God and sinner reconciled

Publisher Joel Belz has been asking me for a long time to write about my conversion to Christianity, which occurred from 1973 to 1976. This is the time of the year to do so, because great carols like "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel"--From depths of hell thy people save--might by now be impressing on our brains what should be there all year 'round: Salvation comes from Christ alone.

I grew up Jewish in New England, a regular synagogue attendee until age 14, a self-declared atheist thereafter. Since Satan abhors a vacuum, I began worshiping idols made of paper: political writings on which I floated leftward. In 1972, when I was 22, I joined the Communist Party, USA.

Party activities were uninspiring, but I had faith in socialist things unseen, and there were immediate payoffs as well. In 1973 I worked at the Boston Globe, with my Marxist perspective fitting right in, and then went on to graduate school, where professors were impressed by my Party-line theorizing.

The Party people I knew were vindictive like me. Once, when I sneered to comrades that my Russian language instructor, a morose escapee from Moscow, had said that he would cut his throat if Communists ever came to power in the United States, one sweet young Party lady said, "That old fool, he won't have to cut his throat, we'll do it for him."

I wanted to be in on such action, at least holding the coats of those who wielded long knives. For a time the prospects for calamity looked good, because the Soviet Union in the 1970s was on a roll internationally and the United States was a pitiful, helpless giant.

But God had other plans, both for nations and for me. One day near the end of 1973 I was reading Lenin's famous essay, "Socialism and Religion," in which he wrote, "We must combat religion--this is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently Marxism." At that point God changed my worldview not through thunder or a whirlwind, but by means of a small whisper that became a repeated, resounding question in my brain: "What if Lenin is wrong? What if there is a God?"

My communism was based on atheism, and when I was no longer an atheist I quickly resigned from the Party, although I thought I was leaving the eventually winning side. Not until 1976 did I become a Christian, however. The steps down that path were hesitant and included activities such as watching classic westerns (with their strong sense of right and wrong) and reading Christian existentialists.

Two activities that I did not choose helped to put me on the solid ground of Christ. To satisfy a Ph.D. language requirement I had to improve my Russian, and one evening, just for reading practice, I plucked from my bookcase a copy of the New Testament in Russian given to me two years before as a novelty item and never even opened. To my surprise, the words had the ring of truth. (It helped that I had to read very slowly.)

An assignment to teach a course in early American literature also helped, since my preparation involved reading Puritan sermons. Those dead white males spoke truth. Later, the writings of C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer showed me that Christian hearts and brains could coexist in the 20th century as well.

Finally, in 1976, a minister in a church picked out of the Yellow Pages made me understand the need to take action: baptism and church membership. But since I was fighting and kicking much of the way, I knew it was God's action, not mine.

The 20 years since then have been the real test. I've recently been examining applicants for membership in our church, and the crucial question concerns not the making of a profession of faith--that may be done many times, like quitting smoking--but the evidence of how God has changed an applicant's life.

I don't pray as often as I should, that's for sure. I get irritated when I should not. I have sinful thoughts. But that I'm able to proceed at all as a husband, father, elder, professor, and editor is a tribute to God, not myself, because all my inclinations were toward evil. I could not even have prayed for God to be as kind to me as he has, because I had no understanding of what to pray for.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.