In 2012, SVS Press published a volume entitled Turning East: Contemporary Philosophers and the Ancient Christian Faith. The book compiles essays from philosophers who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in which they share how and why they became Orthodox. The press has decided to compile a second volume in which I will be included. I am in process of finishing the essay, and I thought its content might be of interest to my readers. So, I’ve decided to post it here (in two installments). Enjoy!
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Early Life
When recounting my journey to Orthodoxy, I cannot deny the role that my mother played. I say this ironically, since she is not Orthodox. She comes from a long line of German Lutherans and was raised in the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, one of the more conservative branches of the denomination. And so, I, too, was raised Lutheran.
My mother was devout. My father was not. As a child, I was unsure that my father believed anything of the Christian faith, despite supporting how my mother chose to raise us. Nonetheless, my mother’s personal devotion and her concern for the salvation of her children and others impressed upon me the importance of religious matters, matters that evidently had eternal consequences.
Argument was a family staple. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of our smoke-filled kitchen (my father was a smoker, and back then people smoked in their homes) reverberating with a cacophony of raised voices and the percussive sounds of pounding on the kitchen table to punctuate a point as my family members argued boisterously. Though to argue was native to my family, without my mother’s influence, such arguments would likely have been relegated to politics. But she added philosophy and religion to the mix.
The reason is that my mother went through a time of struggle in her faith, questioning the truth of Christianity. The crisis sent her down a road of reading Christian apologists of various sorts—some on science, others on philosophy, others on religious plurality. She was, therefore, well-versed in apologetics, much more so than the average lay person. And she liberally shared those resources with her children. The result, which delighted me as a child, was verbose talks in our family about proofs for and against Christianity in which the faithful and the skeptics alike sounded off. Such talks—or, better, debates—awakened my childhood mind and instilled in me a sense of the reasonableness of Christianity.
I was still quite young, only in grade school, when I went from an observer of apologetics to a reader. Two early memories stand out, though I cannot recall which came first. I was reading the book of Genesis for no particular reason. I have never been a casual reader, so even as a child I moved slowly through the text, meticulously trying to understand what was being said. My careful reading led me to believe that Moses thought of the earth as a flat surface upheld by pillars with a dome over top, which held back water that occasionally breaks through in the form of rain. (As an adult, I would learn this is precisely what many Ancient Near Eastern scholars also believe Moses is describing.)1 When pointing out to my mother the apparent errors in the reportedly infallible text, she handed me a book by Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist turned Christian apologist, who has devoted a great deal of time to defending the scientific accuracy of Genesis.2 Though I would not endorse Ross’ work today, this early experience taught me that questions are nothing to be afraid of. Quite the contrary, questions are the doorway to fascinating discoveries.
A second formative experience was initiated, not by myself, but by my mother. She was aware that my private Lutheran grade school had on its docket creation science. In preparation for these lessons, she made me aware that they would teach that the earth was created in only six twenty-four hour days some thousands of years ago. She told me this is false, based on a superficial misreading of the Bible, and I should not take the lesson seriously. She, then, pointed me to resources, should I want to know more. This experience instilled in me a second lesson that would be formative in my journey, namely, that commonly held Church teachings can be questioned without abandoning one’s faith.
I should add an ironic third lesson from my childhood. This I learned, not from my mother, but from the Lutheran Church. The denomination took seriously catechesis. I was made to memorize creeds, the Ten Commandments, and doctrinal formulations about the Trinity and Christology—all in preparation for confirmation in the Lutheran Church. For whatever reason, some of these catechetical lessons stuck in ways that proved formative later in life. I will discuss the point below, but for now, let the irony suffice that while learning from my mother that all commonly held Christian commitments are up for grabs, I was learning from the Lutheran Church Christian commitments that are non-negotiable.
For all the good that came from my Christian upbringing, there was a glaring deficiency in it: the view of salvation instilled in me from infancy. The conservative Lutherans who raised me still lived in the Reformation. The great debate is whether salvation is by works or by faith, and the greatest enemy to one’s soul is the thought that one might earn God’s favor. Hence, my mother instilled in me that if I were to die and stand before God and be asked why I should enter Heaven, I should answer, Because Jesus died for my sins. But I was left with a simple question: How should I live? Because all sins are forgiven and a life of good works has no bearing on one’s standing with God, perhaps even being spiritually perilous, I was left with the impression that how I lived did not matter. My sins did not matter. So, I abandoned all Christian practice in my teens, not out of contempt for the Christian religion—I had been persuaded it was likely true—but because my life choices seemed to be of no consequence. Thus, I embraced hedonism. For I was a lover of pleasure.
A Spiritual Awakening
My hedonism centered around what was at the time my one true love, art—specifically, classical drawing and painting.3 From my earliest memories, I was known as an artist. Peers and adults alike presumed I would grow to be a successful one. In my teenage years, I lived out this identity. Art was my central pursuit, one I aggressively went after with an eye fixed on art school and a profession beyond. During this time, I discovered hallucinogens. I deeply enjoyed the ways in which drugs allowed me to see my artwork with fresh eyes, fueled creative exploration, and broke down creative inhibitions. So drugs became a staple of my life, imbibed daily alongside my creative endeavors.
I share this because LSD (or “acid”) played an important role in my spiritual awakening. Be warned, dear reader, if you hope to hear something about the trendy notion that LSD has spiritual benefits, opening the mind to the divinity that surrounds us, then what I am about to say will disappoint. The experience I am about to recount awakened me, not to the fact that God is everywhere present and fills all things, but instead to the reality of Hell.
For readers unfamiliar with LSD, it is important to understand that LSD takes one on a psychic “trip,” to use the colloquial term. Such a trip lasts a very long time—in my experience upwards of eight hours—and there is no “sobering up.” Once you imbibe the drug, you are buckled into the rollercoaster, and there is no getting off until the ride runs its course. The reason this is important is because “bad trips” can be terrifying. If something goes amiss, there is no jumping ship. And such was the fateful event in my life.
I was in the midst of an acid trip that went wrong. I wanted off the ride. I began to think through possible solutions. The first, most-obvious solution was suicide. Now, I need to again explain for those inexperienced with LSD that this thought was not induced by despair. On acid, many of the things we take for granted are no longer obvious. Gravity, for example, may seem a perfectly obvious and intelligible fact of reality to the sober mind. Yet, on acid, gravity may suddenly strike one as arbitrary, strange, even absurd. One’s thought horizon expands considerably on the drug, which is precisely what I enjoyed about it. Keeping this in mind, then, my thought that I could kill myself and end the trip was not a “suicidal thought” in the sense of one born from despair. The thought was perfectly analytic: Considering that I was in a negative psychic state induced by chemicals, were I to kill the organ facilitating the psychic state, that would, presumably, end the psychic experience.
However, the moment I thought this, a second thought entered my mind: Consciousness is not a material object. Why, then, presume that the death of the material object to which it is attached will end my consciousness? In this moment, I intuited Socrates’ affinity argument for the immortality of the soul, though I would not read the argument until years later. My inner dialogue brought to light the fact that consciousness generally, and my consciousness specifically, is not material. It evidently interacts with matter, apparent from the fact that altering my brain chemistry with LSD had altered my experiences. But it suddenly became less obvious to me that killing my brain would result in the end of my mind, since these were evidently two distinct things.
On the heels of this first realization came a second, or rather, a question: What if killing my brain fails to end my psychic terror? I was acutely aware that my goal was to stop a terrifying psychic state, and I was equally aware that the chemicals I had ingested were what induced that psychic state. But equally clear, in this moment, was that the psychic state was exactly that, a state of mind. And if it were possible that my mind might survive the death of the body, then equally possible was that my psychic terror would endure. And here, for the first time, the concept of Hell became plausible to me—not as a location filled with flames and devils but as a state or condition of the soul.
Terror gripped me. I became acutely aware that with each passing second, death moved one step closer to me, and there was no stopping it. Suddenly, all of the warnings from religions made sense. We shape our souls in this world, and that shape endures in the next. As I was experiencing in real time, one can shape the soul into something dreadful, into a twisted state of terror from which there is no escape, not because one finds himself in a locked room, but because the terror is in the soul itself.
In this moment, I saw religious questions—about God, the afterlife, salvation and damnation—as the most important questions. Every second seemed precious, part of the limited time given to set one’s house in order before the unrelenting strides of death arrive. So I wasted no time. Inadvisable as it was, I climbed into my car, still tripping on acid, and drove home. I found a Bible and began to read. Rather, I tried to read.—Reading on LSD is not an easy task.—After hours of staring at the first page to which it opened, I still had not moved beyond the first sentence I saw: “It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.”4
Upon returning to myself, I began to obsessively pursue answers. I spoke with relatives, pastors, apologists, peers, anyone who was willing to talk about matters of religion in a serious manner. To my surprise and disappointment, I found two troubling patterns.
The first was that very few people took these questions as seriously as I did, including people who ought to. I recall a perplexed pastor asking, during my interrogation of him, if I was on something. (I was not.) He couldn’t understand my obsession. I was equally perplexed. Having been awakened to the importance of such matters, I could no longer see them any other way. I thought a pastor of all people would understand.
The second pattern I noticed was how few people were willing to consider unpleasant possibilities. So many of the folks I spoke with wanted to assure me that God loves me and put me at ease that I am not going to Hell. But this always struck me as an unjustified saccharin sentiment. Our world is filled with terrible truths. Why presume the answers to these or any other questions are pleasant? I was looking for truth, not comfort. And so, I resolved to entertain the most troubling possibilities, never shunning a view because I found it undesirable.
For the next several years, I continued to speak with anyone who might offer insights. I tracked down scholars and professors—at schools I didn’t attend. I discovered the vast body of literature on philosophy and religion. I began to obsessively read, comparing the argument from this work to that, tracing footnotes to more sources. All of this stretched over years, from high school into my third year of art school. The obsession became a hindrance to my art, as I was neglecting such work in order to devote myself fully to this investigation. I finally resolved to leave art school and continue my pursuit unimpeded by formally studying philosophy and religion.
A Disappointing Investigation
From my undergraduate years through my master’s and into my doctorate, my study of philosophy and religion cast a wide net across ancient, medieval, and modern thought. I wanted a sense of the history of ideas on the topics I cared about. I had no preconceived notion of where truth may be found; I had no bias toward the contemporary over the ancient or the religious over the irreligious; I did not presume that the trajectory of this history marked progress rather than regress. I only hoped that by gaining a sense of the whole, I might spot those areas that are most promising, most pregnant with truth that I might delve deeper into those waters. Such was my approach, and a great deal of fruit came from those years. Space does not permit me to examine it all. Instead, I will focus on one particular investigation that proved disappointing—and formatively so.
My early investigation of religion focused heavily, and not surprisingly, on Christianity. As explained above, I had already been persuaded of its reasonableness and likely truth. But there was a Paschalian element to this emphasis as well. Put concisely, my early look at other religions left me with the sense that the exclusivity of Christianity—that Christ is the only way to God—was an oddity in the religious realm. Hence, the stakes of misjudging Christianity to be false seemed higher than with other religions. Weighting my investigation more heavily toward the Christian religion, therefore, seemed prudent.
My approach was, again, historical. I wanted to understand the history of Christian thought and practice. Toward this end, I began by devoting myself to the works of Augustine of Hippo. I recognized that both Roman Catholic and magisterial Protestant traditions lay claim to Augustine as the father of their doctrine. So I went to the fountainhead of Western Christian thought.
Augustine became to me a doorway to other thinkers, spidering out into a history of ideas all its own. Learning of the influence of “certain books of the Platonists”5 (either Plotinus or Porphyry)6 on Augustine’s thought propelled me into a study of the NeoPlatonists who influenced him. And the study of these NeoPlatonists required me to study their namesake, Plato. Moreover, my study of Augustine sent me not only backwards to his influences but forward to his influence, where I investigated the medieval reception of his thought in figures such as Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and others. And these figures, in turn, required me to study Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle.
I confess that my investigation commenced with great hope. As an artist, I loved the art and architecture of the Catholic Church. As a budding philosopher, the robust intellectual tradition of the Latin scholastics appealed to me. I would have loved nothing more than to discover in Augustine a fountain of truth that would lead me to not only answers but tradition, religious practice, and grand religious artwork. Unfortunately, the result was quite the opposite. The more I studied Augustine and his progeny, the more Western Christianity repelled me.
In Modern German literature, I encountered a narrative that suggests that the history of Christian doctrine is syncretistic, a narrative I was increasingly sympathetic to based on my study of primary sources. So the story goes, original Christianity was a Jewish religion, but with the conversion of Gentile philosophers, there arose a hybridization with Hellenism. In Adolf von Harnack, this narrative pervades his Church history.7 In German idealists, such as G. W. F. Hegel, such syncretism is praised as part of the “progress” that they continue.8 Yet, I found the very same narrative in contemporary anglophone writers who were critical of Hellenic theology, arguing that the God of the philosophers supplanted the God of the Jews. Process Philosophers and Open Theists, for example, use this very narrative as proof of something amiss in Christian thought, something deeply in need of correction in order to recover theological truths that have been lost.9
My sympathies for the narrative were both theological and philosophical in nature. Theologically, not only did I see the ubiquity of Hellenistic philosophy amongst Latin writers, but I sensed the theological divergence this syncretism represented. Put bluntly, I did not recognize the God of the Scriptures in the works of Latin theology. In Scripture, I read about a God who is free, relational, active, imminent, dynamic, even penitent. By contrast, in Latin theology, I saw how doctrines of simplicity, omniscience, immutability, and other classical attributes problematized the God of the Jews. The more I studied, the more I saw the scholastic tradition as an elaborate effort to cling to the God of the philosophers while somehow saying of God that which Christians know they must. But for all the scholastic ink poured out to resolve the polarity, I saw only a failed effort to reconcile the irreconcilable.
Philosophically, I was greatly sympathetic to the critiques of Western Christianity. To name just a few, I saw original sin and inherited guilt as unjust. Yet, even if these were somehow unpleasant facts of reality, I failed to see how they offered to God the judicial latitude to arbitrarily damn the infected—be they infants or the predestined reprobate. In such doctrines, I saw an unjust God, at best, and something approaching devil worship, at worst. And I saw this same twisted sense of justice in the doctrines of Hell and penal substitution. I was quite familiar with the standard responses to such critiques, but I found them impotent to alleviate the problems.
All of this was troubling for a particular reason. By this point, I had become increasingly convinced of the existence of God, and I was also convinced that reason offered the clearest window into the nature of God—whether because the mind is a divine spark or a small replica of divinity.10 I thus saw my moral intuitions as offering unique insight into the nature of God, into his goodness and justice, for example. Yet, it seemed that classical Western Christianity perpetually ran up against my conscience, insisting that I set aside my moral objections to original sin or predestination or other doctrines. For who are you, o man, to talk back to God? But a thought troubled me: If the Christian religion is true, then why does it perpetually run afoul of the most godlike thing about me? Why are its teachings at perpetual odds with the one faculty I possess that offers a window into the divine?
In the end, I sided with the aforementioned narrative. Western Christianity (which was the only historical Christianity I knew) is a form of syncretism that obscured whatever truth was there at the origins of the Christian religion. So, I chose to follow those who had concluded the same while not fully abandoning belief in Jesus of Nazareth. In a word, I embraced process philosophy.
Continued in part 2
See N. F. Gier, God, Reason, and the Evangelicals (University Press of America, 1987), ch. 13.
See, e.g., Hugh Ross, The Fingerprint of God: Recent Scientific Discoveries Reveal the Unmistakable Identity of the Creator (Promise Publishing Company, 1991).
You can view samples of my artwork at: https://www.nathanajacobs.com/artist.html
Matthew 18:8, New International Version, which is the translation I had found.
Augustine, Confessions, VII.9.13.
For a discussion of which is of greater influence on Augustine, see John J. O’Meara, “The NeoPlatonism of Saint Augustine,” in NeoPlatonism and Christian Thought, ed. Dominic J. O’Meara (Studies in NeoPlatonism: Ancient and Modern, vol. III) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), passim, esp. 34-41.
Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, 7 vols., trans. Neil Buchanan (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1896-1905).
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), Parts II-III, esp. II.B. The same narrative appears in other idealists, such as G. E. Lessing, F. W. J. Schelling, and (to a lesser degree) Immanuel Kant.
See, e.g., John Sanders, “Historical Considerations,” in The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God, eds. Clark Pinnock, et al. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), ch. 2; and Robert Gnuse, The Old Testament and Process Theology (Danvers, MA: Chalice Press, 2000), passim.
I phrase this as a soft disjunctive because at this point in my journey, I had no firm commitment on whether the soul was divine or an image of the divine.