterly convicted of my own sin, of knowing that I needed forgiveness and knowing where the source of that forgiveness could be found. And just knowing that I had to repent and that, if I asked God for forgiveness, that I would receive it, and I remember . . . . No shining lights or noises but just a real experience of the depth of my sin but also the depth of God’s love for me at the same time. And I haven’t had anything like it since, but it’s always stayed with me.

I bet that was, in a sense . . . . It sounds like such a marker, but it sounds like it was just a bit overwhelming but in a good way.

Yeah, yeah. It’s a unique experience, and I think . . . I could be more skeptical because, as I said, people from other religions have experiences, and I think I’ll be more . . . . Looking back perhaps, I could be skeptical of just that experience, but it wasn’t just the experience. It was different things. It was the experience plus reason and a rational case for God. It was the experience plus Jesus in the gospels and knowing that what he was saying is true and how it makes sense of the things I already know. It makes sense of the universe. It makes sense of my moral intuitions, my knowledge of certain things of right and wrong objectively. Suffering is evil. Something that shouldn’t be welcome. That pain is bad. That there’s beauty. You look out at a sunset or a mountain range. There’s no reason to have a sense of awe from that. And there’s all sorts of things. I think there are certain things as human beings that we know, and I think any worldview has to be able to provide good answers to what we already know, and I think Christianity does that.

Yes, it seems that the Christian worldview, in your mind and for you and for your life, and really I would presume that you would say for all of humanity it makes the most sense of reality, of what we know about the universe, what we know about ourselves and our own human condition and about our loves and our longings, all of those things that you spoke of. Our ability to understand right from wrong. How long ago was it that you became a Christian?

So it was about 15 years ago now. So I’m 35, and I was 20 when I started following Christ.

Well, tell me about that. Tell me about how your life has been affected and changed. You used the word transformed. How has your life been transformed in moving from atheism to Christianity?

Yeah. In a lot of significant ways. I think certain people . . . . There’s only actually very few people that I’m still in contact today who knew me before I was a Christian for various reasons, and I remember one of them saying, of all the people they knew who have become a Christian, I would be last on their list. And he meant that quite genuinely.

Yes, I bet they were surprised.

Yeah. Just a little bit. And so I mean it was definitely difficult to begin with. Just basic things. I mean, I didn’t know what to do. Before I started attending church as a Christian, I’d never been to a church really, other than maybe . . . I don’t even remember going for a wedding. I don’t really ever remember going to a church. I remember going to a synagogue and a mosque when we were at school, but I don’t really remember . . . I definitely never went to a church service before being a Christian. I didn’t know what to do. It was a whole different culture, different language that Christians can speak. You know, their own in-group language. And I didn’t really know what to do with my life.

I remember being at the church where I was part of, that a lot of them worked in healthcare, and so I decided that—well, probably led in some way—that going back to school and getting some qualifications and maybe training to be some kind of healthcare professional might be a good thing to do. And so I went back to college. I worked night shifts, and then in the morning, I went to college during the day.

And at the time, there was some family situation that meant it was very difficult—when you first convert, you’re quite zealous in a way that doesn’t necessarily consider . . . inconsiderate zealousness, I would say. And I think I annoyed quite a few people with that sort of early zealousness, and I regret some of the things I said and did at that point. Not intending to break relationships and things, but you know, just silly things. Listening to Christian sermons loud in the evening when my mum was trying to watch TV and just not really . . . I didn’t think . . . and other things as well. I basically ended up—it became uncomfortable and no longer possible to live at home, so I moved in with a guy from church, and I lived on his floor, so I would basically work night shifts, go to college during the day, and then go and stay at my friend’s house, and I did that for about a year.

I basically got all the qualifications that I needed to go back to try and get into university, but before as well I said, growing up, not someone who’s stupid but just didn’t . . . I was never really nurtured. My mind was never really nurtured in a way. And so I think God just gave me a love for learning, especially reading, and I just started reading. And I’ve never stopped. I just read all the time. I just read, read, read, read, read. Also trying to catch up. I’d missed so much. I didn’t listen at school. My English was pretty rubbish. I didn’t know how to write an essay. I was not a blank slate, but I was a poorly developed slate. Damaged.

And God really used books to change that, and I’m still learning today, but reading stuff like Christian apologetics and philosophy and reading the Bible of course, reading a lot of the Bible, just shaped my mind. Renewed. My mind was renewed. And I don’t want to waste that. And so I went to university, got my qualifications, and I’ve just kind of been studying and working and doing things since then.  Also things as well . . . . I never wanted to get married. Everyone in my family was either a single parent or had been married multiple times, so obviously there was some misunderstanding of the nature of marriage, and I was fortunate. At university, I met my wife, and we’re married with three children today.

That sounds like quite a transformation. And I guess, if you’re teaching at the university level, then you must have pursued graduate level education yourself. Is that right?

Yeah. So I’m fortunate that, in the UK, if you’re a healthcare professional, if you go to an academic post, very, very few people will have their clinical expertise and also a doctorate, and so usually the minimum requirement to get an academic job as a healthcare professional is to have a master’s degree plus you usually have to have five years clinical experience as well. So I have a master’s degree from Heythrop College, University of London, in contemporary ethics, and since then I’ve done a graduate teaching course as well and some other small things, but yeah. I don’t have a doctorate, but they tend to encourage you to get one at some point, which I’ll probably do at some point, but because I’ve got three young children, I don’t want to take on too much that will affect me and being a rubbish husband and a rubbish dad.

Understandable.

So you obviously love to learn but you love for others to learn as well. I understand you have a YouTube channel. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah. So I think during lockdown due to COVID-19, it was difficult to maintain normal relationships with people, and so a friend of mine who’s a pastor at a church in Guilford, a good friend of mine, we sort of decided maybe to start up a podcast, and we like speaking to interesting people, and having a podcast is a great way to get interesting people and get to chat with them for an hour or two. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of months now. I think we’ve interviewed about seven people. We’ve got another one coming out tomorrow. And it’s just great. It just means that we can contact interesting people and just get to chat with them, ask them questions, and get to know them a bit better. It’s called Critical Witness on YouTube. And it’s great. I’m enjoying it. I look forward to having you on there at some point.

Excellent, excellent. Yeah, I’ve watched your YouTube channel, and the content is excellent. It’s stellar. Very substantive content, so I would advise anyone who’s listening to take a look at that. Before we wrap up our conversation—your story has been amazing—what would you like to say to those listening to this podcast who are skeptical about God and Christianity, perhaps those who’ve just presumed that atheism is right just because of what they’ve heard, like you were once? Or like you once did?

Yeah. If you have a Christian friend . . . . I mean, that’s half the problem sometimes. I would imagine I had friends who were Christians. I just never knew. So one thing, as Christians, is to speak to non-Christian friends, and also if you’re a skeptic, if you have a Christian friend that you know is a Christian, speak to them. If you’ve got some objections and questions, go straight to them. Ask them. Maybe they’ve got some recommendations. Podcasts to listen to. Videos on YouTube. There’s so many resources available now that weren’t available 15 years ago, really, and it’s amazing content. So that would be something. Another thing is I also encourage skeptics to read the Bible as well. I think that Christians, especially those who have an interest in philosophy and apologetics, can often be so quick to go to a book. Read Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig or read a John Lennox book or something like that, but actually just reading the Bible . . . . God can speak to you through the Bible. He’s been doing that for over 2,000 years now. And so I would strongly recommend that skeptics read the Bible. Wherever you speak, but I think I remember starting from Genesis for a bit but also just reading the gospels, getting to know Jesus through an unfiltered lens. I think that’s important.

Yeah, an unfiltered lens, I think, is a good idea. I think there are so many ideas about what the Bible is without having read it. But for those who aren’t familiar with the gospels, where could someone find those in the Bible?

Yeah. So there’s New Testament . . . I think the one I’ve always enjoyed reading is the Gospel of Luke. Luke was a physician, historian, and his gospel is written specifically for people don’t necessarily have a religious background, contrary to something like Matthew. Matthew is a great, great gospel but specifically written for people of a Jewish background, so I think starting from Luke . . . . Luke and Acts, I think, are always places I love to recommend people going to.

Yeah, I think that’s good advice. And on the flip side, what would you say, in this culture where there’s an increasing push back against Christians and Christian beliefs, what would you like to say to Christians today, if anything?

Yeah, it’s difficult. And this is probably one of the questions where I might be the least helpful person. Especially as someone who’s in academia, and it’s a very difficult place to be a Christian. I’m not sure I have many good answers. I’m a natural pessimist by nature, a redeemed pessimist, and so I . . . I think Christians need to read the Bible more. I think reading the Bible more. Definitely I need to read my Bible more. I think Christians need to read their Bibles more. I think we need to just get in a habit of speaking to people who aren’t Christians, forming that sort of habit of making it more natural to talk about how great the gospel is, how amazing Christ is, and that there are good reasons to be a Christian. I think those sort of things can make a small difference, I think especially as I said, in the UK. A lot of the US has different places, different cultures. I think just Christians need to have a habit of speaking about their faith more and not giving in to popular expectations to just keep everything at home and keep faith locked away. As soon as you step outside the door to work, school, wherever you’re going, playing football, whatever you’re doing, to find ways of showing people that Christianity shapes who you are and everything you do.

Because I think one of the most common but pernicious ideas about Christianity and belief in God in general, is that it doesn’t have any relevance. It doesn’t change anything. I think people think, “Okay, you might believe that. You believe God exists. You believe Christ died for your sins, but what does that actually change?” And I think it’s so important to show people, actually, it changes everything. And I think something I get frustrated about sometimes is . . . . People see me as I am today, so on paper, you think, “Okay, he’s married for 10 years. He’s got three children. He’s got some degrees. He’s working as an academic. He’s published academic papers.” And things like that. And people can make assumptions about me, about my life story, about my background, about how I grew up, and most of them would be false, because what they see now is someone who’s been transformed by the love of God. But they don’t see that. They just see me as I am now. Whereas my whole life is . . . . Everything I have is but for the grace of God.

Yeah. It is amazing how we are so quick to presume and to make judgment without really taking the time to enter in to someone else’s life story. And I think your advice is really timely and necessary at this moment, when we’re so, like you say, kind of at the very beginning, when you talked about, in England, that religion is private. And we all have a tendency to kind of close our doors and keep our lives to ourselves and especially in this day of distraction and technology, during COVID, it seems like everything is just amplified, but as you are telling us, I think it is very wise and judicious to just take the time to get to know someone, whether they are pushing back against belief about God or whether they have a very strong belief in God. You don’t know their story, and you don’t know the reasons, why they are, what they believe, who they are, all of these things. And it would be good if we just took time to listen to the other side, and that’s kind of the point of this podcast, and I hope that those who are listening really have listened to you. Because you are a life that has been transformed, and it’s, for me, a really beautiful thing.

So I want to thank you, Daniel, for coming on and for sharing your story with us. Is there anything else you want to add to your story before we close?

No. I think it’s been interesting. It’s been cathartic, sort of, talking about it, and yeah, I just really appreciate you having me on and wish you all the best for your future interviews.

Fantastic. Thank you again, Daniel.

Thanks for tuning in to the Side B Podcast. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share this new podcast with your friends and social network. I would appreciate it. Again, to hear more from Daniel, take a look at his YouTube channel called Critical Witness. I think you’ll find it well worth your time as he and his guests think through issues of culture, apologetics, theology, and evangelism. For questions and feedback about this episode with Daniel, you can reach me by email at [email protected]. In the meantime, I’ll be looking forward to seeing you next time, where we’ll listen to the other side.