The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Since all major U.S. universities had Christian roots, too many Christians thought that they could rest in Christian tradition, not Christian relevance.

you never know the terrain someone else has walked to come worship the Lord.

Jesus’ injunction that God is more greatly grieved by the sins of those who claim to know him than by those who know him not, struck a chord for me.

And while I never really liked the idea of growing old alone, I accepted that if God could take me this far in life safely, he would see me through this next part, too.

The saving grace of salvation is located in a holy and electing God, and a sacrificing, suffering, and obedient Savior. Stakes this high can never rest on my sincerity.

Even when faced with the blinding sting of someone else’s sin, it really is not someone else’s sin that can hurt us. It is our own festering sin that takes the guise of innocence that will be the undoing of us all.

I explained that too often good Christians see sexual sin as merely sexual excess. To a good Christian, sex is God’s recreation for you as long as you play in God’s playground (marriage). No way, José. Not on God’s terms. What good Christians don’t realize is that sexual sin is not recreational sex gone overboard. Sexual sin is predatory. It won’t be “healed” by redeeming the context or the genders. Sexual sin must simply be killed. What is left of your sexuality after this annihilation is up to God. But healing, to the sexual sinner, is death: nothing more and nothing less.

The Psalms are the words of Christ. Christ is the word (logos) made flesh. Because Jesus calls himself the word made flesh (and not the “theme” made flesh or the “paraphrase” made flesh), we take him at his word. We do not rewrite or revise God’s word. Rather, we live it. We live it when it fills us with joy. We live it when we are frightened. We live it in his grace. We live the word and it endures through each personal trial and each disappointment. We live the word and it endures through the faithful presence of God’s Holy Spirit working through us. His faithful presence becomes our faithful presence. It is known through the senses, like the oil on Mary’s hair, oil that she rubbed into our Savior’s cracked and pained feet, and oil that she wiped off with the most intimate resource she had: her own hair. Wherever Mary went, the faithful presence of our Savior and the memorial of her love for him followed her. We step into that faithful presence and its palpable aesthetic as we sing psalms.

We in the church tend to be more fearful of the (perceived) sin in the world than of the sin in our own hearts. Why is that?