This may come as a shock to you, but subtle isn’t always my strong suit. Sometimes big flashing lights are needed to get my attention, neon everywhere, a spiritual Times Square. The good news is that the Holy Spirit, or the universe if that’s what you prefer to call divine mystery, while sometimes subtle, can also sometimes smack you upside the head to get your attention. This was the case for me on Monday.
First thing in the morning, the Rev. Rob McCall stopped by the Pastor’s Study for one of our periodic chats. During the conversation, he suggested a book, “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World – and Us,†by Robert O. Prum. At lunch in the Parsonage, I opened the most recent copy of “The Christian Century†to a book review of “Humanism and the Death of God: Searching for the Good After Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche.†Then I started researching this week’s text, about Paul and conversion and stories of conversions, which immediately brought me to Darwin’s infamous deathbed conversion, at which point I looked up and said “Okay, I get it.â€
So Darwin, conversion, and the evolution of the individual soul… This is going to be a bit more complicated than last week.
Charles Darwin had a keen eye and a mind that was able to construct meaning from data, a critical skill, and one all too rare. In fact, I’d suggest that pattern recognition is one of the most important cognitive skills, and Darwin had it. His 1859 text “On the Origin of Species†introduced the theory of natural selection as a primary cause for evolution. We are all familiar with the basic idea: mutations that increase survival and reproduction will be passed down, while unfavorable mutations become an evolutionary dead-end. If a longer bill allows a finch better access to food, eventually all finches in that population will have longer bills.
Darwin’s ideas were widely accepted within a decade of publication, not only by scientists, but by much of the educated public. There were exceptions of course, then as today, those who were and are afraid of the spiritual consequences of human evolution from other species, a condition I think of as monkey-soul-a-phobia. But the more we discover, the more convinced we are that Darwin was right. In fact, in recent years scientists have discovered instances of evolution in just a few generations, far faster than they thought possible.
Most of us also choose to believe, however, that the human animal has moved beyond a strict survival of the fittest paradigm. Those who do strictly apply that biological paradigm to humans embrace a twisted way of looking at the world we have come to call Social Darwinism, unfair to the great scientist to be sure. It is a way of thinking that would excuse all sorts of egregious behavior, from the killing of non-productive elders and the disabled, who offer no evolutionary benefit, to the slaughter and exploitation of entire nations as cultures survive or fail in a Darwinian jungle, from King Leopold’s personal colony in the Congo to the gas chambers of Aushwitz-Birkenau. Social Darwinism justifies everything from the eugenics of the Third Reich to the economic theories of Ayn Rand, and it is wrong, a devaluing of the individual life, and a contradiction of the gospel. You can’t be a Social Darwinist and a Christian any more than you can follow Ayn Rand and follow Jesus, though many who pursue Social Darwinist policies in politics are also quick to claim the Cross.
When it comes to how we interact as humans, most of us try to carve out room for things like altruism, aesthetics, and inalienable rights, a sort of natural selection “plus.†But we still acknowledge that natural selection is at work at the biological level in our species, just as it is for every other living thing on this earth.
Among humans who know and care about Darwin’s theory of natural selection then, we have basically three groups, those who embrace it from a purely mechanical perspective, absent our claim to the inherent value of the individual human life; those who embrace it but add the inherent value of the individual human life; and those who are still terrified and build creation museums in giant arks and blame Satan for putting dinosaur fossils in the ground.
Enter Lady Hope. Born in Tasmania, Elizabeth Cotton was the daughter of a British colonial officer, General Sir Arthur Cotton, and spent much of her childhood in the Raj. When her father retired, the family returned to the strange land of England, eventually settling in Surrey. There, Elizabeth took up the cause of temperance, much as Jonathan Fisher had here in Blue Hill just a few decades earlier. She was apparently quite charismatic, burning with the fire of Christian evangelism, and remaining active in the mission field almost her entire life, even influencing Florence Nightingale. She married twice, the first time to Admiral Sir James Hope, providing the title she would use the rest of her life, though she was no longer really Lady Hope after she was widowed and remarried. Lady Hope is, after all, an ideal name for an evangelist.
At the age of 73, living in America, broke and suffering from breast cancer, Lady Hope began to tell a story that got traction in American Baptist circles and that would give her a place in history, or at least in infamy. She claimed to have visited Charles Darwin at Down House in the last year of his life, thirty-three years earlier. The visit itself is possible as she lived nearby and was from a well-respected family. The problem is what came next in her tale.
Lady Hope reported that she had found Darwin reading the Book of Hebrews, and that he denounced his theory of natural selection and confessed Christ and the grandeur of scripture. It is amazing just how much Darwin’s words, as reported by Lady Hope, sounded just like the words of a temperance evangelist.
The story is absolute nonsense. Darwin’s family denied it, and absolutely no one else who visited him reported his reading of scripture or wavering in his scientific views. Lady Hope had a reputation for embellishment and fabrication, to use the politest possible term for lying. Yet the story became an urban legend of sorts among a certain type of Christian. There will always be folks who don’t care if something is a lie. In fact, Lady Hope’s lie is still circulated today among those who worship a god too small to allow for natural selection and an evolving creation. Darwin was agnostic to the end and simply had no deathbed conversion.
Most deathbed conversions are suspect for good reason. The stories can rarely be verified, and those telling stories of conversion almost always have something to gain, usually some religious or political advantage. There are exceptions, of course. Before he was buried under an Art Deco monument in Père Lachaise, Oscar Wilde does appear to have converted on his deathbed, or at least reclaimed his faith, as he was baptized as an infant. Evidence of his spiritual conversion appears in the posthumously published letter “De Profundis,†in which he describes Christ as a romantic artist. Still, nothing quite as dramatic as Saul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus. That conversion, not a deathbed hedging of bets but a living conversion, you can’t really debate. Saul’s life changed. He went from egging on the mob that was murdering a Christian to being a leading Christian evangelist that was imprisoned and eventually murdered himself if we are to trust the legends.
Christianity started as a religion made up entirely of converts, first of Hebrews that accepted the teachings of Jesus, which were far outside of Hebrew orthodoxy, then of Gentiles who accepted this distinctive variation on the Hebrew religious tradition as their own. The actual active ministry of Jesus is completely oriented toward conversion, right down to Nicodemus and the idea of being born again. Like John the Baptizer before him, Jesus preaches change, change of heart, change of behavior, change to religious institutions, change to social structures and norms. Paul, the Greek form of the name Saul, was a Hebrew convert to this reform movement after that incident on the road, and he was highly effective at sharing the joy and promise of his new way of life with non-Hebrews, intentional about growing the church, and was willing to adapt in order to make that possible.
In our particular theological tradition, conversion would come to be understood as comprising essentially three movements: “an act of repentance, an experience of grace, and a new life of discipleship,†as articulated in The Westminster Handbook to Reformed Theology.
Christianity grew and a number of inter-connected tensions would develop around the idea of conversion. Is conversion necessary? Certainly it was for first generation followers, but what about for those who came after, those who are raised in the faith? This became the bright line that divided the traditions that practiced “believer’s baptism†from those that baptized infants, a point of division during the Protestant Reformation, and you might be surprised where our tradition fell. New England Puritans initially required a personal conversion experience as a precondition for membership in the church. The requirement for conversion remained in place for decades, until the Half-Way Covenant, a compromise reached in the latter half of the 17th century. This Half-Way Covenant all-the-way opened the door to the zero commitment Christianity that plagues so many churches today, where being a church member not only doesn’t require conversion of heart or a life of discipleship, you don’t even have to walk in the door.
What about those who lapse into sin after conversion? Which is pretty much everyone. We saw this tension play out in the Donatist controversy, the question of what to do with those who had buckled under the threat of death during periods of Roman persecution. Is this why Ahab was the “worst of the Israelite kings†according to the Hebrew scriptures, not because he married a foreign Jezebel, but because he had already had one conversion moment, one re-covenanting with Yahweh, then failed again?
The idea that conversion must be followed by perfection seems at odds with the image of God as a loving parent and the command that we must forgive seventy times seven. Why would the Gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew lay out a process for reconciliation within the community of converts if there was to be no forgiveness, no grace, for those who err after their first conversion moment.
If conversion is one-and-done, most of us are in trouble. Fortunately, that is not how it works in the Reformed tradition. Jean Calvin, while holding to the importance of grace as well as justification through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, also believed that conversion was a process, one that we sometimes call regeneration or sanctification. In other words, we practice turning our heart toward God and get better at it all the time, but we are still going to sometimes fail.
In this, the Way of Jesus is not that much different from a 12 step program., say Alcoholics Anonymous. You’re not going to get sober at Step One, but you can’t get sober without it… You’re not going to get Jesus and suddenly be a good Christian, a sinless saint. But you are never going to get very far on the journey of faith without a decision to undertake the journey of faith, to evolve spiritually. The Way of Jesus requires both a conscious decision, a conversion experience, then behavior and practice that reflect that decision, for what you say means far less than what you do.
We do not require that conversion be one brilliant flash of light, a one-and-done, as our Puritan ancestors required, though some have that sort of epiphany or altar call experience. Most humans are slow learners, and it can take us some time and a few false starts before we reach the conclusion that the Way of Jesus is the way forward, that our lives are incomplete without an openness to the divine, that we experience that divine not only in our daily lives but in the powerful story of Jesus, and that we regret and repent some of our past decisions and actions. Those New England Puritans and today’s altar call Christians are wrong to define conversion only as a singular event, as are those secularized cultural Christians who have no expectation of a changed heart at all.
The Rev. Dr. Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his most well known text published in 1821, took on the question of conversion and those raised in the church, writing “If, therefore, in spite of infant baptism, sin thus shows its power in them, they need conversion as much as anyone born outside the Church. The only difference really present is that in the case of others it is a matter of chance how and when the gospel call reaches their ears, whereas Christian children are already called by virtue of their standing in a natural and orderly relation to the working of divine grace.â€
Schleiermacher would go on to explain conversion as a call to action. “Because the whole life of the Redeemer, because solely determined by the being of God in Him, is activity, and not passivity,†he writes, “it is clear that in fellowship with His life no moment can be purely passive, because everything in it that proceeds from Him and becomes an impulse is necessarily activity.â€
Paul’s experience on the road matters. What came afterwards matters more. Paul’s formation in the faith, his learning the story of Jesus, his practice of prayer, these matter. His living his conversion into the world matters.
A 2005 book about new forms of intentional Christian community, expressions of faith that many find more compelling than institutional church, calls these communities “schools of conversion.†Isn’t this what we are called to be, a school of conversion? For if we are only a gathering of the completely sanctified, only a collection of saints, then I have no place in this company. But if we are a gathering of those longing for God, those seeking God in one another, in creation, in story and practice and song, then maybe I belong at the table.
Successful species evolve, adapting to changing circumstances. They don’t spend time complaining that the new bill isn’t as attractive as the old bill, for the new bill feeds them, and in the end, what feeds us today is far more important than what fed us yesterday. Our faith tradition is an evolving faith tradition, one that has learned and repented, that believes God is still speaking. We’ve come a long way from those New England meeting houses that required a testimony at the door, have come a long way in our embrace of science, have plenty of room in our faith for Darwin. We are poised to thrive in the coming years.
Be converted, not once, but again and again, for Jesus will call you again and again, and you will encounter him, look him in the eye, hear his voice, again and again. Evolve spiritually, here in this school of conversion, on this way of active discipleship. And when you fall, and you will fall, get back up. He is calling, maybe not in a flash of blinding light, but he is calling.