My new year’s goal is to generate a blog post in less than 20 minutes. 12:11… If I fail, then the blog is going to have to go.
My Christmas present to myself was Scott McKnight’s Finding Faith, Loosing Faith. I won’t comment on Scott’s writing style except to say that it read like a Master’s thesis, objective and informal, but ended like a blog post, personal and speculative 
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The book explores conversions within the Christian eco-system is divided into 4 parts.
1) Conversions of Evangelicals to Apostacy
2) Conversions of Jewish people to Evangelical
3) Conversions of Roman Catholics to Evangelical
4) Conversion of Evangelical to Roman Catholic.
McKnight looks for patterns, in a social science kind of way. The book refers to collections and anthologies of conversions stories, but seldom gives much details about a particular conversion. Instead, a pattern and a theory of conversion is fit to the fact patterns. One has to wonder if these theories are valid, however, because the conversion stories are subject to a selection bias. Even so, the hypothesis presented are interesting food for thought.
Conversion Theory, Generally, my paraphrase and filter…
a) A conversion begins with the person in a context
b) The person has a crisis that is unmet by his current belief system
c) The crisis triggers a quest by the person to resolve the crisis
d) The person has an encounter with a new belief system that seems to resolve the crisis
e) The person makes a new commitment to the new belief system
f) There are consequences for the person in his family and social group
1. Conversion from Orthodoxy to Apostacy (or Independence, as the McKnight presents it)
Several converts, inculding John Loftus and Christine Wicker and briefly considered. The key crisis identified by McKnight are:
a) Questions about the inerrancy and foundation of scripture
b) Questions about science vs. scripture
c) Unchristian and hypocritical Christians
d) The concept of Hell
e) Unwillingness to accept the Bible’s documentation of the Divine Nature
f) Seemingly unfulfilled promises
2. Jewish people converting to Christianity
Facinatingly, the crisis that most often leads Jewish people to Jesus is a crisis over the Jewish Messiah. They seldom if ever convert using the “Roman’s Road” or something similar, and for them the fundamental question becomes… What does the Hebrew Bible say about the Messiah, Was Jesus the Messiah? When they consider this seriously, it creates a crisis that often results in conversion.
3. Roman Catholic Conversion to Evangelicalism
The crisis most often faced by Roman Catholics include:
a) Questions about assurance of salvation.
b) Reading the Bible for the first time and contrasting it with Roman Catholic doctrine.
c) Questions about the divine authority of the Eucharist, confession, and priesthood.
d) A decision about the divine authority of the Bible vs. the Priesthood. Can they coexist? Scripture usually trumps the priesthood for a convert.
e) An anemic parish. The person desires a more personal worship experience than the ritual of the liturgy.
— I have just spent 22 minutes. Time to shut down the blog?
4. Evangelicals converting to Roman Catholicism
The following crisis may lead an envangelical to Roman Catholocism
a) A desire for transcendence, a desire to embrace all 2000 years of church history, not just the last 500
b) A desire for certainty and authority. Given the splintering of all the evangelical denominations, there is a great deal of disparity among various interpretations of scripture. Giving authority to the catholic clergy settles the theological questions.
c) Unity, the person believes that the church should be subjectively one body, and determines that the Roman Catholic church is the subjective unified church.
McKnight closes by referencing Rambo’s Understanding Religious Conversion. This is a nugget from the book… “The tell-tale sign of a conversion is the reshaping of one’s autobiography,” and a conclusion “patterns of conversions are shaped by human needs and it is the needs that shape the story of conversion.”
The book has impacted me by:
a) Inspiring me to write my own conversion story one day and identify the crisis, quest, and new autobiography.
b) Making me want to listen to John Micheal Tabolt, the author’s favorite musician, and a convert from evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism.
c) Making me want to explore church history in more detail.
d) Making me want to be less of a hypocrite.
e) Making me want to read McKnight’s The Blue Parkeet: Rethinking How you Read the Bible.
Err.. 12:44, I’m not going to proof read this post unless somebody pays me. Done!
